There are truths the Empire teaches its citizens, and truths it seals behind silence.
The Seven belong to the latter.
I learned that the night the Codex refused to sleep.
Its pages hovered half-open on my desk, golden script shifting without my touch, as though the book itself were remembering something I had tried to forget. I did not read it at first. I didn't need to.
When the Seven stir, the Codices follow.
We were not born as legends.
That is the first lie the Realm tells.
We were taken.
I was the youngest—seventeen, reckless, convinced the world could still be fixed with knowledge and stubborn will. One moment I was in the lower districts of the old capital, arguing over failing Resonance conduits. The next, the air collapsed inward, sound tearing itself apart, and the sky folded like broken glass.
There were others with me. Strangers. Future family.
We fell through worlds.
That is the only word that comes close. Falling—not downward, but away. Away from gravity, from time, from anything that resembled home. Colors bled into concepts. Space behaved like water. Somewhere in that endless descent, I remember screaming—and realizing the sound no longer belonged to me.
I remember reaching for someone's hand and feeling it stretch too far, like reality itself had softened.
We landed in a dead world.
A convergence scar—what Theal would later name a fracture plane—where weakened boundaries allowed realities to collide, overlap, and devour one another. It was a graveyard of failed worlds, drifting at the edge of the multiverse.
At the time, we called it hell.
That was where we met the Codices.
Artifacts older than empires, anchored to the fault lines between realities. They did not grant power. They bound it. Each Codex carried a fragment of Resonance given will—concepts so fundamental they reshaped those who wielded them.
Many were tested.
Only seven survived.
Kael rose first.
Even then, command clung to him like gravity. His Codex manifested as a war-hammer of living flame and condensed Resonance—authority made physical. Each strike imposed order on chaos, forcing alignment through overwhelming will. Kael did not learn leadership.
The multiverse recognized it in him.
He became our center.
Mira & Asha followed soon after.
She laughed when her Codex formed—a blade of shifting light, elegant and lethal, bending probability itself. Where Kael enforced structure, Mira danced through uncertainty. Her sword did not merely cut—it rewrote outcomes. She fought like a story refusing to end.
She treated me like a child even then. Still does.
Senior sister. Constant menace. Unshakably loyal.
Kael married her after we returned. Somehow, that surprised no one.
Asha was the shield.
Her Codex crystallized into a broad, radiant barrier—Resonance hardened into defense. But that was only its surface function. Asha was an empath. She felt pain before it struck, fear before it formed. Her shield responded to emotional force as much as physical threat, expanding to protect not just bodies, but people.
She was our wall—and our conscience.
Riven bound next.
His Codex rejected weight, mass, hesitation. It became a blade tuned to velocity, folding space in brief, lethal increments. Riven did not move fast—he arrived. Blink-strikes. Phase cuts. Assassination perfected to an art.
Where Kael held the line, Riven erased what slipped through.
He spoke little. He killed precisely.
Jun nearly didn't survive.
Her Codex resisted weaponization, reshaping itself again and again until it stabilized as a staff—Resonance channeled into restoration, equilibrium, and life preservation. Jun was the heart of us. The healer. The one who stayed standing after battles to make sure everyone else could.
She hated fighting.
She fought anyway.
Then there was Theal.
His Codex did not form a weapon.
It became a clock.
A complex mantle of interlocking sigils and rotating constructs, mapping causality, temporal drift, and Resonance flow across realities. Theal saw systems where others saw chaos. He could not stop time—but he understood how it bent, where it fractured, and how worlds unraveled.
He became our guide.
And then there was me.
The last.
The Codex waited.
When it finally bound itself to me, it did not manifest as steel or flame. It became a spellbook—pages of living constructs, glyphs forming and dissolving as thought became structure.
My Codex was not a weapon.
It was a framework.
Grand-casting. Reality scripting. Resonance shaped into shields, bindings, avatars, entire battlefields of controlled force. Where others wielded fragments of power, my Codex interfaced with the system beneath them.
That was why Kael respected me.
My strength nearly rivaled his.
My potential frightened everyone.
Together, we learned the truth of the multiverse.
It is layered—not infinite chaos, but structured overlap. Worlds exist in Resonance equilibrium, separated by boundaries most will never feel. Some exchange myths. Some brush lightly through dreams.
Others collide.
When Resonance destabilizes—through war, misuse, or desperation—boundaries thin. Gates form. Worlds bleed into one another. One survives.
One doesn't.
The dead world that claimed us had already consumed three.
Ours was next.
We fought there for what felt like years, though time had little meaning near a convergence scar. We sealed fractures. Burned invading realities out of existence. Sacrificed entire planes to preserve equilibrium.
By the time we found a way home, we were no longer human in any way that mattered.
Returning was worse than leaving.
Our world had fractured without us. Resonance storms. Failed gates. Fear. To them, we arrived as miracles and monsters alike.
So Kael unified what remained.
The Empire was not born of conquest—it was born of containment. Centralized Resonance control. Gate suppression. A single authority strong enough to prevent another Collapse.
Peace followed.
At a cost.
I met Lysandra after the war.
She was not one of us. Never needed to be.
She saw the man beneath the Codex that offered not just power but memories of the accumulated echoes of worlds that had died screaming who was tired and weary and chose him anyway. I married her because she reminded me what we had been fighting for.
I closed the Codex and leaned back, the weight of memory pressing against my ribs.
The Resonance was shifting again.
That meant one thing.
Somewhere, a boundary was thinning.
Somewhere, a world was knocking.
The Seven had returned once.
If the gates opened again, we would not survive a second fall unchanged.
The Codex pulsed softly, pages turning of their own accord.
The worlds remembered.
And soon—
So would we.