The last shard of crystal fell not with a crash, but a sigh—a whisper of light dissolving into the stagnant air of a tomb that had been her world for a hundred years. Elyria, once the Radiant Heart, Goddess of Dawn and Renewal, caught the fading fragment in a palm that was now merely flesh. The cost of her own prison-break was absolute. Her divine essence, the boundless ocean from which she had drawn creation and comfort, was now a still, shallow puddle within her. Enough for a final purpose. Enough, perhaps, for a single, desperate lie.
She emerged not into a world, but the corpse of one. The sky was a perpetual bruise, stained by the demonic ley lines that now pulsed across the continent like necrotic veins. The air tasted of ash and iron. Where her cathedrals of light had once touched the clouds, only jagged ruins remained, silhouetted against a sickly green horizon. A century of demonic reign had scrubbed the land of memory, of color, of hope. The sight was a physical blow, worse than the sealing, for this was her failure made manifest.
Her journey to the heart of the last bastion, the so-called Holy Kingdom of Luminar, was a pilgrimage of horror. She walked unseen, a wraith in tattered robes that had once been vestments, her glorious light clamped down to a dying ember in her breast. She saw the people—her people—huddled in fortified towns, their eyes dull, praying to a goddess they believed dead. Their faith was a faint, silver thread in the gloom, and she followed it, a ghost pulled by the last echoes of her own name.
Luminar's capital, the Spire of the Last Prayer, was a grim fortress of grey stone, its only defiance a stained-glass window depicting her own sealing, a martyrdom frozen in lead and pigment. Here, faith had curdled into rigid ritual, a going-through-motions awaiting an end. Using the dregs of her power, she wove the simplest, most vital of miracles: a disguise. A touch to the brow of the aged, dying High Saint Mirelle, a transfer of a memory—the secret location of the sacred reliquary. A gentle cessation of a suffering heart. When the attendants found her, it was the newcomer, the veiled sister Elyria, who knelt in prayer beside the saint's bed, the holy woman's final, whispered secret seemingly entrusted to her alone.
The sanctum beneath the Spire was cold and silent. Before the great altar lay the *Sol Sceptre*, a weapon of office that had been a mere focus for her power in ages past. Now, it felt heavy with latent potential, a reservoir she could no longer fill. This was the gamble. All of it.
She raised the sceptre. Not with the effortless grace of a deity, but with the straining will of a mortal channeling a force that threatened to burn her from the inside out. She did not call upon her own name. Instead, she recited the oldest, most fundamental laws of the cosmos—the laws of balance, of equivalent exchange, of a world crying out for an antithesis to the blight upon it. She offered the sceptre's stored power, the lingering faith of the kingdom, and the final, precious drops of her own divinity as a beacon.
The ritual was not a request. It was a snare.
Lightning, pure and white, cracked in the sealed chamber without thunder. The air ripped open, a tear in the fabric of reality that smelled of ozone and something utterly alien—clean linen and concrete. A figure tumbled onto the cold stone floor with a grunt, clad in strange, coarse blue trousers and a thin shirt adorned with a faded sigil: a stylized beast and the words *Crimson Hawks*.
Elyria let the sceptre clatter to the floor, her strength spent. She approached, her heart hammering a mortal rhythm against her ribs. The hero—a young man with short-cropped hair and an expression of stunned disbelief—pushed himself up, staring at his own hands, then at the arcane circle fading around him, then at her.
"What the hell?" he breathed, his voice echoing in the vast chamber. "The game… the VR rig… this isn't right."
She knelt before him, ignoring the blasphemy of her posture. The goddess was gone. Only Saint Elyria remained. She took his hand, her touch firm. His skin was warm, alive with a potential she could no longer sense directly, but could *hope* for.
"Welcome, champion," she said, her voice soft but unwavering, the voice of a woman bearing a terrible, glorious secret. "The world has awaited you for a hundred years. My name is Elyria. And I am going to teach you how to save it."
Above them, unseen, deep in the twisted realms of the conquered north, a throne of black obsidian shivered. The Demon God Maledict, whose will was law, whose presence was a plague, stirred from a century of smug slumber. A faint, familiar resonance, a note of light thought forever extinguished, had flickered. And then vanished. Not extinguished. *Hidden*.
A smile, full of needle-sharp teeth, spread across his face. The hunt, he realized with delight, was finally about to begin.