Today, 01:34 AM
Age: 21
Birthplace: Chernobyl
Nickname: Nazik
Reborn god: Nergal, Babylonian god of plague, disease, and death
Powers: Channeler & Whitherer
Nazariy was born in 2026, in a place that reeked of rust, rot, and radiation.
His parents were Crimean by blood, but not by fate. After the earthquake of 2022 cracked their world open, they fled north with nothing but a canvas bag and a baby still waiting to be conceived. Ukraine was collapsing under its own weight—crumbling economy, empty promises, whispers that it might rejoin the old USSR under the shadow of Russia’s new leader, President Brandon. No one knew if the rumors were true, but the fear was.
By the time they arrived at the edge of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, desperation had hollowed them out. The villages near the Zone were abandoned, rotting, radioactive—and cheap. Which meant they were perfect.
They found a derelict house with its windows shattered like gunshot glass and the roof half-torn by storms. Looters had stripped the place down to its bones. Still, they made it work. Bit by scavenged bit, they brought the house back to a flickering semblance of life. They rigged a line into the battered electric grid. Raised goats, rabbits, and hens. Foraged wild roots and grew vegetables in soil that stank faintly of iron and memory.
That was where Nazariy came screaming into the world. Not in a hospital, but on a warped floor under a leaking roof, his mother biting down on a leather belt, father holding a rusted lantern, and an old babushka catching his bloody body. His first breath came through air tinged with the metallic ghosts of disasters past.
He was one of the few born in the Zone—not just near it, but in it, where the trees grew twisted and wolves walked on mangled legs. There were no doctors, no records. Just whispered prayers and the silence of the forest and fields pressing in close.
His early life was a patchwork of stillness and suspicion. The nearest school was five kilometers away, a long walk through hushed woods and fog-draped roads. When he wasn’t at school, he worked the land. Helped tend the animals. Dug in the garden.
That’s when things began to go wrong.
The hens would sometimes be found dead, necks stretched unnaturally long, their eyes wide with something that looked like fear. The rabbits wasted away without explanation, their fur falling out in patches. The potatoes came up blistered, black-veined, half-flesh, half-stone.
His father watched this with growing horror. “You’re touching them too much,” he said once, voice low, as if afraid the house might overhear. “Things don’t grow right when you’re near them.”
Nazariy was only a child. He cried, swore he didn’t understand, that he hadn’t done anything. His father hit him anyway—once, hard enough to loosen a tooth, then stormed out of the house and didn’t come back until morning.
From that point on, Nazariy was forbidden from touching the animals or helping with the garden. He was given housework—boiling water, washing clothes, scrubbing rust from old tins. A child removed from the life of the land. But the whispers had already begun. First in his own home. Then in the village beyond. Nazariy didn’t mind. He liked the silence of simmering pots. The warm fog on windows. But the whispering started—not in his head—but in the village.
Children were rare in that place, like clean water or dreams. But he found one: Aleksandr. Sasha. Together, they were shadows flitting through the ruins. They played war with rusted cans, hunted rats with sharpened sticks. They found a box of old matches once, and for weeks they fed fire like an offering. A barn here. A pile of tires there. Sasha lit the match, but it was Nazariy who watched the flames with something deeper than delight.
Then Sasha’s parents died. Their house caught fire in the night. No one found the boy’s shoes. No one needed to.
Sasha vanished, and when Nazariy threatened to follow, his parents locked him in the barn—three days without food or light. When they opened the doors, he didn’t cry. He didn’t speak. He just stared at them with eyes the color of smoke.
Time passed. He grew tall, thin, quiet. The kind of quiet that made dogs uneasy.
At 16, he sensed something dark was coming, like a cloud that wouldn’t leave the sky. His mother’s illness came first. Her hair fell out in clumps. She coughed black strings into her pillow. When she died, it was almost a relief. His father followed not long after, wasting away like ice in spring. Both had cancer.
Alone now, Nazariy tried to rebuild. He tended the rabbits. The goats. The garden. Tried to prove—if not to others, then to himself—that he was not what they said.
But the garden rotted from the inside out. The animals withered, cried, died.
One goat, its ribs showing, its eyes rolling back in its head, he carried to Babuska Irina, the village’s oldest, most devout woman. He didn’t get a word out. She took one look at the trembling creature in his arms and recoiled like she’d seen the Devil himself.
She made the sign of the cross. Spat on the floor.
“Get away from me,” she shrieked. “Cursed child! You bring death!”
He stood frozen as she slammed the door in his face. But the whispering spread like fire in a dry forest. The neighbors wouldn’t meet his eyes. The babushkas stopped speaking to him. Children crossed themselves and ran when he passed.
One night, a mob came.
Lanterns. Shovels. Bottles of homemade accelerant.
They said it wasn’t safe—not for them, not for anyone. They said animals died when he touched them. That he brought sickness. That fire was just the beginning. He didn’t argue. What was the point?
He walked into the dark with only a coat and a sack of stale bread. Behind him, someone threw a match. The fire consumed his house in minutes. He didn’t look back.
Now he lives where the wild things hum beneath the ground.
In the bones of a dead city, in the irradiated silence of Chernobyl, among the few who exist there illegally—ghosts of society, outcasts, criminals, the forgotten. And something else. Something older.
Nazariy doesn’t know yet what he is. But sometimes, at night, the wind speaks to him.
