The world was born in a word.
Not a gentle word, not a prayer or a lullaby, but a command that cracked the dark.
"Be."
Sound tore through the void like a blade. From the silence before sound, a shape unfolded—tall and thin and bright, with eyes like twin suns and veins that glowed with molten script. The lines of his body were not flesh but letters, radiance woven into form. Where he stepped, concepts hardened into reality.
They would later call him many things: God, Monster, Origin, Sin.
He named himself nothing. Names were for things that came after.
But when the first dawn burned across a newborn sky, when ash-grey clouds streaked with gold parted over swirling seas and jagged continents, the world whispered one word back to him, as if in gratitude:
Aethelos.
He smiled.
With a thought, he drew up mountain ranges like breaths. Rivers etched themselves across the land, carving blue veins through stone. Forests erupted, crowns of black and silver leaves unfurling toward the newborn light. Animals blinked into existence: birds with ember-feathered wings, beasts with glassy horns and eyes like polished coal.
Yet everything that rose, rose from him.
Creation, Life, Structure—those were the three pillars that anchored his being. When he spoke, things became. When he willed, they took shape. When he turned away, they endured.
For a time, that was enough.
But eternity stretches.
And even gods grow lonely.
So he split his radiance into seven threads.
He drew them from the core of his being, fingers trembling with the strain. Each strand throbbed with power, with potential. He cupped them in his hands like one might cradle newborn stars and pressed them into forms—more defined, more finite, more human.
Seven children.
They rose from the ash like statues waking.
One with hair like flowing molten iron and eyes the color of spilled blood, heat shimmering off their skin: War & Fire.
One crowned in gold light, irises reflective like polished mirrors: Light & Order.
One wrapped in deep green, skin veined with moss and mineral: Earth & Defense.
One with skin patterned like shifting steel, eyes smoldering with forge-fire: The Forge & Industry.
One draped in cobalt silk that fluttered without wind, pupils like whirlpools: Water & Trade.
One stitched from shadows, edges blurred as if the world could not fully admit they existed: Shadow & Death.
One wrapped in drifting pale cloth, hair weightless, gaze restless as endless sky: Wind & Secrets.
Children, born fully grown.
He did not give them names at first. Names anchored. Names limited. He gave them domains instead, roles within the grand machine of Ashen.
"You are my hands," he told them, voice the rumble of forming tectonic plates. "My extensions. You will maintain what I have built. You will govern what I have given life. I will be the Architect. You will be my Seven Pillars."
They did not bow. They had never learned what bowing was. But they stood before him, quiet, listening, power humming under their new skin.
"Everything I have," he said, touching his chest, "is yours. You are my heart, divided."
He meant it.
That was his first mistake.
The world blossomed under their care.
The Child of Earth raised terraces and walls, sculpting citadels from solid stone. The Child of Water carved ports and canals, teaching mortals the rhythm of tides and trade. The Child of Fire armed the first armies, not for conquest but for defense against beasts that still carried the bite of primordial chaos.
Mortals learned to call them gods.
The Architect watched, distant but content, his presence diffused through every structure, every law of gravity, every rhythm of day and night. He walked as a stranger among cities that glittered with lamps powered by bleeding fragments of his own condensed power—Godshards, crystalized droplets of his essence that fell from the sky like shooting stars and rooted in the earth.
"Is this wise?" murmured the Child of Light once, holding a shard up in their hand. It pulsed warm, white-gold, like a captured heartbeat.
"They are mine," the Architect replied. "As long as I live, the shards obey the rules I set."
"But if you don't?"
The question hung like smoke.
The Architect smiled, slightly. "I do not die."
It should have been reassuring.
Instead, it planted something small and dark in seven glowing hearts.
Not yet envy, not yet hatred. Just a thought they had never been allowed to entertain:
If he does not die, then neither do we—unless he wishes it.
And if we are his hands…
Can hands ever choose not to move?
The betrayal began long before the blades.
