Chapter One – The Sky Cracked Above Lirath
"When the sky breaks, memory bleeds." — Fragment I, Grimoria
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There are mornings that forget how to begin.
The kind where the wind does not speak, and the earth holds its breath.
That morning, the sky above Lirath did not rise it split.
Kael saw it long before his eyes caught it.
He felt it in the marrow, in the way his blood paused just beneath the skin as though the world itself had stopped to listen to something it once knew. He was crouched by the edge of the ashfield, fingers buried in soil long dead. Beneath his nails, the dust was not merely earth, but the remains of words once spoken aloud.
The children of the orphan quarter were forbidden to go near the old fields. But Kael had learned long ago that the places forbidden were the only ones where truth still lingered. The rest of Lirath had moved on wrapped in illusions of peace, faith, and post-Ash harmony. But here, where silence had sunk deep into the bones of the land, something waited.
Something listened.
Then it came the soundless crack.
The air trembled. The sky opened not with thunder, not with rain, but with a wound. Veins of white-gold light stretched across the clouds like scarred glass, pulsing as if the heavens had become a map of old bloodlines.
Kael looked up.
Above him, the sky wept light.
Not sun. Not fire.
Something older than both.
---
They had told him the world had been cleansed.
Magic, they said, was an infection. Blood-born. Language-fed.
To speak a true name in the old tongue was to summon death.
And so, the Inquisition burned the books.
Burned the witches.
Burned the names.
All that remained was the Pact of Ash.
Silence as salvation.
Faith as law.
But silence does not erase.
It only buries.
And Kael Kael had always dreamed of something beneath.
---
"There are names that survive the fire. They rewrite themselves in the bones of the living."
— Fragment II, Grimoria
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The light from the sky bathed the field in a pale shimmer.
Kael reached out, unsure why.
Something beneath the soil pulsed.
It wasn't sight that revealed it, but knowing.
A knowing that bloomed from within the blood itself.
His fingers trembled as they brushed a curve of something not stone, not bone but leather. It was warm. Breathing. Covered in veins like rivers etched across an ancient map.
A book.
No, not a book.
Grimoria.
It rose slowly from the ash as if the earth itself feared to hold it.
The moment it surfaced, the wind returned sharp, laden with whispers. The trees beyond the dead line bent slightly, not from breeze, but recognition.
Kael stepped back. But the book hovered.
Pulsing.
Waiting.
He had not summoned it.
But it had chosen him.
He reached forward.
Time fractured.
---
In the space between breath, visions poured through his fingers:
A child born beneath blood moons.
A girl's mouth sewn shut before she could speak her own name.
A forest burning while shadows chanted in voices made of ink.
A mother screaming words that made the world tremble.
A boy, himself, standing at the edge of a field, forgotten by history.
And then, a page. Blank.
No ink.
Just blood.
And carved into it: KAEL.
---
His body convulsed.
He dropped to his knees, eyes wide, nose bleeding. Memory not his own clawed its way through the cracks of his soul.
The book pulsed again.
Kael gasped.
"Wh-what are you?" he whispered.
The answer came, not in words, but knowing.
I am the name that was taken. The breath that was burned. The voice that was buried.
He wanted to run.
He didn't.
He couldn't.
---
"Blood is a contract. But names are the ink."
— Fragment III, Grimoria
---
The sky cracked again.
From its center, a drop fell. Red but not blood. Not rain. Not fire.
Ink.
It struck the cover of Grimoria.
The book shuddered.
So did the world.
From the far end of the field, an old bell rang. One that had not rung since the Cleansing.
Someone had felt it.
Somewhere, an Inquisitor stirred.
But Kael… he remained.
His hand hovered over the book. His breath slowed.
"Why me?" he whispered, voice hoarse.
The ash swirled around him like breath.
The book responded with silence.
Then
Because you are the last line. The unwritten end. The page that remembers.
---
Kael closed his eyes.
And for the first time, he saw everything not as it was, but as it had been.
The world before fire.
The world with names.
The world where magic lived not in spells, but in bloodlines carried like stories.
And he felt it all…
…press into his spine like ink on a page.
---
He did not see the shadow watching him from the tree-line.
He did not hear the whisper of boots through dying grass.
But far beyond the ashfield, within the marble halls of the Sanctum, a woman named Varya raised her head.
She had felt it.
And she knew:
The last book had opened.
The war they thought buried had begun