At the center of every galaxy is a planet (or a string of planets) that houses life. The lifeforms on such planets often view themselves as the lonesome singular set of intelligent beings in existence—a belief derived from their limited perception of the universe surrounding them. They accept their fate as the sole beneficiaries of the entire universe. For a time, however, one particular group of planets and its inhabitants were correct in this common, egoistic assumption—they were alone in the universe.
For a time.
The universe was new, and the people who lived within that planet grouping were the first to discover what wonders life had to offer. They also faced hardships ranging from overpopulation to pollution to unrivaled crime and war.
Time passed as it does for every planet (bereft of life or not) and the people grew and learned. They discovered that, though they were the first, they were no longer the only form of life connected to Uni-Vare.
They watched from a safe distance as foreign civilizations grew and fell around them from lightyears away. They didn't wish to bring what ills plagued them to new societies, especially those with as much or more promise than their own culture provided. The more they researched, the more they realized that what they had tried had already failed.
This forced separateness was futile because no matter how many lightyears separated them from the other planets, the thread of connection existed not through a thought experiment, but through the energy of Uni-Vare. This almost magical energy ensured an unbroken and entangled connection from one planet to the next, no matter how many inhabitants turned a blind eye. The truth was a light that could puncture the darkest matter.
Lifeforms in different galaxies mimicked the creation of tools so precisely some wondered if there was a being who instructed all life on how to live, behave and understand.
This epiphany led to both the discovery of the System, and to the birth of cultivation within the universe. From this modification to life came Ikarus (the people more commonly known as "those too close to the original sun").
From the interconnected madness of bloodlines, ownership, and war—one company has grown so renowned that they now control most of the realm known as Endless. They work in the fields of science, technology, and the arcane without competitors or rivals. Only those they choose to let stand among them survived.
This is the story of the child that legacy left behind.
* * *
"Is she still asleep?" asked one king to another.
"Yes, but it shouldn't be much longer," responded one of the seven kings who stood near the bedside of the woman they all adored.
"We should probably start before she rouses, then, gentlemen," said the only man lucky enough to win the woman's heart and to father her child. King Draphen and Elizabeth Carter's return to the third realm layer of the universe ended what was commercially viewed as a union of untold power. The fruit and eternal proof of the failed relationship slept in a crib nearby—the baby boy was yet to be seen by his mother.
* * *
Elizabeth had been asleep since the boy's birth. Her long slumber was notable, but it wasn't alarming. The cause of this long sleep had more than one explanation—it was caused in part by the convergence of rare bloodlines, and in part by the amount of energy a child naturally drew from their mother's body during birth having been intensified far beyond what any of the cultivators present had witnessed.
The baby's mother had carried him for centuries within her womb, which was seen as a blessing within the cultivation community. The longer the gestation period, the better the product of said gestation.
Babies born from extended pregnancies soared through the challenges of cultivation with ease. Their abnormally powerful parents produced gene combinations with more than explosive results.
The unnamed boy's parents grew up in a time when such births were far more dangerous, and most children of cultivators (and even godlings) didn't make it to their teens without the instability of their own bodies becoming explosive.
"Are you not worried?" asked one of the seven kings summoned. The baby's father turned to him and wondered if his old friend meant to inquire about the potential fragility of his son's body combined with such overwhelming internal power—or the curse of King Draphen's bloodline.
"Of course I am, but today is one of naming, and honor. Not worries," responded the king with a smile while his son was brought into the large hospital bedroom. The nurse rolled the baby in before she handed him to his father with a smile of her own.
"The first right is yours, sire," said the nurse.
The king took his child and whispered into his left ear. "May your path be as endless as the skies and stars, my son." The father passed his son to the next king and the ceremony began.
First came one father's blessing. Then that of the seven kings. It wasn't a requirement to be a king for this piece of the ceremony—it was mere coincidence.
Then came eleven champions, all with blood relations. These powerful individuals would never gather in one place without great reason, but they did so with great pleasure in this moment.
The ceremony needed to be maintained with family or close friends, and so it was that all of those gathered at this moment were the same as those who had arrived for the birth days ago and had been in waiting ever since.
