Prologue: The Last Breath of Kael Azrion
The heavens cried fire the night Kael Azrion perished.
Over the burned city of Elaros, embers flickered like lamenting stars, lost and wandering in the shattered firmament. Skyscrapers that had known sunlight were now charred skeletons, warped by fire and eternity. The cries had ceased. The war was lost long ago.
And under the broken arch of the Temple of Dawn, Kael Azrion sprawled in a pool of his own blood, looking at a sky that didn't care anymore.
The iron flavor coated his tongue. His right arm twisted at an awkward angle, bone crunching where meat couldn't. Each breath tasted like choking on glass. But none of these pains compared to the hollow hurt in his chest—the one that would not lessen.
He had trusted them.
His fellow soldiers. His council. His ruler.
All of them had turned away when he told the truth. When he spoke to warn them of the rot that festered below the city, the pact made in darkness. They did not listen but called him traitor. Madman. They took rank, honor… purpose from him.
And when the darkness came at last, they called for him to save them.
He had attempted it. Gods, he had attempted it.
But even legends are not limitless. And Kael was not a legend anymore.
He coughed, a wet hack that speckled the marble he lay on with pink spots of blood. Thunder boomed over the horizon, and with it the rumbling of collapsing stone—a section succumbing to decay.
Is this it? he thought. Is this the demise of a man once brave enough to dream?
He wished he could hate them. The liars. The cowards. The betrayers. But in the dwindling light, all Kael felt was regret. Regret over the kindness that he had extended. Over the mercy that he had offered. Over the hope that the world would be better than it was.
His eyes went blurry.
And then… it separated.
For a moment, the tempest above broke up—not of wind or power, but of something much older than the gods. Pale light dripped through the clouds, cold and soft and observing. Suspended above the sky hung a lone eye.
White, with a gold rim.
Unblinking.
Unforgiving.
Kael's frame shook. Not in fear—but recognition.
He'd seen this eye before.
In his dreams. In half-seen reflections. In moments when time appeared to break. It was not the gaze of a god, nor curse, nor salvation. It was a mirror.
And it saw everything.
Pain surged through him—not physical, but something deeper. Like his soul was being rewritten. Images crashed through his mind: battles yet to be fought, cities yet to fall, a world reborn in ruin. And at the center of it all stood him—Kael Azrion, not as a man, but as something else.
Something more.
The Miracle Eye opened within him.
And then—nothing.
Silence. Then stillness. Then… rebirth
---
He awakened not amidst Elaros' ashes, but amidst another world's quiet bones.
His injuries were gone.
His flesh—younger, stronger, colder.
And before the mirror of a broken lake, his own image glared back at him with a golden-white eye that burned softly under the night.
Kael Azrion had died.
Now something else resided in his stead.