The night wind cut through the battered alleys of Kaelorin, a city whose grandeur had long been swallowed by endless wars. Broken towers clawed at a starlit sky as though begging the gods to rebuild them.
Eryndor Kael stepped from shadow to shadow, his boots slick with rain and mud. Twenty-three and already scarred from blade fights and close shaves with debt collectors, he was lean, sharp-eyed, and carried the weary charisma of a man who'd survived things most wouldn't dare whisper.
His destination tonight was the ruins of the old Sanctus Archive a place every sane villager avoided after dusk. They said spirits haunted its broken spires, that echoes of tortured scholars still lingered in the crumbling halls.
But Eryndor was desperate. Word had it a contraband broker was meeting a buyer there, hawking off pieces of enchanted relics trinkets that fetched enough gold to clear Eryndor's family debts for life.
He needed that gold. No one else would pay for his mother's lingering illness. Eryndor crept inside. The ruined archive was eerily silent.
Moonlight pierced gaps in the collapsed ceiling, spilling silver across moss-eaten bookshelves. A faint, unnatural hum reached his earslike thousands of tiny voices murmuring at once.
He turned a corner and froze. At the far end, on a pedestal scorched black by old fires, hovered a fragment of crystal, rotating slowly above an ancient glyph-carved slab. It glowed from within, a swirl of amethyst and blood-red light, pulsing in a rhythm that seemed almost… alive.
Eryndor's breath caught. No smugglers. No guards. Just this impossibly precious shard, left as though waiting for him.
His feet moved on their own. As he drew closer, he felt heat crawl up his arms, threads of energy teasing across his skin. The shard turned toward him an impossible motion like an eye meeting his gaze.
And then it spoke, not with words but with a soundless resonance that rattled inside his skull. "Bearer… found."
The shard shattered. Pieces shot toward Eryndor, slicing the air yet instead of pain, they sank into his chest like melting snow. Power exploded through him. His heart raced as thousands of images flashed through his mind. towers of gold floating above oceans of mist, beasts with eyes of flame bowing before a throne carved from starlight, and a woman with raven hair, eyes like molten sapphire, reaching out to him, whispering
"Come find me before the others do…Then darkness. When he awoke, Eryndor was lying in the rain soaked streets outside the archive. No sign of the crystal, no mark on his chest. But something was different. A warm pulse at his heartand when he reached inside his tunic, he found a faint glow beneath his skin.
From the shadows, a figure watched: robed, face hidden, a signet of some high court on a gloved hand.
"So it begins. The Shard has chosen."
And with that, the figure turned and disappeared into the storm.