The sudden cold of the water awoke him from unconsciousness, only to throw him into the very present reality of immense pain. The ghost that used to be his left arm felt on fire. His fingers torn apart every second, his skin flayed. And yet, there was nothing there. Not anymore.

He would never shoot a bow again. That was the stupid first thought that entered his mind just as he started struggling against the current in the dark. He was going to die. Either of blood loss, drowning, or even just hitting something too fast. He could barely keep himself afloat, gasping for air every few seconds while struggling to keep water from entering his lungs.

He could feel himself falling from time to time, splashing on lower-level water, descending in whatever direction the underground current was taking him.

The minutes felt like hours of fighting, the pain of his severed limb against the cold and the force of the water, both trying to win a battle to get the boy to sleep forever. And yet the union of both was what was keeping him afloat.

He had to see his dad. Helion had promised him he would be careful. They were gonna escape together. He was going to be sad if he didn’t show up.

The water was calming around him. He was going slower and slower. Had he reached the end of the descent? He didn’t know. He couldn’t think.

His strength was going away fast after the initial adrenaline of the shock and instinct to survive started to fade away. And he was fading with it, too.

His eyes started closing, his head fuzzy. The cold wasn’t just on the outside anymore, but on the inside, too. He could’ve sworn there was a small light somewhere over him, but his eyes refused to stay open enough to see.

I’m sorry dad...

With a last apology, the unarmed boy went to sleep.

And then something grabbed him. Many somethings. He felt pulled from the water by several hands, lifted into the air.

“…can you ... me?” A distant voice over him said, lost in the shadows cast by the dwindling ambers of his life. He was crossing over, he knew it. There was no helping it anymore. Helion was going to die.

Something was put on his mouth, and a liquid entered his throat. It was warm, unlike the waters that tried to claim him, and it tasted... like onions.

“Helion! Wake up, please! My boy, please! Don’t leave me like this!” The voice was not of a stranger, but Helion could not understand. Helion was supposed to be dead. He just wanted to rest. The pain didn’t belong to the dead. The dead didn’t have to taste the awful onion soup.

“You still... suck... *cough* at cooking... *cough* dad...” He managed to say while coughing the rancid and death defying homemade onions-and-stuff soup of his father.

“Helion!” His father hugged him, tight enough that pain flashed in his body. He had at least a pair of broken ribs. His arm... well, rather, his stump was flaring in pain.

He opened his eyes slowly and saw a man that looked in his early thirties at most. Ruggedly handsome as he had heard the women and some men in town refer to him, the kind of face that one would expect from a man that had travelled through the most terrible places in the world and returned while still being able to smile. His beard was styled into several warrior braids decorated with carved bone rings, each representing a different prey and victory. One of them, right in the center of the display, was made of a strange orange red material Helion didn’t recognize and his father never wanted to talk about, always deflecting his questions, as usual with most things.

The concerning part was that his father was crying. He never cried. Well, that was a lie. He always cried while cutting onions. Maybe a little too much. Helion thought that maybe he used his onion cutting time as an excuse to have a time to cry about stuff. Stuff like mom. He didn’t hide it as well as he thought behind his signature big smile.

“Listen to me, Helion. Everything is going to be fine.” He said while smiling, but his eyes told a different story, as always. “You are going to be fine. But you are going to have to... Hey! Stay with me! Don’t close your eyes!” But Helion was so very sleepy again. He just wanted a little rest. He felt his father slap him a few times just hard enough on the cheek to keep him awake.

“That’s it, my boy. My brave, brave boy. You need to listen to me, okay? This is gonna be very hard, but you have to do it. Nod if you understand me, please.”

Helion wasn’t sure what his father was talking about, but at least he could hear him clear enough. He nodded slightly.

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“Good! Good.” His father took a few deep breaths. “I will not lie to you, kid. This looks very bad. Your arm is gone, and you have lost too much blood. You are cold as a corpse and look just a little worse”

Well, thanks dad.

“But you can still make it. It’s just not gonna be easy, but I’m gonna guide you, okay?”

Guide me? Guide me with what?

Before his father could continue, something seemed to catch his attention, and he flinched, looking somewhere away from Helion. Alarmed by the sudden change in attitude, he tried to study his surroundings. He was in some sort of big chamber of stone. He couldn’t see the ceiling, it was too dark for that, but there were some light sources around him. His father had used some of his light sticks and put them around him, forming a circle. The sound of splashing water could be heard somewhere below him and the air smelled humid and old. There was a big and heavy looking double door at the end of the chamber. This had to be the “cistern” where he was supposed to meet his father. What were the odds? Well, he had been following a descending path on the marked tunnels before falling, so it made sense that the water could lead to there. But that also meant...

