Prologue

A prologue depicting a supernatural event: an unnatural silence falls across the world as the Creators watch, and a female figure plummets from the moon Slátra, crash-landing on the world below. She is captured, imprisoned, and tortured beneath a mountain, while a male she once loved roams the plains with destructive power, setting in motion a reckoning that fate has orchestrated.

The chapter opens with an eerie calm descending upon the world—even the volcanoes of Gondragh fall silent and the Creators seem to withdraw their attention elsewhere. A scream tears through this stillness, born from a female's anguish and loneliness, and words spill from her without thought, seeking only to ease her pain. The Creators themselves cry out in response, their voices heavy with foreboding. Moments later, the silver moon Slátra pitches from the sky, burning as it falls with tremendous velocity. When it strikes the world, the impact shakes everything; witnesses describe the ground sighing in acceptance. From the wreckage of the moon emerges a female fae with glitter-and-ink eyes, bleeding from a head wound. She tears toward Arithia with violent intent but is quickly captured, subdued, and imprisoned in a cell beneath a mountain alongside a male consumed by bloodlust, where she is tortured and hardened. The Creators observe all of this, recognizing it as the beginning of an end they themselves set in motion long ago. They know that a male she once loved walks the plains with a heart full of ache and words that could destroy the world, and that fate is herding them all toward a suffocating corner. The Creators accept their culpability and do not resist, knowing they would lose. The one thing they had not anticipated when they destroyed someone called Caelis and caged him into screaming submission is a force more powerful than their will: love.