The silence in the shed had density. A palpable thing, heavy against the chest.
In the center of that void, a man rested in an old chair.
He wore a black robe that concealed his silhouette. When the fabric shifted—a breeze? a breath?—it revealed the dull gleam of armor beneath. Something that had seen many battles and survived them all.
Between his gauntleted hands, he held a book. The black cover absorbed the light. Only the title remained, engraved in letters that reflected nothing.
The Empty Man.
With a steady pen, he opened to a blank page. The tip hovered over the paper for a moment—a hesitation that lasted less than a breath.
Then the ink flowed:
"Thus begins the empty man..."
Prologue:
"What Is Living?"
POV: "???" - (Chapter 1-39)
Suddenly, reality fragmented.
Not like a shattering mirror... but like a curtain being torn open.
The pitch-black of the shed was devoured by the blinding brilliance of a beach.
The sun blazed overhead—a presence felt on the skin, warming the bones. The roar of the waves filled the space. The salty scent of the sea impregnated the air in a way that ached in the lungs.
People walked along the sand. Laughter. Conversations. Children ran toward the water, their small feet leaving marks that the next wave would erase.
The armored man walked.
The metal of his boots sank into the warm sand with a dull thud. So real, so present—an insult to that place that did not exist.
He moved through the crowd like a mistake in reality.
People veered away without realizing they were veering. Their bodies shifted to accommodate his passage, but their eyes did not see him. He was a walking absence, a hole in the world through which light passed without meeting resistance.
Until he stopped.
Before a woman.
Long black hair, as dark as the shadows he knew. A white dress that shone in the sun, made of condensed light. She stood alone, gazing at the horizon.
Then she turned her face.
And she saw.
Not through him, like the others. She saw.
Her eyes met his—the only visible points in the dark slit of his helmet. The exposed hand, the only skin he showed, was pale like old parchment.
She did not retreat.
"So, this is where you want to take me after all these years?"
She hesitated. Her gaze wandered for an instant.
"Wait... you're not Gustavo, are you?"
A monument of silence.
She tilted her head. Curiosity was a living thing—a thread extending beyond fear.
"You... are different from anything I've ever seen. Why is your face covered?"
Her hand reached out. Her fingers neared the helmet.
In the same instant, the sword left his hip.
The movement was so fast there was no time to see it—only to feel the displacement of air.
Her hand was still extended when her head separated from her body.
The cut was precise.
The head arced through the air, eyes still open, the expression of curiosity still frozen. For an instant, she was alive enough to see her own body fall.
No one screamed. No one moved. The people continued to live, as if nothing had happened.
Her body collapsed onto the sand. The white dress, stained red, spread around her like the wings of a bird.
Then the illusion began to melt.
The sky dissolved into smoke, like paint running on a wet canvas. The sand split, giving way to the shed's concrete. The people evaporated as if they had never existed.
The beach was nothing but a memory. The ghost of a curse that, at some point, had been human.
So, the reality of that beach was something else.
The memory fragmenting to reveal what had always been beneath: the raw, dark truth.
The ground was black, dead—nothing could grow from it. There was no fertile soil, no seed that would germinate, no life that could sprout from that poisoned earth. Only dust. Cracked asphalt. Dry, gray grass that had died long ago. Dead earth that the wind carried in clouds of dust that never settled.
In that place, there was no light.
It was nonexistent.
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A permanent darkness, dense, as if it had weight. Gray and black clouds covered the sky like a ceiling, thick and unchanging, blocking any trace of light that might exist beyond them. The sun, if it still existed somewhere, could not be seen. The stars, if they still shone, could not be reached.
That was the place known as the "Infernal Zone."
Even if the armored being couldn't know that.
He had never heard that name. Never read about that place. To him, that world of darkness and death was simply the world. The only one he knew. The only one that existed.
Light was only possible in those moments.
In those small moments when, suddenly, the curse shifted.
As if something inside it—something not even it controlled—carried it to a place where its monstrous form dissolved. Where it was no longer an aberration, but human.
Just like what one day he had seen in an old book.
In the worn pages, there were figures that smiled. People with whole faces, bodies without distortions, hands that didn't transform into claws. He had never seen anything like it in real life. Only in those visions. Only in those brief instants before the illusion dissolved.
Light was only available in that moment.
In that fragile instant when the curse tried to deceive him.
It created a beach. A blue sky. People laughing. Everything he couldn't have was offered as bait.
But when that revealed itself to be a lie.
An illusion.
When the last spark of humanity dissipated, and only the monster that needed to be eliminated remained...
Everything came to the surface.
The reality.
The truth.
The world as it had always been.
And the darkness, which had never really gone away, returned along with it.
The emptiness man tightened his grip on the sword's hilt. His fingers, beneath the gauntlet, did not tremble.
A movement in the shadows.
His body leaped—not away, but into it. The first curse's blade passed inches from his helmet, cutting the air where he had been an instant before.
Another emerged from the darkness.
Two.
The battle exploded.
He moved with a speed that defied the eyes. Precise, economical steps. He danced between the blows as if he knew each attack before it was made.
Dark energy concentrated beneath his feet. The floor cracked, shards flying. The impact launched him into the air, his body spinning.
From up there, he saw the two creatures lift their distorted faces.
The sword rose.
The final blow was ready.
Then, everything dissipated.
Time stopped.
Sixteen years ago, he was an infant in a deserted house.
Not because someone cared for him. Not because there was food. But because something—a force he would never understand—refused to let him go.
His skin was transparent. Beneath it, dark veins pulsed. His body was kindling wrapped in skin.
He did not eat. He did not drink.
He only existed.
The years passed. His body learned to live without what kept others alive. His mind learned to process the world without the tools others used.
But his appearance remained terrifying.
One day, he rolled out of his crib.
