Author's Note:
This isn't a standard prologue.
No info dump. No exposition. Just the kind of silence that moves governments.
You won't understand everything yet.
You're not supposed to.
But in this world, the name you don't say is often the one you should fear most.
Welcome to The House of the Sage.
The control room blinked red. Once. Then flatlined.
A single heartbeat passed.
Then:
"Target is off-grid."
No alarms. No shouts. Just silence.
The kind that rewrites protocols.
On the screen, the words appeared like a curse:
NIVRIT DISAPPEARED — LIVE FEED LOST
Two encrypted pings left the system in under five seconds.
The first reached a summit in Istanbul.
Selene Vashirayan, seated between two presidents, looked down at her phone. One glance. Then she stood.
No explanation. No farewell.
She pressed the mic inside her cuff and said a single word:
"Cradle."
The second signal landed in London's financial district.
Shaurya Vashirayan, reviewing stress simulations for Southeast Asian currencies, stared at the glowing phrase on his private monitor.
He pressed a single button on the desk.
"Vane."
That was all.
The last time he spoke that name aloud, two intelligence agencies ceased to exist by morning.
Riverstone Academy wasn't a school.
Not really.
It looked like one—football fields, maple trees, pristine halls—but every window was reinforced glass, every classroom under passive scan.
The children of billionaires, diplomats, and shadows studied there.
At the far edge of the field, a boy sat alone.
Nivrit Vashirayan.
Six years old.
Knees pulled to chest.
Eyes fixed on the sunlit dust in the air.
He hadn't spoken in three days.
He wasn't supposed to be alone.
He wasn't supposed to be outside.
But rules bent around Nivrit.
Sometimes out of love.
More often, out of fear.
Teachers thought he was sulking.
The system thought the surveillance was airtight.
Even the internal network—paranoid, generational, self-healing—showed nothing wrong.
But Nivrit had noticed the latency in the sensor resets.
The rhythm of the security drones.
The shallow patterns in the AI's patrol logic.
He didn't panic.
He didn't run.
He simply stood, turned, and walked.
No one saw him slip through the back gate.
No one stopped him on the long path to the lake.
He didn't want to disappear forever.
He just wanted to know if anyone would come looking.
If he mattered enough to cause motion.
He wasn't assigned a Shadow. Not yet.
Too young.
Too valuable to leave unguarded—
Too unusual to understand.
Cradle wasn't watching.
Vane wasn't tracking.
That was their first mistake.
Across the border, in a facility disguised as a research camp in northern Pakistan, the mercenaries had planned well.
Their target: Kabir Mehta—heir to a billionaire defense contractor.
Same school. Same age. Same morning walk.
They waited weeks for a security gap.
Then a boy walked alone.
They moved.
The strike took thirty seconds.
Security neutralized. Extraction smooth.
The boy didn't scream. Didn't resist.
He matched the profile.
Except the boy wasn't Kabir.
They had taken the wrong child.
They had taken a Vashirayan.
Within the hour, heads of state around the world received visits.
No announcements. No names. No introductions.
Just people. All different.
Some stepped from limousines. Others from rickshaws.
Old, young, scarred, clean.
But they all bore the same glyph:
A circle inscribed with symbols no one dared decode.
No one stopped them.
Not out of understanding—
But because of the standing order passed down through governments:
If you see the mark… stand down.
The leaders didn't ask questions.
Each of them carried a phone with four numbers.
No names. Just numbers.
A phone they were told never to touch.
A phone they prayed would never ring.
That morning, it rang.
Selene Vashirayan exited Istanbul airspace before her chair at the summit had cooled.
Shaurya was already en route from London.
"Untraceable," he said, over the encrypted channel.
"No alarm triggered," Selene replied.
A pause. Then:
"He's six."
Shaurya didn't answer immediately.
But when he did, his voice was quiet steel.
"But he did it."
They didn't say the rest.
They didn't need to.
An hour later, the boy sat in a metal chair.
Too large for him. Too still.
He wasn't bruised.
He wasn't tied.
He just sat there—unblinking, unbothered.
The mercenaries whispered outside the door.
They were already unnerved.
They didn't know why.
One of them would describe his stare later as:
"Like being watched by something older than you thought existed."
They thought they had captured a pawn.
They hadn't.
They had called down the board.
Years later, the boy disappeared again.
Not off-grid.
Off-record.
No Shadow.
No movement.
Just silence.
That silence is ending.