Name: Hadiko
Alias: Gaze
Race: Dark Elf
Origin: Kurai-Kuni
Hadiko was not born in darkness… he was dragged into it.
He came into the world beneath a violet sky, in a hidden enclave of dark elves deep within a forest where the trees grew so tall they stitched the sky shut. Their home was silent, sacred, untouched by the noise of the outside world. The elders called it Vel’tharuun—“the place where shadows rest.”
For a time, his life was soft. His mother sang in a language that sounded like falling leaves. His father taught him how to listen to silence, how to move without disturbing the breath of the forest. Hadiko wasn’t meant to be a warrior. He was meant to be something gentler… something whole.
Then the fire came.
It didn’t roar at first. It whispered.
Steel clashed in the distance. The scent of smoke crept in like a warning too late to understand. By the time Hadiko stepped outside, the trees that once protected them burned like torches. Strangers—hunters, soldiers, maybe worse—tore through his home like a storm that had learned how to hate.
He remembers hands grabbing him. His mother’s voice breaking. His father standing between him and the world, just for a moment… just long enough to lose everything.
They didn’t die somewhere far away.
They died right in front of him.
That moment didn’t just take his family. It carved something out of him and left a hollow space where warmth used to live.
He ran.
Through burning roots. Through ash that fell like black snow. Through screams that followed him long after the forest disappeared behind him.
Days blurred into nights until he collapsed at the edge of a human settlement.
Kurai-Kuni.
It was nothing like his home.
Where Vel’tharuun was silent, Kurai-Kuni was alive with noise—markets shouting, metal clanging, people arguing, laughing, surviving. The air smelled of rain-soaked stone and street fires. Lanterns hung like captured stars, flickering in narrow alleyways. It was a place for the forgotten, the outcasts, the ones who didn’t belong anywhere else.
Perfect for someone like him.
At first, they feared him. A dark elf child with eyes too sharp, too empty. Some called him cursed. Others called him a ghost.
But Kurai-Kuni had a way of shaping people.
A blacksmith took him in—not out of kindness, but necessity. Free hands were useful. Hadiko learned to work, to fight, to endure. The streets taught him faster than any elder ever could. He learned how to read danger in footsteps, how to disappear in a crowd, how to survive without being seen.
They gave him a name he didn’t choose:
“Gaze.”
Because when he looked at something… it felt like he was seeing through it.
Or remembering something it didn’t want remembered.
Years passed, but the fire never left him.
Sometimes he’d wake up with smoke in his lungs that wasn’t there. Sometimes he’d hear his mother’s voice in the wind between buildings. Sometimes he’d see flames reflected in polished steel… even when there were none.
He didn’t cry anymore.
Not because he healed.
Because he hardened.
One night, during a storm that drowned the city in cold rain, Gaze found something.
A symbol. Burned into the armor of a dead traveler dragged in from the outskirts.
The same mark he saw the night his world ended.
The same mark that haunted his memory.
It wasn’t random.
It wasn’t over.
That night, Gaze didn’t sleep.
He stood at the edge of Kurai-Kuni, watching the rain erase his footprints before they could exist. The city that raised him… the only place he had left… felt smaller than the fire inside him.
Revenge doesn’t knock.
It calls your name until you answer.
So he left.
Not as Hadiko, the child who survived.
But as Gaze… the shadow that remembers.
He carries no home now. Only direction.
Every step forward is a promise:
He will find them.
He will make them remember.
And when the flames rise again…
This time, they won’t belong to him.