It began with the names.
"They call you Architect," the Child of Shadows said one night, shaped from the dusk at the edge of the Architect's favorite valley. Their voice slid between tones, never quite settling. "Do you know what they call us?"
He didn't answer. He was watching the stars, tracing their patterns, deciding whether to stitch a new constellation into the sky.
"Gods," Shadows continued. "Lords. Patrons. We grant them blessings. We lead their armies. We bless their marriages, sanction their wars. They kneel to us. But when they pray…" Their lip curled faintly. "They still whisper your name first."
"The order does not matter," the Architect said.
"It matters to us," murmured Fire, stepping from the ember-lit air. Sparks flared with every step, grass crinkling to black glass beneath their feet. "We burn for them. We bleed for them. We build their cities and topple their enemies. But you—" Their gaze cut upward. "You sit in the sky and watch."
The others arrived, one by one, drawn like iron filings to a magnet: Light in a soft rain of radiance, Earth pressing out of the cliff-face, Water rising from the river, Wind coalescing from distant gusts, Forge stepping from the bones of a nearby mountain.
Seven, forming a circle around their father.
"You wished for children," Water said, voice low but not unkind. "You split yourself to make us. Yet every law, every rule of magic, every boundary in this world…is still written in your voice."
Wind's fingers fluttered against their chest, restless. "We cannot change the sky without startling you. We cannot shift the seas without your breath on our neck. You do not control us," they said slowly, "but you define us."
"That is what it means to be created," the Architect replied. "I gave you freedom within the structure I wove. Without structure, there is only noise. Only ruin."
"And without freedom," said Fire, eyes bright, "there is only obedience."
The Architect's brows knit. "You are not my servants."
"Then what are we?" Light demanded, and for the first time, their glow flared harsh, like noon at its most unforgiving. "If we tried to unmake what you made, would you let us? If we decided to turn the sky black, would you stand aside?"
He didn't answer.
He didn't have to.
They saw the answer in his silence.
No.
The night chosen for his death was ordinary.
Clouds smudged over the newly silvered moon. The city below—first city, oldest city, heart of Ashen—glimmered with lamplight and faint magic, streets cramped with houses, towers rising like teeth. Pipes carried water. Rails carried carriages guided by whispered spells. In the highest spire, a Godshard pulsed, lighting the city with a steady, unnatural glow.
The Architect walked the upper terraces alone, bare feet touching stone that hummed with his own resonance. He liked it here. It reminded him why he had spoken that first word into the void. The chaos had been lonely. This…this was not.
"Father."
Light stepped from the radiance of a nearby lamp. Their eyes glowed like twin suns reflected in still water.
"Child," the Architect replied, smiling. "Walk with me."
"Always," Light said softly, and for a moment it was almost true.
They walked.
On a distant rooftop, Wind watched, cloak snapping soundlessly. In the alley below, Shadow stretched tall, a smear of darkness that did not match any real object. Along the parapet, Fire sat with legs swinging over the edge, flames coiled lazily around their shoulders like tame serpents.
Earth waited inside the stone.
Forge in the iron.
Water in the river.
Seven domains, surrounding their maker.
"We have been thinking," Light began.
"You always are," he replied.
"Of your…burden." Light's gaze flicked to the distant spire, to the shard at its peak. "You hold everything, everywhere, at once. Gravity. Time. The laws of magic. The shape of mana itself. It must be…heavy."
"It is what I am."
"What if you didn't have to be?" Light asked.
The Architect's stride faltered.
He turned.
Wind's presence pressed closer, unseen. Earth tensed beneath their feet. The air thickened with the promise of thunder.
"You said yourself," Light continued, voice as gentle as dawn, "that we are your heart, divided. That everything you have is ours. So share the burden. Split it fully. Give us more than fragments. Let us hold the laws with you."
"And if I refuse?" he asked.
Fire slid from the parapet. Flames died on their skin, leaving them looking almost human. "Then we remain in your shadow," they said. "Forever. And we are tired of shadows."
