Not all debts are born from the lack of money. Some are born from an excess of love — love exercised in the wrong way, without the permission of those who receive it. This is the debt that built the entire system.
Centuries before me, Marek — the one I know as Armando — made a pact with the cosmic Equilibrium. In exchange for something he desperately wanted, he offered a soul. Not his own. The soul of someone who loved him without reservation. Someone who had given no consent. Someone who knew nothing.
The Equilibrium accepted. But a soul given without right does not dissolve — it remains in the system, stuck, like a knot that cannot be untied. And around that knot, Marek built everything else: the purgatories, the collectors, the Bridge of Shadows. Not out of cruelty. To keep that original guilt compressed.
"The oldest and most ignored debt that exists: the one we incur every time we take something that does not belong to us — even when we do it out of love, even when we see no other choice."
— from the Prologue
It was not offered to me in a moment of weakness — it was offered at the exact moment when weakness had become structural. Debts, mortgage, exhaustion. Armando knew where to strike. Beings like him always know where to strike.
Phase I
The Offer
Armando approaches me with the promise of a different life — debts cleared, security for Marie, stability. In exchange: a nightly task as guardian of the purgatories. A job, he says. Like any other.
Phase II
The Signature
I signed. Not because I was foolish — because desperate men always sign. And because no one explains the real cost until it is too late to turn back.
Phase III
The Investiture
On the Bridge of Shadows, arms of earth and mud locked my ankles while Armando pronounced words in a guttural, ancient language. From the sky descended a beam of dense light. I caught fire. Not metaphorically.
Phase IV
The Transformation
When the flames died, I was Averius. Larger, stronger, denser. Eagle talons instead of legs. Claws instead of nails. A dark metal helmet fused to my skull. My face still mine — but behind my eyes, something Joseph had never had.
It is not a being. It is not a deity. It has no preferences, no mercy, no cruelty. The Equilibrium is the principle that holds the system upright — the force that ensures every compressed guilt finds its form of containment.
Guilts Are Compressed
An unprocessed guilt does not vanish. It compresses until it finds its final form — a purgatory tailored to whoever carries it. Not punishment: logical consequence.
Debts Remain Active
A debt given without right blocks the system. Time does not resolve it. It can only be untied from within — by someone not yet consumed by the system itself.
Anchors Are Necessary
Every guardian needs an anchor — a point of contact with the physical world that prevents total drift. Without one, a guardian stops being someone and becomes something. A function. A gear.
The System Does Not Tolerate Variables
Armando thought he was creating a collector. He created something unpredictable. Someone who learned the system from within without ceasing to be human. This, the Equilibrium had not calculated.
It is the place where the two planes meet. Not a building, not a structure — a permanent threshold that rises from the peak of a mountain and descends toward the purgatories. Across the Bridge walk the souls: men and women dressed in clothes that seem decades old, heads bowed, eyes fixed on nothing.
They do not collide with Armando — they avoid him instinctively. They stepped aside at my passing too, after the investiture. They sensed my new nature before I understood it myself.
Every night, for months, I crossed that Bridge. And every morning I returned next to Marie, her belly growing and her breath slow. The two most distant things I have ever lived, always less than a meter apart.
"I no longer collided with them; they stepped aside at my passing, sensing my new nature. It was a humanity stripped of all hope."
— Joseph, Chapter 6
VANTOR
Lance / Halberd — Blue Energy — As Ancient as the Night of Time
Armando handed it to me after the investiture. The moment I took it, I felt pure power flow through my arm — a cold, ancient energy. It is not a weapon in the ordinary sense. It is a tool built for a precise function in a precise system: to release souls from the purgatories when they are ready. Not to kill them. To complete them.
"He handed me the lance and in that moment I felt pure power flow into my arm, a cold and ancient energy."
— Joseph, Chapter 6 — The Investiture
At first it was a matter of switches. By day: Joseph. Husband, construction worker, man with debts and a daughter on the way. By night: Averius. Guardian, collector, force working at the margins of the real. Two separate states.
By Day — Joseph
Plain work clothes. Construction site. Marie. The dogs. Morning coffee. The exhaustion in his bones. The ordinary life the pact was meant to protect — which was instead becoming the hardest thing to keep real.
By Night — Averius
Black leather suit born from his own flesh. Eagle talons. Claws. A dark metal helmet fused to the skull. Human face — always his face — but with a gaze Joseph never had. Cold. Precise. Predatory.
"I used to light Joseph up by day — a husband, a construction worker, a man trapped; I turned Joseph off at night to turn Averius on, the reaper, the collector of the Debt."
— Joseph, from the novel
Every being that operates between the two planes needs an anchor — a point of contact with the physical world that prevents complete drift. Without one, a guardian stops being someone and becomes something.
My anchor is Marie. Armando had explained it to me as a technical feature of the system. What I did not know is that Marie was much more than a personal anchor. She was the original knot around which everything had been built. The first anchor. The one Marek had offered the Equilibrium without having the right, centuries before I was born.
"For what do you want it? The answer was sitting a meter away from me and was adding honey to her tea with the absorbed concentration of someone who doesn't know they're being watched."
— Joseph, Chapter 23