Tenebres pulled at his bonds, but he knew it was futile. He was scrawny for his age, but even if he wasn’t, it would take a powerful gift to break free of the coarse ropes. The chanting continued unabated around him. The cult members were used to their sacrifices trying to struggle, and they knew it was futile.

All his writhing succeeded in doing was pointing his face towards two of the cultists standing to one side of the chanting circle. They clearly weren’t high level enough to participate in the ritual itself, so they stood with the other low level cult members, their eyes downcast and their hoods covering their faces. Still, Tenebres recognized them. The shapes of his parents, even under the loose robes, were engraved in his soul as clearly as any gift.

If he wasn’t gagged just as thoroughly as he was tied, he might have called out to them, pled for them to help him, to untie him. But deep down, he knew that it would be a waste of time. It wasn’t like they couldn’t see the desperation in their son’s eyes, they just didn’t care. The cult had taken everything from them in the course of their induction. What little worldly possessions they had to their name. Their home. Their empathy. And now, apparently, their son. If they were ever going to fight, it would’ve been a long time ago.

Tenebres grimaced and squirmed more intensely as he felt the magic in the air around him begin to shift and warp, reacting to the cult’s chants. His thrashing threatened to bring him to the edge of the flat stone slab he had been placed on, and he began to try to writhe towards it, every muscle in his skinny body flexing with the effort. He could tell, from the ambient feel of the magic as much as from the increasingly impassioned voices of the chanters, that the ritual was reaching its peak. Perhaps, if he could get off of the sacrificial table just as the ritual concluded, he could spoil the magic. A hard sprawl on the rock floor would hurt, but it would be better than being sacrificed, right?

No luck. All his thrashing did was finally earn him the attention of the cult’s patriarch, whose hands roughly grabbed the boy by the shoulders and flipped him onto his back in the center of the crude stone altar once again.

“None of that, boy,” Kellen’s voice was rough, and reeked of the pungent tack he was constantly chewing. The patriarch was not an impressive man under his vestments, his face as sunken as his body was sallow, but he boasted a gift of might, and his thin arms were like bars of iron slamming down on Tenebres’s shoulders. “It’ll only hurt a moment. And just think. You’ll be part of something truly great!”

“HMMHUMFOUU!” Tenebres made every effort to cuss the man out through the disgusting rag stuffed in his mouth. The result was unintelligible, but he could tell that Kellen understood anyways from the way the chief cultist’s eyes went hard.

“Well enough. Get it all out boy,” Kellen growled through a rictus smile. “It won’t change anything now.”

The chanters were practically screaming the sybillant words of their unnatural ritual now, and even to Tenebres’s unenhanced senses, the weft and warp of the magic in the air was sickening. The boy made every effort to choke back the nausea it inspired - the last thing he wanted was to die choking on his own vomit.

Oh, who was he kidding. The last thing he wanted was to die at all, but that choice had been taken out of his hands. It was the first day of spring, and Tenebres was old enough to receive his gifts, but no relic or Divine Archetype had yet carved their power into his soul. Kellen and his cohort carefully controlled the distribution of gifts among the underlings of the cult, and they had struck before Tenebres could try to gain a gift of his own. Couldn’t risk a sacrifice being able to call up a gout of flame or conjure a weapon to escape, now could they?

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Bastards.

That was it. That was when Tenebres gave up. He couldn’t escape on his own, not without the very power Kellen had denied him. His parents certainly wouldn’t help. They had given up long ago, even before they first met the charismatic man who asked them to come to a meeting in the woods. Even if his ropes disappeared at that moment, Kellen still stood over him, boasting the power of an Initiate, a level of power no one else in the cult could match. The magic continued to stir around Tenebres, thick and oily, like he was immersed in a pool of slugs, all sliding against his body.

He felt it when the magic finally violated him and began to sink into his skin. There was no need for Kellen to bother with something as crude as the ritual knife Tenebres had seen him use with other sacrifices. This was an important ritual, an artificial thinning of the impermeable barrier between the Realm and the Void. Tenebres wasn’t supposed to know that, of course, but that had never stopped him before.

Ever since he was young, Tenebres had a hunger for knowledge. Prior to his parents giving up their lives to a backwoods, idiotic cult, he had planned to one day take the Mage’s exams. It didn’t matter how poor you were if you had a gift for alchemy or artifice. He could’ve provided for his family, given them comfortable lives. Instead, they listened to Kellen’s bullshit. After they moved into the reclusive, half-buried commune the cult inhabited, Tenebres sated his thirst of knowledge the only way he could, by sneaking in the chief cultist’s rarely used study to read through his books himself.

Not that any of that mattered anymore. The books were thick and complex, but from Tenebres’s understanding, the ritual was an attempt to beckon the power the tomes referred to as the Void. The energy of it already filled the subterranean ritual chamber, and it was even now working to consume his soul and the vast magic inherent to all living people. The ritual called for a very specific sacrifice, an unalloyed soul, one strong enough to bear gifts but that had not yet received any. He’d die, consumed by the energy of the Void, but in his place would be… something. Some remnant of the Void. Tenebres hadn’t parsed out the book fast enough to learn exactly what, but it couldn’t be good.

He could feel it happening, the corrupted magic seeping into his blood and flesh and bone like hot tar. Finally, he screamed. And screamed, and screamed, his gag unable to muffle the depths of his pain. Across the room, unnoticed, his parents flinched - but still, they took no action. As the burning, searing pain rampaged through his body, Tenebres felt the magic changing him. His once golden brown skin became tinged with an unnatural gray even as his hair bleached to a dead, bone white. His eyes began to glow with a blood red light, startling enough to make even Kellen take a step back in surprise.

Finally, the pain began to coalesce in his chest. His body ravaged, the magic began to consume his soul. Tenebres was past screaming now, his back arched into an unnatural bow from pain that felt like it would never end, and he began to long for the embrace of death, the cessation of that horrible, soul-rending agony.

And then, just like that, it stopped.

And Tenebres was alive.

His body dropped down to the slab, every muscle giving out at once. He tried desperately to draw breath, his body screaming for air, but the gag kept him from the deep gasps he needed. Sweat beaded on his skin, emphasizing his ghoulish pallor and matting down his mussed white hair.

For a long moment, the ritual chamber was silent but for his ragged breaths. Even Kellen had no idea what happened.

That confirmed what Tenebres had always suspected, that the patriarch didn’t fully understand the magic he was trying to abuse anymore than Tenebres did. Kellen had bound him only with rope, not wasting time with any ritual or item capable of dampening gifts. After all, Tenebres did not have any gifts.

Not until the cult had engraved the gift of the void onto a soul that somehow survived the process. The pain had receded, leaving behind a vague sense of potential, of power. Gifts were, by and large, supposed to be intuitive to use due to their connection to the souls they were carved into. Tenebres reached for that power instinctively.

The next screams in the little stone room did not come from Tenebres.