A thousand years before the name World's Edge was spoken in whispers and screams, before it became a curse carried on banners and bloodstained prayers, the world was still young enough to believe that miracles were merciful.
In those days, the sky burned brighter.
Stars did not merely watch the world—they leaned close to it, pressing their will into the firmament like fingerprints in soft clay. The people of the Five Realms called this age the Luminous Era, a time when the boundary between the seen and unseen thinned, and gods still answered when mortals dared to ask.
It was in this age that the wish was born.
Not a hope whispered to the wind, nor a prayer carved into stone, but a singular, impossible plea spoken by a dying world.
The land then was breaking.
Mountains groaned under their own weight. Seas clawed at the shores as if trying to escape their basins. Crops withered no matter how faithfully they were tended, and children were born beneath skies already dimming with ash. Scholars named the calamity The Unraveling, though none truly understood its cause. Some claimed the gods were withdrawing. Others swore the world itself had grown tired of being shaped by mortal hands.
Five rulers gathered at the center of the world, in a city that no longer exists except in dust and half-remembered myths. They came not as conquerors, but as supplicants.
King Halvrek of the Iron Marches, whose armies had never lost a war, arrived without his crown.
High Oracle Selene, voice of the Sun Choir, came stripped of her visions, blind for the first time since childhood.
The Tide-Queen Myrrha walked from the sea on bare feet, her scales dulled, her dominion shrinking with every tide.
Archsage Corven brought the accumulated knowledge of a thousand libraries—and admitted it was not enough.
And lastly came Elyndra of No Banner, a wanderer with no throne, no title, and no history that could be verified. She carried nothing but a shard of star-glass wrapped in cloth.
They met at the World's Heart, where ley lines crossed like veins, and the ground hummed with power older than language. There, beneath a sky torn open by auroras and falling embers, they made a choice no generation was meant to make.
If the gods would not answer, they would build something that could.
The artifact took seven days and seven nights to shape, though time itself bent uneasily around the work. They poured into it everything they were—faith, rage, love, regret, ambition. The Heart drank it all without judgment.
When it was finished, it hovered above the stone dais like a sliver of the horizon itself. It was not a blade, nor a crown, nor a jewel, yet it resembled all of them, depending on who looked upon it. Its edge shimmered endlessly, as if it marked the boundary between what was and what could be.
Elyndra named it first.
"The World's Edge," she said softly. "Where desire meets consequence."
They did not celebrate.
Each of them felt it then—the terrible clarity. The artifact would grant any wish. Not only noble ones. Not only wise ones. It would not weigh intent or measure worth. It would answer.
King Halvrek was the first to speak.
"With this," he said, voice trembling despite himself, "I could end the Unraveling. I could save millions."
"And rule what remains," Selene replied, though there was no accusation in her tone. Only exhaustion.
"My people are drowning," Myrrha said. "The seas retreat from us as if ashamed. I would wish for balance."
Corven said nothing. He stared at the artifact as though it were staring back.
Elyndra alone stepped away.
"You feel it," she said. "The cost."
They all did. Even Halvrek, even Selene. The World's Edge pulsed with a quiet hunger—not for souls, not for blood, but for change. To grant a wish of such magnitude, something else would be reshaped in its place. The world could be saved, yes—but never in the way the wisher imagined.
Selene fell to her knees.
"This is not salvation," she whispered. "This is temptation made divine."
Arguments followed. Voices rose. Centuries of belief and fear collided beneath the shattered sky. At last, when it seemed the artifact itself might tear free from their indecision, Elyndra acted.
She raised the star-glass shard.
"No single hand should ever hold this," she said. "And no single wish should decide the fate of all."
Before anyone could stop her, she struck the World's Edge.
The sound was not a shatter, but a scream—a tearing noise that echoed through stone, sea, and sky alike. Light exploded outward, and the world lurched as if struck by a hammer.
When the brilliance faded, the artifact was gone.
In its place lay five fragments, each glowing with a diminished but unmistakable power. They hovered briefly, as if unsure of gravity, then shot away in different directions—north into the icebound wastes, south into jungles that had not yet been named, east beyond the horizon, west into the deep deserts, and one straight downward, swallowed by the World's Heart itself.
The Unraveling slowed.
Not ended—but eased, as if the world had drawn a long, painful breath and decided, reluctantly, to continue.
The rulers survived. The city did not.
In the years that followed, truth dissolved into legend.
King Halvrek returned to his realm and forbade all mention of the artifact. When he died, his empire collapsed within a decade.
Selene vanished into the desert, her final prophecy sealed in a tomb no one has ever opened.
Myrrha sank beneath the waves with her people, choosing obscurity over extinction.
Corven spent the rest of his life hunting the fragments, then burned his notes when he realized what others would do with them.
And Elyndra—
Some say she died that night, consumed by the backlash of her choice.
Others claim she became the first Guardian, bound to ensure the World's Edge would never be whole again.
What is known is this: the fragments endured.
Each carried a whisper of the original power—not enough to grant a wish, but enough to guide. Those who held a fragment dreamed of places they had never been, paths that twisted toward something vast and waiting. Kingdoms rose on rumors of those dreams. Cultures were shaped by distorted retellings. Wars were fought over lies told by men who had never seen the truth.
Over centuries, four fragments vanished into myth.
One did not.
A single shard surfaced again and again throughout history—always briefly, always disastrously. A tyrant who claimed it was struck down by his own army. A priest who found it lost his faith and founded a bloody order in its place. A hero who carried it into battle won every fight—and died alone, convinced the world itself was watching him.
Each time, the fragment disappeared.
And so the World's Edge became a story told to frighten children and inspire fools.
Until the whispers returned.
Until the fragment was seen once more.
Until the edge of the world drew closer again.
Because the artifact had never been destroyed.
It had only been waiting.
And it remembered every hand that had ever reached for it.