Chapter1: The Pact Beneath the Dead Water

Prologue: 

The first sound he heard was not a song.

Nor the roar of a monster, nor the clash of a sword, nor the lament of a soul dragged into hell.

It was the murmur of water.

Cold water, still water, too black to reflect the sky.

The young man’s eyes flew open, and he gulped a breath that tasted of mud, algae, and ash. He coughed violently, arching his back, and felt his whole body sink and rise at the same time. His hands plunged into the soft surface of the lake, breaking apart a film of dark mist that shattered like liquid glass around his fingers.

He did not understand where he was.

He did not understand why he was alive.

He did not even understand why that word, alive, felt so heavy in his mind, as though it did not belong to him.

The night was absolute.

Above him stretched a starless sky, veiled by thick clouds that looked as though they had been painted with ink. The lake, vast and silent, breathed in slow ripples like a sleeping animal. Far away, on the shore, twisted trees rose with black trunks, their branches leaning toward the water like slender fingers. Mist hung between the trunks, and from that mist came pale flashes—blue, greenish—like eyes watching without being seen.

The man tried to stand.

He nearly collapsed.

His legs were trembling. He wore light clothing, soaked to the bone, dark fabric clinging to his body. There was something ancient about it, though he could not say why. A torn mantle hung over his shoulders, embroidered with silver thread, and on his wrists there were faint marks, almost imperceptible, like symbols burned beneath the skin.

He brought a hand to his head.

Nothing.

His name did not answer.

His past did not answer.

His memories did not answer.

There was only an immense emptiness, a bottomless pit where everything should have been and there was nothing. Not a single image. Not a single voice. Not a beloved face. Not the pain of a loss. Not the warmth of childhood. Not even the echo of a city or the sound of a home.

Only that lake.

And a strange, unbearable sensation, as though something inside him had broken just before being reborn.

“So you really came back.”

The voice came from behind him.

The young man turned with difficulty.

On the shore, where the mist swirled among the tree roots, stood a female figure with pale skin, very long black hair, and eyes of an almost luminous violet. Tattoos in the shape of serpents coiled around her arms and legs, seeming to move subtly with a life of their own. She did not appear to walk on the ground: she seemed to float a few centimeters above it on thick black smoke, her bare feet barely brushing the mud. She wore a dress made of dark veils and black shells, and at her throat gleamed a necklace of sea teeth.

He looked at her in silence.

She smiled with cruel delicacy.

“Don’t pretend to be surprised. You yourself crossed the threshold. You yourself offered your name. You yourself agreed to sink into the waters of the Forbidden Lake so you could return to this shore.”

The young man frowned.

Trying to remember brought a stab of pain to his temple. He clenched his teeth.

“I… I don’t know who I am.”

The woman tilted her head, as if that answer were neither sad nor unexpected.

“I know.”

Then, from the darkness behind her, more silhouettes appeared.

One.

Two.

Five.

Ten.

Many more than his gaze could count with any certainty.

They were beautiful women with inhuman beauty, and at the same time terrifying. Some had blue-green hair like deep seaweed. Others wore long black braids decorated with coral spines. Their eyes gleamed from the gloom in different shades of sickly light. They all moved with silent elegance, as if the whole lake belonged to them, as if the air itself had to part before them.

Nymphs.

The young man did not know why that word came to mind so naturally.

And yet, the moment he saw them, his body answered with a shiver.

The women approached the shore without touching the water. They stopped in a semicircle around him, studying him with interest. There was none of the warmth one might associate with water creatures or benevolent spirits in their faces. There was possession. Curiosity. Hunger. And a kind of ancient patience, like that of a predator that has spent years watching the same path.

The first nymph, the one with violet eyes, raised a hand and showed a ring made of black bone.

“The contract was sealed.”

The young man lowered his gaze to his chest.

There, on the cold skin, was a bright mark, white like moonlight on stone, shaped like an incomplete circle with a crack running through it.

“Contract?” he repeated, trying not to let the word sound alien.

The nymph nodded.

“You asked us to bring you back. You asked for strength. You asked for a body that could rise again when the world killed you. In exchange, you offered what the dead always offer when their resentment is deep enough.”

“What?”

