Prologue
# PROLOGUE
## The Beginning of the World
In the beginning, there was God.
This was before heaven and earth had been divided, when nothing in creation yet had a name.
God first opened the heavens.
There, in the highest reaches, He fashioned angels to carry His will.
Then He spread the earth beneath the endless void and shaped mankind from the soil.
But the first humans did not know how to live.
They could not remember the faces of yesterday.
They could not dream of tomorrow.
Everything in the world existed without a name. Humans understood birth, but not the meaning of death.
They could not count the passing days, nor did they understand why a promise made to another should be kept.
And so they lived beside one another without truly knowing one another.
They walked upon the earth without knowing what it meant to live upon it.
Then God chose seven lands and sent a dragon to each.
They were not kings sent to rule mankind.
They were not messengers sent to proclaim the will of God.
They had been born for another purpose—
to teach an unfinished humanity what it meant to live.
The First Dragon gave mankind **Memory**.
And humans learned to keep the days that had passed within their hearts.
The Second Dragon gave them **Dreams**.
They learned to imagine what had not yet come, and to yearn for things that did not yet exist.
The Third Dragon taught them **Names**.
For the first time, humans could call to one another.
They named the mountains and rivers, the stars and the wind.
The Fourth Dragon taught them **Death**.
And because humans learned that every life must one day end, they finally understood the worth of the time they had been given.
The Fifth Dragon opened **Time**.
Yesterday, today, and tomorrow became part of a single path.
Humans learned to understand where they had come from—
and where they were going.
The Sixth Dragon gave them **Promise**.
One person's words could remain within the heart of another.
And so humans learned trust.
They learned how to live together.
Then came the seventh and final Dragon.
It taught mankind **Prayer**.
How to reach toward what mortal hands could never touch.
How to hope for what could not be attained.
How to mourn what had been lost.
And how to wait for salvation that had not yet come.
Only then did humanity truly become human.
They remembered one another.
They shared their dreams.
They called each other by name.
Because they knew death, they learned to cherish life.
As time passed, they made promises to one another.
And when sorrow became too heavy, or hope too great for human hands alone to bear,
they placed those things into prayer
and sent them toward the heavens.
Thousands of years passed.
Humans cut down forests and raised cities in their place.
They built bridges across rivers, crowned kings, and founded nations.
Roads stretched between the Seven Lands.
And at last, the vast realm they shared came to be known by a single name.
**Eardia.**
But no matter how many centuries passed,
the heavens never answered.
Children prayed to be spared.
Soldiers begged not to die.
Mothers cried out for their dead children to be returned to them.
Kings prayed that their kingdoms would not fall.
Sinners pleaded for forgiveness.
The dying begged for just one more day.
But God did not answer.
No one heard His voice.
And in time, mankind stopped looking to heaven for judgment.
Instead, they turned to one another.
At the heart of Eardia, where the Seven Lands met, a great city was built.
Its name was
**Arceum.**
And at its center rose an order that would govern human lives in the place of the silent God.
**Valdrak.**
Valdrak made laws.
It judged the guilty.
It sanctioned the crowns of kings.
It decided when wars were just
and upon what terms peace would be made.
Before long, people feared the judgment of Valdrak more than the silence of heaven.
They trusted law more than prayer.
They waited for verdicts instead of revelation.
Centuries passed.
Then Valdrak made a declaration.
The Seven Dragons were no longer the guardians of mankind.
They were ancient calamities—
beings that had set themselves above the world God had created.
And so the judgment of the dragons began.
Mankind gave that judgment an ancient name.
**Drakhar.**
Divine judgment upon a dragon.
In the **First Drakhar**, the Dragon of Memory fell.
From that day forward, humans could remember the dead—
but could no longer recall their faces clearly.
In the **Second Drakhar**, the Dragon of Dreams fell.
Humans still slept.
But little by little, they lost the ability to dream of worlds that did not yet exist.
In the **Third Drakhar**, the Dragon of Names fell.
Names remained,
but the true meaning carried within them began to fade from the world.
In the **Fourth Drakhar**, the Dragon of Death fell.
And from that day onward, some of the dead could no longer reach death's final end.
They began to return.
In the **Fifth Drakhar**, the Dragon of Time fell.
Time fractured across Eardia.
In some places, a single day became a hundred years.
In others, traces of things that had not yet happened appeared before the events themselves.
Then came the **Sixth Drakhar**.
The Dragon of Promise fell.
And from that day forward, an oath could no longer bind the world.
Kings broke their word.
Knights abandoned their sworn loyalties.
People vowed to love one another forever—
and betrayed each other the very next day.
Six dragons were gone.
And slowly,
Eardia began to fall apart.
But mankind did not understand why.
Valdrak gave them an answer.
The world was not dying because six dragons had been slain.
It was dying because one still lived.
Only one dragon remained.
The Seventh Dragon.
The being that had taught mankind how to pray.
**Ruad.**
But humanity had long since stopped waiting for God to answer.
Prayer had become an old habit.
Faith, an illusion.
Hope, little more than a worn word carved into the walls of temples.
And so Valdrak issued its final decree.
To every king in Eardia.
Every knight.
Every priest.
Every mage.
**Find the last Dragon.**
**Kill Ruad.**
That day,
every bell in Arceum rang seven times.
And across all of Eardia, the final Drakhar was proclaimed.
**The Seventh Drakhar.**
Mankind set out to kill the last Dragon.
The last being that had taught them how to pray.
And none of them knew the truth.
For a thousand years, that Dragon had listened to the prayers of mankind.
And in all those thousand years,
**Ruad had never once offered a prayer of his own.**
