Ash drifted like slow-falling snow across the blackened horizon of Kara-Tor. Once a jewel of ancient craftsmanship, its towers now stood gutted and scorched, jagged silhouettes against a crimson sky. The Dominion's march had been methodical — not an act of war, but a pilgrimage. Not a conquest, but a ritual. What they sought was not territory or tribute. It was memory. And the erasure of it.
Indra stood in the heart of the ruin, the soles of his feet warm with dying embers, the scent of iron and grief thick in his lungs. He was too young to lead and too old to mourn like a child. Yet he did not cry. His silence was louder than the death cries that had once echoed here. He stared at the place where the Grand Anvil of Kara-Tor once pulsed with celestial fire — now reduced to cinders and forgotten blueprints, the blueprints of a civilization etched in echoes.
He did not speak to the survivors. He barely acknowledged them. Their gazes were hollow. Some looked at him as if he had failed them. Others, as if he were the only god left in a godless world. Neither interpretation reached him.
Beneath his skin, something shifted. Not pain. Not fear. A vibration. A pulse that did not match his heartbeat — older, deeper. It was not his. Or maybe it always had been.
He moved through the rubble like a shadow haunted by its own body. Around him, monuments crumbled. Ash clung to his arms like second skin. The sky watched, silent and bruised, as he walked toward the ruined shrine of Tavrah — the heart of Kara-Tor's soulcraft. It was there the Dominion had begun their "cleansing." Tavrah, who had sung iron into spirit. Tavrah, who had forged weapons from grief and bridges from breath.
She was gone now. Her flame snuffed. Her whispers drowned.
Indra knelt at the shattered altar. His fingers brushed something warm beneath the ash. A shard of her — not flesh, not bone — but memory. A memory encoded in metal, still glowing with the last flickers of divine resonance. His mind did not recognize it. But something deeper did.
And that's when he heard it.
Not a voice, but a weight. A presence. A calling. The First Whisper.
Not from the world. Not from the Dominion. Not even from the gods above.
But from within.
It said nothing, and yet in its silence, Indra understood: Tavrah's death was not an end, but a threshold. A gate. And Kara-Tor's ruin was not punishment — it was provocation.
Suddenly, the wind changed.
The ash no longer fell — it danced.
It spiraled around him in slow orbits, as if magnetized to the storm quietly building in his soul. The air grew heavy with static, though no stormcloud crowned the sky. Iron fragments in the soil shivered. The bones of Kara-Tor whispered, not in fear… but in anticipation.
Far above, in the Dominion's orbital spires, their seers and data-minds registered the anomaly.
But they did not understand it.
A boy had survived.
But something more dangerous had awakened.
The Pilgrimage of Ashes had begun not with the Dominion's invasion — but with Indra's stillness.
And in that stillness, the first of ninety-nine divine seals cracked — not from rage, but from loss.