Prologue - The Song of Ash and Ember

Prologue - The Song of Ash and Ember

Part I- The Forgotten Unity

They say the first light was born from a lie.

That before names had meaning and crowns had weight, the realms were one - seamless, radiant, and whole.

The heavens and the underdeep mirrored each other, bound by a breath older than creation itself.

In those days, there was no war between flame and shadow.

The sun rose not to conquer the night but to fold it in its arms, and the moon, pale and patient, carried the memory of the dawn. Magic was not wielded, it was sung - a resonance in every heartbeat, in every stone, in every fluttering wing. The dragons of the First Age circled the horizons, vast and unending, their scales catching light from both stars and abyss. They were the keepers of equilibrium, the memory of the world made flesh.

The children of Light and Shadow walked among them, two halves of the same breath. The Light-born sculpted temples from sunlight, their spires translucent and humming with living runes. The Shadow-born carved sanctuaries beneath mountains where silence itself became prayer. Between them stood the Ember Gates - where the two tides met and wove the magic that nourished all realms. It was said that from those Gates came the First Song - the melody of creation, pure and unbroken. It was not a hymn to any god but to the harmony of opposites: warmth and cold, truth and concealment, flame and void. In that balance lay immortality.

But harmony is a fragile thing.

Even the most eternal melody can be undone by the hand that dares to perfect it. No one remembers who broke it first. Some say it was envy - the Light-born seeking dominion, claiming the heavens as their birthright. Others whisper it was love - a union forbidden between a daughter of dusk and a son of dawn. Whatever the truth, a fracture opened between them, a hairline crack in the heart of creation that widened with every prayer, every fear, every hunger for more.

And through that crack, something ancient stirred - the promise of dominion, the temptation of order over balance. From it, the Queens of the Paius Legacy rose, and the world began to forget the sound of its own name.

The dragons, vast as memory itself, felt the dissonance before any mortal ear could hear it. They sang to the heavens to hold fast, to remember the first rhythm. But the heavens had already begun to forget. The First Song faltered. One note, sharp and discordant, pierced through its eternal measure - the first act of claiming. A single will rising above the rest, naming what should have remained nameless. And in naming, dividing.

Some dragons wept; others roared in defiance, their grief shaking the skies. A few fell from flight, broken by the loss of the song that had sustained them. Their bodies turned to stone where they struck the earth, their hearts still glowing faintly beneath the soil. Those that survived sealed themselves within the farthest peaks, guarding the last echoes of the melody in sleep.

The world dimmed. The rivers no longer sang. Even the stars flickered - as if the breath that bound them had been stolen away.

And from that wound, a new power rose - not born of the Song but of its absence.

She came crowned in flame that cast no light, her eyes veiled, her smile a promise of perfection. The first of the Paius Queens. Behind her followed her sisters, each carrying a piece of the silence that had devoured the world. They called it truth. They called it order.

The dragons warned them, but the Queens were deaf to melody. They spoke in geometry, in laws and bindings, in the logic of dominion. Where the Song had flowed like water, they built walls of stone and will. And thus, the balance was broken not by hatred, but by the illusion of control.

The Light-born bowed to them, believing they would restore purity. The Shadow-born resisted and were hunted. And as the last dragon fell to ash over the plains of Vel'shara, the First Song finally ended.

Yet even silence has memory.

And in that memory, something faint still stirred - a single ember beneath the ruin.

It is said that before the last dragon closed its eyes, it sang once more - not to the heavens, but to the dust itself. The note was low and aching, carried by the wind across the dying realms. Those who heard it wept, for they understood its meaning:

That the Song could not be unmade, only forgotten.

That what was broken would one day rise again.

That light and shadow, though severed, would find their meeting place in mortal flesh.

And so, they prophesied: When the ember learns to breathe, the world will remember its music.

Then the dragon slept - and the age of silence began.

Part Two - The Rise of the Queens

When the dragons fell silent, the world mistook their absence for peace.

The ashes of their wings settled upon the lands like snowfall, and from that grey stillness the Queens built their dominion.

They called themselves the Paius Legacy, though none remembered what Paius once meant. Some said it was the name of the first Queen's mother; others believed it was a word for order in a language older than gods. Whatever its origin, the name became law.

The first Queen, Caelivra the Veiled Thorn, ruled with beauty that blinded and reason that cut. She taught her sisters that perfection could be manufactured, that harmony could be forced into obedience. They did not destroy the old magics; they dissected them, plucking power from their bones.

