PROLOGUE — "When the World Held Its Breath"
A barren plateau lay beneath a moon veiled in thin, trembling clouds.No wind moved.No creature stirred.Even the cold felt as though it feared to touch the two figures standing at the heart of the darkness.
One stood upon the cracked earth — tall, quiet, the faint outline of a beast-shaped silhouette flickering behind him like a mirage of something ancient. His presence felt wrong, as if reality strained simply to contain him. Depthless shadows pooled around his feet, stretching and shrinking with his breath.
The other stood upon a jagged rise of stone above him — a lone figure outlined by dim moonlight. The air around this one shimmered… not with light, but with something colder, something that made the world itself hesitate. His silhouette was human, and yet not entirely. The darkness bent toward him like it recognized its own.
Neither moved.Neither spoke.
For a moment, the world was perfectly still.
Then, at last, the figure below lifted his head.
His voice was calm… too calm.
"I did not expect someone to follow the same path."
The figure above remained silent, his expression unreadable in the moonlight.
A faint smile — or something resembling it — touched the lips of the one below.
"Tell me… which part of you answered my call?"
The windless night swallowed the question.
A long silence.Then the figure above finally spoke — his voice soft, steady, almost sorrowful.
"The part that refuses to let this world break again."
A low, rumbling sound — neither laughter nor growl — escaped the one standing below.
"How noble."He tilted his head slightly."How naïve."
The figure on the stone stepped forward, the ground cracking under his foot.
"If your birth brought ruin once…"A pause."…then my existence will end it."
The smile below faded.
The sky dimmed as if something unseen inhaled the moonlight.
"Then come," the beast-shaped shadow whispered behind him,"and show me which of us deserves to shape the world."
The two figures moved.
And the world shuddered.
A pressure unlike anything mortals had ever felt rippled across continents. Birds fell silent in their nests. Oceans stilled. Entire kingdoms looked up at the same moment, sensing something they could not understand — a distant wrongness, a tremor in the bones of existence.
Far from the plateau, children woke from sleep with tears in their eyes.Soldiers paused mid-step, gripping their chests.Scholars dropped quills that felt suddenly too heavy.
And deep in the earth, old scars remembered the last time such a power had been unleashed.
Back on the plateau, mountains cracked.Stone split.The sky flickered — light, then dark, then light again.
No voices.No words.Only the clash of forces that should never touch.
And then—
Silence.
Cold.Absolute.Final.
The moon reappeared.The wind returned.The world exhaled.
And the plateau was empty.
As if nothing — and everything — had happened.