Ashes of the Divine

Thousands of years ago, when the sky still burned with the passage of gods, humanity knelt beneath their shadow.

It was a time when a prayer could save a life… or condemn it.

Temples rose on every hill, statues gleamed with blood and gold, and the names of deities were spoken with the same trembling voice with which one speaks of fear.

They said the gods loved mankind.

But the love of gods was not tenderness: it was dominion.

Their compassion was measured in sacrifices, their justice in fire, and their glory in the cries of those who dared look to the heavens with too much hope.

Among them was one —a god now nameless, erased from all scripture— who crossed the line between devotion and cruelty.

From his desire were born tragedies, and from his sin, a girl who should never have existed.

A human girl, with hollow eyes and a wounded heart, who would later defy the heavens themselves.

Villages rose and fell, ages bled through wars, and prayers became chains.

For though the gods swore to protect, they only protected that which made them seem eternal.

And so, among ruins and prayers, hatred began to take root in the soul of a mortal.

A young woman who had lost her father to divine wrath and her mother to a god’s whim.

A girl who would learn that miracles are only another form of slavery.

Her name… was not feared yet.

But the day she raised her sword and faced the sky without fear, the entire world trembled at her destiny.

For the era of the gods was about to end.

And the era of Lyl was only beginning.