They bound the wind to carry their decrees, tamed the tides to mark their reign, and stitched light itself into their banners. Beneath those banners, the Light-born rose to prominence once more, their temples blazing with captured suns. The Shadow-born, accused of harboring the dragons' heresies, were driven into exile - hunted, shackled, or consumed by the very light they had once revered.

What the Queens could not burn, they buried.

What they could not name, they cursed.

Yet in their endless desire to perfect the world, they discovered what the dragons had long guarded: the Law of Cost. Every act of creation demanded surrender. Every binding, a bleeding. To fuel their order, the Queens offered pieces of themselves - memories, emotions, fragments of soul - until their hearts beat hollow and their voices echoed with borrowed divinity.

Still they hungered.

They forged relics to anchor their dominion: the Crown of Shattered Stars, the Mirror of Binding, and, at last, the Obsidian Tether - a monument of black stone veined with silver, carved from the bones of a dead dragon. It was said the Tether could imprison even light itself, drawing the magic out of anything it touched. To the Queens it was a triumph; to the world, a wound that would never close.

The sky dimmed beneath its shadow.

Rivers turned sluggish.

Dreams soured.

And then came Kaelith, son of Aberon, High Lord of Shadows.

He was born in the twilight between ages, carrying traces of both dawn and dusk in his blood. The Queens saw him as a threat - a relic of the old balance, a living contradiction. But Aberon, their ally then, promised loyalty if they spared his line. They agreed, yet they watched the boy.

Kaelith grew amid silken courts and silent halls, where light was a weapon and truth a currency. He learned the new hymns, the new laws, but the Song - the one the dragons had sung - still haunted his sleep. Sometimes, when he touched a candle flame, it flickered with a color unseen since the First Age: blue-white, the hue of memory.

He began to question.

And in questioning, he was marked a heretic.

Whispers followed him: that he consorted with shadows older than creation, that he sought to unmake the Tether, that he carried the dragons' last prophecy in his veins. Perhaps he did. For Kaelith believed the world was dying not from darkness, but from silence-the enforced perfection of the Queens' design.

When he spoke against them, the skies cracked. His words carried remnants of the First Song; even the stones seemed to tremble. Followers gathered in secret- Light-born disillusioned with tyranny, Shadow-born weary of hiding. Together they sought to rekindle the balance: not to reignite war, but to remind the world of what it had forgotten.

The Queens answered with fire.

They unleashed storms of glass and molten light that devoured cities. Rivers turned to mirrors, reflecting only ruin. In desperation Kaelith called upon the last relics of the dragons: a shard of scale, a drop of blood preserved in crystal, and the memory of their final breath. From these he forged the Sigil of Reverence, a weapon not of destruction but of remembrance. It sang when drawn, a faint echo of the First Song itself.

The battle that followed split the realms. Light and Shadow clashed until both bled grey. Mountains sank; oceans rose. Velanthar's skies burned red for a hundred days.

And when it ended, Kaelith stood alone before the Queens. His body broken, his magic spent, yet his defiance unyielding. They offered him mercy if he would kneel. He refused.

So they turned to his father.

Aberon, bound by oath and fear, pronounced the sentence himself. He invoked the Tether-its runes blazing like a black sun-and sealed his own son within. The stone drank Kaelith's magic, his voice, his form. What remained was neither man nor shadow but a consciousness scattered through the cracks of time, condemned to watch eternity rot.

They called him the Heretic Prince, the Bound One, the Memory that Would Not Die.

Yet the Queens, in their triumph, did not understand the nature of what they had bound. For the Obsidian Tether was not a prison alone-it was a mirror. And in its depths, Kaelith's curse reflected back upon the world.

Wherever the Tether's shadow reached, light dimmed, but so too did darkness lose its hold. Bound together, they began to blur-the first whisper of balance returning. And somewhere, deep within that eternal void, Kaelith's last thought lingered:

If the Song is gone, I will remember it.

Centuries folded upon centuries. Empires rose, fell, and turned to dust. The Queens' power waned, their bodies fading into legend. But the Tether remained, humming softly beneath the ruins of Vel'shara, pulsing like a buried heartbeat.

And the prophecy of the dragons endured-passed from dream to dream, from whisper to whisper-until at last it reached mortal ears once more.