[14th March 2026]
[Planet: Earth]
What is war?
To most people it was two sides that had run out of patience with each other. Simple as that.
The war that started all these madness began in the Middle East in 2026. A region that had been sitting on a powder keg for the better part of a century, passed around between foreign interests who wanted its ground but not its people. Old tensions that had been managed and suppressed and plastered over with diplomacy for decades finally ran out of plaster. Missiles were fired. Borders were crossed. And the world, which had gotten very good at watching that part of the earth bleed from a comfortable distance, suddenly found the distance shrinking.
When the most powerful country on earth mobilized, the shrinking stopped entirely.
Every nation that had been carefully neutral found reasons to stop being neutral. Alliances that existed on paper became alliances that existed in the field. What had been one region's catastrophe spread the way those things always spread, faster than the maps could keep up with.
By 2027 it had a name.
World War Three.
People said it quietly at first, like saying it too loud would make it more real than it already was. Cities emptied out as families packed what they could carry and moved toward anywhere that was not on a list of targets. A whole generation of children grew up learning the sound of sirens before they learned anything else.
Then one day the ground cracked open and let in nightmares that would hunt humanity for generations.
The war stopped. But not because anyone won. It stopped because something worse had arrived and it did not care which side you were on.
It stopped because what Beasts emerged from a rift that formed across earth.
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[3rd September 2150 - Post First Surge, Year 122]
[Planet: Earth - Bronze Continent, Northern Residential Sector 4, Zone 7]
A century had passed since the war and the beasts. What they left behind was a different world.
The old borders were gone. They were not erased. After the war and the emergence of the beasts, arbitrary things became irrelevant. What replaced them were three continents, Gold, Steel and Bronze, each one defined not by geography but by what it had managed to hold onto through everything.
The Gold Continent held the wealth, the crystal trade, the old money that had survived two catastrophes and come out richer for it somehow. The Steel Continent held the tamers, the highest concentration of bonded pairs the world had ever produced, the kind of military strength that made other continents speak carefully. And then there was Bronze. Not the poorest, not the weakest, but sitting in the uncomfortable space between the other two, aware of exactly where it stood and building anyway.
Human civilization had not collapsed. That was the thing people always got wrong when they told the story. It had compressed and pulled inward. The scattered sprawl of the old world gave way to something some would say was better.
People lived where they could be protected and protection had a very specific shape now.
In every major settlement across every zone, walls had gone up. Thirty feet of composite material developed specifically after the first surge proved that stone and steel bought you seconds at best. Watchtowers stood at every interval along the perimeter, manned and flanked by bonded beasts crouching on platform edges with their eyes dragging slowly across the treeline below. Broad shouldered quadrupeds with hides that caught the light like hammered iron, heads low and patient. Longer leaner creatures coiled around the tower bases with their heads raised, reading the air for things the human eye would miss entirely.
The sky above the walls was never empty. Winged beasts cut wide circles through the low clouds, their wingspans throwing shadows across the outer roads below. They looked unhurried. But they were never unhurried.
Further in, past the tamer guilds and the crystal markets that had replaced what used to be stock exchanges, the city softened. Streets narrowed. Buildings dropped in height. Gardens crept between houses and children moved through them.
The northern residential pocket sat at the city's quietest edge, far enough from the outer wall that the sounds of the patrol beasts faded into something close to silence. Houses stood with lights on in their windows and smoke rising thin and straight from chimneys into the cold night air. The smell of something cooking drifted out into the street and disappeared slowly into the dark.
The Pendragon household sat on the corner of a quiet street, curtains drawn against the night, warm light pressing through the fabric.
Inside, four chairs around a single table. Four plates.
Eleanor Pendragon sat to the left, a woman somewhere in her early forties who did not look it. Tall even seated, with blonde hair that fell past her shoulders in loose waves, the kind of blonde that had started somewhere golden and deepened over the years into something closer to wheat. Her face was sharp at the jaw and soft everywhere else, fine lines at the corners of her eyes that only appeared when she smiled, which she was doing now, passing a dish across the table with the easy authority of a woman who had run this household for twenty years and intended to run it for twenty more.
Across from her sat her husband, Edmund Pendragon. Broader than he used to be, darker at the temples, with the kind of face that looked like it had made a lot of decisions and was quietly making another one. His sleeves were still rolled to the elbow. The day had not quite finished with him yet.
Beside Edmund sat Lucas. Nineteen, broad shouldered, with their mother's jaw and their father's eyes and the particular ease of someone who had never once walked into a room and wondered whether he belonged there. He was laughing at something their father had said, the sound of it filling the space between the four walls the way it always did.
And across from Lucas, quiet, silver haired, with blue eyes that caught the candlelight and held it longer than they should have, sat Cent.
'Half the continent is missing someone they loved. The beast surges have taken whole families, parents, children, siblings, all swallowed whole and leaving nothing behind but grief and empty chairs at dinner tables. I still have all three. My mother and father and my elder brother, Lucas. We dine on the same seats every single night. I have never once taken that for granted. I have also never once made it through a meal without thinking about slitting Lucas's throat.'
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Author's Note: Thank you for reading. It genuinely means a lot.
The start will feel slow, I won't lie to you. But this story picks up faster than you think and where it goes is worth the patience. Stick with Cent.
If you're enjoying it so far, please drop a power stone, leave a comment and add the book to your library. Every bit of support helps more than you know and lets me know you want more.
See you in the next chapter.