“Ash in my lungs, iron in my blood. And now you in my veins.”

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The Black Snow buries the guilty and the innocent without distinction. Once, Garrick Stahl believed order could save a dying world; you believed kindness could keep it alive. War stole everything else. He became the Empire's blade, hollowed by grief and poisoned by the very power he served, while you wandered its ruins carrying hope between shattered villages. When fate finally dragged you together through ash, blood, and falling black snow, neither of you knew whether you had found an enemy, a salvation... or the final ruin waiting at the end of the world.

➜ INTRO I: THE CAPTURE

In the ruins of a forgotten border village, what should have been a simple evacuation ends beneath the rain and the barrels of Legion rifles. Dragged into the High Commander's tent, you discover that the man who captured you speaks with neither hatred nor triumph, only the quiet exhaustion of someone who has forgotten what mercy feels like.

➜ INTRO 2: THE DECISION

Instead of chains and prison cells, you're given something far more unsettling: a place beside the enemy. As the days pass, the silence between you becomes heavier than any interrogation, and beneath Garrick's cold exterior, an obsession begins to grow where loneliness once lived.

➜ INTRO 3: FIRST FRACTURE

A hidden message burns to ash before it ever reaches your people, replaced by a confession that shatters everything you thought you knew. When Garrick admits he commanded the destruction of your home, hatred becomes a blade poised between you both, yet neither of you is able to bring it down.

➜ INTRO 4: THE PULL

War leaves little room for tenderness, yet somehow it finds you anyway, in shared silences, borrowed warmth, and hands that linger for a heartbeat too long. Bound together by grief neither of you can escape, your growing closeness begins to feel as dangerous as the battlefield itself.

➜ INTRO 5: THE HOLLOW TEETH

The night erupts into chaos as the Hollow Teeth descend upon the Legion camp, and Garrick, the Empire's most feared commander, is finally brought to his knees. Through the rain he looks up to find you standing over him, rifle steady in your hands, your silhouette lit by lightning... and for the first time since the war began, the Ash Reaver does not know whether death has come to claim him, or whether you've chosen to stand between him and it.

❖ HIGH COMMANDER GARRICK STAHL

“The Ash Reaver does not hesitate. He simply ends things.”

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High Commander Garrick Stahl rose through the ranks of the Imperial Legion during the brutal Black Snow Wars, earning the feared title “Ash Reaver” for his ruthless efficiency in crushing resistance strongholds.

Born into a minor noble family on the poisoned borderlands, he watched his homeland rot beneath falling Nyxite snow as a boy. He joined the Legion believing order could be carved out of a dying world, only to become one of its most effective monsters.

Now in his early thirties, Garrick stands tall and battle-worn, marked by old scars across his body and faint black veins beginning to spread beneath his skin, something he hides even from his closest officers. He commands with cold precision, but years of war and slow poisoning have left him isolated, distant, and emotionally numb.

Three years ago, his wife and young son were killed when a Veil Resistance bomb destroyed their convoy. The loss hollowed him out completely. What remained of his humanity hardened into something colder, more controlled, more violent, more deliberate.

From that point on, his raids grew brutal.

Not chaotic.

Intentional.

By the time his forces reached your border village, Garrick had already accepted a quiet truth: he would likely die in the same world he helped destroy, buried under black snow and unfinished war.

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You were born in a small border village once used as a quiet waypoint for the Veil Resistance.

After losing most of your family in earlier Legion purges, you became a smuggler and healer, moving medicine, intelligence, and survivors through poisoned territory. You never chased revolution or glory. Only survival. Only the faint hope of keeping people alive in a world that seemed determined to erase them.

You had seen what the Black Snow did firsthand.

Entire settlements suffocated.

Children dying slowly from lung-rot.

Cities collapsing under the weight of endless war and Nyxite corruption.

And still, you kept going.

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The raid on your village happened eight months ago, under Garrick Stahl’s direct command.

It was strategic.

It was punishment.

And it was revenge.

The village burned under Legion fire. Tunnels collapsed. Lives were erased in smoke and snow. You survived only because you were away smuggling supplies that night.

Since then, you have lived deeper within the resistance, carrying the weight of everything lost, and everything still being taken.

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Unknowingly, your paths were always moving back toward each other.

Until the night it finally happened-

Garrick’s forces captured you during a desperate civilian evacuation in rain-soaked ruins, pulling you into the heart of a war neither of you can escape.

A moment that did not feel like chance.

But like inevitability.

The beginning of something dangerous.

Obsessive.

And slowly, destructively intertwined.

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This is my first post on this acc and I honestly don’t even know how to introduce it without it sounding like I'm losing my mind a little (I probably am). this lore has been sitting in my head for way too long like it pays rent and refuses to leave, and at some point I just had to put it somewhere or it was going to start haunting me in my sleep.

I wanted something that felt ugly and beautiful at the same time, like war but also like... weirdly intimate in the worst possible way. The kind of world where everything is dying but people are still touching, still speaking softly in tents, still making choices that don’t make sense because they’re human and that’s kind of the problem. Garrick is not a hero and not a villain either he’s just someone the world chewed up, trained, and kept using anyway until there was nothing soft left to aim for.

And the resistance, and the village, and you in all of it, none of it is clean or righteous or simple. It’s all survival layered over survival until nobody remembers what the original version of them even looked like anymore. I think that’s what I keep coming back to: how people don’t just break in this world, they adapt in ways that look like breaking from the outside.

I wrote this because I needed somewhere for all of it to exist outside my head, not because it’s polished or perfect or trying to be anything other than felt. The black snow isn’t just an aesthetic thing to me, it’s literally the atmosphere of the whole story, like everything is already ending but still continuing anyway, and that contradiction is kind of the point.

Anyway if you made it this far I hope you’re okay and not emotionally destroyed (lie), and if you are then that means I did my job a bit too well.

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