Prologue: The Great Forgetting
They say the world was born from a scream and a seed.In the beginning, there were no cities, no sirens, and no walls. There were only the Heralds beings of gold and law and the Uncreated, a shadow named Abyssus who wore the silence of a billion dead stars as a cloak. Billions of years ago, the sky didn’t just flash white; it broke. The “Seed” and the “Abyss” fought a war that unmade half of everything, only for the Seed to plant hope into the resulting void, restitching the lattice of existence thread by luminous thread.But hope is a heavy thing to carry through eternity.As the eons crawled forward, the memory of the Heralds began to fail. The gold of Seraphiel’s wings didn’t vanish; it simply thinned, bleeding into the marrow of a new, smaller race. The starlight of Luminara and the molten fury of Korayn were no longer divine mandates; they became biology accidents of birth, “superpowers” possessed by a lucky few who called themselves Supes. They wore silver capes and hovered over streets, pretending to be the gods they had forgotten they once were.Yet, Abyssus remembered.The Void did not leave when the war ended; it simply waited for the world to start lying to itself. It watched as the “Seed’s” creation grew crowded, noisy, and arrogant. The Uncreated didn’t need to return as a cosmic god this time. It returned as a parasite.The Terido were not born; they were realized. They were the scabs of a healing universe that refused to close, the errors of a reality that the Void was slowly trying to delete again. They were a reminder that every song eventually ends.Billions of years after the last Herald fell, the sun is no longer a source of life. It is divided. Half of its light belongs to the Supes who hoard it in their armored glass towers, and the other half belongs to the shadow that is creeping back through the cracks in the eastern wall.The Earth no longer watches over us. It is too busy trying to remember its own name.And then, the sirens sounded.