The impact against the floor was his first lesson in pain.
He lay there for a long time. Motionless.
Then, he began to crawl.
Months passed like this. Crawling across the floor, centimeter by centimeter. His goal: a shelf on the other side of the room. There, there were books.
He didn't know what they were. He only knew that the colorful covers drew his eyes.
When he finally reached the shelf, his bony fingers touched the spine of a book: The Tale of the Princes.
Empty didn't know the letters. But he devoured the images.
There, he saw a man in armor.
The prince.
And the princess.
The prince, a handsome boy, saved people. And when he saved them, they smiled.
The princess was saved by him as well.
Empty spent hours studying those smiles.
In the same book, there was another character: Empty.
He saved no one. He only existed. He watched.
In the story, the Empty was a fool who always lagged behind the prince throughout the entire narrative.
He followed beings who, for his own convenience, were superior to him.
What was understood? Nothing.
Just an image of a life never lived, of a simple and unique lesson.
What does that mean? Will someone smile at me one day?
Like the prince does?
Empty felt he was a mix of both — the prince and the empty.
The mirror beside him, showing his monstrous appearance, was the answer he desired.
He could never be the prince.
Not under the pretext one might imagine.
The day he reached the door changed everything.
Years passed before his legs could carry him to the entrance. He opened the door.
And he confronted the world.
A four-legged monster watched him—scaly skin, yellow eyes.
Empty felt no fear. To him, that aberration was the standard of normalcy.
The problem was the wind.
The air against his skin was like a lash of needles. Each particle of dust was a small death.
The monster moved. Not in an attack—in a casual charge. Its paw struck Empty, and his thin body rolled down the hill, hitting rocks, branches, until it stopped in a ruined park.
Empty tried to scream.
No sound came out.
He lay there for days. The sun burned his skin. The cold froze his bones. The rain fell.
Until the will to live roared louder.
Get up.
He got up.
Black energy emanated from his feet—dark, dense, like liquid smoke. It rose up his legs, enveloped his body. The pain of the wind lessened.
He ran.
The monster perceived the threat. Its yellow eyes are fixed on the fragile creature now advancing.
Empty ran with an intensity he had never known. His body moved as never before. His lungs burned.
And then, something happened.
His voice tried to escape. It didn't form words—but a sound emerged from his throat. A primal noise. A cry of existence.
For the first time, he was human.
As he crossed the threshold of the house, the monster stopped. It retreated.
In that moment, Empty understood: he needed protection.
Months passed.
Empty tried to understand what he had done. He found no answers.
But he found the power.
The darkness around him condensed, solidified. First, the chest. Then the shoulders. Then the arms, the legs, the helmet.
The armor.
It covered him completely now. The wind could no longer hurt him. The world could no longer touch him.
He also shaped the sword—black as night, cold as the void, sharp as regret.
Years later, Empty left that house forever.
The curse was waiting.
The four-legged monster, the same one that had dragged him down the hill, now stared at him.
Empty didn't hesitate.
He launched himself forward, the sword in a perfect arc. With a single blow, he cut off the first curse's head.
The body fell, and for the first time, Empty felt something that might have been satisfaction.
The dense air of the shed enveloped him once more.
The two curses stood before him. He moved. In a single attack—a movement containing sixteen years of existence—he cut off both their heads.
They fell together.
In that moment, something changed. Something he couldn't name.
He could never be a prince.
But that was not just emptiness.
That was The Empty Man.
Back to death, to chaos, to destruction...
Empty moved among the fallen bodies. His eyes found something on the ground.
A green stone.
Small, the size of a palm, it glowed with a soft light that seemed to come from within. Empty picked it up—as he picked up everything he found. It was an old habit: collecting fragments of a world that no longer existed.
On the stone, words were engraved:
"Protect her. Never show it to anyone."
Empty couldn't read.
He kept it.
His footsteps echoed on the cracked concrete as he walked away. Behind him, the curses lay twisted forms, like broken dolls someone forgot to put away.
He walked a few steps.
And then he stopped.
Behind him, something was happening.
Slowly, the curses began to change. The distorted flesh dissolved into fine mist, like dry ice in the sun. Piece by piece, the monstrous forms unraveled.
In their place, two human figures.
Almost translucent—projections of warm light in the gray dust. The woman from the beach: long black hair, a white dress with no shine, a soft smile that didn't belong to that place. Beside her, a man with ordinary features, gentle eyes, his hand intertwined with hers.
Something stirred inside Empty.
It wasn't pain. It wasn't fear. It was a pressure—warm, strange, rising up the back of his neck.
He didn't resist. He let it come.
The first conversation under a flowering tree. Hands that were touched by accident—and then on purpose. The first kiss. The child was born. The boy who cried loudly and then smiled. The loss. The pain. The void.
He didn't understand those scenes. He had never loved anyone. He had never lost anyone.
But, for the first time, he might want.
He wanted the smile of thanks at the end? He wanted those forms to look at him and say, without words: "Thank you for having existed?"
The woman and the man raised their eyes to him.
They smiled.
It wasn't a smile of pity. It wasn't a smile of fear. It was a smile as if he had done something right. As if, for an instant, he wasn't just a walking weapon.
As if he were someone.
Then they dissipated. Mist that the gray wind carried away.
Empty stood still for one more second.
What Is Living?
He had no answer. Perhaps he never would.
But something was growing inside—small, fragile, insistent. Something that didn't need a name.
It was there.
And to search for that question.
And for the light that could finally shine on that dark world.
Like any child afraid of the dark.
Empty kept walking.
The dead horizon stretched ahead, empty as always.
Only now, for the first time, the emptiness felt a little less absolute.
'The Empty Man'
Observant, analytical, and blunt. He dismantles the story character by character. His biggest flaw: he doesn't explain rules.