Volume I — The Awakening
Chapter 1 — The Day the World Changed
18th Maelis, Year 9,000 of the Elyndrian Calendar
Eryndor Vaelith woke before sunrise, as he often did, lying quietly beneath a thin blanket while the faint darkness of early morning filled the small room around him, and for several moments he simply stared at the wooden ceiling above his bed, listening to the silence of the house.
There was nothing unusual about the morning, nothing that suggested the world was about to change forever, yet Eryndor couldn’t shake the strange feeling that something was waiting for him, something he could neither see nor understand.
Today was his eighteenth birthday.
For most people in Elyndra, eighteen was an important age, because it was the age when a human could experience the Awakening, although nobody truly understood what the Awakening meant.
Ancient records spoke of Talents, supernatural Races, powerful warriors, strange abilities, and beings who had supposedly surpassed the limits of humanity, but those stories had become little more than legends over the centuries.
There were scholars who believed the ancient records were exaggerated, others who believed they described a forgotten civilization, and some who simply considered them myths.
Eryndor had never cared much about them.
He had spent most of his life in the small city of Vaelcrest, living a quiet life with Aldren, the old man who had raised him since infancy.
He had no known parents, no relatives, no famous bloodline, and no great family name behind him.
As far as Eryndor knew, he had simply appeared one day eighteen years ago, abandoned outside the city with an old piece of cloth bearing the name Eryndor Vaelith and a strange mirror pendant hanging around his neck.
That pendant was still with him.
Eryndor reached beneath his shirt and pulled it out, letting the small mirror rest against his palm.
Its surface was unusually dark, and although it could reflect his face under certain light, the reflection always seemed slightly distorted, as though the mirror were showing him something that existed somewhere beyond the ordinary world.
He had asked Aldren about it many times.
Aldren never had an answer.
“You’ve been staring at that thing since you were old enough to hold it,” Aldren had once told him, “and you still haven’t found anything interesting.”
Eryndor had replied that perhaps the pendant was waiting for the right person to discover its secret.
Aldren had laughed and told him to stop imagining himself as the hero of an ancient legend.
Now, eighteen years later, Eryndor still wondered what the pendant truly was.
He slipped it beneath his shirt and got out of bed, then opened the door and walked into the small living room, where Aldren was already sitting beside the wooden table with breakfast prepared.
“You’re awake early,” Aldren said.
“I could say the same about you.”
“I’ve been awake for hours.”
“You always say that.”
“And I’m always right.”
Eryndor smiled as he sat down, and Aldren pushed a bowl toward him.
“Happy birthday.”
Eryndor looked at the meal, then looked back at the old man.
“You remembered?”
Aldren frowned dramatically.
“Of course I remembered.”
“You forgot last year.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“I was busy.”
“Doing what?”
Aldren paused for a moment, then calmly answered, “Trying to remember your birthday.”
Eryndor laughed, and for a little while, everything felt normal.
That was what made what happened next so terrifying.
At exactly seven in the morning, the world changed.
There was no warning, no thunder, no divine announcement, and no visible sign that something was approaching, yet every living being on Aetherion felt the same indescribable sensation at the exact same moment, as though the world itself had suddenly taken its first breath after sleeping for an eternity.
Eryndor froze.
The bowl slipped slightly from his hand.
A strange pressure passed through his body, beginning somewhere deep within his soul and spreading outward until every part of his existence seemed to tremble.
Then the ground shook.
Outside, people screamed.
Aldren immediately stood.
“What was that?”
Eryndor didn’t answer, because he was staring toward the window.
The horizon was moving.
At first, it looked like an illusion, but then the mountains began shifting farther away, the distant lands stretched beyond their previous boundaries, and the seas expanded as though enormous invisible forces were pulling the entire world outward.
Aetherion was expanding.
The world that had once been roughly ten times the size of Earth was becoming something vastly larger, stretching toward nearly one hundred times Earth’s scale, and the change happened so quickly that ancient maps became meaningless almost instantly.
Mountains rose where none had existed before, forests spread across enormous regions, rivers changed their courses, and distant landscapes that had never been visible from Vaelcrest appeared beyond the horizon.
Then the sky changed.
Eryndor stepped outside.
Thousands of people had already gathered in the streets, all of them looking upward.
The Sun was no longer golden.
It had become black.
Not dark because of an eclipse, not covered by clouds, but truly black, as though the light itself had been removed from its surface, and within that impossible darkness were seven enormous points of power, seven Cores belonging to the celestial body itself.
Then something even more disturbing happened.
A face appeared across the black Sun.
It was not a human face, yet it carried an expression that felt unmistakably frightening, as though the Sun itself had become something that could watch the world below.
Eryndor felt a chill run through him.
Before anyone could understand what they were seeing, the Moon changed.
Its pale surface became deep red, its light turning crimson across the sky, and seven Cores could be sensed within it as well, while a terrifying expression appeared across its surface, making the Moon seem almost like another living presence staring down upon the world.
