The first light came without warning.
No sunrise, no dawn-song of birds — just a single burst of color that tore through night and day alike, painting both in gold.
Across Eirath, every soul who saw it would remember that moment for the rest of their lives, though few could describe what they had truly seen.
I – The Scholar of Mirane
In the high spires of Mirane's Grand Archive, Scholar Eren Talth awoke to the sound of breaking glass.
He turned — every mirror in his chamber was shattering in perfect silence, the shards hanging in the air like fragments of frozen rain.
Then they began to move.
The shards spun slowly, aligning into a circle. Within them flickered a reflection — not of the room, but of a sky filled with thousands of suns.
Eren fell to his knees, weeping.
"The Concordant Flame…" he whispered. "It's real."
When he looked up, every page of every book in the Archive was burning with letters of light — rewriting themselves, as though the world's history was being corrected by unseen hands.
II – The Child of Sand
Far to the south, where the dunes sang with the wind, a young girl named Ariah watched her shadow dissolve.
She had been running to fetch water when the light arrived. The air turned thick, shimmering like glass heated by desert fire. Her clay jar split apart, not from heat — from silence.
Around her, the dunes rippled as if something beneath them was stirring.
She looked up and gasped.
The sun had been joined by another — a smaller one, pale and pulsing like a heartbeat.
It hovered in the sky beside the real sun, and though it gave no warmth, the sands around her bloomed with flowers of glass.
She reached for one, trembling. It whispered in a voice like wind over stone:
"He rises."
III – The Starwatcher
In the northern observatories, where the world's last astronomers studied the fading heavens, an old man lifted his head from his telescope.
He could no longer see the constellations.
They had… moved.
The sky above was alive — stars rearranging themselves in spirals and sigils, entire galaxies bending into patterns that spelled a language he couldn't read.
He smiled, tears freezing on his beard.
"The heavens are rewriting themselves," he said. "The gods are coming home."
IV – The Voice Beneath the Sea
Beneath the western oceans, where creatures older than time slumbered, a leviathan stirred.
Its eyes opened for the first time in millennia. In the deep, far below where light could reach, it saw the surface glowing with fire — a new sun being born.
It rose slowly, each motion sending tremors through the sea floor.
Coral fields lit up like stars. Entire schools of fish changed direction, following the ancient current as if remembering a forgotten command.
From the depths, the leviathan sang — a low, thunderous note that echoed through every ocean, every river, every drop of blood in every living being.
"The Worldseed awakens. The cycle begins again."
V – The Return
When the light finally faded, the sky did not return to normal.
Half of it still burned gold — the other half shimmered with violet twilight. Between them hung a single fracture of pure white light, like a scar across heaven.
From that scar descended a rain of radiant dust — glowing, soft, weightless. Wherever it fell, the world changed.
Mountains breathed.
Forests grew songs instead of leaves.
Cities awoke to find their statues looking back at them.
And across every land, one name spread on every wind:
Kael.
No one knew who had spoken it first. No one dared to.
But all who heard it felt the same thing — awe, and the quiet terror of something greater than gods returning to the world.