All eleven gave a champion's blessings, and his father smiled as he heard the whispered words of all who held his son. He listened intently as the boy was passed throughout the room. King Draphen did not hope for the opportunity to kill anyone who uttered curses or any ill wishes to his son but he was prepared for it.
Then came thirteen arcane masters, seventeen martial grandmasters, and twenty-one realm lords.
It wasn't until the king looked at those gathered that he realized the weight that his newest son's birth carried within the realm—so magnitudinous was the impact. The men and women gathered there were blood related either to the father or the mother of the baby, which made Draphen worry for his son's future for the first time in the baby's seven days of life.
Draphen and Elizabeth Carter weren't a beloved pair within the realm. Even those who had congregated for their child's birth harbored negative opinions on the coupling that produced the child—a fact that made the back of Draphen's neck prickle with fear as the boy's maternal grandfather held the child and whispered, "May you rule over Omni. May you live beyond Omen. May all know your name. Your path shall be endless."
If the child had the capacity of comprehending the words spoken to him, he would wonder whether those words were a curse draped in the robes of blessings.
The boy's father smiled with the knowledge that none present had been able to give anything but the best of intentions in his son's direction now that the hooded old man handed his grandchild back to the nurse.
The moment had come and all that was left was for the black-haired beauty to awaken and take in the sight of her son. Elizabeth would name their son and set him on a path Draphen hoped would be filled with glory and honor.
Nothing King Draphen had done could have prepared him to be the father to this boy. Nor what was to unfold.
"She's awake, sire," said the nurse as she brought the boy back to his father. He looked to the woman he loved with his whole heart, whom he had deeply missed with every day that passed. Her warm smile gave him chills—he adored her. She also happened to be one of three people in that room who could kill him.
"Bring him to me, Draphen. Our son needs a name."
King Draphen, Lord of Three Realm Layers, looked into the heterochromatic eyes of Elizabeth Amorra Carter—one eye shone golden, and the other a brilliant crimson. The sight of either was enough to take his breath away, but the combination had him stuck in place before he nodded. His heart skipped a beat as she lifted her arms for the baby. Though their relationship had been turbulent and fraught with public and private scrutiny, Draphen would always think of Elizabeth as a goddess worthy of every realm's adoration.
Draphen's breath hitched when he heard his son make a noise and was stunned when the child opened his eyes for the first time and looked up at him. The irises were strong and told of a perception far beyond the limits of most immortals—beautiful little rings that expanded or contracted when candle or lamplight swept near or away from the soft flesh of the boy's face. It took a moment for an accurate description of what Draphen had seen in his son's eyes to form, so stunned was he by their peculiar flecks and spirals.
Elizabeth burst into tears the moment her eyes met those of her son, and from a distance, King Draphen observed what the odd patterns resembled, and what future was foretold in those multicolored star-specked, spiraling crimson eyes.
The baby had two dazzlingly crimson irises, each filled with multicolored flakes. The king couldn't tell but the flakes were like the faintest echoes of stars in the sky during the last moments of a sunset. The exotic energies moved in a hypnotic spiral that kept the man frozen where he stood.
"No, no, no!"
Draphen's eyes shot up toward Elizabeth who was yelling and, to his alarm, attempting to get out of her hospital bed.
"What's happening?" But he needn't wait for an answer—the familiar inversion of gravity that arrived with every Tribulation instantaneously ripped through the palace. Weightless and restricting, it did not immediately upend the earth, but the sensation was unforgettable. The damage wrought by previous Tribulations had been etched into his muscle and bone, as he assumed it had done to all others who had survived such horrors in the past.
The two kings nearest him trembled visibly. One of them tried their hardest to hold his head down, as though that would stop what was to come—averting the eyes to avert disaster was certainly worth a try in such times. But the other lifted his head, which hung back in such a manner that his neck appeared to have nearly snapped, and the man's mouth was a wide O-shape as a sorrowful groan escaped his throat. Though Draphen had trouble hearing the man's pain through the crack of lightning that sliced the heavens, briefly illuminating the man's eyes so that they appeared reflective rather than instruments with which to observe and understand the world. From lid to lid, the man's eyes had gone glazed, blank, and a thick film of milky white coated them. There were punishments for looking upon things one should never witness—and there were harsher punishments for daring to live through such events; a thing Draphen understood far too well.
