The first mistake humanity made was believing myths were dead.
The second was believing they could be controlled.
Long before cities learned to build walls high enough to scrape the sky, before kings learned to wear crowns instead of fear, the world belonged to beasts whose names were spoken only in prayers and curses. They were not animals. They were not gods. They were stories that had learned how to breathe.
The Age of Beasts did not begin with fire or thunder.
It began with silence.
On the morning the myths returned, birds stopped flying. The wind itself seemed hesitant, as if unsure whether it was allowed to pass through the world anymore. People stepped outside their homes and felt it instantly—the pressure, the wrongness, the sense that the ground beneath their feet no longer recognized them as its masters.
In the western province of Halvyr, a shepherd named Eron was the first to die.
He never saw the beast that killed him. None of them did. Witnesses later described the moment as a forgetting. One instant Eron existed, calling his flock down the hill, and the next there was only blood in the grass and a shape too large to be named moving through the fog.
By nightfall, Halvyr was gone.
Not burned. Not destroyed.
Erased.
The survivors—few and shaken—spoke of horns that scraped the clouds, of eyes that reflected forgotten centuries, of a voice that sounded like a thousand stories screaming to be remembered. But no one agreed on the details. Myths never allow themselves to be recorded honestly.
That was the problem.
A century later, humanity learned how to survive.
Not by killing the beasts—because they could not be killed—but by taming the myths that defined them.
Kairn stood at the edge of the stone arena, fingers clenched tight around the binding chains. He was nineteen years old, though the dark circles beneath his eyes made him look older. The mark of a Myth Tamer—burned into the skin of his left forearm—still ached when he breathed too deeply.
The arena roared with anticipation.
Above him, carved into the mountain itself, sat the Watchers—officials, scholars, generals, and priests who had rewritten the world by rewriting its legends. To them, this was not a ritual.
It was maintenance.
"Bring in the subject," a voice echoed.
The gates groaned open.
Something massive shifted in the darkness beyond.
Kairn swallowed.
He had studied the texts. Memorized the classifications. Recited the doctrines until his voice went hoarse. He knew the rules: a myth can be bound only if you understand the story it believes about itself.
But knowledge did not stop fear.
The beast emerged slowly, chains dragging across the stone like broken thunder. It resembled a lion only in the loosest sense—its body elongated, muscles layered with unnatural symmetry, its mane made not of hair but of shifting symbols that burned faintly as they moved.
Its eyes locked onto Kairn.
And something ancient looked back.
"State the myth," commanded the Watchers.
Kairn forced his voice steady. "Designation: Lyrake. Class: Apex Remnant. Origin myth—The Devourer of Crowns. It believes itself to be the end of rulers."
The beast snarled, and the sound vibrated through Kairn's bones.
Good, he thought. It understands me.
He raised the chains.
The first rule of myth taming was never dominance.
It was agreement.
"You were worshipped," Kairn said loudly, carefully. "Feared. You broke kings and drank their names from history."
The Lyrake's head lowered slightly.
"But this is no longer your age," Kairn continued. "The story has changed."
The chains glowed.
Symbols flared to life, wrapping around the beast's limbs as Kairn spoke the Binding Verse—words not meant to command, but to edit. Each sentence altered the creature's understanding of itself, trimming power here, redirecting instinct there.
The beast roared.
The arena shook.
Then—
It laughed.
The sound was wrong. Too knowing. Too deep.
"You lie," the Lyrake said, its voice sliding directly into Kairn's mind. "You do not change stories. You bury them."
Kairn froze.
No myth had ever spoken back during binding.
The Watchers leaned forward.
"You call this taming," the beast continued, chains cracking under unseen force. "But you do not understand what you have caged."
Pain exploded in Kairn's arm as the mark burned white-hot.
Around him, the symbols flickered.
For the first time in a hundred years, a myth resisted being rewritten.
And in that moment, Kairn realized the truth no one had dared to record:
The Age of Beasts had never ended.
It had only been suppressed.
And some stories remember what they were before humans tried to tame them.