Eryndor did not feel like a world that had ever been stable. It felt like something that had been broken too many times and only partially put back together. In the west, mountains shifted over years as if the land still remembered how to move. In the north, distance behaved incorrectly, where sound sometimes arrived before sight and direction could not be trusted for long. In the east, deserts burned unevenly, as if heat itself followed inconsistent rules. Elsewhere, entire regions simply disappeared, not destroyed, not conquered, just… gone, as though the world had decided they were no longer necessary.
People called it Behemoth passage. No one truly understood it. When Behemoths moved, the world did not resist. It adjusted.
Above them were the Ancients, though even that name was uncertain. They appeared in records as contradictions. Some altered history without warning. Others left gaps that could not be explained. Where they acted, reality seemed to change its own explanation afterward.
Humanity existed beneath all of this in fragments. Kingdoms like Valmara and the Korellian Dominion rose and fell depending on how long their land remained stable. They were not rulers of the world. They were occupants of temporary permission.
Power was divided into three systems. Elements allowed rare individuals to channel forces like lightning, flame, frost, or darkness. Martial arts refined the body into structured combat systems, each with its own philosophy and limitations. Concepts allowed the rarest individuals to impose rules on reality itself, though most never reached that level without dying first.
None of it guaranteed survival.
Only adaptation did.
At the edge of the Halved Crown, in a border region that appeared inconsistently on official maps, a child was born during a conflict no one would later bother naming. He had no lineage that mattered, no recognition, no expectation of significance.
His name was Veyr Ashen.
At the time, he was nothing more than another life in a place where lives ended easily.