One Hundred Years Ago,
The sky over the Mardukin lands wasn't blue anymore; it was a bruised, sickly purple, choked by the thick soot of a dying world.
"I am going to protect you."
The voice was a low hum—part melody, part sharpened steel. Elzia stood among the ruins, a figure of terrifying grace. Her massive black wings, iridescent like a raven's feathers dipped in oil, pulsed with a heavy, rhythmic beat. In the center of her forehead, a sharp, geometric chakra glowed with the color of faded lace, casting a ghostly azure light over her pale features.
She was a Metzlian. To the World Government, she was a weapon to be decommissioned. To the Mardukin people, she was a God.
"El... Elzia..." the child whimpered, clutching at her robes.
Elzia pulled the girl tight against her chest, her wings curling around them like a fortress of silk and iron. Above, the clouds didn't part for birds or rain, but for the Aegis-Class Eradicators—monolithic, floating rail-cannons and autonomous hunter-drones that hummed with a sterile, white noise.
They hadn't come for the people. They had come for the Stone of Immortality, the relic the Metzlians guarded with their very lives.
A Metzlian's mind is never truly lonely. Every holder carries the echoes and tragedies of every ancestor who came before. It is a bloodline that cannot be abandoned; it is a Will that demands a host.
A shrill, whistling sound pierced the air as the Eradicators locked on. Then, the world simply exploded.
The World Government wasn't there to conquer; they were there to delete. High above the atmosphere, orbital kinetic strikes—"God-Rods" made of tungsten and mana-conductive alloys—were released. They hit the Mardukin capital with the force of falling stars, vaporizing stone and bone instantly.
It wasn't a battle. It was an erasure.
From the tree line, Elzia watched as the homes of her people—the libraries of ancient lore, the sacred temples—were wiped away by beams of concentrated ion-light. Following the strikes came the Purge Units: soldiers in pressurized, white nano-armor equipped with "Silence Fields" that neutralized magical energy. They moved through the outskirts with mechanical precision, using thermal scanners to hunt down every surviving Mardukin, ensuring no record of their existence remained.
By sunset, the nation of Mardukin was no longer a place.
It was a blackened scar on the map.
"Data scrub complete," a cold, synthesized voice crackled through the Purge Units' comms. "Let the world forget the name Mardukin. Let the Metzlians be remembered only as a ghost story from a primitive age."
The Forest of Whispers
Elzia plummeted through the canopy, her flight jagged and broken. She hit the earth with a bone-deep thud, twisting her body at the last second so her mangled, blood-soaked wings would cushion the child's fall.
The azure glow on her forehead was flickering, turning a dull, ashen gray—the color of a dead star.
For a Metzlian, the chakra is more vital than the heart; once the light leaves the stone, the soul leaves the world.
"I am going to seal you away," Elzia whispered, her voice trembling like a snapped string. "For the sake of the bloodline. For the sake of the grudge."
She set the wide-eyed girl down against the gnarled roots of an ancient tree and cupped the girl's cheeks, her palms erupting in a fierce, blinding light.
"It's okay..." Elzia managed a smile, even as a single black tear—thick as ink—trailed down her cheek. "You are more powerful than any who came before you. Rise well, my little moon."
The ritual began. The air grew heavy, charged with static and the sharp scent of ozone.
"I seal your memories. I seal your name. For now, you will be a ghost among humans, knowing nothing of the wings you once bore. But look to the stars, little one. When the Sun and Moon collide in a silent embrace, and the shadow of the Earth turns the sky into a bruised violet—when the 'Black Sun' weeps for the first time in a century—the seal shall shatter. You will remember the fire. You will remember the blood. And you will hold a grudge against humanity that will never die."
She placed a black sword—heavy and silent—beside the fading girl. "When the light dies and the world is plunged into that false night, this blade will reveal its true power."
As the child began to dissolve into shimmering black particles, she vanished into the roots of the earth, hidden from the cold sensors of the World Government.
The End of the Metzlian
Alone in the clearing, the shadow of a hunter-drone swept over Elzia, its crimson sensor cutting through the gloom like a predator's eye. Her wings, once her greatest pride, hung from her back like useless slabs of lead. She turned toward the treeline just as the shadows began to warp and twist into something unrecognizable.
Before her, the world was ending. As she watched her home succumb to the inferno, a suffocating guilt clawed at her throat. Every scream echoing through the trees was a reminder of her failure. She was supposed to be their shield, yet she stood paralyzed as their history turned to ash.
The crushing weight of despair collided with a jagged, white-hot streak of rage. The burden of being the lone witness to the extinction of her race felt heavier than death itself. As the region vanished into a sea of fire, a cataclysmic aura erupted from her, shattering the earth beneath her feet. She was hoisted into the air by sheer, unbridled power, her chakra igniting with a frantic, blinding intensity.
Elzia didn't reach for old legends; she reached into the raw, bleeding center of her own shattering spirit. She forged a vow—a jagged, visceral curse woven into her very aura. She bound her essence to a promise of vengeance for every Mardukin life snuffed out. Her voice vibrated with a terrifying frequency that seemed to turn the blood of her enemies to ice.
But as the final note of her curse hung in the air, the darkness behind her coalesced. Without warning, a void given shape—an entity colder than the vacuum of space—lunged from the warping shadows and slammed into her back.
"I never knew a Metzlian could become so weak after her." The figure hissed into her ear, the sound like dry leaves skittering over a fresh grave.
There was no grand struggle. The entity's presence simply devoured her light. With the sickening sound of tearing silk, his shadow pierced through her, and a final, defiant scream split the heavens before being abruptly snuffed out. Elzia's essence was swallowed whole by his suffocating darkness as she fell.
A hollow laugh echoed through the charred remains of the forest. He had won. He had dismantled a civilization with the cold precision of a machine.
But he had missed the seed planted deep within the scorched earth.
The World Government had purged the archives, but they could not delete the blood. Deep beneath the ash and the ruins, a girl waits. When she finally awakens, she won't just remember her name.
She will remember the fire.