Elanor was born in a village that no longer exists on any map. It was a quiet place, hidden beyond skyfracture cliffs and buried in thickets of silverleaf trees. Her people weren't warriors, arcanists, or nobles—they were keepers of old stories. They passed down myths that didn't match the kingdoms' histories, tales of ancient beings, silent wars, and names too heavy for the world to speak aloud.
Her mother was a whisper-weaver—a kind of oral archivist. Her father was never mentioned.
And then the sky broke.
Not in thunder. Not in flame. In silence.
A Rift opened above the village. But what emerged wasn't a Riftbeast. It was worse. Something colder. Something older. A Protector Beast—a being that arrived not to kill, but to correct a mistake.
That mistake… was her home.
Elanor remembered the moment it began to unmake her village: the air twisting into knots, trees folding sideways like paper, and her mother's voice cut short mid-syllable. Not a scream. Just gone.
She tried to run—but the ground beneath her remembered she existed, and it tried to keep her. The last thing she saw before everything collapsed was a shadow with too many limbs, bowing—not to her, but to something behind her.
When she awoke, she was the only one left.
No ruins. No ash. Just nothing where her people once lived.
🕊️ After the Erasure
She was found days later by a noble envoy, catatonic and frost-touched. The nobles adopted her—not out of kindness, but obligation. Survivors were rare. And the way the Beast bowed before it vanished made them curious.
They dressed her in silk, gave her a surname that wasn't hers, and placed her in halls of golden walls and hollow smiles.
But Elanor never forgot.
She learned to speak again.
She learned to smile again.
But deep down, she carried something worse than grief—recognition.
Because when she first met Arthur…And his red eye flickered like a glitch in a story…She saw that same bow, in reverse.
He was the one the world didn't know how to contain.
And she'd seen what happened to places that tried.