Shardborn a litrpg fanta.., p.1
Shardborn: A LitRPG Fantasy (Last Light Book 1), page 1
Chapter 1 - Dead World
The gods had been dead for three hundred years, and the world still hadn't figured out what to do about it.
I stood at the edge of the Hollowed District, watching smoke curl up from another collapsed building. Third one this week. Without the gods' magic holding everything together, the old structures were finally giving up. Some of them had been standing for millennia before the Godsfall. Now they crumbled like wet paper.
"You going to stand there all day, or are you going to help me carry this?"
I turned to see Maren struggling with a crate twice her size. She was a short woman with arms like tree trunks and a personality to match—which is to say, blunt and immovable.
"Depends," I said. "What's in it?"
"Salvage from the old temple. Priest's vestments, ceremonial daggers, that sort of thing. Worth a small fortune to the right collector."
"Or a large prison sentence to the wrong guard."
Maren grinned, showing off a gap where her front tooth used to be. "That's why I have you, Kane. You're pretty enough to talk us out of anything."
I wasn't sure if that was a compliment or an insult, but I grabbed the other end of the crate anyway. Maren and I had been running salvage together for three years now. She found the goods, I found the buyers. It wasn't glamorous work, but it kept food in our bellies and a roof over our heads—which was more than most people in the Hollowed District could say.
We hauled the crate through the winding streets, past beggars and merchants and the occasional patrol of city guards. The guards didn't look twice at us. We were just two more scavengers in a city full of them.
The Hollowed District had earned its name after the Godsfall. When the gods died, their temples collapsed—not physically, but spiritually. The divine magic that had sustained them simply... stopped. Thousands of priests and priestesses died in the first week alone, their bodies unable to survive without the constant flow of holy power.
Those who survived weren't much better off. Most went mad. Some turned violent. A few simply sat down and never got up again.
Three centuries later, the temples were still standing, but nobody went inside them anymore. They were hollow shells, monuments to something that no longer existed.
"You hear about what happened in the merchant quarter last night?" Maren asked as we turned down an alley.
"I heard a lot of things," I said. "Most of them were lies."
"This one wasn't. They found a Shardborn."
I nearly dropped my end of the crate. "What?"
"You heard me. Young woman, maybe twenty. She was glowing like a lantern in the middle of the street, screaming her head off. Guards had to drag her away before she started a riot."
"Did they say what kind of Shard she had?"
Maren shook her head. "Does it matter? They're all the same in the end. Burn bright, burn out, die young. Prettiest corpses you ever saw, though."
She wasn't wrong about that. Shardborn were what happened when fragments of divine power lodged themselves in human souls. When the gods died, their essence shattered and scattered across the world like seeds from a dying flower. Most of those fragments dissipated harmlessly. But some found hosts—always women, for reasons nobody understood—and took root.
The result was a Shardborn. A woman carrying enough magical power to level a city block, trapped inside a body that couldn't access or control it. The Shard would burn through them slowly, poisoning their blood and boiling their organs until there was nothing left.
Average lifespan after manifestation? Three years. Five if they were lucky.
I'd seen a few Shardborn in my time. They were easy to spot. The glow was one thing—faint at first, but brighter as the poison spread. The real tell was in their eyes. They had this look, like they were staring at something beautiful and terrible that nobody else could see.
The last Shardborn I'd seen had been a girl of sixteen. She'd manifested in the market square, screaming about fire and light and the sound of a thousand bells. The guards had taken her to the Tower of Healing, where the physicians would do their best to make her comfortable.
She lasted two months.
"Anyway," Maren said, "that's not why I brought it up. Word is, someone's been asking around about Shardborn. Offering good money for information."
"What kind of information?"
"Locations. Identities. Whether they've been claimed by the Sanctum yet."
That got my attention. The Sanctum of Mercy was the kingdom's official response to the Shardborn crisis. They took in women who'd manifested and gave them food, shelter, and medical care until their Shards burned them out. Noble work, in theory.
In practice, the Sanctum was a gilded prison. Shardborn who entered rarely left—and the Sanctum's leaders had been known to use their charges' power for "emergency situations" that seemed to happen with suspicious regularity.
"Who's asking?" I said.
"Don't know. But whoever it is, they're paying ten times the going rate."
Ten times. That was enough to buy passage out of the city, maybe even out of the kingdom entirely. Enough to start over somewhere that didn't smell like ash and desperation.
"I'll keep my ears open," I said.
We reached our destination—a nondescript building wedged between a tannery and a butcher shop. The smell alone was enough to discourage casual visitors, which made it perfect for our purposes. Maren knocked in a specific pattern, and the door swung open to reveal a wiry man with more scars than teeth.
"You're late," he said.
"We're exactly on time," Maren replied. "You're just impatient."
We hauled the crate inside and set it down in the middle of a room that was part warehouse, part black market, and part gambling den. Half a dozen people were scattered around, examining goods or haggling over prices. The wiry man—his name was Tetch, though I doubted that was real—started going through our salvage with practiced efficiency.
