Patron of Pain
At sixteen, every human receives an Ending: a vision of how they will die.
Some see quiet deaths. Some see monsters, murder, betrayal, war, or disasters that will swallow everyone near them. Society learned to rank people by those visions, train the useful ones, fear the dangerous ones, and abandon the ones marked by deaths too ugly to stand beside.
Derula Black’s Ending never came.
His ceremony broke.
A year later, his best friend died in front of him, and Derula learned the truth hidden behind one of the blood-chained doors inside him: he could not stay dead. Every time he died, time dragged him backward. Sometimes seconds. Sometimes longer. He tried again, and again, and again, until he had died 1,233 times trying to save one person.
He failed anyway.
Now Derula is eighteen, forced into Harrowgate Institute after too many deaths begin bending around him. He wears a fitted white leather glove on his right hand, but the glove is not the source of his power. It only opens the three hidden doors buried inside him.
His true Talent is Patron of Pain.
His first known ability is Ending Break.
Derula can interrupt a person’s destined death and force that Ending into a brutal fight against fate’s correction. If he wins, someone lives past the moment meant to take them. If he loses, death collects.
But every broken Ending leaves a mark.
Every life saved costs pain, blood, memory, or something worse. Every victory draws a Collector. Every secret inside Derula points back to the two white doors stained in blood and wrapped in black chains.
To some, he is a miracle.
To others, he is the mistake making fate bleed.
And Derula already knows the cruelest truth of all:
Sometimes dying is easier than trying again.
“Derula Black did not quit the first time he died, He quit the first time his best friend did.”