The soil was warm that morning.
Not from the sun.But from blood.
Kael Ruvian's hands pressed into the earth he'd tended since he was five years old.Back then, he had dug these fields with tiny fingers, crying every night because the shovel was heavier than he was.But he did it anyway—because his baby sister needed a home.
The same home that now lay in splinters.The same soil that now tasted ash.
Smoke curled into the gray sky like a dying creature's final breath.Burning wood, crushed grain, trampled earth—Kael could smell every memory he'd ever planted here turning to dust.
Footsteps echoed behind him.Not the gentle skipping he wanted to hear.Not Lyra's voice.Not her laughter.
Just silence.
He rose slowly.
The invaders had left hours ago. His village had been nothing but a stop along their march—another map-marking to erase. But they had taken one thing with them.
The only thing that mattered.
Lyra.
Kael's jaw tightened until it hurt.He remembered her little hands tugging at his sleeve at dawn every morning.
"Brother, don't work so hard. I'll help too."
She was only fifteen.She laughed like the world couldn't hurt her.She trusted that the world would protect her.
And the world repaid that trust… by dragging her away in chains.
Kael bent down and picked up something from the dirt.A small wooden carving—an ugly little bird she had made when she was seven.
It was cracked now.Like everything else.
Kael closed his eyes.The soil beneath his feet felt different—as if it was shaking with something hidden, something ancient. Something alive.
The land had seen countless battles.Countless deaths.Countless promises broken.
And now…It remembered him.
A trembling whisper crawled through the dirt, up Kael's legs, into his bones.
"Find her."
He exhaled sharply, dropping to one knee.
The soil pressed back—warm, pulsing, aware.
It wasn't comforting him.No.
It was binding him.
The first Echo awakened.
A memory returned to him—
Lyra, at age two, wrapped in a cloth, cried through the night.
He had held her trembling body against his chest and whispered:
"I won't leave you.Not like they did.Never."
The land drank in that memory, and a surge of impossible warmth burst beneath his skin.
Kael felt a pulse—like a second heartbeat, one not entirely his own.
A new strength.A new resolve.A new curse.
An Echotrait—his first.
The world around him sharpened.Colors deepened.Sound stretched.
His fingers clenched the broken wooden bird.
"Lyra," he whispered, voice cracking."I'm coming."
He turned away from the ruins of his childhood and took his first step into the unknown.
The soil trembled again, as if approving.
Behind him, the wind scattered ashes across the field—the last harvest he would ever make as a farmer.
Ahead of him stretched a world that would one day fear his name.
But not yet.
For now, he was just a brother.
And that was enough to destroy kingdoms.