Three miles away from the squalor of the slums, atop the jagged peak of the Oakhaven Citadel, Grand Magistrate Vane of the House of Embers stood on the obsidian viewing platform.
His long, crimson robes snapped violently in the wind, though no natural draft should have been able to penetrate his personal thermal barrier.
Vane was a Tier 5 Fire Master, a man whose very veins ran with liquid heat.
Yet, as he looked up at the pale, silver star piercing the night sky, his breath came out as a thick white plume of vapor.
The air around him was turning ice-cold, defying his nature.
“Magistrate!” a frantic voice shouted from the spiral stairwell.
A breathless young scribe stumbled onto the platform, holding a heavy copper plate inscribed with ancient, glowing runes.
The runes were flickering erratically, casting unstable, jagged shadows across the polished stone floor.
“The Ley-Line Core…
it’s bleeding energy,” the scribe cried, his hands trembling so hard he nearly dropped the artifact.
“The Earth pillars are cracking.
The Water reserves are boiling without heat.
The instruments say the elemental balance of Oakhaven has tipped by a fraction of a percent.” Vane did not look back.
His eyes remained fixed on that mocking silver point in the heavens.
A fraction of a percent sounded small to a layman, but to the High Houses, it was a terrifying impossibility.
For a thousand years, the six elements had existed in perfect, calculated proportions.
For the balance to tip meant a seventh force had just entered the equation.
“An anomaly,” Vane muttered, his voice like the dangerous crackle of drying wood before a forest fire.
“The prophecies of the Unbound Era…
they weren’t myths.” He reached out, his hand catching a stray speck of glowing light drifting down from the sky.
It wasn’t ash.
It wasn’t snow.
It was a flake of solid, crystalline silver energy.
The moment it touched his palm, Vane’s tier-five flame protections instantly shattered.
The silver light did not burn his skin; instead, it felt as if it were erasing the heat from his flesh, leaving a numb, dead void where his active mana once flowed.
Vane gasped, instantly severing the connection and snuffing out his own hand-flame.
The void disappeared, but the skin of his palm remained stark white, temporarily drained of all magical resonance.
“Sir?” the scribe asked, horrified by the expression on the master’s face.
“Sound the martial alarm,” Vane commanded, his eyes narrowing into slits of pure, burning fury.
“Deploy every enforcer, every shadow hound, and every tracker we have in the garrison.
Seal the city gates.
No one leaves.
No one enters.” “What…
what are we hunting for, Magistrate?” Vane looked down at his numb, pale palm, a cold dread settling deep in his chest.
“We are hunting for whatever just drew its first breath under that star.
Find the child.
If it cannot be contained, it must be incinerated before it wakes up.” Back in the dark alleyways of the Weaver’s Slums, the bronze bells continued to wail, their heavy tones sounding like a funeral knell for the world as they knew it.
Inside the shanty, John blew out the white-flamed candle, plunging the small room into total darkness.
He held his silent, silver-eyed son tight against his chest, listening to the first distant screams of citizens as the military purge of Oakhaven began.
The Seventh Spellborn had arrived, and the hunt had officially begun.