“Your memory.”

The silence that followed was so deep that the boy thought he could hear the movement of his blood inside his ears.

He looked at the woman, then at the others, searching their faces for a joke, for gratuitous cruelty, for a kinder explanation. He found none.

“Okay, I understand that, but from what you’re saying, it sounds like you know me. Could you tell me who I am?”

“Of course not,” replied another nymph from the shadows, in a lower, softer voice. “That privilege no longer belongs to you.”

The first nymph spoke again.

“The pact demanded three conditions. First: you would return to life beneath the waters of the Forbidden Lake. Second: you would not retain the memory of your past, because vengeance was not meant to be guided by a weak identity, but by pure necessity. Third…”

She leaned a little closer to him.

“You would have the right to the title you claimed.”

The young man blinked.

“Title?”

The nymphs exchanged glances. Some smiled.

Then the woman with the black bone ring said, with absolute serenity:

“Husband of the dark nymphs.”

The phrase fell on him with the weight of a sentence.

The wind stopped.

Even the lake seemed to go quiet.

He opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again.

“That can’t be serious.”

One of the nymphs let out a short laugh, almost musical.

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Because I just woke up in a cursed lake surrounded by extremely beautiful women, but I can still tell you’re dark beings, beings that look like something out of a nightmare.”

“That is a very common beginning for a marriage, given the difference between our species. But you’ll get used to it,” said another, with cruel calm.

The man stepped back in the water, nearly slipping.

“I don’t know anything about this. I know you say I made a deal with you, but I don’t think that’s possible. I feel some kind of repulsion toward all of this, especially toward you.”

The first nymph lowered her hand, and the bone ring vanished into the folds of her dress.

“We know. But the contract does not depend on your current knowledge. It was sealed with your previous soul, with what you were before you lost your name. The lake returned your body, not your story.”

“Then give me back some of the story,” he shot back, with more desperation than he wanted to show. “If you made a deal with me, I need to know something about why.”

The nymphs watched him in silence.

The youngest of them, a girl with silver eyes and an almost childish expression, tilted her head.

“We can’t.”

“Why not?!”

“Because it’s already paid for.”

That was the moment when a cold sensation ran down his back.

It was not ordinary fear.

It was recognition without memory.

As if some buried part of him had heard those words once and still remembered the taste of loss.

“Paid for with what?” he asked in a low voice.

The first nymph looked at him with such a small compassion that it almost seemed more cruel than indifference.

“Everything about your past, young husband, every little part of you, what made you who you were, all that made you human, and what stole your humanity from you before you returned to us.”

He clenched his fists.

He should not despair.

He should not show weakness.

Yet he should not, either, ignore the obvious truth standing before him with the same clarity as the moon hidden behind the clouds: he had no control over anything. Not his name, not his story, not the reason his life had ended in that lake forgotten by the world.

And yet…

There was something else.

Something hidden at the center of the void.

An impulse.

An invisible scar.

A direction.

Revenge.

The word lit up in his mind on its own with brutal clarity, like a spark touching oil. The young man brought a hand to his chest. The white mark beneath his skin burned fiercely, and for an instant—brief as lightning—he thought he saw an image: a red sky, a tower in flames, a woman’s voice shouting his name, a bloodied hand letting go of a sword.

Then it all broke apart.

He breathed hard.

The nymphs watched him immediately.

“You felt it,” said the first, now more attentive, with a shadow of genuine interest. “The contract still answers.”

“What was that?”

“An echo. Perhaps the last splinter of the desire that brought you here.”

He swallowed.

“Revenge?”

None of them answered. They only fixed their gaze on him as if silence were the only confirmation he needed.

Even the lake, as though mocking him, made a faint sound on its surface.

The man clenched his jaw.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to strike the water. He wanted to demand a truth the world refused to give him. But even that anger felt incomplete, as though the fury that should have possessed him had been torn out by the roots, leaving only a shadow of itself.

“Then tell me what I’m supposed to do here,” he said at last, hoarse.

The first nymph lifted her chin.

“Be our husband. That is all.”

Silence.

“No,” he said, with a mix of disbelief and horror. “No, it can’t stay that simple.”

“Would you prefer another title?”