He followed his father’s gaze.

The heretic was standing in the open arch of the entrance to the cistern chamber, barely illuminated by the many bright colors of the light sticks. Green, oranges, blues, and purples cast dark shadows behind him. But the color that seemed to refuse to leave the heretic’s visage was the red light. He looked bathed in blood and he probably was, but what truly called Helion’s attention and then horror was what the eerie figure was doing.

He was eating Helion’s arm.

Slowly, methodically, without breaking eye contact with his father, his teeth sank into the young flesh, tearing apart muscle and skin and munching on it like a gluttonous beast. But he was a man. A man was eating his arm. And he was smiling while doing it, relishing in the sadism of his heinous display. Helion couldn’t see him clearly, but somehow he knew he was.

“Listen to me Helion.” His father said without looking away from the monster. “You need to form your core.” He put a hand to his side and with a flick of the wrist, a beautiful bow of cold moonlight and braided metals appeared on his hand. He had summoned his Moonwatcher. A silvery mist exuded from the Almat as a bright, yet pale light started emanating from his father.

“Listen to your father, young man. This is no time to stumble your shot.” Said the Almat bow with a stern tone.

“I know it’s too sudden.” Continued the hunter. “I know the conditions are less than ideal. But you have to do it. It’s the only way for you to survive.” His father stood up, an arrow of pure moonlight manifested on his other hand, pulling with it strings of light, the Moonwatcher bow ready to fire.

“You know what you need to do. But this is gonna be much harder than usual. Look at your wound.”

Helion stopped admiring his father’s fighting stance and looked down at where his arm used to be. There was something wrong. He could feel it now that his father had called attention to it. The sleeve had been torn apart, drenched in blood, and it was sticking to his flesh. Helion was scared to look, but he pulled the cloth apart anyway with his remaining hand. His broken ribs made it hard, but he had to know what the weird feeling was. He looked at his wound, expecting open flesh and protruding bone.

Instead, what he found was much, much worse.

“Emperor’s light... no...”

His stump was closed, his blood loss cut off. Thanks to that, he hadn’t bled to death, which made his survival to that point make more sense. But blessings are always double edged, his father used to say. And he was usually right.

Where the wound should have been now was a growth of something Helion had only heard about or read in books. Something their small and safe valley town had never had to deal with beyond the tales of travellers and the sermons of Wordkeepers. But there it was. The scarred and decayed orange and browns pulsed in a mass of reddish metallic substance, intricate patterns on his broken apart skin, extending over his elbow halfway to his shoulder as roots of profound decay and oxidation that marked the moments apart from the end of his life in a fate far more terrible than death.

He was Rusted.

The heretic’s Almat had infected him with the Rust. The stories were truth. All the tales of horror and mutation, of people falling ill to the infection of the Rustmist, of monsters from the Slaughterlands carrying their evil with their every bite and claw inland when the protection of the frontiers failed. Or wherever the heretics started a Surge of infection and the birth of monsters through a Sinseed.

He didn’t need to remember all the stories or how they ended, with those infected consumed and turned into statues of metallic degradation and twisted hardened flesh, forever trapped into their forms, forbidden to live, unable to die, suffering for all eternity lost to time, separated from the Word of the Emperor and Their light. And those were the lucky ones. Those that weren’t Wielders at least didn’t have to keep existing. One can only end up turning into a monstrous Broken.

Helion was living such a tragedy now. He was going to die. No, he would not die. He would just lose himself in the rust, end up a forgotten statue and eventually turn to dust to be carried by the Rustmist just to infect others. Or his body would become food for the monsters that only consumed the Rust. Either way, he was doomed.

“Snap out of it!” raged his father. “I know it looks bad, but please believe me! You can survive this if you form your Core. Now.“ The Wielder had more steel in his voice than the father he knew, gone the softness but not the care. Helion couldn’t stop looking at his monstrous and grotesque infection. Soon all of his body would be like that.

The Wielder got out of the circle of light sticks with a slow but decided pace. “Form your Core before you are lost. I know you can do it. I believe in you Helion.”

“How can you believe something like that? I’m dead, dad! I’m dead! I’m too weak, I can’t do it!”

His father lifted the Moonwatcher and smiled at him while the pale moonlight concentrated on the tip of his arrow of shaped Radiance affinity Rohmat.

“What are you saying? Of course you can do it! It’s the duty of a parent to believe in his child.”

He fired at the heretic and everything went crazy.