Prologue
The first time I witnessed the end of a life, it was small, silent, and contained within a glass bowl. I was five years old when I saw my golden fish turn into a dull, lifeless grey in my dreams. When I woke up to find it floating on the surface of the water, I didn’t cry. Instead, I felt a chilling realization: my eyes were no longer my own. They had become a cursed window, peering into a future that refused to be altered.
In a world strictly divided by elements, where the Sovereigns of Wind, Water, Earth, and Fire ruled their respective domains under the watchful eyes of their deities, my existence was a defiance of nature. I was born from the whistle of the wind and the flow of the water—a hybrid, a rarity, a mistake. My mother’s emerald eyes and my father’s golden hair were the colors of a peace that was never meant to last.
They called my father the “The Light Bringer” because he moved with the speed of a sunbeam, appearing wherever there was darkness. Yet, even he could not outrun the shadow that haunted my nightmares. Every night, the same vision plagued me: the scent of ozone, the sound of a blade, and a man hidden behind a mask. I tried to scream, to warn them, to change the course of the stars. But fate is a cruel master; it allows you to see the storm, but never gives you the power to stop the rain.
The night my brother was born, the world I knew was devoured by flames and blood. As I stood there, clutching my infant brother to my chest, I watched the masked figure extinguish the two brightest lights in my life. In that moment, the girl who loved the breeze died alongside them.
By the time I was nineteen, I had lost almost everyone. My friends, my mentor, my uncle—each one a name carved into the hollow of my heart. The only thing left of my old life was the boy I carried through the flames, but even looking at him felt like staring at a shattered mirror of our parents.
Now, I walk among the regions as a shadow—a ghost known only as ‘The Scarlet Girl.’ I hide my true face behind a fox mask, concealing the silver eye that sees too much and the red eye that yearns for vengeance. To the world, I am a phantom; but to my brother, I am the only wall between him and the abyss. He is the reason I still breathe, and the reason I hide my red hands behind a mask of indifference. My hands, once clean and reaching for the sky, are now stained with the weight of those I couldn’t save.
I am Ascella. I am the daughter of the storm and the heir to a genocide. And I will not stop until the one who turned my world into a graveyard bleeds the same color as my hands.
