Exactly 400 years ago :
Before the salt-crusted wastes of the south claimed his name, he was known across the high citadels as Alain the Unbroken, the sole inheritor of the Man Solpeur—the radiant art of soul-weaving. Unlike common sorcerers who drew power from ley lines, Alain harnessed the dormant vitality within his own blood and marrow, manifesting it as iridescent, living silver light. It cloaked his heavy steel, turned his greatsword into a sun-bright arc, and allowed him to mend his flesh mid-strike. A solitary bulwark against horrors that broke lesser armies, Alain had never met a force that could dull his luminance.
Then the iron gaze of the Grand Conclave turned toward the Km Lands.
Shrouded in perpetual twilight, the Km was a bruised, jagged expanse of shifting obsidian sand and hollowed stone. It was inhabited by the Kms, an enigmatic, taciturn race whom outsiders whispered were neither fully mortal nor entirely tied to the waking world. The Kms fought not with roar and rage, but with silence; they commanded the heavy, gray stillness between breath and void.
Alain marched into their sunken gorges alone, seeking to break the anomalous tide creeping across the borders. For three days, his Man Solpeur roared against the twilight. Everywhere he swung, his silver soul-fire cleaved through shadows, incinerating the strange, jointed spears and pale, blank masks of the first war-parties. He fought like an indomitable tempest, his soul-power flaring higher with every clash.
Yet the Kms did not panic. They merely watched.
At the obsidian crater of the Maw, the true Elders of the Km stepped forward, weaving no magic Alain could comprehend. They did not contest his light; they suffocated the very air that fueled it. The silence of the Km Lands bore down like leaden water. With each strike of his glowing blade, the Kms did not dodge or deflect; they caught the radiant edges with bare, ash-stained palms, drinking the living silver from his aura.
For every wound Alain healed with the Man Solpeur, the gray soil claimed a year of his vitality. The vibrant white light shifted to sickly ember, then to soot. He was not broken by a single catastrophic blow, but systematically bled dry of spirit, stripped layer by layer of his legendary mantle. When his knees finally cracked against the black stone, his soul-flame was gone, smothered into cold cinder beneath the empty, unblinking gaze of the Km. He had entered a new journey seeing the lights and left as a forgotten ghost of the ash-waste.