"Vestments are damaged," he muttered. "Water stain on this one. Moth holes in that one. Daggers are decent, though. I'll give you forty marks for the lot."
"Sixty," Maren said flatly.
"Fifty, and that's generous."
"Fifty-five, and you throw in dinner."
Tetch considered this for a moment, then nodded. "Done."
While Maren collected our payment, I wandered over to the corner of the room where a few others had gathered. They were watching something—someone—with the kind of hushed attention that usually meant trouble.
I pushed through the small crowd and stopped dead.
She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.
That wasn't an exaggeration. I'd been with beautiful women before—tavern girls with warm smiles, merchant's daughters with wandering hands, even a noblewoman once who'd wanted to see how the other half lived. But this was different. This was the kind of beauty that made you forget to breathe.
She sat in a chair at the center of the room, her wrists bound loosely with rope. Her hair was dark as midnight, falling in waves past her shoulders. Her skin was pale, almost luminous, and her features were delicate and sharp at once—high cheekbones, full lips, a nose that turned up slightly at the end. She wore a simple dress that had probably been white once but was now stained with dirt and what looked like blood.
And she was glowing.
Faintly, barely visible in the dim light of the room, but unmistakably there. A soft radiance emanating from somewhere deep inside her, pushing against her skin like light through thin paper.
A Shardborn.
Her eyes found mine across the room. They were green—the deep, vivid green of summer leaves after rain—and they held a kind of desperate intelligence that made my chest tight.
"Help me," she said. Her voice was barely a whisper, but somehow I heard it clearly over the murmur of the crowd. "Please. They're going to sell me."
One of the men near her—a heavyset thug with a face like a spoiled ham—laughed and cuffed her across the head. "Shut it. Nobody's helping you."
Something hot and sharp twisted in my gut. I'd seen plenty of ugly things in my life. Watched people die, watched people kill, watched people do worse to each other in the name of survival. I'd learned to look away, to mind my own business, to keep my head down and my mouth shut.
But something about this felt different. Wrong in a way I couldn't quite name.
I walked forward. The crowd parted around me, probably because of the look on my face.
"How much?" I asked.
The thug looked at me like I'd grown a second head. "What?"
"The girl. How much do you want for her?"
"She's not for sale. Got a buyer coming in an hour. Very particular buyer. Paying top coin for an unclaimed Shardborn."
"Everyone's for sale," I said. "What's your price?"
The thug's eyes narrowed. He looked me up and down, taking in my worn clothes and calloused hands. "More than you've got, pretty boy."
"Try me."
"Five hundred marks."
Maren made a choking sound behind me. Five hundred marks was more than we made in a year. It was enough to buy a small house, or a very large horse, or approximately one million nights at a decent tavern.
I didn't have five hundred marks. I didn't have fifty marks. I had exactly seventeen marks and a handful of coppers, plus whatever Maren had left after paying for dinner.
"Don e," I said.
The word came out of my mouth before I could stop it. The thug stared at me. The crowd stared at me. Even the Shardborn woman stared at me, her glowing eyes wide with surprise.
"You've got five hundred marks?" the thug asked skeptically.
"I've got something better," I said. "I've got information about the buyer you're meeting. The one who's paying top coin for unclaimed Shardborn."
The thug's expression shifted. "What kind of information?"
"The kind that tells you he's already been arrested. City guard picked him up this morning. Something about an unfortunate incident involving the Duke's daughter." I had no idea if any of this was true, but I'd learned a long time ago that the best lies were specific lies. "Your buyer isn't coming. Which means you're stuck with a Shardborn who's going to draw attention and a roomful of witnesses who know you're trafficking in human cargo."
The thug's face went red, then white. He looked around the room, suddenly aware of how many eyes were on him.
"Or," I continued, "you can take whatever I've got in my pocket and walk out of here with a clean conscience and a head start."
There was a long, tense silence. Then the thug spat on the floor.
"Fine. Give me what you've got and take the bitch. She's more trouble than she's worth anyway."
I handed over my seventeen marks and change. The thug counted it, scowled, and shoved past me toward the door. His companions followed, casting dark looks over their shoulders.
When they were gone, I turned to the Shardborn woman and started untying her wrists.
"That was very stupid," she said.
"Probably," I agreed. "But it worked."
"You just spent everything you had on a woman you don't know. A dying woman. A woman who might explode at any moment and take this entire building with her."
"Are you going to explode?"
She considered this. "Not immediately."
"Then we're fine." I finished with the ropes and helped her to her feet. Up close, the glow was more visible—a soft shimmer that seemed to pulse in time with her heartbeat. "What's your name?"
"Sera," she said. "Sera Valdris."
"Kane," I replied. "Just Kane."
"Well, Just Kane." A faint smile crossed her lips, there and gone in an instant. "It seems I owe you my life. Or what's left of it."
"You don't owe me anything. I just didn't like the way they were treating you."
