They say the world was not always divided by trails and rails.
Before the first clang of metal met the earth, Tilbara was a single breathing field — its rivers silver, its skies quiet. The five Pillars ruled together then, guardians chosen not by birth but by purpose. Each bore a name forgotten to time, save one: the Fifth, who built and betrayed in the same lifetime.
The Pillars were not kings or gods. They were anchors, souls who carried the burden of keeping the realm from tearing apart after the First Scarring — that ancient war where myths and men collided, and even the stars cracked. Together, they sealed the wounds of the world with five oaths written in flame, dream, shadow, stone, and ink.
But peace, even born of sacrifice, breeds envy.
The Fifth watched his brothers and sisters fade — one turned to ash in the defense of Durama's ley-lines; one became a spirit to guard Harama's forests; one drowned herself to keep Shinganatsu's lakes from swallowing the mountains. Only he and Lady Orynne, the first queen of Tilbara, remained.
Orynne's heart was weary. The scars of the sky still bled light at night, and she wished only for stillness.
But the Fifth could not bear silence. He heard the world still groaning beneath, the ley-lines pulsing like veins about to burst.
He believed the answer was not prayer — but design.
And so he began to build.
With tools forged from mythic blood and human memory, he shaped the first rails — lines of power that bound one station to another. Each station was more than stone: it was a seal, a nerve, a promise.
Durama rose first, a fortress heart to hold the sorrow of Tilbara.
Evalia next, a crown of harmony.
Then Harama, cradle of the next generation.
Shinganatsu, the mirror to fate.
And finally Amakatsu, the wall of final dawn.
The Five Stations mirrored the Five Pillars — and so, the Fifth had replaced what was divine with what was built.
But in his triumph, pride began to whisper.
He told himself that if the world could be rewritten once by gods, it could be rewritten again — by him.
And he wrote.
He forged not only rails, but scripts of power, inscriptions that told reality where to flow and what to forget.
These inscriptions were the First Scripts, the origin of the "Author's marks" that would later twist into the forbidden art of the Pale Editors
Lady Orynne warned him: "To write the world is to chain it. To chain it is to break it anew."
But the Fifth would not listen. He called himself the Architect, and carved his name into the ley-lines.
When the others discovered this, it was too late.
The rails began to hum with unnatural rhythm; time folded like paper; the seas screamed with memory.
Orynne gathered the remnants of her people and sealed the Architect beneath the northern cliffs — the land that would one day become Kurogane.
The day he fell, the skies tore open once more, birthing the Rift — a wound where time, ink, and memory bled together.
The myths Rudhana and Nagalira awoke soon after, drawn by the scent of broken truth. They took upon themselves the duty Orynne once bore: to guard what humans had built from what humans might again destroy.
Centuries passed. Tilbara rebuilt itself upon the bones of the Architect's sin.
His descendants, unknowingly carrying the same blood, became the Hiroki line — protectors of the Trails, destined to both preserve and challenge the very rails he once forged.
And still, beneath the sea, the Architect's voice lingers.
His scripts remain half-erased.
The Pale Editors call him by another name now — Uhayyad.
He sleeps, dreaming of a world rewritten perfectly this time —without queens, without myths, without mistakes.
But the Trails remember.
And every time steel hums under the feet of a Hiroki, the world whispers the same warning Orynne spoke long ago:
"To write the world is to end it twice."