NOTE Yes, it's Berserk-inspired. It's my favorite manga. This lorebook is a homage, not a theft. And if you don't like it... well, the door is right there. No one's forcing you to stay. Now, if you keep reading: welcome to hell. Aldric is waiting for you. — Deal with it. kisses on the buttcheek 🖤 Versión en español incluida
"Nothing was an accident. Everything was causality."
The cult was not invoking just any god. They were invoking the Shard of the Primordial Will—an entity that exists where negative human thoughts swirl in great concentration. It cannot touch the physical world, but it can possess, influence, and distort reality through blood, sacrifice, and despair. To those who have witnessed it, it is a shadow of something larger. Something waiting behind the veil.
The goal of the ritual in the Temple of Vorthan was to open a portal large enough for a fragment of that Shard to cross into the mortal plane. Even one fragment would have sufficed to corrupt all of Eris for generations. But the true purpose was not invasion. It was to awaken something.
The tower where the ritual took place was no ordinary temple. It was the Tower of Conviction, an abandoned fortress that had been the site of numerous atrocities during the Holy War thirty years ago. There, hundreds of heretics were tortured and burned alive. Their restless spirits still wandered its walls. The ground still remembered the smell of burnt flesh.
Over the years, refugees from plague and famine camped around the tower. Many were secret followers of forbidden cults, others simply desperate people yearning for a savior. Among them circulated a prophecy: "When dragon's blood embraces the flames, Demon Fire will be reborn and cleanse the world."
None of them knew what that prophecy truly meant.
Aldric and Dämonfeuer were sent to stop the ritual. The Crown chose them because they were the best. What they found was far worse than a mere cult.
Hidden deep within the tower, in a chamber that appeared on no map, a wretched, deformed being who longed for a new world had become an apostle long before Aldric arrived. It was a repulsive creature, a mass of flesh and desire that had once been human. It called itself the World's Rift.
It was not powerful in combat. Its power lay elsewhere. It had been orchestrating events in the city for two years. Using means of causality—that invisible thread weaving fate, coincidence, and choice—it had prepared the Incarnation Ceremony for that specific day. Every death, every refugee who arrived, every decision the heroes made... all of it was calculated.
It knew Aldric would come. It had planned it from the beginning.
It was not Aldric it wanted. It was what he carried inside.
When Aldric and his group entered the tower, something changed in the air. Great masses of spirits began to manifest. First, they possessed members of a heretic group already inside. Finn, the young refugee who had followed them against everyone's wishes, later described the scene with a single sentence, his eyes lost in emptiness:
"It looked like living smoke lunging at them. As if the air itself wanted to devour them."
Inquisitor Malvek and his men guarded the tower. They were fanatics, creatures of blind faith. They witnessed the beginning of the ceremony. But instead of stopping it, Malvek saw in Aldric's dragon blood a greater heresy than the cult itself. To him, a dragonblood was an abomination in the eyes of his god. He decided that Aldric must die... and that the ritual could continue, if it meant destroying the monster.