The Four Continents of Prodio
The world was not kind. It was a place of steel and neon, of skyscrapers clawing at storm-wracked skies, where mana-powered trains streaked between cities like veins of lightning. But beyond the glass and glow, beyond the reach of civilization's desperate grasp, there were places where older things still ruled.
1. Veythar – The Strongest
A continent of gleaming spires and war-towers, where the air hummed with the pulse of mana reactors. Here, the Ascendancy ruled, a council of archmages who had turned magic into a science, their floating citadels casting shadows over cities where the weak toiled and the strong thrived. Their soldiers wore armor woven from liquid spellwork, and their guns fired concentrated blasts of pure energy. Veythar was not just powerful. It was untouchable.
2. Krovahl – The Land of Demons
Once, it had been a place of industry, of factories belching smoke into blood-red skies. Then the rifts opened. Now, the ruins of its megacities were overgrown with pulsating flesh-vines, and the streets crawled with creatures that wore human skin like ill-fitting suits. The demons here did not hide in shadows, they ruled in the open, their twisted hierarchies enforced by teeth and terror.
3. Draksis – The Land of Dragons
The skyline here was broken not by buildings, but by spines, great, jagged peaks where dragons roosted in nests of scrap metal and shattered highways. The continents were the strongest, they were not beasts of fire and scale, but something worse: leviathans of living alloy, their wings humming with anti-grav enchantments, their breath a storm of molten shrapnel. Humans still lived here, in fortified arcologies beneath their shadows, praying not to be noticed.
4. Talshir – The Land of Fusion Beasts
A grotesque masterpiece of bio-sorcery. Here, the land itself breathed, its forests made of sinew and its rivers flowing with liquid bone. The creatures of Talshir were patchwork horrors and lions with scorpion tails grafted by magic, wolves with human hands sprouting from their backs. The cities were no better: half-alive, their walls pulsing like giant hearts, their streets lined with vendors selling spliced familiars to the desperate.
And then, there were the Hollow Peaks, where none of these powers mattered.
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Five Years Later
The boy was eleven years old, and the mountains had not killed him yet.
That, Dain supposed, was something.
Rydan Marr crouched in the center of the Blackwater Falls, his bare feet planted on moss-slick stone as the torrent hammered down on him like a thousand fists. The water was glacial, stolen straight from the snowmelt of the northern peaks, and it carried with it the kind of cold that gnawed at bone. His arms trembled as he held the boulder aloft, a jagged slab of granite twice his size, its surface etched with the claw marks of failed attempts. Three hours now. His muscles screamed. His lungs burned. His vision swam with black spots.
And still, the waterfall roared.
Dain watched from the shore, his coat rippling in the wind. He had long since stopped counting the minutes. Time didn't matter here. Only endurance. Only survival.
"Your elbows are dropping," he said.
Rydan snarled, his teeth flashing in the dim light. He forced the boulder higher, veins standing out like cables beneath his skin. The water pounded harder, as if the mountain itself were testing him.
A normal child would have broken by now. Shattered into pieces and washed away downstream.
But Rydan was not normal.
He was something worse.
And yet-
The First Seal remained shut.
Dain had tried everything. Every pill, every elixir, every forbidden recipe scrounged from the corpse of the Old Alchemists' knowledge.
The Bloodroot Fusion (crushed direwolf fangs + black lotus pollen): It made Rydan vomit for a week.
The Shatterspine Elixir (dragon marrow + liquid mercury): His bones glowed for a day. Nothing else.
The Voidcap Tablet (a mushroom that grew in demon corpses): It dissolved halfway down his throat, taking a chunk of his esophagus with it. Dain had to stitch him back together.
Failure. All of it.
The Dragons were the strongest continent amongst the four and yet, Dain had walked among them just to find the right ingredient to unlock Rydan's seal.
Once, when Rydan was eight, a juvenile dragon had strayed too close to the Hollow Peaks. It had been a sleek, arrogant thing, its wings crackling with static charge, its maw dripping with corrosive saliva. It had taken one look at the old man standing in the valley and decided he was prey.
Dain had broken its spine with a single kick.
Rydan still remembered the way the creature's roar had choked off into a whimper. The way Dain had dragged its twitching carcass back to the bunker, where he skinned it for armor and boiled its bones for broth.
"They're not gods," he had said, wiping dragon blood from his knuckles. "Just animals with better PR."
None of them mattered. Not here. Not in the Peaks.
END OF CHAPTER 2