The wind that swept over the highlands of Solisreign carried with it more than just cold. It whispered ancient things - of time fractured, of gods forgotten, of a war that no longer existed... yet never truly ended.
The year was unknowable. The calendar of the old world had long been abandoned, replaced by a simple truth: before the fall and after the veil.
Tonight marked the final hour of the longest eclipse in recorded history - six days without sun, six night with stars rearranged like foreign constellations. Scholars panicked. Nobles prayed. And the common folk buried their fears in silence.
In the outskirts of the city, hidden beneath the long dead tree, a cloaked woman ran.
Her breaths came in shallow bursts. Her robes were torn, soaked in sweat and blood, and in her arm - she held a child wrapped in ancient cloth, its thread laced with glowing sigils. The baby did not cry. He watched the world with quiet, too-ancient eyes.
"H-he cannot stay with me a little more longer," the woman whispered into the dark, cradling him like something both scared and doomed.
"If-if only i can stay, more with you..." "But if they find, it begins again..." she whispered herself.
Lightning tore across the sky - not from a storm, but from a crack in the clouds that seemed to blink. For just a second, reality shivered. The baby blinked back, unfazed.
She reached the ruined gate of an abandoned temple: The Temple of Versai, once devoted to knowledge and neutrality. It had long since become a grave for secrets.
A man appeared out of nowhere and seemed like he has been waiting there - tall, robed, face hidden by a veil of light.
"Is this the child?" he asked without looking at her.
"Yes," she replied, tears streaking her ash-covered cheeks. "He bears the Mark of Echo"
"Then history is already changing..."
They placed the child within the cradle carved from voidstone, once used to store memory crystals. Around him, runes activated on their own - as if recognizing his presence.
"What will happen to him?" the woman asks. "The voidstone will send the child away from dangerous places, enemy's and live until the time has come" the man replied.
"I hope you'll live until then, and let the world name you when it is time."
Then she took a single a single strand of her hair along with a necklace, placed it on the baby's chest, and vanished into the shadows beyond the temple, never to be seen again.
The man lingered, staring at the infant with something between reverence and fear.
"Child" he finally murmured. "May the worlds be gentler to you than they were to us."
He turned, and with a wave of his hand, sealed the temple behind him - runes flashing once, then fading into silence.
Above, the eclipse ended.
The sun returned.
And the sky, still cracked at the edge of sight, began to mend... for now.
He was not born like other children.
He did not cry like them. He did not age like them.
And though he would forget everything... The chronicle would not