* * *
A massive hole had ripped into the sky far above the city-nation of CloudLake—so large it gave those powerful enough to set their gazes upon the sight a true glimpse into heaven.
The large halo of light framed a portrait filled with luscious landscapes and environments that every realm layer below its majesty tried to emulate in one way or another.
All those who braved a look up at the might of the lightning summoned from heaven's breath lost both consciousness and days of memory.
The only beings powerful enough to fight the inversion of gravity as heaven's mouth inhaled, were those gathered around the boy. While those outside of the hospital were sucked into the sky alongside entire buildings and streets amid a storm of chaos; the mightiest of the realms below heaven couldn't even move.
They were at the direct middle of the storm. A judgment of wrath and vengeance poured from the center of the portal to heaven so focused it no longer looked like lightning.
A pillar of manna threatened to erase the continent as it fell from above.
Draphen screamed as his son was lifted from his arms by pure pressure and mana fluctuations. No Tribulation he'd lived through had caused enough pressure to stop his movements entirely, which made him fear the effects. The more powerful the Tribulation, the more intense the divine act was in nature.
People began to disappear from the room, teleported to different realms, city-nations, or worlds.
The force of gravity threatened to rip Draphen apart from the inside out as the pressure around him grew. His body was pulled off the ground slightly and panic set in as he watched those around him be stripped of their footing and yanked into the sky through the windows in the room.
Cars smashed into buildings. Trees spun through the air like twigs caught in a hurricane. The destruction rolled throughout the entire section of the city and claimed a billion lives in a breath.
Most of those lives left no trace other than trinkets they owned, letters they'd never been able to send, or remnants of homes stripped down to their foundations. Shattered glass coated the ground and other detritus, as if that were the final layer of this grand astrological storm—mountains of scattered glass, left in piles of dead memories—the final reflective surface through which one could view the dissecting of one's own flesh, knowing that neither the glass nor their memories could be swept into a haphazard collection and sorted out at a later date to be put back somewhat askance but whole, nonetheless. No. Tribulations were as irreparable as were the lives of those who lived or died through them. Draphen's son would be another such casualty, and the king watched helplessly, screaming an inaudible loss into the whipping wind that twisted his voice until there was nothing left as his son was struck by the immense power of the storm.
Draphen was the sole witness and the sole heir to this horrific loss, and the pain that followed might as well have come from a million shards of glass puncturing his chest—the helplessness of the situation struck him in another form—a rage with which he could do nothing but watch as his world fell all around him.
The gateway to heaven closed and Draphen felt the wind against his flesh again. Cold tears ran down his face, soaking the neck of his ceremonial robe. What seemed like an entire city dropped from thousands of feet in the air the exact instant his son had vanished. The crunch of glass beneath the weight of this city echoed as though he now stood at the pit of a canyon.
Debris rained down—a wing of a building here, a spire of a house of worship there—that further destroyed the hospital Draphen was still inside. His horror and the sudden emptiness of loss precluded him from a true understanding or concern for his own wellbeing, and he found himself buried beneath the rubble.
It was in his darkest moment at the bottom of that collapsed hospital that he remembered Elizabeth had once confessed to him that a violent Tribulation had occurred the day she was born. From what she'd described, only a city block had been affected. Whereas the birth of their own son had changed the landscape for hundreds of miles. Shame crept into Draphen's already staggered breathing, and he couldn't catch the end of his last breath with the beginning of his next for a period of time that could only be labeled as eternal.
Until something interrupted him, shifting his focus, a scene that would have to be so unbelievable, so unrealistic that he could pay attention to that rather than the horror he'd endured. And that distraction was this: he was given a quest for the first time. Elizabeth had told him that such quests were real, but he'd never believed it until now. Perhaps he only believed it because he needed to believe in something in that moment, lest he give up and meet his demise—a tempting thought experiment.
A red box outlined in a fanciful white-gold trim stated the terms of the task reality bestowed upon him.
You have helped birth a power that has the potential to bring either great ruin or bountiful prosperity. Your direct actions will form your child into what your people want, or what they will need to survive Omen. Be careful, son of Omni, as heroes need villains to rise and are not always strong enough to make the necessary sacrifices to see true ends to the conflicts of the living.
