“Listen carefully.

  The world you know is only half the truth.

  The rest... has been hidden — forgotten, and waiting.”

  They told you light was the beginning of all things.

  That in the beginning, there was nothing… and then, a spark.

  They lied.

  Before light, before time — there was Darkness.

  It had no shape. No face. No name. No limit.

  It drifted through the world freely,

  and it remembered everything the light refused to carry:

  Pain. Fear. Hunger and Death.

  And it shaped them into a world beyond your realm.

  We called it the Shadow World — the Dark Realm.

  When we walk in your world, you call it imagination, ghosts, and demons.

  For us… it’s just a visit to the old world.

  You’ve seen glimpses of it, even if you didn’t know.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  That chill crawling up your spine in an empty room.

  The flicker in the mirror that vanishes when you turn.

  The scream that catches in your throat when you’re wide awake in the dark.

  That’s us.

  That’s the Empire that lies beyond the veil.

  Once, long ago, we walked your world freely.

  Not as monsters — but as one of you.

  The First Emperor was born human.

  But you — your pain, your fear, your hunger — made him one of us.

  And finally, death completed the transformation.

  He shed his name.

  He bled out his soul.

  And he became the voice of the Darkness.

  Under him, the Shadow Empire was born —

  A kingdom of whispers and silence, built not from stone, but from memory and fear.

  Its cities were carved from the bones of forgotten gods.

  Its knights fed on the last thoughts of dying men.

  And its laws… were eternal.

  In our world, shadow is not absence — it is power.

  We wear it.

  Speak through it.

  Travel inside it.

  Kill with it.

  The strong bend it to their will.

  The weak vanish beneath it.

  But power… eats itself.

  The First Emperor’s son — the one we now call the Second King — saw what we had become.

  So he changed everything.

  He closed the gates.

  He forbade our magic from ever touching your world again.

  He sealed the Empire in silence and shadow,

  and erased us even from memory.

  To break that law was not to be punished…

  but to be unwritten.

  And so, we vanished.

  You built your cities. Fought your wars.

  You believed yourselves alone.

  We let you be.

  But don’t think we were alone in the dark.

  We were not.

  In the depths of the Dark Realm, there are monsters —

  creatures born of corrupted magic,

  beings more powerful than your gods,

  more intelligent than anything your machines can comprehend.

  And we have been at war with them.

  For thousands of years.

  Too busy to care about your world.

  Too tired to intervene.

  At some point… we even began to pity you.

  Pity everything that lies beyond our veil.

  But that was then.

  Now — the gate has opened.

  For the first time since the Second King,

  an army Is waiting to march in front of it.

  Our strongest is getting ready to fight with you —

  The Black family —

  has declared war upon your world.

  When the shadow walks again…

  light will have nowhere left to hide.