Damnation & Redemption

A Thorne Darrow Origin Story

I. The Hollowing

Umbraeth had always breathed like a living thing—its exhalations thick with smoke, its whispers curling through alleyways, its pulse erratic and fevered. But in the Darrow household, the air was stagnant. The sickness had settled in long before Thorne realized it had a name.

At first, it was just exhaustion. His father, a man of ironclad will, would slump in his chair earlier each night, rubbing at his temples like a blacksmith soothing aching hands. His mother, once so full of sharp-eyed wit, began staring past him, through him, as if trying to catch glimpses of something hidden in the shadows.

And then, the voices came.

Not loud, but constant—a murmuring from his parents’ lips when they thought he couldn’t hear. Prayers to something that did not answer. Pleas to something that did. The hunger followed soon after. Not for food, not for drink, but for the strange vials that appeared in their room, sealed with wax and marked with sigils that hurt his eyes to look at. The scent that clung to them was neither chemical nor herbal—it was something older, something deep and sinking and wrong.

Nethercraft.

He confronted them in the kitchen, the cold of the stone floor biting through his boots. The fire sputtered in the hearth, throwing his parents into sharp relief—the hollow shadows under their eyes, the brittle slant of their shoulders.

“Where did you get it?” His voice sounded foreign to him, edged with something he did not recognize. “How long?”

His father flinched, a tell Thorne had never seen in the man before. His mother sighed, setting a trembling hand on the table. The candlelight caught the bones of her wrist, sharper than they had been last week. And the week before.

“It keeps us strong, Thorne.”

“Strong?” His laugh was brittle. “You look like corpses.”

His father’s gaze snapped to him then, and for the first time in his life, Thorne did not recognize the man staring back at him.

II. The First Weapon: Redemption

He tried to save them. He needed to save them.

Thorne turned his grief into motion, his desperation into steel. He locked himself away in the workshop, surrounded by half-built mechanisms, discarded blueprints, and the ever-present hum of Zero-Core energy coils. He worked feverishly, ignoring hunger, ignoring sleep. Redemption took form beneath his hands—not just a weapon, but a chance.

A gun that could freeze, that could stop the body without killing it. A weapon that could halt corruption in its tracks, force it to stagnate, maybe even reverse it. A gun built to stall, not end.

The first test misfired, the cryo-magnetic containment failing, sending shards of brittle frost shattering across his workbench. The second overloaded, cracking the barrel’s delicate inner lining. He refined, recalibrated, perfected.

The first time he fired Redemption properly, the shot whispered through the air like a ghost and sealed solid ice across a steel plate. No cracks. No breaking. Just stillness.

Thorne allowed himself one exhale of relief. One moment of hope.

It was the last time he would ever feel it.

III. The Fall

The house was different when he returned.

It should have been subtle—the shift in the air, the hush of a home no longer pretending to be one—but the weight of it pressed against his ribs like hands trying to push him back.

He stepped forward anyway.

The vials were empty, shattered on the floor like discarded promises. The candlelight burned lower than it should have. The shadows were too thick.

He found them in the parlor.

Or—what was left of them.

His mother moved first, the slow, unnatural tilt of her head catching the dim light, revealing the sickly blue veins branching from her eyes like cracks in porcelain. Her lips parted, too wide, as if her bones no longer fit beneath her skin.

His father followed, slower, heavier. The man who had once taught Thorne how to steady a rifle now dragged his feet across the floor like a marionette whose strings had been cut and crudely reattached.

Nethercraft had taken them. Hollowed them.

But some small part of them still knew him. That was the worst part.

His mother’s lips trembled, forming something almost like his name. His father’s fingers twitched at his sides as if trying to clench into the fists that had once pulled him from the frozen streets, held him steady when he was too weak to stand.

And yet, their eyes did not hold them anymore.

Thorne raised Redemption.

He fired.

The shot struck true. His mother’s body locked into place, frozen mid-motion, mouth still forming the remnants of his name. His father stopped too, the ice climbing his limbs like ivy.

Thorne waited.

And waited.

“Please,” he whispered. “Please, let this be enough.”

The silence pressed in around him.

Then, with the slow, agonizing creak of something not entirely human anymore, his father took another step. The ice cracked.

Thorne’s hand trembled. Redemption had failed.

The breath he took was sharp and final. He knew what had to be done.

IV. The Second Weapon: Damnation

He did not leave. Not yet.

Instead, he returned to the workshop, the echoes of his mother’s half-formed words still lingering in his ears. He did not grieve. He built.

Damnation was forged from his own hands, from the pieces of what had been left behind. If Redemption was his last hope, Damnation was his acceptance.

This gun would not stop. It would not hold. It would end.

The barrel was heavier, reinforced to withstand the sheer force of what it would do. The Zero-Core chambers pulsed violently, the power contained only by the delicate balance of oscillating compression fields. There was no room for misfire. No room for error.

He only had one shot.

When he returned to the parlor, his parents were still waiting.

His mother’s frozen form had begun to move again, fractures lining her skin. His father had nearly broken free, the light in his eyes flickering like a dying ember.

Thorne raised Damnation.

He did not hesitate.

The shot rang out like the tolling of a funeral bell.

It shattered the ice. It shattered them.

When it was done, there was nothing left to bury.

V. The Birth of a Legend

No one ever found the bodies. No one ever asked about the house on the hill that stood empty after that night, nor the young man who left its doors, two guns holstered at his side.

But the city remembered. It whispered of a hunter who walked the streets with ice in his veins and death on his hip. A man who built weapons not out of anger, not out of hate, but out of the knowledge that sometimes, mercy was colder than vengeance.

They would call him many things.

Killer. Outlaw. Hunter.

But in the end, he was just a man who had once believed in salvation.

He still carried Redemption.

But he never fired it first.