Aerasyl did not spin.
It breathed.
The sky pulsed.
Forests remembered.
Rivers mumbled half-names through cracked stone mouths.
Even silence here had weight.
To live was to inhale magic.
To speak was to risk being heard by something that never forgot.
---
Swords were born with breath.
Not forged. Not taught.
Heart Power was felt before speech—vibrations in the soul, colour in the blood.
Silver shimmered like control.
Gold endured like memory.
Platinum listened.
Diamond clarified.
Dark Shining... changed things.
Once gifted—never reclaimed.
Some gave it to survive.
Some, to end.
---
Magic did not answer.
It watched.
Star Ascension did not ask if a mage was ready.
It listened, then judged.
Ten colors. Ten rises. One breath between each.
Blue when naïve.
Amber when bold.
Crimson when bleeding.
Black when... no records remained.
And still, they climbed.
---
They wrote with grief.
Sigils were not spells.
They were confessions.
Emotions carved into glyphs.
Elements bound by direction.
Space folded. Memory caged. Divinity burned.
Some mages traced them in ash.
Others in air.
Crimson mages didn't trace—they remembered.
When Alastor blinked—reality sharpened.
His eyes remembered.
Others forgot.
---
Some sigils are born.
Not learned.
Bloodline marks flare only in gaze—symbols etched across iris and pupil, dragon-echo pulsing in silence.
Ancestors married flame.
Children carried it in their stare.
When Alastor watched, his eyes whispered ◐.
When Solmere exiles screamed, their eyes ignited ⨗.
Royal eyes cracked open with ⚚.
Y'rehn eyes dreamed in 𓂀.
They did not need truth.
They saw it.
---
Five powers divide land.
North—Valehollow.
Steel-throated warriors where silence duels silence.
South—Caer Thalor.
Grief-forged magic. Archives that hum. Crimson Eyes that see too much.
West—Y'rehn.
Dream-painted maps. Clans born in memory. Miran's homeland.
East—Solmere.
Frost-bitten exiles. Hollow winds. Emotional scars shaped into blades.
Center—Arcaedia Empire.
Expansionist. Divine veins stitched into marble. Power that doesn't ask—it assumes.
---
Alastor was seven.
Hair silver. Eyes red.
His robe didn't flare—it hummed.
His gloves weren't warm—they contained.
His sword wasn't enchanted.
It was rebellion. Quiet. Unsheathed only in thought.
---
Miran was five.
Dark hair. Violet eyes.
Barefoot upon arrival.
His cloak was stitched from funeral threads.
His belt salvaged from discarded sigil robes.
He spoke less than ghosts.
He wasn't bought.
He was placed.
A gift the Duke gave to silence a child's loneliness.
---
The garden of the Duke did not bloom beauty.
It bloomed memory.
Vines hummed softly.
Petals opened for those who had loved.
Trees recorded without ink.
Alastor sat beneath a shadow-fruit tree.
The breeze forgot to blow.
Then—
Miran arrived.
Cloak trailing. Eyes too still.
They sat.
Not strangers.
Not brothers.
Just two voices untested.
> "Do you want something sweet?"
No reply.
Just fruit, offered.
Taken.
> "I don't know your name."
> "I don't want to give it."
> "Okay."
> "This garden smells like magic."
> "Yeah it does"
The trees listened.
The vines stopped humming.
And the memory stitched itself into bark.
---
This is the breath before plot.
The pulse before motion.
This is how the world began to remember.
---