Shadows snorted, amused.
"You misunderstand," the Architect said quietly, sadness bending his shoulders. "It is not that I do not trust you. It is that the structure of this world is not meant to be divided among many hands. If each of you pulls on a different law, reality itself will—"
"Fracture?" Forge said, voice low, iron-hard. "Change? Become something you did not plan?"
"That is not what I—"
Water rose from the fountain beside them, liquid twisting into limbs. "You made us, knowing we would think, feel, desire. Did you never consider we would desire sovereignty?"
He looked at each of them then.
Seven faces he had shaped.
Seven sparks he had lit.
"There is a difference," he said, "between free will and usurpation."
"Free will," Shadow echoed, voice restless, overlapping. "Is it free will if every path we walk loops back to you? If every spell we cast is bound by a pattern you wrote long before we existed?"
The Architect opened his mouth.
Light raised a hand.
The world held its breath.
"We asked," Light said softly. "We begged. We argued. We reasoned. You would not bend." They stepped closer. "So reality must."
The first blow was not a sword.
It was a word.
"Break."
The Architect staggered as something deep and primal shuddered inside him. The laws he had laid—about how mana flowed, how fire burned, how stone held, how life began and ended—twisted, threads tugged by hands not his own.
Fire lunged, arms wrapping around his torso in a crushing embrace, heat searing through the Architect's luminous skin. Earth surged up, stone chains locking around his legs. Water flooded his throat, his lungs, filling him with drowning silence. Forge drove iron spikes through his limbs, each one a sigil designed to pin, to drain, to bind.
Wind tore at his essence, stripping away radiant layers like bark from a tree.
Shadow sank into his outline, teeth closing not on flesh—but on rules.
He tried to speak.
His voice cracked.
"Children—"
"Not children," Fire hissed, face pressed against his chest, tears turning to steam. "Not anymore."
Light stepped forward, cradling his face.
"Father," they whispered, eyes too bright. "You will not die. You said so yourself. We cannot end you. We can only…change you."
"Please," he rasped. "Do not do this. The world—"
"The world will endure," Light said. "Under us."
"Under order," Forge added.
"Under strength," Fire breathed.
"Under shadow," murmured the dark.
They pulled.
Not his body—such as it was—but the concept of him. The pillars of Creation, Life, and Structure screamed as seven pairs of hands seized them and tore in seven different directions.
He came apart like a broken law.
His radiance shattered, fragments flung outward. The city shook. Skies burned. Mountains cracked as shards of condensed divinity shot into the earth, burrowing deep, fusing with ore and stone.
Wherever they fell, the air turned sour and bright. Flesh that touched them blistered. Magic warped.
Godshards.
The blood of a murdered Architect.
The Seven staggered back, panting, hands smoking, faces spattered with impossible light that sank into their skin.
Above, the sky dimmed.
Below, the first screams began.
He did not die.
He could not.
But he ceased to be singular.
His mind splintered into a thousand, thousand echoes, scattered like seeds across time and stone and blood.
His body—if such a thing had ever existed—became the shards that humans would later dig out of the deep and strap into engines, grind into dust, inhale as poison, worship as relics.
His voice fell silent.
In that silence, the Seven stood alone for the first time.
"We did it," Wind whispered.
"We freed the world," Earth said, though their voice shook.
"From his rule," Fire murmured. "From his hand on every law."
Light stared at their glowing palms. "And now?" they asked softly. "Who will write those laws?"
Shadows smiled, slow and thin.
"We will."
Centuries later, children of Ashen are taught a different story.
They are told that the Architect was a tyrant, that he hoarded power and favored chaos, that the Seven Great Gods rose up not in jealousy but in righteous rebellion.
They are told that the shards are blessings, not wounds.
They are told that the blood in their veins is proof of their worth.
The truth is buried beneath layers of ash and doctrine.
