Lian Pov:
The day began with the same oppressive silence that haunted the Palace of Demons.
The sun never truly rose here it only shifted into a dim glow of molten light that seeped through the palace's translucent ceiling.
Pillars of black stone stood like charred memories of a world that once burned.
Dragon statues guarded every corner, their obsidian scales glinting blood-red.
Between those walls inside the fortress that was more a gilded cage than a home
was born Prince Lian, of the Fifth Bloodline.
The youngest of five brothers.
The son of a concubine.
His mother quiet, graceful, breathtakingly beautiful had vanished from the world when he was only five.
The queen, his father's lawful wife, had made sure of that.
No one ever spoke of it aloud.
But in that palace, words were unnecessary.
Blood told every story.
Lian grew up on the edge of an abyss.
In a realm where power was law, being a side-born son meant being invisible.
His older brothers studied diplomacy, political sorcery, the command of armies.
He was sent to the pits to train in sword, spear, and bare-handed combat.
Each day he returned from training bruised and bleeding, yet his eyes still burned with defiance.
"If I can't be the heir," he would whisper to himself at night,
"then I'll be the one they all fear."
He never gave up not for a single day.
While his brothers slept on silk sheets, he trained on cold stone floors.
While they debated in the Crown Council, he stood alone in the Hall of Blades,
repeating the same motion strike, block, breathe, strike again
until his hands bled, until the sword became an extension of his will.
His father, King Razal, saw everything but never intervened.
He was not a gentle man.
His faded golden eyes always regarded Kael with the same cold calculation
as if silently asking:
How long before you break?
Lian never broke.
He fought, he conquered, he slew demons that crawled from beyond the realms.
By twenty, he commanded a legion.
But instead of honor, he was rewarded with exile.
The decree came from the Queen herself
a pale woman with a smile like a crack in stone.
She approached him on the day of his eldest brother's coronation,
the palace gleaming with gold dust and false joy.
"The southern border needs guardians," she said in a voice too sweet to be kind.
"And who better than you, my prince?"
He understood at once.
The southern border was exile disguised as duty
the edge of the demon realm,
a place where even the sun of the abyss dared not shine.
A place no one returned from unchanged.
But he knelt, face expressionless, and replied:
"As you command, my Queen."
She smiled
a smile colder than the blade in his hand.
That night, before his departure, Lian stood on his stone balcony,
gazing over the molten landscape.
Rivers of lava crawled beneath violet skies trembling at the horizon.
The wind that blew carried the scent of scorched iron and sacred ash.
"A side-born son…" he muttered.
"That's what they see. But I'll be more than that.
I'll find something even they can't understand."
He closed his eyes
and for a moment, the world around him blurred.
Images surged before him not a dream, not a vision,
but fragments, as if someone else's memories were bleeding into his mind:
A table of glass.
Blinding white light.
The sound of a woman laughing.
Hands touching. Warmth. A smile.
And the strangest of all
a glimpse of a completely different world:
walls of metal, machines glowing with shifting light,
names and symbols he had never heard.
He staggered back, clutching his head.
"What in the abyss… is this?" he whispered.
The memories weren't his
but the emotion within them the longing, the pain, the love
felt too real.
In the nights that followed, the visions returned again and again.
Always the same woman.
Always the same laugh.
Always that haunting sense of belonging
as if he had lived another life, in another world, another time.
"Am I losing my mind?" he asked himself.
But deep down, he knew the answer was no.
Days later, he left for the southern border,
escorted by a small unit of soldiers.
He left the palace without farewell.
There was no one to say goodbye to.
He abandoned a world of cold gold and thick blood,
carrying with him only the shadows of memories that weren't his.
There, at the edge of the Demon Realm,
he was supposed to find the silence of exile.
But instead, he found a man who had fallen from the sky
And that meeting would change everything he knew
about himself,
about his world,
and about what truly lives within his soul.