No one remembers a time before the war.
Not because it was long ago, but because the world itself was broken that day.
The sky did not darken slowly. It tore open.
Thunder did not roll it screamed. The ground shook so hard that mountains cracked like dry stone, and rivers changed their paths in a single night. Fire fell where rain should have, and the wind carried voices that did not belong to any living thing.
People ran. They prayed. They begged.
The gods did not listen.
Two divine powers clashed above the land that was once whole. Their names would later be carved into temples and whispered in fear, but on that day, they were only destruction. Light burned against shadow. Fire swallowed moonlight. The air itself seemed to split, as if the world could no longer hold them both.
When it ended, the land was no longer one.
A great scar stretched across the earth, deep and endless. On one side, the soil burned warm beneath bare feet. On the other, the air grew cold and heavy with unseen presence. The sea pulled back, forests fell, and the sky settled into an uneasy silence.
The gods were gone.
What they left behind was worse.
From the ashes rose two lands.
The first was called Aethros, a place where fire still lived in the ground and strength was praised above all else. The people there learned quickly that survival meant power. Weakness was mocked. Mercy was dangerous.
The second was called Nyvoria, larger, quieter, watched over by spirits that lingered in the wind and the trees. The people did not seek conquest. They built walls, not empires. They learned to endure instead of dominate.
Between them lay a border soaked in blood long before the first army crossed it.
The gods did not return to rule directly. Instead, they left laws behind.
Invisible laws.
Unbreakable ones.
The most feared of them all was spoken only in whispers:
No bond must ever form between Aethros and Nyvoria. No love must cross the divide. If it does, the world itself will suffer.
Most people obeyed. Not out of faith, but fear.
And so, the war began not with a single battle, but with generations of hatred passed from parent to child. Children grew up knowing who the enemy was before they learned how to read. Stories were told at night, not to comfort, but to warn.
Across the lands, fires burned. Borders hardened. Soldiers marched.
Far away from the screaming skies and broken earth, a newborn cried for the first time in the land of Aethros.
He was born into flame-lit halls, beneath banners stained by old victories. Before he could walk, a blade was placed near his crib—not as a threat, but as a promise.
They named him Kael.
On the same night, beneath a quiet moon in Nyvoria, another child was born.
No banners. No ceremony.
Just tired parents, calloused hands, and a silent prayer that the child would survive a world that had never been kind.
They named her Lunara.
Neither child knew of the other. Neither knew of fate, curses, or gods.
But the world already did.
And it was waiting.