The world had once belonged to dragons.
For centuries their shadows drowned mountains, their roars shattered kingdoms, their flames carved valleys of glass and bone. Humanity had been nothing but prey, clinging to the ruins of its own cities while the skies burned. Until the last age of calamity ended, and Zaryon, Lord of the Black Flame, fell beneath the blade of the Knight of the Moon.
A thousand years passed.
Upon the carcass of that forgotten age, empires rose. From the ashes of temples, cities grew. Churches spread the word of the Moon's promise: the dragons will return.
Where one kingdom crowned itself with faith, erecting towers of silver in worship of the Moon, another swore by steel, raising armies that drilled endlessly upon their borders. Merchant republics funded academies with coin and blood alike, forging contracts that spanned generations. Even the cynics, who mocked prophecy in secret halls, maintained their own orders of knights.
And so, across the continent, academies became the heart of preparation.
They were not regular schools. They were forges. Each child taken into their gates was stripped of name, of freedom, of innocence, and given back only duty. Duty to train, to bleed, to die. The world called them promising youths.
And the Thalassia Academy.
One such academy stood in the kingdom of Astrya, a realm of iron-clad fortresses and pale moons painted upon banners. It was said their walls had never fallen, that their faith in the lunar prophecy was as unyielding as their stone.
The road to that academy was long. Through fields where villages whispered prayers to the Moon, through forests marked with shrines of silver and ash, the carriages passed. Within them sat the nameless, the unwanted — children bound by fate, chained by prophecy, rolling toward a destiny they could not refuse.
And in one such carriage, as wheels groaned over broken stone, a boy stirred. His breath was shallow, as if waking from a distant dream. Eyes opened, not to wonder, but to memory — memories of battles that no child should know, of flames that no age should have survived.