The wind over Eryndor carried no warmth that morning. It screamed. Through the jagged peaks, across the torn plains, over seas that had not known peace in a thousand years, it screamed — not with sound, but with a pressure that gnawed at the soul. Every living thing felt it, though none could name it.
Somewhere above the horizon, in the farthest reaches of the sky, the first light of dawn should have risen. It did not.
Instead, the heavens wore a deep and alien black — darker than any night the world had endured, thick enough to swallow the stars themselves. It was not cloud. It was not shadow. It was absence, raw and absolute. For a single breath, the sun's promise faltered… and the land of the Eternal Horizon forgot it was morning.
Those who stood at the edges of their empires — the golden towers of Solvaris, the frostbitten citadels of Lunareth, the storm-wrapped canopies of Zephyrn, the season-swept battlements of Novae — paused in unison. Archmages stilled their spells mid-weave. Beasts in the deepest wilds pressed their heads into the dirt. The world, for a heartbeat, belonged to silence.
And then… it passed. The sun rose, the black bled away, and Eryndor exhaled as if nothing had happened.
But the oldest among them knew better.
In the heart of the Oblivion Crest Academy, behind the walls no empire dared to touch, the Headmaster sat alone in his study. His tea had long gone cold. The ripples in the porcelain cup had not been made by his hand. He stared through the high glass toward the far south, where the black had first bloomed, his gaze fixed and unblinking.
"It begins," he murmured — and for the first time in centuries, there was weight in his voice.
Far from the academy's reach, in the ragged backstreets of a nameless border town, a boy lay in the dirt. His breaths came ragged. His hands were empty. His eyes, black as the void that had swallowed the dawn, stared at nothing.
No law bound him. No name marked him. No one in the world had reason to remember him.
And yet… when the black sky had appeared, something in his chest had stirred — not with fear, but with recognition.
He had not yet taken a single step on the Arcane Path. He knew nothing of empires, of ranks, of the heights where mortals shed their mortality. But deep in the marrow of his bones, he understood this:
The black had called to him. And someday… he would answer.