Chapter 1: Ashes of a Dying Sky
The sky bled quietly.
Overhead, a thousand cracks spiderwebbed across the dome of the world like broken glass suspended in twilight. Stars blinked out one by one, not from distance, but from collapse—like someone had declared the end of this realm and begun deleting it from memory. The heavens weren't falling. They were forgetting.
Skyler Novaah stood at the edge of the crumbling cliff, the dry wind tossing his hood back. He didn't blink. He didn't need to. His eyes hadn't blinked once since yesterday—not since the dreams began.
Behind him, the family's old bunker creaked under weightless tension. It had been home for seventeen years. A secret. A prison. A lie. Inside, his mother rehearsed silence like a ritual. His father, an unreadable man of too few words, kept counting rations with the intensity of someone preparing for war. And his younger sister, Saya... she was drawing eyes again—dozens of them—on the concrete floor with white chalk that glowed slightly when no one watched.
Skyler knew the signs.
He remembered none of his early life, but something in him always knew. Like instinct wrapped in a whisper. Like gravity that pulled memory down through his spine. Today, that instinct burned.
A shard of the sky fell.
Literally.
It whistled through the clouds, a piece of cosmos spiraling like a comet, but it didn't land. It disintegrated before it touched the ground—like it had no memory of its own existence. Like it had never been.
He whispered:
> "This world is ending."
No one had told him that. It wasn't on the emergency broadcasts. It wasn't carved on some prophetic stone or shouted by wild-eyed mystics. It just came to him, not as a guess, but as a remembered fact—like he had lived this ending before.
Just then, a presence stirred behind him.
Skyler turned slowly. A figure cloaked in layered robes darker than the shadows stood beside the bunker door. The figure had not been there a second ago. There was no sound of approach. No aura. Just… presence. Solid. Ancient. Familiar.
The wind ceased.
Even the sky froze in place.
"Skyler Novaah," the man said, voice like cracked parchment soaked in time, "you don't know who you are, but your blood remembers."
Skyler's hand went to the pendant on his neck—the one his mother told him never to remove. It had begun to warm. Slightly. Rhythmically. Like a pulse.
"Who are you?" Skyler asked, though his heart already gave him an answer.
The stranger stepped forward. Eyes glowing faint red, not with malice—but memory.
"I am Orias," he said. "Your great-grandfather. Last of the Witness Flame before you."
Skyler didn't move.
Not because he was frozen, but because his soul had gone completely still.
In the distance, the world split open. Not by war. Not by time.
But by truth.
And Skyler Novaah—the boy who thought he was ordinary—watched as the sky forgot how to exist.