"That's a very expensive form of not liking something."
I shrugged. "I've made worse decisions."
Behind me, Maren cleared her throat. "Kane. A word?"
I turned to see my partner looking at me with an expression that was equal parts furious and bewildered. I held up a finger to Sera.
"Give me a minute."
I followed Maren to a corner of the room, where she grabbed my arm and hissed in my ear.
"Have you completely lost your mind?"
"Possibly."
"You just spent our entire earnings—our entire month's earnings—on a Shardborn. A dying Shardborn. Do you have any idea what you're going to do with her?"
"Not yet," I admitted. "But I'll figure something out."
"You'll figure something—" Maren stopped herself, took a deep breath, and started again. "Kane. I like you. You're a good partner and a decent person, which is rare in our line of work. But this? This is insane."
"I know."
"She's going to die. In a few months, maybe a year if she's lucky, that Shard is going to cook her from the inside out. And when it does, all you'll have is a corpse and an empty wallet."
"I know," I said again.
"Then why?"
I looked back at Sera, who was watching us with those luminous green eyes. The glow had intensified slightly—or maybe I was just noticing it more. Either way, she looked fragile and fierce and utterly alone, standing there in her bloodstained dress with rope burns on her wrists.
"Because someone had to," I said.
Maren stared at me for a long moment. Then she sighed and shook her head.
"You're an idiot," she said. "But you're a good idiot. Fine. But you're explaining this to Tetch, not me."
"Fair enough."
I walked back to Sera and offered her my arm. She took it hesitantly, like she wasn't sure it was real.
"Come on," I said. "Let's get out of here before someone else decides you're worth money."
We left through the back entrance, stepping out into an alley that smelled marginally better than the front of the building. The sun was setting, painting the sky in shades of orange and purple. It would have been beautiful if not for the smell and the distant sound of another building collapsing somewhere in the Hollowed District.
"Where are we going?" Sera asked.
"Somewhere safe," I said. "Or as safe as anywhere gets in this city."
"And then?"
"Then we figure out what to do next."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "You really don't have a plan, do you?"
"I really don't."
"That's very reassuring."
"I try."
We walked in silence through the darkening streets, the faint glow of her Shard lighting our way like a candle that never flickered. I had no money, no plan, and no idea what I was doing.
But for the first time in years, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Chapter 2 - Manifestation
My safehouse wasn't much to look at. A single room above a baker's shop, barely big enough for a bed and a chair. The walls were thin, the floor was crooked, and the window didn't close properly. But it was mine, paid up for three months in advance, and right now that made it the most valuable piece of real estate in the city.
Sera sat on the edge of the bed, watching me pace. The glow had gotten brighter since we'd left Tetch's place—bright enough now that I could see it clearly even in the lamplight.
"You're going to wear a hole in the floor," she said.
"I'm thinking."
"About what?"
"About how I'm going to keep you alive."
She laughed at that—a short, bitter sound that didn't match her face. "You can't. Nobody can. The Shard will kill me eventually. It always does."
"How long have you had it?"
"Three weeks since manifestation. Maybe a month." She looked down at her hands, which were trembling slightly. "I can feel it inside me. Like fire that never goes out. Some days it's bearable. Other days..."
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.
I stopped pacing and knelt in front of her, close enough to see the faint luminescence in her skin. Up close, she was even more beautiful than I'd first thought. Her features had a classical elegance to them—the kind of face artists used to carve into temple statues back when there were still gods to worship.
"Tell me about your Shard," I said. "What kind is it?"
"Wind," she said. "At least, that's what the healers told me before I escaped from them."
"Wind. That's one of the stronger affinities."
"So they said. Strong enough to level a building. Strong enough to kill everyone inside." Her voice caught. "That’s what happened when I manifested. I was in my family’s home. The Shard activated without warning and I just... exploded. When I woke up, I was lying in the street where the front wall used to be, glowing so bright I could see it through my own skin. Everything was gone. My parents. My brothers. The house itself. All of it, turned to rubble and dust."
I absorbed this quietly. Manifestation events were always violent, but this sounded worse than most.
"That's why you were on the run," I said. "The Sanctum was looking for you."
"Everyone was looking for me. The Sanctum wanted to 'protect' me. The city guard wanted to arrest me for destruction of property. And apparently, there are people willing to pay good money for an unclaimed Shardborn." Her lips twisted. "I still don't know what that means. Claimed by who?"
"Keybearers," I said, the word coming out before I could stop it.
Sera's eyes widened. "You know about Keybearers?"
I hesitated. This was knowledge I'd kept buried for years—knowledge that had gotten people killed when they spoke too openly about it. But Sera was a Shardborn. If anyone deserved to know, it was her.
"The gods didn't just leave Shards when they died," I said carefully. "They left Keys too. Fragments of divine will that lodged themselves in human souls—just like Shards, but different. Shards contain power. Keys contain..." I struggled to find the right word. "Access. The ability to unlock that power."
