Long before the age of magic, before gods walked openly among mortals, the world was ordinary.
Humanity had built its civilization upon science and steel. Great cities rose from the earth, their towers piercing the clouds and their streets glowing beneath countless lights. Machines carried people across oceans and continents. Satellites watched from above, while laboratories sought answers to questions once reserved for philosophers and priests.
The world had its problems, of course.
Nations argued. Wars were fought. Poverty persisted beneath the shadows of prosperity. Hunger remained in places the modern world had failed to reach. People struggled with politics, greed, ambition, and the countless conflicts that had followed humanity since the beginning.
Yet these were familiar problems.
The world still made sense.
Then came the day the sky changed.
At first, they appeared as streaks of light.
Across the heavens, objects descended from beyond the clouds—enormous, unnatural structures that burned through the atmosphere like falling stars. They struck the earth with a force that shook mountains and shattered cities.
They became known as the Celestial Nails.
No nation had created them.
No telescope had detected their approach.
No scientist could explain what they were.
They were simply there.
And wherever the Nails fell, the world began to break.
The earth split open.
Rifts appeared across continents, descending into depths that no human instrument could measure. From those wounds came things that belonged neither to science nor to nature—creatures of ancient legend, monsters without names, and beings that humanity had once dismissed as nothing more than stories.
The old weapons were useless.
Bullets could not stop everything that emerged from the darkness. Missiles destroyed cities but could not close the wounds beneath them. Armies fought until their ammunition ran dry, while entire populations fled from places that had once been considered safe.
Civilization began to collapse.
Cities burned beneath unfamiliar skies. Highways became refugee roads. Skyscrapers that had once represented humanity's triumph became monuments to a dying age.
And then, as humanity stood at the edge of extinction, something even more impossible happened.
The myths returned.
Stories once confined to ancient texts began walking upon the earth.
Gods descended from the heavens.
Heroes appeared where there had once been only ordinary men and women.
Creatures spoken of in forgotten legends emerged from forests, seas, ruins, and shadows.
The world discovered, too late, that mythology had never truly been dead.
Humanity had simply forgotten how to see it.
The age of science and steel was ending.
And an age of magic, gods, monsters, and myth was beginning.