Marrik Vane

Human / Eater

Submitted character story

You are a hero forged by restraint, the kind who rode Old Yost's Cart and learned patience before power. What brought you back was not the Core's hunger but the voice that told you to stay human. The axe glows red because you feed it what you refuse to become, and that cost never stops compounding. Tables will remember you as the one who proved something fiercer than rage: that surviving can be an act of defiance.

Defining moment: Marrik Vane still remembered the sound before he remembered the blood.
Rain hammered the steel rooftops of Low Meridian, turning the alleyways into rivers of oil and neon. He was thirteen, small enough to hide beneath the rusted undercarriage of a cargo hauler while the city above screamed in static and gunfire. His mother’s hand covered his mouth so tightly he could barely breathe. Her palm trembled.
“Don’t move,” she whispered.
The hunters wore white visors with hollow blue optics. Corporate reclamation teams. They had come for the Symbiotic Core hidden inside Marrik’s chest — an experimental relic his father had stolen from a forgotten Precursor vault beneath the Black Trenches. Marrik didn’t understand what the Core was back then. Only that people killed for it.
His father stood in the alley entrance with an old shock rifle shaking in his hands. One man against armored executioners.
Marrik watched the rifle overheat after only three shots.
The visor-men advanced without urgency.
His father screamed for them to run.
Then the alley lit white.
The blast split metal apart like paper. Marrik felt fragments tear across his face. His ears rang so violently the world became silent. When the smoke cleared, half the alley was gone. His father’s body had vanished with it.
His mother pulled him from hiding and ran through the rain, dragging him through flooded streets glowing with holographic advertisements that kept smiling while people died beneath them. She kept apologizing between breaths.
“I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”
He never understood why until they reached the magrail bridge.
She stopped.
The hunters were already there.
Cornered between the void below and rifles ahead, she knelt before him and pressed both hands against the faint blue glow beneath his ribs. The Symbiotic Core pulsed in response.
“You cannot let them take this,” she said. “Promise me.”
Marrik was crying too hard to answer.
One of the hunters raised his weapon.
His mother smiled anyway.
Then she shoved him off the bridge.
The fall should have killed him.
Instead, the Core awakened.
He remembered drowning in black water while something ancient unfolded inside his spine. Cold mechanical tendrils wrapped around his bones. He heard voices speaking in dead machine-language. Hunger. Endless hunger.
When Marrik clawed his way back onto shore three days later, the city listed him as deceased.
His mother’s body was never found.
But sometimes, late at night, when the Core whispers through the hollow spaces of his mind, Marrik still hears her final words beneath the static:
“Stay human.”

Came to prove something