Chapter One
There was always something off about her — they always knew. Hell, even she knew. She just used to think that one day, she’d escape it.
Perhaps that was where it all went wrong.
Clarea drifted in a familiar deluge of golden light, encapsulated by the absolute now. She stared longingly at her fingertips, watching vibrant colors swirl around her skin like watercolor in clear water. Ethereal sunshine. Infinite. Eternal.
Until the day it all ended.
The presence surrounding her felt like a warm, ghostly embrace, wrapping around her shoulders in a way her parents never had. Well, they did. But it was easier to believe otherwise.
The Spirit World was a realm she knew all too well—a sanctuary where Clarea spent entirely too much of her waking life. Too much time drifting away from the real world. Away from time itself.
When she was younger, elders warned her of the dangers of wandering the Spirit Realm. “Stay too long,” they’d say, “and you’ll lose your anchor. Your world will fade into the background, and piece by piece, you’ll become a spirit yourself.”
She hadn't cared. It felt like home at a time when home felt like a cage.
Her father was a prominent scientist, obsessed with logic and concrete data. Her mother was an aristocrat who cared only for status and high society. Together, they had raised six other daughters- all high achievers, all perfect, and none of them ever in trouble for "floundering around in spiritual spaces." Their society was built on the backs of ancient magic and spirit energy, yet like all great things, true connection to it had been lost to industrial progress. Clarea was the sole anomaly in a pristine family tree.
Then, she met him.
She had encountered spirits before— floating orbs of light, that sometimes felt more like a concept, than something actual. But this entity was real, tangible. And it spoke.
It possessed the massive, imposing body of a gorilla paired with the stern, weathered face of a human man. The moment Clarea saw him sitting by the glowing banks of the golden spirit-river, she knew he was different.
She sat nearby on the luminous grass, holding her breath as the creature turned its heavy gaze toward her.
"Doriulus," a deep voice resonated, vibrating right in her chest.
"You do not belong here," he continued.
Something shrank inside Clarea. His words struck her like the heavy toll of a brass gong. She tried to reply, but her breath caught. A sudden, piercing cold slid down her throat, settling in her chest like a shard of ice.
"You've been here too long," Doriulus warned, his eyes glowing with an ancient wisdom, and something else. Something else entirely. "Come find me again when you want to leave."
Before she could process the warning, the gorilla-man leaped. He moved like a blur of sheer muscle and blinding light. Clarea screamed, bracing for impact as he slammed into her—not with violence, but with a surge of raw energy that felt like a spirit forcibly waking inside her own soul.
Then... blackness.
"...Or find the One," his voice echoed in the cavernous dark of her mind as she fell.
-
When Clarea finally came to, she felt wrong. Heavy. Groggy.
It wasn't until she tried to cross back into the physical world that the horror set in: she was trapped.
Panic—utter, blind, suffocating panic—seized her.
Time moved differently in the Spirit Realm, but in the living world, it marched relentlessly forward. She quickly discovered a cruel rule to her predicament: only when dusk fell in the real world could she bleed through to the physical side, and only until the first rays of morning pushed her back into the light of the Spirit Realm.
Just who was that spirit? And why was it so evil?
The first couple of nights, she returned home in a frenzy, begging her family for help. Her parents denied it all- out of fear, or perhaps because they simply couldn't handle dealing with her. Eventually, Clarea stopped going back to them altogether.
Instead, she wandered.
She searched endlessly for Doriulus, desperate for answers. Months bled into one another until she picked up a tip from a forlorn graveyard keeper: a giant gorilla spirit was rumored to be hiding near the docks, tied to a run-down tavern called The Rusty Anchor.
Taverns weren't Clarea’s scene, but it was the only lead she had.
Unbeknownst to her, the physical world had changed drastically during her period of entrapment. A new King had seized power a year ago, enacting the brutal Conscription Act- a royal mandate forcing the firstborn of every household into the crown's service "for the greater good of the realm." Public outcry tore through the streets.
Floating as a dusk-bound ghost through the city, Clarea only caught whispers of the outside world. She knew only two things for certain:
-
The new King was a monster.
-
You never asked what happened to the old Queen.
A full year had passed since the tyrant took the throne, and every single night, Clarea circled The Rusty Anchor. No gorilla to be seen in sight.
Every night, she wishes she will meet him. Someone.
She was giving up.
Night after night, surrounded by the rowdy merriment of pub songs and the quiet, desperate sobbing of patron-citizens mourning their stolen firstborns, Clarea sat in the corner. The warm oil lamps reminded her of a home long gone.
She truly felt like a phantom. A living ghost.
This can't be my life, she thought, tracing a finger through a pool of spilled ale that she could barely feel. It can't end like this.
The regulars knew her only as the strange, quiet girl who sat in the shadowy corner every dusk and stared at the door. Most nights, she wasn't even sure if they actually saw her, or if she was just a trick of the candlelight.
She closed her eyes, letting the exhaustion wash over her. She was ready to stop fighting.
"Are you going to drink that?"
Clarea’s eyes snapped open.
Standing over her table was a young man leaning casually against a wooden pillar. He wore a dark, battered leather duster pulled over practical, travel-worn armor. A heavy broadsword was strapped across his back, its hilt wrapped in faded red cloth, and a metal-sheathed dagger rested at his hip.
He had sharp, angular features, dark eyes that held a dangerous mix of military discipline and cynical humor, and a jagged scar cutting through his left eyebrow. Despite his smirking, sarcastic demeanor—and the casual, cocky way he rested his hand on the pommel of his blade—there was an intense, hyper-alert stillness to him. He was a survivor— a fighter.
And he was looking directly at her. Or more precisiely, her drink that is rested in front of her that she hasn't touched.
Perhaps, she is not as invisible as she once thought she was.