“I’d prefer to understand what the hell is going on!”

The silver-eyed girl smiled faintly.

“That is part of the marriage too.”

A murmur of laughter spread among the shadows.

He looked at them as if they were a council of capricious judges gathered to mock his misfortune. And yet, beneath that apparent frivolity, there was something undeniable: authority. They were not ghosts. They were not servants. They were not simple seductresses. There was an order in the way they spoke, in the exact distance they kept from one another, in the way they all waited for the word of the one who seemed to be their leader.

The violet-eyed nymph stepped forward.

“Come with us.”

“Where?”

“To your home.”

He gave a short, disbelieving laugh.

“My home?”

“At the bottom of the lake there is a sanctuary. Your home.”

The man went still.

The nymphs watched him in silence, as if waiting for his exact reaction.

“I am not joking,” said one of them, in a deeper voice. “Beneath these waters sleeps the Black Sanctuary, and in it dwell the houses of our mothers, our sisters, and our dead. You have been recorded in our ancient seals. By right, you are part of the lake.”

He looked at the water around him. The dark reflection barely showed his pale face and the shadow of his hair stuck to his forehead.

“That’s impossible.”

“Death is impossible,” replied the first nymph, “until it happens.”

He had no answer.

Mist moved across the surface of the water. For an instant, it seemed something enormous passed beneath his feet, a slow, elongated shape like a sleeping dragon or a pillar of shadow. The young man took another step back and his boots touched something firmer than the muddy bottom. He looked up and realized he was no longer in the middle of the lake.

The shore had advanced toward him.

Or perhaps he had been dragged toward the shore without noticing.

Black earth now stretched a few meters away. The tree roots formed twisted arches. Between them, carved into wet stones, were ancient symbols covered in bright moss. Some looked like closed eyes. Others, sealed mouths. One of them, when observed closely, awoke a throbbing pain behind his skull.

He brought a hand to his temple.

“What’s happening?”

“The lake recognizes you,” said the violet-eyed nymph. “It is awakening its memory before yours.”

“The lake has memory?”

“Everything it has swallowed has one.”

He did not like that sentence.

In fact, it gave him a sensation very close to nausea.

Before he could answer, something emerged from the shore.

Not a nymph.

Not a water creature.

But a hand.

A bony hand, pale as salt, with long black nails. It sank into the mud, followed by another, and then by a face covered in sludge and algae. The man jerked back, raising a small wave. The thing coming out of the water looked like a drowned corpse, but its eyes were open and completely white.

The nymphs turned without surprise.

The creature lifted its head with a wet groan.

“My ladies of the lake…” it murmured in a broken voice. “The outer world…”

The first nymph lifted a hand in annoyance.

“Speak.”

“The northern border has been violated. Holy hunters entered the ash forest. They bear a red insignia.”

A different kind of pressure settled over the atmosphere at once. It was not fear, but organized tension. The nymphs stopped smiling. Their bodies, once relaxed, straightened like blades hidden beneath the water.

“Holy hunters with a red insignia?” repeated the violet-eyed nymph. “Are you certain? The lake had never before released mana at such a great distance as to alert the holy hunters, especially the ones with the red insignia.”

“Yes, my lady. I have no doubt.”

The leader’s gaze hardened.

“How many?”

“Seven visible. Perhaps more. They also brought consecrated chains. And…” The creature hesitated. “They carry a sealed object.”

The man did not know why, but the moment he heard the words sealed object, his heart lurched.

As if he recognized a threat.

As if some part of him knew, without memory, that everything buried in his life had begun with a sealed object.

“What object?” he asked, barely above a whisper.

The creature lifted its head toward him for the first time.

It stared at him fixedly.

And in its white eyes appeared something like terror.

“A kind of coffin.”

The world stopped.

The young man felt the air vanish from his lungs.

He did not understand why that word struck him with such force. He did not understand why a black, rectangular image formed on its own behind his eyelids. He did not understand why the name coffin did not feel abstract, but intimate. Personal. Lethal.

The mark on his chest burned again.

And this time it was not an echo.

It was a wound that remembered.

He saw a hand on a dark wooden lid.

He saw blood running down the edge.

