Before the silence, before the veils of time pulled shut across the realm, there was Eldarath.
The world was not always as it is now—fractured, trembling, haunted by echoes. There was a time, long before the sky split and the ground sang with ruin, when the continent of Aethoria stood united beneath a single banner: the sigil of the Aerthys Empire, luminous as the morning star and twice as proud.
From the gleaming spires of Eldarath, the imperial seat, magic pulsed like breath through the veins of the land. Elemental scholars harnessed the song of flame, stone, wind, and sea—not as tools of conquest, but as harmonies in a greater symphony of balance. Glyphs carved in High Aerthian adorned every tower, every gate, every threshold, forming protective sigils that bent natural law and held back the rot of chaos. The Empire's finest minds believed they had tamed the world itself.
They were wrong.
What shattered the Aerthys Empire was not an outside force. No darkness from beyond the mountains, no leviathan risen from the deep. No, it was pride. Pride masquerading as progress. Ambition cloaked in the guise of vision. When the High Circle of Mages attempted the Ascension Rite—a forbidden convergence of elemental resonance and celestial alignment—they did not lift Eldarath to divinity.
They broke the world.
The skies split into storms without voices. The earth moaned. Forests turned to glass. The seas became mirrors too deep to reflect. And at the center of it all, Eldarath… vanished.
Not destroyed. Not buried. Vanished—folded between time and memory, lost not only to the land, but to the minds of those who once walked its radiant streets. Only fragments remained: a shattered glyph on an obsidian pillar, a lullaby whispered by those who no longer remembered its source, and beasts—twisted and strange—born of the resonance that bled from the wounds of the world.
In the centuries that followed, nations rose and fell, borders redrawn with every generation. The languages shifted. The glyphs faded from common use. And in the skies above, strange auroras began to appear—veins of light dancing like the last heartbeat of something vast and unseen.
Whispers began to circulate in secret circles. Of a city that walked among stars. Of a name forgotten by history, yet carried by the wind. Of a voice that would one day call it back.
They say that when the lost heir of balance awakens, the ruins of Eldarath will rise, not to reclaim an empire, but to remind the world why it fell.
And somewhere, in a mountain city where the skies kiss the feathers of the Aetherborn, a girl dreams of a name she does not yet understand.
Eldarath.