Chapter 1: The First Echo
The taste of antiseptic clung to Aurelia's tongue, sour and sterile, like the year of her life that had been stolen.
She awoke in a place of white walls and machines that hummed like insects, the sterile scent of medicine making her stomach turn. Her family had placed her in a VIP ward—the kind reserved for royalty, with polished floors, glass partitions, and soft sheets that suffocated her instead of comforting her. She had slept for a year. Or rather—she had been buried alive in dreams.
Those dreams were the problem.
They weren't dreams. They were memories. Not hers, yet undeniably hers. The memories of a being who had lived and ruled and conquered for six millennia. A woman who had crushed kingdoms beneath her heel and raised an empire from the bones of Terra itself.
The War Queen. Aurelia Aldreath.
The clash of those ancient memories with her own twenty fragile years had broken her. She had been Aurelia Hills all her life—pampered, loved, cherished as her family's only daughter. She had known warmth, laughter, home. And now, another self pressed against her skull like a storm: the War Queen with violet eyes, abandoned at birth, raised by wolves, hardened into steel.
Two selves, too much. Her brain had closed itself off like a fortress under siege, shutting her away in silence. For a year, her body slept while her soul fought.
And when she finally woke, she was not healed. She was split.
She rose from the hospital bed, trembling, gazing at the mirror in the bathroom. The reflection looked familiar yet wrong. The softness of a pampered heiress lingered in her face, but her eyes—those cursed violet eyes—burned with an ageless fire. She pressed her palms to the mirror, desperate for a single truth, and found only fractures.
That was when she knew she could not stay.
Her family meant well, but they could not understand. They still called her by the name of a daughter who no longer existed. To them, she was still the Aurelia Hills they had raised, the girl who loved garden parties and fine silks. They did not see the Ancient lurking behind her stare. If she stayed, they would smother her with their love, or fear her when they realized the truth.
She needed space. She needed air. She needed a resemblance of something real.
The family guards had been stationed outside her ward as always, one of them dozing in a chair. She knew their patterns from days of silent watching. Aurelia's mind—sharpened by memories not her own—spun quickly. She feigned sudden urgency, sent the guard on a fabricated errand, and when he disappeared down the corridor, she slipped into his shadow.
In his absence she found what she needed: a change of clothes left folded in the staff's lounge, and the pouch of money hanging from the sleeping guard's belt. She took both without hesitation. The cold cultivator she once was would not flinch at stealing from her own men; neither would she. Her family would repay, but she knew that that would be the least of his concerns.
By the time the other guard realized his mistake, Aurelia was already gone.
She slipped into the city like a phantom, her new clothes disguising her, the purse of money weighing against her hip. Yet Lysven did not feel like a homecoming. It felt like another planet.
This city hadn't existed in her time.
Back then, the capital of the world had been Virelia—the beating heart of the Aldreath Kingdom, her kingdom, the seat of an empire that ruled all Terra. But now? Now Virelia was not a city at all. It was a nation. A nation with Lysven as its capital. A city that in her age would have been no more than a county, too insignificant even to mark on a map, was now the center of power in this new Terra.
It was wrong. All of it was wrong.
She walked the cobblestone streets, trying to find familiarity and finding none. Banners fluttered that bore no sigils she recognized. Merchants shouted in accents that grated against her memory. Food stalls steamed with scents she had never known. The laughter of children should have been comforting, but instead it hollowed her chest.
She was a queen walking through a world that had never belonged to her.
The antique market was her last hope. Hidden in a quieter corner of the city, it promised relics of the past, scraps of the Terra she had once ruled. Maybe there she could find a resemblance—something to anchor her against the tide of confusion.
She wove between stalls stacked with rusting tech-scraps, faded coins, shards of old pottery. Her heart beat faster as she searched. Then she heard it.
A voice.
It was like rustling leaves and crackling fire, a sound that carried the weight of centuries.
She turned.
An old man stood in the shadow of a crumbling stone wall, his face a roadmap of forgotten battles. A small crowd gathered half-heartedly around him, their attention wandering. But Aurelia froze. She knew the cadence of his words before she even grasped their meaning.
"…In the beginning, chaos reigned supreme. From the void, the Celestial God emerged, bringing order to the universe…"
Her stomach dropped.
No. This was not just a tale. It was history. Her history.
The old man's voice wove the story like a tapestry. He spoke of the Seven Heavens, of Gaia's creation, of the Celestial God's hunger for faith power. He spoke of the dwarves, elves, beast-men, humans, and even the nextans- robots who rose against Gaia once, cultivating spiritual power to ascend into godhood. He spoke of their pride, their rebellion, and their slaughter when the Celestial God's wrath fell upon them.
Aurelia's blood ran cold. She remembered it. She had lived through fragments of it.
The old man told of Gaia's barrier, its cycles of rebirth, its decay. And then he spoke of Terra—the world of men, built as Gaia's replacement. Terra, infused with chaos, thriving under the Celestial God's watchful eye.
Her Terra.
He spoke of Terra's betrayal, of Gaia's envy, of Terra's barrier trembling at the edge of destruction. And then, softly, with a weight that made her chest ache, he spoke of the War Queen. The conqueror of Aldreath. The one whose fall marked the first fracture in Terra's fate.
Her.
Aurelia's hands shook. She wanted to run, but her feet refused. His eyes, dark and bottomless, rose and found hers. And in that gaze she felt stripped bare, as though her very soul had been laid open.
He knew. Somehow, he knew.
The crowd began to drift away, bored of his tale. A pair of children ran past, crashing into her side. She staggered, heart racing, and when she turned back—
He was gone.
The space where he had stood was empty, like he never existed.
The sound of the market surged back around her, but it no longer felt real. Laughter was a lie. Voices were hollow. The world had shifted. She was not just a woman with fractured memories. She was a target.
The fairy tale was over.
The war was beginning.
And as Aurelia left the market behind, her feet carried her not toward home, but toward the mountains on the horizon. A whisper in her bones called her name, a pull older than this new Terra. The Jade Forest awaited.