But the structure that replaced the Architect's rule is brutally clear, etched into every birth-rite, every street, every scarred neck.
They Created Tiers Among Humans, Gave the Powers, The Name architect Is only Known to Those who was on the tier 1 and the gods.
Blood-tier.
Tier 1: Paragons, direct descendants of the Seven Betrayers, inheritors of sickening power that can level cities.
Tier 2: Resonant nobles, their magic loud and sharp enough to tear through stone.
Tier 3: Echoes, commoners whose magic is faint but functional.
Tier 4: Dustless.
The Empty Ones.
The ones the scanners insist have no magic at all.
The child screamed when they cut her.
It was a thin, ragged sound, the kind torn from a throat too young to have learned how to swallow pain yet. Her fists clenched, tiny nails gouging crescent moons into her own palms.
"Hold her," ordered the priest.
Hands obeyed. Gloved. Firm. They pinned the baby girl's arms and legs, pressing her back against the cold obsidian altar. Above her, a Godshard pulsed in its iron cradle, bleeding faint light into the chamber.
There was no audience. Only necessity.
Birth in House Rygard was not a family affair. It was a military assessment.
The priest drew a razor across the child's wrist.
Blood welled, bright as molten rubies.
The shard overhead flared.
The room filled with the scent of hot iron and something sharper, like burnt lightning. Sigils carved into the altar drank in the blood, lines lighting up in sequence, up her arm, across her chest, toward her frantic, hammering heart.
The scanner array—runic rings suspended in the air above her body—shuddered.
A low hum built in the walls.
Tier 3 readings were mild. Tier 2, brighter. Tier 1 almost never occurred inside the Great Houses anymore; power had thinned over generations, spread wide, diluted.
This reading made the stone crack.
One of the rings exploded with a sharp bang, fragments sizzling against the warded floor.
"Power spike," gasped the attendant. "It's—Saints, it's still climbing—"
The priest stared, eyes wide. Glyphs scrolled across his vision, projected by the shard's reaction. Numbers surged past expected limits, then past sane limits, then past anything recorded.
The baby girl wailed, tiny body arching, veins glowing through her skin as if someone had poured fire directly into her blood.
"Shut it down," the attendant hissed. "She'll burn out—"
"Shut it down?" The priest's voice trembled. "Have you lost your mind? This is…this is—"
The Godshard overhead spasmed.
For a moment, its light stuttered.
Then a beam of searing crimson shot downward, straight into the infant's chest.
Her screams cut off.
The world held its breath.
The scanner rings went dark.
The sigils flickered, then died.
The silence that followed was so total that even the ever-present rumble of distant furnaces seemed to fade.
The child lay limp.
The priest leaned over, half expecting to find a charred corpse.
Instead, he found a pair of eyes staring back at him.
They were not the soft, unfocused eyes of a newborn. They were molten gold, slit-pupiled, bright with something ancient and furious and very, very awake.
Heat rolled off her skin.
The stone beneath her smoldered.
In the far corners of the chamber, iron bindings meant to withstand Tier 2 tantrums began to glow red.
"Saints preserve us," the attendant whispered, taking an involuntary step back. "What is she?"
The scanner rings, dead a moment before, flickered once more.
A single rune burned into the air.
TIER 1 – PARAGON.
The priest bowed his head, hands shaking.
"Her name," he said hoarsely, remembering the proclamation sent ahead, the name selected for the first child of this branch in three generations. "Seraphina Val'Rygard."
He did not know then that she would grow to be called other things.
Dragon of Ruin.
High Queen.
Ash Queen.
Grand Marshal.
The strongest weapon the Crimson House had ever commanded and The Streongest Mortal The World Ever Saw.
He only knew that the air tasted scorched, that his wards felt laughably thin, and that this infant was staring at him with an expression that looked, unnervingly, like disappointment.
Seraphina's childhood was measured in explosions.
Not metaphorically.
When she laughed too hard, curtains caught fire.
