The world was called Astraeon, and it was impossibly vast.
A hundred times the size of Earth, it spun beneath distant stars with uncharted oceans and continents lost to history. Its skies cracked with lightning from storms that spanned months. Its mountains pierced clouds laced with fire. And far beyond the human maps, other beings ruled—ancient dragons, whispering depth dwellers, and civilizations that had never spoken to man.
Humans claimed a single continent: Veyrath. Even there, they were not kings of the world, only its loudest tenants. Great beasts roamed the wilds, untouched by steel or spell. Magic flickered faintly through bloodlines, but in Astraeon, to be human was to be fragile.
Veyrath was divided: four empires, ancient and bloated; three kingdoms, proud and bitter. The smallest of them—Kingdom of Halvaran—rested in the west. And in its narrow valleys and silver-grain plains stood a fading noble house: House Goad.
Calen Goad, its third son, trained before dawn with sword in hand, sweat clinging to his brow. He had no memory of the world he came from, but its clarity remained. He saw patterns others missed. He asked questions others feared.
"Why do we cling to titles in a world that forgets men so easily?"
He bore no ambition for a throne. His heart beat not for conquest, but for creation. Trade, knowledge, innovation—those were his weapons. But even as he studied ledgers and drilled forms, he could feel the world beyond Veyrath pulling at him.
He was a small figure in a forgotten corner of a small kingdom on a single continent in a monstrous world.
And yet, something in him whispered:
"This world is sleeping. And I was born to wake it."