From "The Fractured Codex: Forbidden Histories of the Arcane Age" — Anonymous, Author Erased
In the beginning, there were Eight.
Eight shapes of truth. Eight forces of order. Eight names carved into the bones of the world.
They did not merely grant magic—they were magic. And each sigil was a chain around chaos's throat.
Pyra, the Flame That Remembers.
Aere, the Whisper of Wings.
Terran, the Unmoving Father.
Virel, the Tides of Hunger.
Lumen, the Guiding Light.
Umbra, the Veil of All Things.
Vitae, the Breath of Becoming.
Spiralis, the Cycle Unbroken.
Together, they formed the Circle of Balance, binding raw power into form, rule, and ritual.
But the legends do not end there.
They never do.
There was once a Ninth.
A secret sigil. Unspoken. Uncarved. Its shape is not etched by human hand but born of the world's first scream.
Scholars called it by many names:
The Nameless Chain,
The Sigil of Undoing,
Or in the tongue of the vanished Seers: "Nocturon."
It was not a gift.
It was a mirror.
Where the Eighth gave definition, the Ninth reflected. Where they created, it rewrote. Where they obeyed intent, it listened only to truth—deep, soul-carved truth.
It did not need training.
It did not need ritual.
The Ninth Sigil awakened, fully formed, inside the one who needed it.
And it terrified the First Mages.
Because those it chose could rewrite reality not by command, but by being.
They were not spellcasters.
They were corrections.
One such bearer brought the Wailing Mountains to dust. Another still a plague across a continent with a single breath. A third turned on the High Conclave itself and spoke them into silence. Not metaphorically. Not politically.
Their names ceased to exist.
Their cities faded from maps.
Their bloodlines turned to mist.
The Circle erased all records, save for broken scraps and cryptic verses. They called it mercy.
But every erasure leaves a crack.
Every crack becomes a whisper.
And the whispers speak of a final bearer, chosen when the world bends too far.
A being who will not save it.
A being who will reset it.
The Ninth Sigil is not cast.
It is not drawn, etched, or learned.
It awakens.
It remembers.
And when the time comes… it returns.