The scent of aged parchment and arcane incense filled Kaelen's study, a familiar comfort that had grounded him for over a decade. Moonlight streamed through the leaded glass window, illuminating the intricate astrological chart he was updating for the Royal Academy. He dipped his quill, the scratch of the nib a soft counterpoint to the crackle of the hearth. This was his life: respected Archmage, trusted advisor to the crown, and a man deeply content with his lot.
He was about to add a notation for a minor celestial convergence when the world tore itself apart.
It was not a sound, but the absence of one. The fire's crackle, the distant city noises, the very hum of the world—all were sucked into a vacuum of absolute silence. Then, a pressure, immense and alien, filled the room. The air shimmered with fractured light, and a psychic scream of unimaginable magnitude ripped through his consciousness.
*"...THE SEAL IS BROKEN. THE WEAVERS CONSUME. OUR LIGHT EXTINGUISHED. TAKE IT. TAKE ALL WE WERE. AVENGE—NO—SURVIVE..."*
Images, knowledge, raw data—the final, desperate legacy of a people called the Aethelgard—flooded into him. He saw towering cities of crystal and light being unraveled into shimmering dust by entities of pure, hungry void. He felt the collective terror of billions, the last defiant stand of their greatest mages, and the final, catastrophic failure of their fractured magic.
Seven pillars of knowledge burned themselves into his soul. The razor-edged geometry of War Magic. The profound depths of Soul Arts. The intricate formulas of Alchemy. The creative genius of Artifice. The mind-bending principles of Dimension Magic. The vital essence of Life Creation. The terrifying scope of Cosmic Theory. He saw how each school was a masterpiece, yet how their practitioners' pride had kept them separate, preventing the unity that might have saved them. The knowledge was a crushing, glorious, unbearable weight. He felt his mind fracturing, his sanity peeling away like old paint. With a gasp that tore from his throat, his head slammed onto the parchment, darkness claiming him.
He was floating in a star-filled nebula, but the stars were dying. Before him, he saw his own world, Veridia, hanging in the void. Then the Weavers came—sightless, formless things that were holes in reality itself. They touched the planet, and it began to unravel. He saw the Royal Spire of his own capital city dissolve into motes of light. He saw the forests where he'd played as a child turn to gray ash.
His perspective shifted, pulling him down to his own manor. He saw Lyra, his wife, her face a mask of defiance, a protective shield shimmering around her. It held for a moment before a tendril of nothingness brushed against it. The shield, and then Lyra herself, dissolved into shimmering particles that were consumed by the void.
But she was not alone. A woman with hair like liquid silver and eyes holding entire galaxies stood back-to-back with a fierce warrior in emerald armor. An alchemist hurled vials of incandescent liquid while a sorceress wove spells of immense power. A quiet woman with soul-deep eyes tried to mend the fraying edges of reality itself. There were others, their faces blurred but their presence a solid, comforting weight in his soul. His wives. A harem of power and love he could scarcely comprehend.
They fought with a unity of magic that was breathtaking—War Magic reinforcing Soul Arts, Dimension Magic bending space to empower Alchemical explosions. It was the unity the Aethelgard had never achieved. And it was failing. He saw a child, a girl with his eyes and Lyra's smile, cowering behind them. A Weaver's tendril shot past the defenders. He tried to scream, to move, but was a ghost in this future. The tendril touched the girl, and she was gone. The silent, psychic scream of his future selves—of the powerful Archmage he would become, of all his wives—was a wave of pure, universe-shattering agony that washed over him.
"Kaelen! Kaelen, speak to me!"
The voice was a tether, pulling him from the abyss. He choked, sucking in air as if he'd been drowning. He was on the floor of his study. Lyra was cradling his head, her face pale, tears streaking her cheeks. The concerned faces of two household guards were framed in the doorway.
"The pressure knocked us off our feet," one guard stammered. "What was that, Archmage?"
Kaelen could only stare at Lyra, the image of her dissolution burned onto the back of his eyelids. He could still feel the phantom agony of his future children being unmade. He reached a trembling hand and touched her face, needing to feel that she was solid, that she was real. "I saw the end of everything," he croaked, his voice raw.
He looked past her, at the astrological chart on his desk. It was ruined, the ink smeared from where his head had fallen. But through the smear, he could see he had subconsciously drawn a new constellation—a pattern of seven stars, intertwined in a way that was both impossible and perfectly, devastatingly clear. It was the unified sigil of the Aethelgard.
The peaceful Archmage was gone. In his place was a man who had inherited the graveyard of a civilization and witnessed the tombstone of his own. He looked into Lyra's frightened eyes, his own hardening with a terrifying resolve. He would find the women from his vision. He would master the sevenfold path. He would build the family he had seen destroyed. He would make the Void Weavers pay for a future they had not yet committed. The Last Empyrean had been born.