Shadowbound: The Doctor Who Became a Blade"

Once, long before he bore the name Elias, he was known as Nathan — a man unraveling under the quiet weight of a life that had slipped from his grasp.

At forty-two, Nathan was a ghost of a man, exiled from the one thing that had once given his existence purpose. A surgeon by title, once lauded in quiet corners of surgical theaters, he now drifted through grey days and sleepless nights like a phantom clinging to a rusted chain of memory. He lived in a crumbling apartment on the outskirts of a city too fast for the broken, with only the dim hum of an old refrigerator and the occasional siren to remind him he hadn't died yet. 

They called him Dr. Nathan Ashford — prodigy, precision incarnate, the man who whispered to dying hearts and coaxed them into beating once more. In the hushed corridors of St. Amelia's Medical Center, nurses spoke his name like a prayer. Families clung to his every word, eyes wide with desperate hope. His success was clinical. Cold. Impeccable.

But in the end, it took only one moment. One mistake.

One child who didn't wake up.

No screaming, no alarms — just the silence of a flatline and the sterile smell of iodine. Nathan stood frozen in the OR, gloved hands hovering over the open chest of an eight-year-old boy, his lungs still beneath the retractors, his heart still in Nathan's grip. A thousand hours of training, a thousand more of experience — and it meant nothing now. A single miscalculation. A cut too deep. Too fast. 

The silence devoured him.

He could still hear the beeping even after they shut the monitors off — phantom echoes in his skull, pulsing behind his eyes. They told him it wasn't entirely his fault. That complications happen. That some cases spiral beyond control. But he knew better. He had seen the blade in his own hand. Felt the tremor that shouldn't have been there.

He killed the boy.

And that knowledge — quiet, slow, acidic — unstitched him from the inside.

---

The Collapse

He didn't fight the investigation. Didn't call a lawyer.

Didn't speak in his own defense when the tribunal stripped him of his license. 

He simply packed what little remained of his pride and walked into obscurity. The apartment shrank around him. His phone stopped ringing. Friends faded into silence. His name was scrubbed from hospital directories like mold from a wall.

He became a ghost in his own life.

Months passed in a haze of sleep deprivation and half-eaten meals. He moved back to the crumbling house on the edge of the city where his grandmother still lived — the only person who hadn't turned her back. The building was a ruin of old wallpaper, creaking floors, and forgotten clocks, but it was the only place that didn't spit him out.

She never asked about the trial.

Never said the boy's name.

She just brewed tea and told him stories about forgotten family relics, old paintings, and a strange basement that had been locked for decades.

He nodded. Listened. Pretended to care.

But inside, Nathan was hollow — a man-shaped wound. 

---

It wasn't grief. Not exactly. He didn't cry. Didn't scream into pillows or drink himself to sleep. Instead, the world simply dulled around him, as if grief had worn through all its sharp edges and left only the dust. He walked like he was underwater. Spoke like his lungs were tired of holding words.

He saw the boy's face everywhere.

In the mirror.

In dreams.

In the fleeting glint of a child crossing the street.

His grandmother noticed. Of course she did. Her eyes were sharp, even as her body gave way to time. But she never pried. She knew how grief lies — how it rots in silence. She let him crumble in peace.

Until the cough started.

A dry rasp at first. Harmless. Annoying.

But by the time he noticed the blood on her handkerchiefs, it was already too late. *** 

 Nathan sat by her side through the final days. Hospital rooms, this time from the other side. Fluorescent lights humming like flies. The irony was suffocating — the man who once held life in his hands, now watching it slip from the only person who still loved him.

She clutched his hand and whispered through cracked lips:

> "The door in the basement... it's yours now."

He didn't understand. Thought it was the fever talking. But her eyes were too lucid for madness. They gleamed with something... else. Not fear. Not delirium.

Something ancient.

She died two days later.

And the house fell utterly silent.

---

Dust and Whispers

Nathan buried her alone. The church was nearly empty — just him, a priest who didn't ask questions, and the distant sound of rain on gravestones. When he returned home, the emptiness felt carnivorous. Every floorboard seemed louder. Every shadow deeper.

Grief had grown teeth.

He avoided the basement for weeks. But the thought festered — the locked door, the strange way she said it, the way her gaze seemed to pierce through him.

And eventually, he descended the stairs.

They groaned beneath his weight. Dust clung to every surface like ash. The basement was a mausoleum of forgotten heirlooms, broken chairs, yellowed books. But in the far corner — past a rusted trunk and shattered mirror — stood the door.

Wooden. Black. Unmarked.

And sealed with five iron bolts. ****

His hands shook as he undid each latch. Something in the air thickened — as if reality didn't want the door to open.

Behind it: darkness.

Not the absence of light. But a presence. Waiting.

Stairs carved in stone led downward. Far deeper than the foundation should allow. The walls shimmered like obsidian wrapped in frost.

At the bottom, another door. This one was not made of wood.

It pulsed. Breathed. And above its arch, in silver flame, an inscription written in a language he did not know, yet understood:

> "I am Louna, daughter of the undesired. Heir of what was lost. If you wish to gamble with fate... step forward."

Nathan stood at the threshold, a thousand memories tearing at his mind — the boy, the hospital, the silence.

He stepped through.

And the world ended.

---

The moment Nathan stepped through the gate, the world around him convulsed.

It was not like falling. It was not like flying. It was nothing his senses could define. Light folded inside out. Sound dissolved into colors, and weight became motionless. He felt as though he were being rewritten—not transported, not carried—but unraveled, scattered, and then rewritten.

A scream caught in his throat, but he couldn't hear it.

For an eternity that may have lasted only a heartbeat, there was nothing. No body. No voice. No thought.

Then—the ground.

Soil. Cold, damp, and rough. He tasted moss, bitter and earthy, and the sting of chilled wind burned across his bare neck. Nathan coughed, breath hitching in his lungs as if his body were relearning how to breathe. His fingers clawed into the dirt, searching for something real.

When he opened his eyes, the world was dim.

Twilight.

But the sky above was nothing like Earth's. There were no stars—only a vast, bruised horizon of shadowed clouds swirling like smoke caught in slow motion. A pale moon hung unnaturally close, carved with strange symbols that seemed to shift when he blinked.

He tried to stand, only to stumble.

His limbs felt wrong.

Smaller. Lighter. Younger.

His breath caught again, this time out of terror.

He raised his hands to his face—and froze.

They weren't his.

Not Nathan's.

Slender fingers. Smooth, unmarred skin. No surgical scars. No bone-deep calluses. And his skin—too pale. As if it had never known sunlight.

He scrambled to a puddle, its surface reflecting the light from the moon above. What stared back at him made his heart skip.

A child.

A boy.

Blonde hair—damp and tangled.

And eyes.

Red. A deep, unsettling crimson that shimmered faintly, even in the dark.

He reeled back, stumbling to his feet, spinning in place as the forest loomed around him. Twisted trees, black bark, and leaves like withered hands. No birds. No wind. Just silence.

"What... is this place?" he whispered, his voice now younger, unfamiliar.

A name stirred in his mind.

Elias.

He didn't know why, but it rang through him like a memory—someone else's memory. Or maybe it had always been there, waiting beneath Nathan's skin.

A distant howl echoed in the trees. Not animal. Not human. Something in between.

He turned back to the gate—only to find it gone.

The stone archway that had led him here was no longer behind him. Just more forest. More dark. As though it had never existed.

Nathan—Elias—stood alone beneath a cursed moon, in a body not his own, in a world that whispered madness between the leaves.

And behind him, from deep within the trees, something watched.