Prologue — The Silent Throne Of A Forgotten One
There was a time when existence answered to a single presence.
He stood where scale lost meaning. Not because he was infinite, but because reality itself adjusted around him. When he took form, it was deliberate—never fixed. Sometimes a towering silhouette threaded with slow-moving constellations. Sometimes something closer to a body, shaped so lesser beings could perceive him without breaking. His eyes were not eyes. They were pauses. Points where causality waited.
When he leaned toward a world, mountains rose beneath him. When he turned away, oceans receded. Time softened near him, stretching and folding without permission. Nothing resisted him.
Civilizations formed beneath his gaze. Some he nudged; some he ignored. When they destroyed themselves, it was expected. When they endured longer than predicted, it registered only as a variation. Creation did not please him. Destruction did not offend him. Only duration remained.
At some point, he stopped remembering why he made things.
He stood once at the edge of a dying star. Space curved around him, light thinning as the sun collapsed inward. He could have restored it. He could have erased it. He did neither. The silence lingered.
Nothing surprised him anymore. Choice had lost consequence. Outcomes arrived already resolved. Eternity felt hollow. Infinity had hollowed him out.
So he withdrew.
Across the world, ancient structures responded. Temples older than recorded history split open. Ley-lines twisted, rerouting through impossible geometries. Symbols carved themselves into air, stone, and memory. No sound accompanied it. No explanation followed.
The world did not understand. Only the pressure of something immense made itself felt.
He divided his presence, fragmenting awareness into parts that would one day be carried by others. Authority fractured, memory suppressed.
For eons, the balance endured. Gods and demons rose to maintain it. Good and evil, creation and destruction—forces in opposition yet intertwined, each tethered to the world.
Time passed. Eons passed. The balance slowly began to fracture. Corruption crept where vigilance faltered. Evil multiplied where light receded. Scholars whispered of the old texts and broken scripts that spoke of the seal—cryptic, misunderstood, dismissed.
Among them, a Pope in a temple finally gave voice to a prophecy.
"When the world moves toward its end,
when the balance between good and evil begins to fail,
twenty-six beings will rise from the corners of the world to restore it.
Only then shall the lost power awaken."
The words spread like wind through dust-strewn halls. Few understood them. Fewer believed. Most ignored them entirely.
And that night, the world remembered something it was never meant to recall.
Across oceans, forests, and deserts, ordinary lives fractured without warning. Some people woke to find the rules they had lived under no longer applied to them. Others felt nothing at all.
History would later call it anomaly, coincidence, mutation—anything except what it truly was.
No one knew why some were chosen.
No one knew why most were not.