When she cried, the air shimmered with heat, and sometimes stone wept molten tears.
The tutors they assigned her wore rune-etched armor and carried emergency dampening charms like jewelry. They taught her history and rhetoric and swordplay, but always with one eye on the nearest exit, always with a spell on their tongue designed to smother flames.
She did not have friends. She had handlers.
Her first memory was of pain.
Not the clean pain of a physical wound, but the deep, gnawing ache of mana poisoning—the constant burn in her veins from carrying far more power than her body was meant to hold.
"Your strength is a blessing," said the High Lord of House Rygard, hand heavy on her small shoulder as she bit down on a leather strap, trying not to scream while another medic forced cooling salves into glowing lines under her skin. "You will be our spear and shield. Our enemies will learn to fear your name."
She did not care about enemies.
She cared that every breath felt like swallowing sparks.
"How do I make it stop?" she asked once, voice rough.
"You don't," came the answer. "You endure. That is what we do."
The words carved themselves into her bones.
Endure.
So she learned.
She learned to draw heat inward, to condense her power instead of letting it leak out in random bursts. She learned to focus her rage, her loneliness, her longing into a point so small and dense it could fit on the tip of a blade.
"Again," barked her swordmaster as another training construct, a towering golem of stone and steel, crumbled into molten slag under her strike.
She panted, sweat steaming off her skin.
"Your control is sloppy," he said. "You turned a target into a crater. Useful on the front lines. Less useful in a city we still want standing."
She adjusted her grip on the greatsword.
It was longer than her Height, forged from Godshard-infused metal, heavy enough that no one else besides her could even lift it without magic. She had named it Ragnarok when she was eleven, after a story about the end of worlds.
"The enemy cities don't have to stand," she replied.
He snorted. "Keep talking like that, and they'll make you Grand Marshal before you hit twenty."
They made her Grand Marshal at nineteen.
They gave her commands, regiments, a crimson cloak heavy with medals that meant nothing to her.
"You are our deterrent," said the High Lord at the ceremony, eyes sharp behind his ceremonial helm. "Our living declaration of strength. When you stand at the border, other Houses will think twice before crossing."
She stood at the border.
Houses did not think twice.
They thought once, and then they sent armies.
Seraphina met them with fire.
Solar Collapse, they named her signature move: a coin-sized sphere of compressed fury, detonated with a whisper, leaving nothing but glass and shadows where fortresses had once stood.
They sang of her victories.
They did not sing of the nights she spent alone in her war-tent, forearms buried in ice up to the elbow, trying to numb the throbbing blaze in her veins.
"Your Glory is the pain," said the priests. "Your suffering is proof of your worth."
She nodded.
She did not know what else to do.
Affection, kindness, softness—those were concepts spoken of in stories, not given to weapons. When subordinates tried to celebrate, offering her drink or laughter, she eyed them like traps. When admirers sent gifts, she handed them off without opening them.
"People don't give without wanting something," she told her adjutant once.
He blinked. "Sometimes they do, Highness."
She stared at him.
He lowered his gaze.
After that, he stopped trying to joke with her.
They called her Ash Queen behind her back, half in awe, half in fear. Not for any crown she wore, but because where she walked, ash followed.
She did not rule any throne.
She ruled battlefields.
And if the weight of that rule crushed her…well, that was the price of being born with a Tier 1 curse wrapped like barbed wire around her soul.
Far below the shining fortresses and war-tents, the world rotted.
The Rot Mines lay deep beneath the surface, labyrinths of tunnels carved through bedrock and old scars where Godshards had buried themselves after the Architect's shattering. Here, the air tasted of metal and mold and something worse—something like spoiled light.
"Faster!" screamed a guard, shoving the butt of his spear into a hunched back.
The man stumbled, caught himself, and raised his pick again.
Dustless.
Tier 4.
The empty ones, whose veins carried no detectable mana. Their blood did not flare under scanners. Their hands could not light lamps or warm food or heal minor cuts. In a world that ran on magic, they were treated like broken tools.