Choose carefully.
Draphen looked the words over a hundred times or more. He ignored the thousands of notifications that popped up into his overlay. People from all over the SunSpire realms were frantic to figure out what had occurred in his home. But all Draphen could think, all that he could do was cry in relief. My boy is alive, and as long as there is blood in his veins and breath in his lungs, then I shall carry hope for him to be who he needs to be.
Draphen slowly came to his feet, wiped the tears and a good amount of snot from his face, and cursed while literal tons of weight slid from his back and shoulders. He had to choose from two options beneath the passage.
Like Father, Unlike Son—will you be what the world wants?
Or what the world needs?
Draphen thought it was a simple choice. As did all others across all realms who received a quest and a choice that day.
A mother who would have to live without her son, a son who was pulled through time, made the choice to become the catalyst of change. A grandfather made the decision to give a blessing, rather than a curse to a boy he'd hadn't truly met, in the far future for his own quest.
While many others made kind choices for their quest, far more did not. Draphen began to wonder what his son's life would be like, and if he would ever be able to meet his lost child. Then his mind flickered to the quest, and he knew that he would.
Draphen cried silently at the thought that his son would go without a name, even as he began to transform. He often fought the rage brought on by his dragon's blood, but for the first time in a long, long while, Draphen urged on the pressure that came with his curse. A roar escaped his chest and a wave of fire rippled out in all directions.
If the heavens believed they could take his son without repercussion, Draphen would grow until none could stop him as he made his choice.
He would be what he wanted to be. After all he'd lived through, the theft of his child to be used as a tool of fate was the last straw. Never again would he allow powerful beings to control the direction of his life or any for whom he cared.
The prompt disappeared from his vision and he balled his fist. He wanted to curl into a ball and sleep, all while his unbridled rage manifested physically. An unmatched heat poured from his skin that emanated from deep green and blue flames.
"May your path be as endless as the skies and stars above, my son," said Draphen while his internal flames melted his flesh away. He'd never made it through the effects of his curse without pure agony prior to his son being taken, but from that point forward, no pain could be more intense or damaging than the deep pit of loss that scorched his heart.
His vision had been taken by his curse—a curse that could one day take his son's sight, but as the landscape caught fire around Draphen, the fire sight of the cursed dragons allowed him to see more of his surroundings while the heat and form of the flames grew.
His body distorted. His bones broke. Wings ripped through the flesh of his back and sprung from his spine. Draphen became hysterical with laughter and rage as he pointed his maw upward the moment his dragon's lungs formed and his body finished extending.
Rubble slid off his scaled features as his wings snapped out to his sides. With his every breath his rage grew and so did his body. Heat built in his room-sized chest and he opened his mouth.
Flames like liquid sunlight geysered up toward the heavens and the sky itself seemed to catch fire. Draphen's roar before he took flight pained all nearby survivors who heard the cry. Only to be washed in flames the next moment by a building-sized beast with a hundred-foot wingspan.
Cultivator became dragon, and the blind king of the city-nation of Aspire began his rampage across the lands in search of a boy who had been teleported far, far away, to an orphanage, a single day into the future.
Hidden by the system as his son now was, none would find the boy for many season cycles. And while those who knew what occurred when he'd been born may wish to aid the child, none who found him for season cycles to come would have the power to bring him home, as only he could make the choice to rejoin his family.
In fact, the system gave one last quest that day to a now-abandoned boy as he lay on the steps of his new home. His eyes took in a sunset and the night's stars above as he began to fuss and draw in the attention of nearby children.
A red box could be seen—lined in gold with a single sentence that the baby could never possibly read, sat firmly in the box's center:
Find your family. They need you.
As the boy cried the door opened and a young girl with brown hair and multi-colored eyes rushed out to pick him up. The girl smiled at the boy, and he stopped crying to look up at her.
"Hey, there! Let's get you to Momma Almarine. Shouldn't be too hard to find a home for a cutie like you," said the girl before she pinched the boy's nose and caused him to giggle. The two were off to find the Orphan Mother of the CityNation of Maelstrom, and the life of Arson Omni began.
"Hey Momma Almarine! We got another Arson!"