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The first time the sky bled fire, no one believed it was a sign.
They called it a comet, a burning stone dragged by the gods, beautiful and distant. But by the time it struck the earth—splitting the heart of Mount Irsen and awakening something old beneath its bones—the world had already begun to change.
In the frost-hung village of Drelda's Keep, a boy stood barefoot on a cliff, watching the fire rain over the mountains. He had no name, not one given by parents. The villagers called him Ash, for he was found as a babe in a bed of soot and smoke, swaddled in cloths that never burned.
Ash was sixteen winters old and different in ways that made others uneasy. His hair was a shade too silver for someone so young. His eyes, storm-gray, flickered when he dreamt. And he always dreamt—of towers swallowed by roots, of shadows that whispered, and of a sword that sang to him from beneath the earth.
Tonight, as the firelight danced across the sky and people wailed that the end had come, Ash felt something stir inside him. Not fear. Not awe.
Recognition.
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Down in the valley, bells clanged. The Elders were gathering. Their breath steamed in the cold as they huddled around the black altar in the center of the village. For centuries, it had been a monument to silence—a slab of obsidian said to be older than time, older even than the gods.
But now, for the first time, it was humming.
Ash watched from the shadows, his heart pounding. Then, something called to him—not a voice, but a pull, like the earth itself reaching through the soles of his feet.
He stepped forward.
The moment his hand brushed the altar, a shock of warmth surged through his veins. The obsidian glowed with a sigil—complex, spiraling, burning. The villagers gasped. One screamed.
The Elders fell silent.
The ground shook.
The mountain—the one struck by the comet—was no longer just a peak. It opened, like a cracked egg, and from within spilled a mist blacker than night and colder than death.
Something ancient had awakened.
And it had seen Ash.
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To be continued