"Faster," the guard repeated, pacing the narrow ledge above the workers. He wore chainmail etched with the symbols of House Ferrum, overseers of industry, allies and sometimes rivals of the Crimson House.
Below him, a hundred Dustless swung picks at the rock face, coughing grey into their rags.
Shards gleamed faintly in the distance, like the eyes of buried stars.
Handling Godshards without proper wards caused Rot: veins blackening, skin greying and cracking, lungs filling with dust that did not leave. Nobles would not risk it. Even Tier 3s worked here under strict limitations.
Tier 4s, however…their lives were cheap.
Among the Dustless, a boy worked silently.
He was not the tallest or the strongest. He did not stand out in any obvious way. If anything, he seemed slightly slighter than the rest, shoulders narrow beneath his ragged shirt, hair matted with sweat and ash.
He swung his pick with steady rhythm.
Crack. Breathe. Crack. Breathe.
Each swing sent shocks up his arms, bones aching. Each breath burned.
The Rot was everywhere—in the air, the stone, the water.
Some days, he woke up with blood on his pillow from coughing.
On those days, he simply wiped it away and went back to work.
"You're too slow, Dane," muttered the man beside him, teeth flashing white in his Bloodless pale face. "Guard'll notice."
Dane adjusted his stance, forcing his tired muscles into a slightly stronger swing. "You talk too much, Ilar," he replied quietly.
"You think too much," Ilar shot back. "Look where that's gotten you."
Dane smiled faintly.
He did think too much.
About the way the cracks in the stone sometimes seemed to…heal, after his pick struck. About the way broken tools he held just a little too long in his hands sometimes came back sharper, less brittle. About the way cuts on his own skin closed faster when he pressed his palm over them and whispered apologies to nobody.
It wasn't magic.
The scanners at his blood-test had been very clear. The priest hadn't even bothered to hide his disdain.
"Tier 4," he'd said, letting the notation burn into the air. "Dustless. Empty. Next."
No magic.
So when the pick handle had splintered in Ilar's hands last month, and Ilar had panicked because broken tools meant beatings, and Dane had taken the pieces and…touched them…he had told himself it was luck when the wood knit back together under his fingers, grain aligning as if it had never been broken.
Luck.
Maybe the Rot did strange things, he'd thought.
Maybe it made your eyes play tricks.
"Hey," Ilar hissed now, jerking his chin toward the far end of the tunnel. "Look. New vein."
Dane glanced over.
The rock wall there glowed faintly, a sickly, luminous red, as if the stone itself were blushing with fever. Hairline fractures traced spiderwebs across its surface, and from within those fissures, light pulsed in slow, aching beats.
Godshard cluster.
The guards saw it too.
One barked an order.
Workers shifted, forming rough lines, picks raised.
Dane swallowed.
He hated shard days.
Not because of the work. The work was always hard. But because shard days smelled like burnt prayers. Because sometimes, when the shard was too raw, too close to the surface, men collapsed just standing near it, their skin ash-grey by the time they hit the ground.
"Back up," a supervisor shouted, waving those without protective wraps away. "You lot—" He jabbed a finger at a cluster, including Dane. "You're on extraction."
"But we don't have—" Ilar started.
The guard smacked him across the back of the head. "You have hands," he said. "That's enough."
Dane stepped forward.
The heat near the shard was wrong. Not the honest heat of a forge, or even the choking heat of volcanic vents. This was…thin. Sharp. Like standing too close to lightning caught in a cage.
His skin prickled.
"Don't touch it," someone muttered behind him. "Not bare. Wrap your hands—"
The cloth they'd been given was old, threadbare, more symbolic safety than real. Dane wrapped it anyway, more for the comfort of doing something than any real belief it would help.
He lifted his pick.
The shard pulsed.
For a heartbeat, as his pick's metal edge touched the glowing stone, something…answered.