He saw someone kneeling before him.

He saw tears.

He saw a promise spoken through clenched teeth.

And above all, he heard a voice that split him in two:

“If we don’t do something, he’ll come for us.”

The young man fell to his knees in the mud.

The nymphs surrounded him at once, not with panic, but with fierce attention. The violet-eyed nymph with the black ring knelt before him and held his face with a cold hand.

“Were you able to remember something? What impressive willpower.”

He was breathing hard.

The lake roared in his head.

The shore blurred.

The image of the coffin dissolved like ash in water.

“No… I don’t know,” he murmured. “Only… a voice. And… hatred, but especially fear.”

The nymph smiled, but there was no mockery in her expression this time.

There was confirmation.

“Then the contract is still alive.”

The young man raised his gaze to her.

“What does that mean?”

She withdrew her hand gently.

“That your revenge did not die with you.”

Behind them, the drowned creature began to tremble.

“My lady… the sealed object is awake. The holy hunters are advancing toward the sanctuary. They say they are looking for the evil that has awakened.”

He froze.

The holy hunters were looking for him.

For some reason, he understood that with absurd certainty.

The nymphs looked at one another. Their eyes shone in the dark like wet blades.

The first nymph stood.

“Then the time has come.”

“For what?” asked the man, still on his knees.

She looked down at him.

“To decide whether you will be an ornamental husband…”

Her lips curved in the faintest smile.

“Or the cursed king you promised us you would be.”

The lake stirred.

Far, far below, something answered with a vast tremor, as if an entire city had opened its eyes.

And for the first time since he awoke, the young man felt that the emptiness inside him was not only absence.

It was a door.

A door sealed with blood.

And on the other side of that door, his true name was waiting.

Chapter 1: The Crown Beneath the Water

They did not give him time to keep thinking.

Two nymphs lifted him by the arms with surprising strength and set him on his feet. He was still dazed, his body wet and his mind at war with itself. One of them placed a black mantle edged in silver over his shoulders, heavier than it looked. The fabric was cold, but when it touched his skin it left a strange, almost solemn sensation.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Dressing you,” one of the nymphs replied, as if the answer were obvious.

“For what?”

“So you won’t look like a freshly returned corpse. It already took enough work to bring you back.”

He looked at her in indignation.

“That’s your idea of comfort?”

“No,” she said. “My idea of comfort would be letting you hurt yourself with elegance, but our customs are a little more practical.”

The tension, absurd as it was, drew a short sigh from him. It was not laughter, but it was close. The nymphs watched him with a different kind of attention upon perceiving that reaction, as though they had found an interesting crack in his defenses.

The leader moved toward the edge of the water. Behind her, the lake began to rise in small columns, droplets suspended in the air like dark beads from a broken necklace. He followed her cautiously to the line where earth became mud and the water began to reflect a deeper shadow.

“Listen carefully,” said the nymph.

Her voice had lost its playful tone. Now it was the voice of someone accustomed to command.

“In the sanctuary, not everyone will accept your presence.”

“Why?… I’m apparently the husband of all of you.”

Some of the nymphs gave playful laughs. Others looked at him with the same expression one might wear when examining a new tool—interesting, but potentially dangerous.

“Because the title is real,” said the leader. “But respect is not inherited. It is earned.”

“And how do you earn it among dark nymphs?”

The leader smiled coldly.

“By surviving us.”

He thought that sounded exactly like a threat and a familiar custom at the same time.

“I don’t remember anything,” he said then, with a sincerity that weighed heavily in his mouth, “but at least give me some clarity, or I think I’ll lose my mind… and I don’t think that would be convenient for either of us.”

The nymph watched him for a long moment.

Then she answered:

“I can only tell you that the man who came to us to negotiate a deal was stubborn enough to bargain with death and challenge evil incarnate. You came here bearing a wound the world could not close. Because your hatred was so deep that the waters of forgetting from the rivers of the underworld that feed this lake from an unfathomable depth recognized you and brought you back.”

Her words settled into him like stones.

“And the coffin…” she added, “let’s just say it is an object you should keep as far away from yourself as possible if you do not want to be locked away for eternity.”

The young man felt a new chill.

“Can someone do that?”