The Sun and Moon were both extraordinarily powerful cosmic beings, yet neither had reached the level of a Domain Lord.
Then the stars began changing.
One after another, they became different colours, some blue, some violet, some crimson, some silver, some green, some gold, while others displayed colours that humanity had never possessed names for.
The heavens no longer looked like the heavens Eryndor had known.
Then ten enormous golden manifestations appeared across the world.
They did not descend like ordinary walls, and they did not feel like structures built by human hands, instead they appeared as ancient barriers surrounding ten enormous regions, their existence carrying an incomprehensible sense of age.
The first surrounded Vaelcrest.
The others appeared across distant lands, encompassing Astravelle, Drakemere, Lunareth, Caelthorn, Veyrion, Solmara, Ravenholt, Highmere, and Eldermere.
Nobody knew what the Ten Domains were.
Nobody understood why they had appeared.
Nobody knew that each was connected to the remnants of beings who had existed long before the current age.
For Eryndor, however, the sight of them triggered something deep inside him.
He didn’t remember seeing them before.
Yet somehow, he felt as though he had.
Then another sensation spread through humanity.
Across Aetherion, humans awakened.
Eryndor felt something change inside his soul, and a voice appeared within his mind.
[Awakening detected.]
His body became strangely warm.
[Talent awakening.]
Something opened within his existence.
[Race awakening.]
Eryndor instinctively understood that something was still missing.
There was no Core.
Not yet.
The Awakening gave him his Talent and Race, but his Core would not manifest before the Tower Trial, because the Trial would determine what potential truly existed within him.
Then the world spoke again.
[The Tower has opened.]
Eryndor looked around.
There was no tower in the sky, no enormous structure rising from the ground, yet every awakened human could somehow sense its existence, a place beyond ordinary space that was waiting for them.
Another message appeared.
[Enter the Tower.]
Eryndor didn’t know why, but a single word suddenly surfaced within his mind.
“Ascend.”
The moment he thought it, reality disappeared.
He found himself standing somewhere impossible.
There was no ground beneath his feet, yet he wasn’t falling, and there was no sky above him, yet he could somehow see countless awakened humans surrounding him in every direction.
Thousands.
Perhaps millions.
Everyone had been brought into the same Human Trial Space.
Some people were shouting in confusion, others were testing their newly awakened Talents, and some were staring at their hands as though they had become completely different people.
Eryndor barely noticed them.
A sharp pain suddenly struck his head.
He grabbed his forehead.
Then the memories came.
A battlefield beneath a broken sky.
Cities burning.
Ancient beings fighting across dimensions.
Artifacts of unimaginable power.
People he didn’t recognize.
People he somehow remembered.
A black ocean spreading across existence.
A darkness that didn’t simply destroy its victims, but consumed their individuality, merging everything it touched into something singular.
Then he saw himself.
Older.
Far older.
Standing among ruins.
He didn’t know when it had happened, but he remembered fighting.
He remembered losing.
He remembered death.
Then—
He remembered the beginning.
No.
Not the beginning.
Something before it.
The memory shattered before he could understand it.
Eryndor gasped and fell to one knee.
The mirror pendant beneath his clothes suddenly became freezing cold, and the deeper memories disappeared behind an invisible barrier.
He could still remember the future, but only fragments remained.
Wars.
Artifacts.
Organizations.
Powerful individuals.
Deaths.
Victories.
Betrayals.
The rise of beings that should never have existed.
And eventually, the end of the world.
But the memories were incomplete, and the farther into the future he tried to look, the less reliable they became.
Something else was different.
The future he remembered was no longer guaranteed.
The moment Eryndor awakened, the timeline had already begun to change.
A message appeared before him.
[Existence recognized.]
Eryndor stared at it.
He didn’t understand what the Tower had recognized.
Neither, in truth, did the Tower itself.
The strange message was not an explanation, only a reaction to something within Eryndor that its ancient systems could identify but not fully comprehend.
Eryndor slowly stood.
Around him, the other awakened humans were beginning their own trials, each person carrying a different Talent, a different Race, a different potential, and a different future.
They didn’t know what waited beyond the Trial.
They didn’t know what the Awakening would eventually become.
They didn’t know that the world had already entered an age that history would one day consider the dividing line between everything that came before and everything that came after.
Eryndor looked toward the endless Trial Space, his hand tightening around the mirror pendant beneath his clothes.
He remembered the end of the world.
He remembered the darkness.
He remembered losing everything.
But this time, something was different.
This time, he remembered.
The Tower’s final message appeared.
[Human Trial commencing.]
Outside, the black Sun watched over the transformed world, the red Moon stared down from the heavens, the newly coloured stars burned across the endless sky, and the Ten Golden Barriers stood over the ancient regions they protected.
The old world had ended at seven in the morning, and although nobody yet understood what that moment truly meant, humanity had taken its first step into a new age, an age that history would eventually name the Awakening.