The night over Eastern Atlantia was not like any other.The horizon trembled under a pulse of dim electric light, as if the heavens themselves were struggling to breathe. The air smelled faintly of rusted circuits and burned incense—a strange harmony of machine and faith.
Inside a small wooden house at the edge of the old city, a woman labored through the darkness. The power grids had long gone silent, their metallic hearts cooled to ash. A single candle flickered beside her, its weak flame fighting against the shadows.
When the child's cry finally broke the silence, the wind outside shifted. The candle guttered once—then steadied. The woman, pale and trembling, looked down upon the boy wrapped in coarse cloth.Her whisper trembled like the air:
"He was born when the light dimmed… He will walk where light and shadow meet."
That was the night Hetu Rasei came into the world.
The Echo Years
Time moved slowly in Eastern Atlantia.Machines still slept beneath the sands, remnants of the forgotten era when men tried to conquer enlightenment through circuits and steel. People now lived by simpler means—harvesting grain, boiling rice, whispering prayers to both Buddha and the Tao.
Hetu's mother ran a small rice porridge stall by the village square. He helped her every morning—carrying water, serving bowls, listening to travelers talk about the skies where cultivators flew.Whenever one of those radiant figures passed overhead, riding a beam of light, the boy would stop whatever he was doing and stare until the glow disappeared beyond the clouds.
He never spoke about it, but in his chest, something stirred—a yearning that felt older than his name.
At eighteen, that yearning became unbearable. His mother had grown frail, her body eaten by time and silence. On her final night, she called him close and placed a trembling hand upon his heart.
"The body fades," she said softly, "but truth travels. Find it… even if the path breaks you."
When dawn came, she was gone.Hetu buried her beneath the willow by the riverside—the same tree that had once sheltered their stall from summer rain.
That evening, he sat by the fading light, watching the currents carry away the reflection of her grave.Somewhere far beyond the horizon, lightning flared across the sky—not of thunder, but of energy. The cultivators of the great orders were already in motion, weaving their unseen wars across the upper atmosphere.
He rose, turned toward the mountains in the north, and whispered to the wind:
"If the heavens have a gate… I will find it."
That night, under a sky dimming once more, Hetu Rasei took his first step toward the Path of the Eightfold Way—a journey where silence and motion, wisdom and force, would one day fuse into a power the cosmos itself had forgotten.