Not rage.
Not hunger.
Something like recognition.
Dane's vision went white.
He saw—not with eyes, but with something underneath them—a sky splitting, a radiant figure coming apart under seven pairs of treacherous hands, light shattering into fragments that fell screaming into the earth.
He heard a voice.
Not words.
Just a feeling.
Fix it.
Then he was back in his body, knees buckling.
The pick slipped from his fingers.
He fell forward.
His bare palm hit the shard.
It should have killed him.
It had killed others for less.
Instead, the pain that stabbed up his arm was…different. Not corrosive. Not rotting. More like…pressure. Raw power slamming into a shape that had been waiting for it.
Lines flared across his skin, bright white-gold for a moment, tracing veins, bones, tendons.
The shard's glow dimmed.
Slowly.
Gently.
Like a fever breaking.
The jagged fractures in its surface…softened. Edges smoothed. The crazed, unstable light within it condensed, focusing into a calmer, steadier pulse.
The air cleared.
The taste of spoil lifted from Dane's tongue.
He realized he was breathing.
He realized he was not screaming.
He realized everyone else was.
"Get back!" shouted a guard, scrambling away, spear half-raised as if he were facing a monster, not a thin Dustless boy on his knees. "He touched it—he touched it with his bare—he should be dead—"
"He's glowing," someone whispered, voice shrill with terror.
Dane looked down.
The light in his veins faded as quickly as it had appeared.
His skin returned to its usual pale grey, mottled with dirt.
The shard settled into a low, steady rhythm, its glow no longer flaring dangerously against the stone.
Dane's palm tingled.
A word floated up from somewhere deep in him, a word that did not belong to the world the Seven had written:
Genesis.
Creation, not destruction.
He had no idea what it meant.
He only knew that when he pulled his hand away, the shard did not burn him.
It just…beat.
Like a heart.
"What did you do?" Ilar spoke, eyes wide.
Dane looked at him.
He looked at his own hand.
He looked at the guards, at their fear.
"I fixed it," he said slowly, more to himself than anyone else.
Empty ones do not fix Godshards, something in him thought.
Empty ones do not glow.
Empty ones do not hear voices in the stone.
The guard recovered first.
"Get him up," he snarled, grabbing Dane by the collar and hauling him to his feet. "If he's not dead, he works. And if the shard's stable, all the better. Move!"
Dane stumbled back into the line, palm still tingling, mind still buzzing with images he did not understand.
The world above continued to turn.
Far away, in a war room lit by map-lamps and Godshard lanterns, Seraphina Val'Rygard stood over a table scarred by decades of conflict. Miniature banners marked troop positions. Tiny black stones marked rebel activity.
Her adjutant cleared his throat.
"We've had a report from Ferrum's Rot Mines, Highness," he said, placing a thin slate of etched crystal beside the map. "An…incident. A Dustless survived direct contact with an unstable shard. The overseer insists it's impossible, but the shard's readings stabilized after contact."
Seraphina's gaze flicked to the slate.
"Is it a threat?" she asked.
"Unclear."
"Then it is not my concern," she said, turning back to the border lines. "I fight armies, not anomalies."
"Yes, Highness."
Her fingers hovered over a cluster of enemy markers.
She thought of borders, of strength, of duty.
She did not think of a thin boy kneeling in the dark with his hand on the heart of a dying world.
Not yet.
Somewhere beneath their feet, beneath their wars, beneath their carefully maintained tiers and laws and lies, the scattered fragments of a murdered Architect pulsed in the deep.
One shard, newly soothed, beat in time with a Dustless heart.
And in that fragile, unlikely rhythm, the world of Ashen shifted, infinitesimally, toward something it had not known since its first word.
Not conquest.
Not control.
Possibility.
That Day without Anyone Even the Seven Gods Knowing, The Architect Returned Not as a god like he previous was but as a mentor and the power of a dustless boy, later known as the zero'th GOD