“In your case, apparently yes.”

It was not a reassuring answer.

The drowned creature that had brought them the message dragged itself out of the mud and lay on its side, panting as if breathing were still a privilege. He looked at it and, for the first time, felt not revulsion but something close to pity. That thing had once been a man. Perhaps a guardian. Perhaps just another victim of the lake.

“Who are the holy hunters?” he asked.

The leader turned her gaze toward the dark forest.

“Men who pursue what they do not understand. Fanatics, relic thieves, war dogs with prayers in their mouths. Long ago, they swore to destroy every dark being, every creature that uses magic forbidden by the church and the imperial crown.”

“And now they’re coming for me?”

“Not exactly. It’s because of the mana the lake expels.”

“A mana so dense and dark should have put them on maximum alert,” said the nymph, crossing her arms. “If the hunters find you in the middle of the Forbidden Lake, they’ll try to seal you…”

The nymph paused for a moment before answering.

He stood very still.

“That doesn’t help. It still means they’re coming for me.”

“I never said it would help. I only said what was true.”

“But you have nothing to worry about. I doubt they’re capable of crossing through the flames of our torches that illuminate the darkness.”

Then she held out a hand toward him.

A simple gesture.

Strangely intimate.

“Come. If you are truly the husband you claimed to be, you cannot go into war with a broken memory and a naked soul.”

He looked at her.

In those violet eyes he saw something that did not fit the vulgar idea of nymphs as seductive or capricious creatures. There was hardness, yes. But there was also intelligence. And a kind of fierce loyalty, as if the lake were a cruel and ancient family, but family nonetheless.

Without knowing why, he took her hand.

The nymph did not smile. She only squeezed once, with enough force to transmit a strange certainty: you are under our law now.

The water at his feet parted.

Not like a wave.

Like a door.

Before him appeared a path formed by submerged steps descending into the deep darkness. The waters, which had seemed like a dead mass before, now shimmered with blue and green reflections, as if thousands of sleeping lamps were awakening inside them. He held his breath. The bottom of the lake stretched far deeper than reason allowed. There, among columns of black coral and ruins covered in symbols, towers, bridges, and curved roofs began to take shape. A city.

Real.

Buried beneath the water.

Breathing in silence.

The young man was left speechless.

“Welcome to the Black Sanctuary,” said the nymph leader. “Your home.”

Bells rang.

They were not metal bells.

They were bells of bone.

Their sound rose from the bottom of the lake in a deep vibration that ran through the water’s surface, the trees, the mist, and the young man’s heart, filling everything with an almost ritual gravity. In the depths, a multitude of lights came on one after another; the glow of torches seemed to grant it the necessary calm. They lit with a beautiful, warm fire, but at the same time they looked like the eyes of a predator opening in the dark.

And then he knew something, without knowing how he knew it.

This was not just a return.

It was the beginning of a war.

An ancient war.

A buried vengeance.

And he, the memoryless man who had awakened as the husband of the dark nymphs, stood at the exact center of the abyss.

He turned his head once to look back, and far away, from what seemed to be the edge of the forest, small red torchlights appeared through the mist.

Then another.

And another.

Accompanied by a symphony of screams of desperation, laughter, crying, insults, and the familiar sound of weapons clashing and blood spilling.

The hunters had arrived, but they had encountered the greatest challenge in reaching the Forbidden Lake.

The nymph leader withdrew her hand from his, threw her shoulders back, and with terrible serenity turned toward her retinue.

“I told you there was nothing to worry about. No mortal is capable of looking into the fire of our torches, and by tomorrow the forest will have changed its location.”

“Close the gates.”

The nymphs responded in unison with a bow that felt like a sentence of war.

“Yes, my lady.”

He looked at the red lights trembling in the darkness while listening to the screams of desperation and felt something inside his chest answer with a hard beat. It was not fear. It was recognition, a dark satisfaction, as if those screams were something expected.

He did not know who he was.

He did not know whom he had hated.

He did not know what face he was meant to destroy.

But for the first time since he opened his eyes in the lake, he had a certainty as clear as the edge of a freshly drawn sword:

His revenge was inevitable.

And when he remembered, the world would pay for having buried him.