Before Aethon is born, something ancient screams.
Not in sound — in memory.
Across a collapsing cosmos, the Aethelian cradle shatters like brittle glass. Children of flame and symmetry burn out of existence, erased in a single architect-level blink. Stars fold inward. Thrones overturn. A king dies before he ever learns his own name.
Yet one spark refuses to collapse.
A mother, bleeding fire instead of blood, tears open a forbidden gate with her final breath. She whispers a spell not meant for mortals, not meant for this universe, not meant to ever be spoken again.
Her dying promise is not a prayer —
but a command:
"Live."
And so the last fragment of the Aethelian King is hurled into a world too small to contain him.
A city of humans.
A shaking hospital.
A newborn child who should have cried — but instead opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling like he remembered something older than creation.
That child is named Jaden.
The doctors call him weak. Sickly.
The hunters call him "F-rank mistake."
The world calls him nothing at all.
But the universe?
The universe calls him something else.
A throne without a king.
And in Aethon's nightmares — long before he ever lifts a blade — a voice waits in the dark, whispering from the smoking ruins of a forgotten godhood:
"You are not human.
Return."
He wakes shaking every night, unable to remember the dream but terrified it might someday remember him.
For twenty years, he lives pretending he is ordinary.
For twenty years, something inside him pretends to sleep.
For twenty years, the throne of echoes waits in the hollow of his ribs.
And in another life — in another realm entirely — a girl cries in her sleep without knowing why. Her heart aches for a boy she has not met. She sketches flames she has never seen. She whispers a name she does not recognize:
"Aethon…"
Her name is Lisa.
She is not ready to remember.
He is not ready to awaken.
And the thing watching them — the Architect who walks like a man, speaks like a mentor, and kills like a god — is very ready to begin.
Because fate is not gentle.
Destiny is not kind.
And the story of a broken king never starts with a triumph.
It begins with a mistake.
The weakest hunter on Earth.
The dying heir of a dead race.
The boy whose soul still burns with a throne he cannot control.
…. Aethon The lost king born from silence.
His prologue is ending.
His punishment is beginning.
His crown is waking.
And somewhere in the infinite dark, a scribe writes the first forbidden line of history:
"The vessel stirs.
The king breathes.
The universe shivers."
The story begins.