Chapter 1 Prologue - The Supernatural War

Four hundred years ago, the sky split open.

The old stories call it the Rift. A wound torn open across the heavens when the world’s magic came crashing back.

No one remembers what started it, only what crawled through. Dragons on wings of fire. Wolves walking upright with eyes that glowed like suns. Vampires rising from the ashes of their graves, starved and reborn.

They called it The Supernatural War.

Humans fought, of course.

We built machines that spat lightning, burned cities to stop invasions, prayed to gods that no longer answered.

We lost in a single generation.

The supernaturals signed their Dominion Pact, dividing the world like they were divvying up meat at a feast. Wolves took the wildlands, dragons the mountains and skies, and vampires took the cities that still burned.

Humans got the ruins. Collars, slavery and silence.

That was the beginning of our obedience, and the start of our rebellion.

My parents were the kind of people who still believed in impossible things.

They worked for the Ashborn before it even had a name, smuggling children out of labor camps, and planting explosives beneath wolf convoys. My earliest memory is the smell of smoke and my mother’s voice saying, “Run and don’t look back.”

I didn’t look back.

By the time I stopped running, the only thing left of my family was the charred remains of their rebel insignia. A single feather carved into metal.

Commander Solen Vare found me a week later, hiding in a drainage pipe under Old Denver. He was already half a ghost himself back then, with his silver hair, half his face burned from dragonfire, and a voice too calm to belong to anyone sane. He didn’t ask my name. He just said, “If you’re going to survive, learn to fight.”

So I did.

Life in the rebellion wasn’t noble... it was survival with better branding. Haven-9 became my home. It was a network of old subway tunnels patched together with relic tech and stubbornness. I grew up on canned beans and adrenaline, and trained with blades too heavy for my hands until my knuckles bled. By fourteen, I could gut a man twice my size. By sixteen, I stopped feeling bad about it.

Solen raised me like a soldier, not a daughter. He taught me how to kill cleanly, how to disappear into shadow, and how to choose between mercy and victory. I learned fast because there wasn’t time to be a child.

There were only two options in this world, be useful or be dead.

When I was nineteen, I earned my codename, Ghost.

The Ghosts were the rebellion’s assassins, the ones who went where others wouldn’t, did what others couldn’t, and didn’t always come back. You became a Ghost when your first kill didn’t make you flinch. I was the youngest to ever join the rank.

Now I’m twenty four, and every scar I have tells the same story, we keep fighting because no one else

will.

People think the Ashborn are heroes.

They’re wrong.

We’re the dirty work of humanity’s last hope. We poison vampire wells, bomb dragon refineries, and slit throats in the dark. We steal their magic relics, experiment with their blood, and try to turn their power into our weapon. Half our own people die testing those experiments. The rest of us just drink and joke about which supernatural will kill us first.

But every night, before I sleep, I whisper our motto. Ashes remember the fire.

Because they do. Because we do. Because someone has to.

I remember the first time I saw a dragon.

I was thirteen, standing on the ruins of a collapsed tower when the sky caught flame. He wasn’t even close, just a shape cutting through the clouds, bronze and terrible. The air shimmered in his wake. For a second, I thought he was beautiful. Then he landed on a human outpost two miles away and turned it to glass.

That was the day I decided beauty was dangerous.

That was the day I decided to stop being afraid of monsters.

By the time I met one face to face, I’d already learned how to kill them.

Solen always said I was too reckless.

He wasn’t wrong.

I’d led infiltration raids into vampire feeding camps, set traps that took down half a wolf battalion, and stolen firestone from the dragons’ own forge lines. They called me the deadliest Ghost in the rebellion, which mostly meant I’d survived too long.

My closest friends are other dead men walking, Maris, the tactician with a soldier’s brain and a death wish, Eron, the half-vampire spymaster who lies better than he breathes, and Sera, the medic who keeps us stitched together with her witch born hands. They’re the only family I’ve got. And Solen, he’s not blood, but he’s the closest thing to a father this world allows.

I don’t fight for gods or glory. I fight because there’s no one else left who can.

Sometimes, I wonder what it would’ve been like to be born before the Rift, when the sky was whole and magic was just myth.

They say humans ruled back then, before greed cracked the world open. It’s hard to imagine a world where we were the monsters’ equals.

Now, we’re ghosts in our own story. Living reminders of what happens when you lose.

______

They call me Ghost because I never die where they expect me to.

Because every mission ends the same way, with blood on the walls, bodies on the floor, and me walking away, breathing when I shouldn’t be.

But lately, I’ve started to wonder if maybe that name isn’t a codename anymore. Maybe it’s a warning.

Because sometimes, when the world goes quiet and the lights flicker in the tunnels, I swear I can feel something inside me that doesn’t belong. Something waiting.

Something ancient.

And if I ever find out what it is…the monsters that took this world might finally have something to fear.