Birthplace: Chernobyl
Nickname: Nazik
Reborn god: Nergal, Babylonian god of plague, disease, and death
Powers: Channeler & Whitherer
☢ ☢ ☢
Nazariy was born in 2026, in a place that reeked of rust, rot, and radiation.
His parents were Crimean by blood, but not by fate. After the earthquake of 2022 cracked their world open, they fled north with nothing but a canvas bag and a baby still waiting to be conceived. Ukraine was collapsing under its own weight—crumbling economy, empty promises, whispers that it might rejoin the old USSR under the shadow of Russia’s new leader, President Brandon. No one knew if the rumors were true, but the fear was.
By the time they arrived at the edge of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, desperation had hollowed them out. The villages near the Zone were abandoned, rotting, radioactive—and cheap. Which meant they were perfect.
They found a derelict house with its windows shattered like gunshot glass and the roof half-torn by storms. Looters had stripped the place down to its bones. Still, they made it work. Bit by scavenged bit, they brought the house back to a flickering semblance of life. They rigged a line into the battered electric grid. Raised goats, rabbits, and hens. Foraged wild roots and grew vegetables in soil that stank faintly of iron and memory.
That was where Nazariy came screaming into the world. Not in a hospital, but on a warped floor under a leaking roof, his mother biting down on a leather belt, father holding a rusted lantern, and an old babushka catching his bloody body. His first breath came through air tinged with the metallic ghosts of disasters past.
He was one of the few born in the Zone—not just near it, but in it, where the trees grew twisted and wolves walked on mangled legs. There were no doctors, no records. Just whispered prayers and the silence of the forest and fields pressing in close.
His early life was a patchwork of stillness and suspicion. The nearest school was five kilometers away, a long walk through hushed woods and fog-draped roads. When he wasn’t at school, he worked the land. Helped tend the animals. Dug in the garden.
That’s when things began to go wrong.
The hens would sometimes be found dead, necks stretched unnaturally long, their eyes wide with something that looked like fear. The rabbits wasted away without explanation, their fur falling out in patches. The potatoes came up blistered, black-veined, half-flesh, half-stone.
His father watched this with growing horror. “You’re touching them too much,” he said once, voice low, as if afraid the house might overhear. “Things don’t grow right when you’re near them.”
Nazariy was only a child. He cried, swore he didn’t understand, that he hadn’t done anything. His father hit him anyway—once, hard enough to loosen a tooth, then stormed out of the house and didn’t come back until morning.
From that point on, Nazariy was forbidden from touching the animals or helping with the garden. He was given housework—boiling water, washing clothes, scrubbing rust from old tins. A child removed from the life of the land. But the whispers had already begun. First in his own home. Then in the village beyond. Nazariy didn’t mind. He liked the silence of simmering pots. The warm fog on windows. But the whispering started—not in his head—but in the village.
Children were rare in that place, like clean water or dreams. But he found one: Aleksandr. Sasha. Together, they were shadows flitting through the ruins. They played war with rusted cans, hunted rats with sharpened sticks. They found a box of old matches once, and for weeks they fed fire like an offering. A barn here. A pile of tires there. Sasha lit the match, but it was Nazariy who watched the flames with something deeper than delight.
Then Sasha’s parents died. Their house caught fire in the night. No one found the boy’s shoes. No one needed to.
Sasha vanished, and when Nazariy threatened to follow, his parents locked him in the barn—three days without food or light. When they opened the doors, he didn’t cry. He didn’t speak. He just stared at them with eyes the color of smoke.
Time passed. He grew tall, thin, quiet. The kind of quiet that made dogs uneasy.
At 16, he sensed something dark was coming, like a cloud that wouldn’t leave the sky. His mother’s illness came first. Her hair fell out in clumps. She coughed black strings into her pillow. When she died, it was almost a relief. His father followed not long after, wasting away like ice in spring. Both had cancer.
Alone now, Nazariy tried to rebuild. He tended the rabbits. The goats. The garden. Tried to prove—if not to others, then to himself—that he was not what they said.
But the garden rotted from the inside out. The animals withered, cried, died.
One goat, its ribs showing, its eyes rolling back in its head, he carried to Babuska Irina, the village’s oldest, most devout woman. He didn’t get a word out. She took one look at the trembling creature in his arms and recoiled like she’d seen the Devil himself.
She made the sign of the cross. Spat on the floor.
“Get away from me,” she shrieked. “Cursed child! You bring death!”
He stood frozen as she slammed the door in his face. But the whispering spread like fire in a dry forest. The neighbors wouldn’t meet his eyes. The babushkas stopped speaking to him. Children crossed themselves and ran when he passed.
One night, a mob came.
Lanterns. Shovels. Bottles of homemade accelerant.
They said it wasn’t safe—not for them, not for anyone. They said animals died when he touched them. That he brought sickness. That fire was just the beginning. He didn’t argue. What was the point?
He walked into the dark with only a coat and a sack of stale bread. Behind him, someone threw a match. The fire consumed his house in minutes. He didn’t look back.
Now he lives where the wild things hum beneath the ground.
In the bones of a dead city, in the irradiated silence of Chernobyl, among the few who exist there illegally—ghosts of society, outcasts, criminals, the forgotten. And something else. Something older.
Nazariy doesn’t know yet what he is. But sometimes, at night, the wind speaks to him.
Nazik ☢ Nergal