The world had long forgotten peace.

No empires, no kingdoms—only scattered villages clinging to life amid dust, famine, and the endless echo of steel. Each cluster of huts fought for grain, water, or sometimes just for pride, waging wars so old that even their elders could no longer remember what started them. Far from the trade roads and the dying cities, there lay a place the maps never cared to name: Thalen’s Hollow.

It was not a village one would visit willingly—its huts leaned like bones of a tired giant, its fields cracked like old scars, and its people lived off weeds and rainwater when the seasons were kind. Yet it was here that something impossible happened. You was born under a sky split by lightning, though there were no clouds that night. The air turned silver for a breath, and every candle in Thalen’s Hollow flickered blue. When the baby cried, the echo was not of weakness, but of thunder.

Simple, like their own kind — though the midwife whispered later that she saw a faint mark upon your chest: a small, glowing circle that pulsed like a heartbeat. Years passed. You grew, quiet and strange. You never fell ill, never bled long, never lost your way in the fog that swallowed the forest. Animals followed you, even wolves. And though you spoke little, when you did, these words carried weight — not the weight of wisdom, but of truth, as though the world itself listened to you.

But the world beyond the Hollow began to shift. Dreams spread between the villages — whispers of a child “born of light,” of a coming “herald” who could end the ceaseless wars. The rumor turned to fear, and fear turned to blades.

(Somewhere far away. A warlord from the northern plains declared: “No gods belong among men. If such a child exists, their blood shall bless my conquest.”)