Before the war became endless, there was a moment when the world still believed it could be saved.
It was a fragile belief, trembling like glass held over fire—but it existed.
The heavens were whole then.
Stars obeyed their paths. Time flowed forward without hesitation. The borders between realms were sealed tight, guarded by laws older than memory. Mortals prayed not because they were desperate, but because they trusted that someone listened.
And the gods answered.
They were not kings upon thrones, nor distant watchers wrapped in eternity. They were fated gods—beings bound to existence itself, shaped by necessity rather than worship. Where they walked, reality stabilized. Where they stood, chaos receded.
Among them were two whose names would later be erased from scripture.
They loved.
That love was quiet at first. Forbidden not by law, but by consequence. Fated gods were not meant to bind themselves to one another. Attachment created imbalance. Love created preference. Preference created weakness.
They chose love anyway.
And when the Outer Dark stirred—when something ancient clawed its way toward creation from beyond the last boundary—it was those two who stood first against it.
The King of Chaos did not arrive with trumpets or flame.
He arrived with absence.
Where he passed, meaning unraveled. Where his gaze fell, certainty collapsed. He was not destruction—destruction implied intent. He was contradiction given will. A being that should not exist, yet did.
Reality rejected him.
And failed.
The war that followed tore the heavens apart. Divine blood fell like rain, burning continents to glass. Mortal kingdoms vanished between heartbeats—not conquered, but forgotten. Names dissolved. Histories rewrote themselves in terror.
The fated gods fought not to win—but to delay the inevitable.
And in the end, delay was all they achieved.
The King of Chaos could not be slain. Fate itself recoiled from him. So he did what chaos does best—he twisted the rules until victory became imprisonment.
The two gods were sealed.
Not killed.
Not destroyed.
Sealed alive.
Their prison was forged from paradox and eternity, a place where time looped endlessly and pain could not culminate in death. A place designed not to end them—but to break them, moment by moment, forever.
When the seal closed, the heavens screamed.
And something else happened—something the King of Chaos did not foresee.
Sealed God's child
She was grown up into into ash.
The sky burned red the night Caera Lionheart entered the world, torn open by distant battles between beings too vast to be seen. The land trembled with each divine impact, as if the earth itself feared what it carried.
No prophecy announced her arrival.
No choir sang.
She did not cry.
Her eyes opened beneath a shattered sky, reflecting fire and ruin as though she already understood what awaited her.
The remnants of divine power—everything her parents had left behind—had been poured into her existence. Not gently. Not mercifully. But desperately.
She was not born to live.
She was born to continue a war the gods had failed to end.
From the moment she drew breath, the world pressed its weight upon her. Fate did not wait for her to grow. The Outer Beings sensed her immediately—something wrong, something bright, something that did not belong among mortals.
So despair found her early.
Villages burned before she learned their names. Cities fell while she slept. She learned the sound of screams before laughter, the taste of blood before sweetness. Childhood was not stolen from her.
It was never offered.
Those who raised her did not tell her stories.
They trained her.
Steel replaced comfort. Pain replaced patience. Every day she survived was another day the world demanded more from her. The name Lionheart was not given in admiration—it was spoken like a prayer by those who had nothing left to believe in.
"Be our light," they whispered.
Even as they pushed her toward darkness.
Years passed.
The war did not.
Caera grew into her burden, her body and soul reforged by conflict. She learned to wield weapons that bent under divine resonance, learned to channel power that scorched her nerves and cracked her bones. Each victory saved thousands.
Each victory took something from her.
She stopped asking why she fought.
She stopped asking who she was.
There was only the war. Only the seal. Only the promise she carried like a blade against her own throat—that one day, she would free her parents or die trying.
And then fate twisted again.
On a battlefield soaked in corrupted blood, she encountered something she should have destroyed without hesitation.
A demon.
Not a mindless beast from the Outer Dark, but a descendant of a demon lord—ancient, powerful, and broken. His wings were torn. His horn shattered. His life bled out onto the scorched earth as he dragged himself from the ruins of battle.
She raised her weapon.
He begged.
Not for mercy.
For use.
"Don't kill me," he said, voice shaking with desperation and awe. "Chain me. Command me. Let me live long enough to serve you.
She saw the truth in him immediately.
He was dangerous.
He was corrupted.
And he was devoted.
Caera spared him not because she believed in redemption—but because she understood weapons.
She would use him.
And when he was no longer useful, she would kill him without hesitation.
That was the promise she made to herself.
The promise he never heard.
Viehl followed her from that day onward, chains binding his body but not his gaze. Where she saw a tool, he saw salvation. Where she saw sin, he saw purpose.
Her hatred did not deter him.
Her attempts on his life only deepened his devotion.
She was light in a world that devoured itself—and he would burn if it meant standing close to her.
Far beyond the battlefield, within the prison of sealed eternity, two gods felt something stir.
Hope.
And somewhere in the fractures of reality, the King of Chaos smiled.
Because the war was no longer just endless.
It was personal.