In a remote corner of the universe, where the vastness of space seemed to possess no boundaries, and where distant stars were swallowed by an endless ocean of eternal darkness, an enormous planet floated through the cosmic void.
Still...
Silent...
As though it were a forgotten existence cast into the depths of the cosmos since an age whose beginning no mind could possibly comprehend.
It did not move.
It made no sound.
There was nothing to indicate that anything within it was still alive.
It simply continued to drift through that eternal void, year after year, age after age, for countless and immeasurable years, until it resembled an ancient primordial beast sealed within this place since time immemorial, buried beneath the weight of silence and left alone to face eternity.
There was nothing in the scene to disturb that stillness.
No visible movement.
No trace of activity.
It was as though time itself had lost its meaning before an existence that had remained in the same place throughout ages beyond count.
Its size was immense, far beyond the limits of perception.
A planet whose vastness could scarcely be encompassed by the eye, whose true scale could not be grasped by the mind merely through sight.
And yet...
The sheer size of this world was not the strangest thing about it.
There was something else.
Something hidden, yet apparent enough to shroud its entire existence in an inexplicable unease that could not simply be ignored.
For despite its incomprehensible size, this planet did not bear the appearance of a flourishing world.
Rather, it seemed...
Like a world on the verge of death.
Its energy was frighteningly weak.
Scarce...
Faint...
As though the force that had once nourished this world and sustained its vitality had been drained away throughout the endless ages, leaving behind nothing more than frail strands of energy struggling silently within its vast expanse.
That contradiction alone was enough to provoke questions.
How could a world of such colossal proportions appear so utterly feeble?
And how had it managed to remain intact, drifting through the void, after countless ages had passed?
Yet there was no one to answer.
Nor was there anyone to hear the question in the first place.
Amidst that majestic cosmic silence, the planet remained quiet.
Ibiron.
Deep within this colossal world stretched vast waters whose boundaries could scarcely be perceived.
A boundless ocean, so immense that its limits were difficult to comprehend, as though an endless expanse of water had embraced the world from its very edges.
The waters stretched beneath a heavy silence, surrounding the immense land that occupied the heart of this world, while the horizon itself offered no clear indication of where that vast expanse of water ended.
And at the heart of that great ocean...
Lay an enormous continent.
A continent whose lands stretched across immense distances, its sheer scale challenging every familiar conception of what a continent could be.
It was a colossal expanse of land, spread across the heart of a world of such magnitude, yet its grandeur was accompanied by no scenery worthy of its immense size.
Instead, the sight that greeted the eye was not that of a world teeming with life.
It was a scene that inspired both melancholy and dread.
The land was barren.
Vast...
Silent...
Dryness had consumed it to such an extent that it seemed as though life itself had retreated from these lands long ago.
The vegetation that remained scattered here and there was pitifully scarce, withered and exhausted, standing upon the parched earth like the last remnants of life stubbornly refusing to fade away.
Withered leaves, frail branches, and isolated patches of vegetation amid immense stretches of barren land formed a scene in which plant life itself seemed like scattered remnants of an age long gone.
As for the deserts...
They spread across nearly every part of the continent.
Seas of sand stretched as far as the eye could see, merging into one another and swallowing vast expanses of land, giving the entire scene the appearance of a forsaken world that had long since lost the signs of life that should have inhabited it.
Those stretches of sand extended in silence, without any discernible end, until certain regions seemed almost indistinguishable from oceans of motionless sand.
Even the mountains had not escaped that desolation.
Barren mountain ranges rose across scattered regions, their harsh rocky peaks cutting into the heavens without forests to adorn them or life to cover them.
The rocks lay exposed beneath the sky, harsh and cold, while the slopes stretched onward without any clear trace of the verdure that should have granted the land even the faintest semblance of vitality.
Deep valleys stretched between those mountains, resembling colossal wounds carved into the body of the continent, their depths descending into darkness untouched by any light.
And within those depths...
There was an aura.
An aura of death and destruction.
It could not be seen clearly, yet it was present everywhere, pulsing within a heavy silence and filling those valleys with a terrifying sensation that something had happened there long ago—something that had left behind a mark the passage of ages had failed to erase.
Even the silence itself seemed heavy.
The air was motionless.
And the earth appeared to have lost its ability to retain any trace of life.
The farther the gaze traveled across those vast lands, the stronger became the feeling that the continent carried within its depths traces of an ancient era—remnants that even the passage of countless ages had been unable to completely erase.
And as the gaze extended toward the distant corners of the continent...
The scene grew increasingly mysterious.
In one of its remote corners, where the land seemed to end at a boundary beyond which no one knew what lay, there appeared a colossal abyss.
An abyss shrouded in terrifying darkness.
It stretched through the earth like a gigantic wound, its depths opening into a darkness so dense that the eye could scarcely perceive anything within.
Its bottom could not be seen.
Nor could its depth be known.
There was only pitch-black darkness extending inward, as though it swallowed light itself and concealed within its depths something the outside world was never meant to know.
The abyss stood in silence amid the barren land, terrifying in its stillness, like an eternal scar left upon the body of the continent by ages long past.
A continent immense...
Barren...
Terrifying...
And covered in mysterious traces of death and destruction.
As ages passed, as civilizations fell and others rose upon their ruins, the name of this continent continued to echo through the records of the civilizations that succeeded one another, until it became an ancient name carrying within it the weight of a history whose true length was unknown.
The Upper Continent.
That was the name by which it had been known since ancient times.
Around it, within that vast ocean, thousands of islands were scattered.
Islands of varying sizes, dispersed throughout the sea. Some were small, while others stretched across vast expanses, appearing from afar like stars scattered across an endless sheet of water.
They lay distributed in silence around the continent, distant from one another in some regions and closer together in others, like scattered remnants of an immense world submerged within a boundless ocean.
Yet even those islands had not escaped the death that had descended upon this world.
Most of them were dead.
Silent lands, devoid of living creatures, standing alone amid the ocean, carrying nothing above them but stillness.
No life.
No movement.
No clear trace that any creature still lived upon them.
From afar, those islands appeared like motionless points upon a vast sea, carrying nothing but silence, as though death had reached them long before life ever could.
And so, beneath the boundless heavens of the cosmos, Ibiron continued to drift in silence.
A world that surpassed imagination in size...
Yet its energy was feeble.
And its heart was burdened by death.
Within it stretched an immense continent known since ancient ages as the Upper Continent, surrounded by thousands of islands, while that ancient world concealed within its vast reaches secrets that remained buried in silence.
As though this colossal planet were not merely a living world...
But the remnants of a great existence...
Waiting for something.
Something that had yet to come.