The World Made Me
The Darkest Heart, Forged in the Loneliest Light
Content Warning:
This story contains dark and emotionally intense themes, including trauma, loss, cruelty, and violence, explored through the internal monologue of a villain shaped by deep suffering.
Read at your own discretion, especially for those sensitive to themes of abuse, emotional manipulation, and psychological descent.
This tale seeks not to excuse darkness, but to explore the shadowed spaces where it is born.
They say the screams echo longer in marble corridors.
He steps through them—slow, deliberate. Moonlight slips through high cathedral windows, painting him in white like some mockery of grace. Blood follows—warm, human, alive. What waits behind him holds no weight anymore.
He was seven the day they buried his name in the playground.
He had a drawing—dragons, sketched in shaky crayon lines, bright red and black with wings too large for the page. He waited his turn at the base of the slide, the drawing folded like a secret in his pocket.
Laughter rang sharp across the gravel. One of them held it up high, out of reach. Another tore it straight down the middle.
He tried to grab it back, and they shoved him hard enough to scrape his palms open on the asphalt.
A teacher watched from a distance, too tired to care. A few girls turned away.
When he got up, red blooming across his hands, his dragon lay in pieces on the ground. Crumpled. Forgotten.
They laughed harder. Laughed when his mother turned from him in shame. Laughed when she said, “Look what you’ve done.”
That sound lingers as the chamber door opens. Guards slump like broken dolls. One still draws breath. For a moment longer.
The world feeds on what it crushes.
At twelve, he pleaded for a creature smaller than his hands. A kitten—starved, trembling. His father taught him the cost of softness. A cage. A belt. A week without food. “Affection invites ruin,” he muttered through clenched teeth.
The animal curled into silence. So did the boy.
His boot presses against bone in the corridor. Whether marble, flesh, or memory—it all cracks the same.
They called it redemption.
At fifteen, he stole books—ink-bound miracles. Magic, mechanics, ideas bigger than his scars. The academy opened its gates. A scholarship carved from headlines and pity.
Lessons came quiet. Mockery wore silk robes. Applause belonged to the undeserving. He built something beautiful—they praised the student beside him.
His thesis vanished beneath another’s name.
The university smoldered under winter stars. He offered warning. They dismissed it.
They silenced themselves in flame.
The council chamber waits.
Stained glass looms overhead—saints frozen mid-benediction. Incense thickens the air, mingling with rust and rot. Walls pulse around him. Something ancient beats through the floor, through his ribs, echoing through the emptiness inside.
He plants the charge. Lights bloom red in the corners. Each blink a heartbeat. Each flicker a tolling bell.
Her smile still lives behind his eyes.
The girl with the wind-chapped lips. A tavern laugh. A farm-born soul with dirt under her nails and stars in her voice. She saw the burn-marks, the twitch behind his eyes.
He spoke of darkness. Of what the world does to things that dare to hope.
“Sit with me anyway,” she said.
They dragged her through it. Marked her. Left her in the square with his name stitched into her skin.
His voice split the sky that night. Lightning could not match it.
The final click breathes through the room.
He walks the circle's edge. The hum rises—steady, sacred. Red light spills across the council’s empty chairs.
This is a eulogy.
For the boy who stitched wings from wonder.
For the creature who starved beside him.
For the woman who loved without armor.
Flames reach higher than the spires. Stone cries crumble beneath ash.
And through it all, his whisper carries farther than any scream—
“I gave everything.”
“The world made me.”
“Now it will feel what it shaped.”