Chapter 1: The day the wind died
"When the wind forgets your name, remind it who you are."
— Saying of the Whirls Lineage
The sky was a flat gray—too quiet for Awakening Day.
On the edge of Driftmoor Isle, a forgotten island battered by storms and hardship, fifteen-year-old Kael stood barefoot on the dusty central square, where dozens of other youths waited for their turn to face the Spirit Sigil.
Most of the people here were nulls—powerless. Poor. Overlooked. The island was littered with rusted wreckage from a world long destroyed, and its people clung to scraps of food, dreams, and myths.
Kael was one of them.
Except… he wasn't.
He was the last of a bloodline no one remembered.
"Kael Caelum!" called the overseer, his voice echoing.
Whispers stirred. Laughter from the teens around him wasn't even hidden.
"That's the sickly one, right? From the shack on the cliff?"
"Bet his system short-circuits just trying to breathe."
"He's from nobodies. Dead parents, dead blood."
Kael said nothing. He walked toward the obsidian Spirit Sigil at the center of the square — a smooth, pulsing stone said to connect to the world's System and determine one's awakened ability.
Every child touched it on their fifteenth birthday. The stone judged them, accepted them, and implanted the seed of power — a unique gift based on their soul, nature, and the world's reaction to them.
Kael's heart pounded.
He remembered his father's words, spoken so often they felt carved into his bones:
"You are of the Whirls, Kael. We were windwalkers once. Not warriors, not kings — but the sky bent for us."
He'd believed it as a child. But that was before everything was taken.
Kael touched the stone.
The warmth that others spoke of… never came.
The System did not open to him. The world remained still.
His hand trembled. Sweat dripped from his brow. He pressed harder, heart screaming for the storm, for the wind, for anything.
But there was nothing.
"No reaction," the overseer said with a sigh, not even surprised.
"Candidate Kael Caelum… registered as Null."
Gasps. Chuckles. One boy clapped mockingly. "Congratulations, you've joined the Driftmoor legacy. Useless!"
Kael backed away, face pale, mouth dry. He felt something shatter inside him — not just pride, but belief. That desperate hope he had carried for three years, since that awful night.
The night his world collapsed.
He was twelve when it happened.
The attackers came under the cover of stormclouds and steel.
They weren't bandits. They were organized, cloaked in symbols Kael hadn't seen before. They moved like wolves, fast and surgical. He remembered his father, Theron — tall, quiet, kind — standing in the doorway, wind howling around his body.
"Hide," he had told Kael. "Go beneath the altar."
Kael had obeyed. He had crouched beneath the carved slab in their ancestral shrine, hidden by loose stones and shadow.
He saw flashes of light through the cracks.
Screams.
His mother fought too, though she was a null. She had courage Kael never understood. But even she had been dragged away screaming, her voice swallowed by the storm.
He had stayed hidden.
He had lived.
And he had never forgiven himself for it.
Now, three years later, the world gave him nothing in return.
Kael staggered home alone, down the cracked cliffside path, past rusted windmills and salt-blasted stone. The house was quiet. Abandoned. No warmth. No light.
Only silence.
He sat beneath the ruined windchime, the one his mother had built out of polished shell and string.
It used to sing with every gust.
Now, it hung limp.
He didn't eat that night. Didn't speak. He just sat, the sound of mocking laughter from the ceremony still echoing in his head.
"Null…"
"Frailty…"
"Lost cause…"
But in the early hours before dawn, something shifted inside him.
A pull.
Something old.
A call.
The cliffs near his home overlooked the sea. And carved into the lower rock was the Temple of the Whirlwinds — an ancient, weather-worn shrine said to be older than the System itself. No one dared visit it anymore. They said it was cursed, that the Whirls were mad wind-demons who challenged the gods and paid the price.
But it was the last place he had left.
The storm hit as Kael stumbled down the slippery path toward the temple, winds now howling like they remembered his name. Rain tore into him, blinding. Waves smashed against the rocks.
Inside the shrine, Kael collapsed at the altar.
"I tried," he whispered, voice breaking. "I waited. I believed."
He clutched the old stone, hands bleeding from the jagged carvings.
"You left me with nothing. No family. No answers. Not even a class."
"Why?"
Thunder cracked like the sky split open.
"WHY!"
Then, a deep rumble answered.
The ocean roared. Wind surged. The sky exploded with light as a streak of lightning screamed down—
—and struck the temple.
Pain and electricity swallowed him.
But within it… clarity.
He saw eyes made of mist and storms. Scales of water and lightning. The Ancient Whirl — the forgotten patron of his people — spiraled above him in the clouds.
And then everything went dark.
Kael's body was gone.
Only ruins remained.
Driftmoor mourned a lost failure, unaware the boy was now drifting across the sea — carried by forces older than the System itself