They say our world ended not with fire, war, but with words.
One morning, without warning, every human body was branded. Flesh split open, bones glowing, and strange invisible hands etching inscriptions into every soul. They called them Scripts - lines of living language carved deeper than blood, deeper than DNA.
Some wept. Some screamed. Most simply collapsed, their bodies unable to bear the weight of the verses written ever so deep within them. Within hours, most of us were gone. Not dead. Not alive. Their Scripts went wild, spilling nonsense into their flesh until it tore them apart and remade them as Shattered - husks staggering on broken limbs, their bodies twitching to an unheard rhythm of verses no sane mind could - or would - read.
The survivors carried stable scripts, and became known as Scripts-Bearers, bound to the Dominion inscribed within them. Each Dominion was unique. It is your law, your path and your prison.
To live means to obey the Script.
To grow means to decipher its verses.
But every verse ascended comes with a price, be it your memory, flesh, sanity or even your humanity.
In this new age, the Shattered roam the ruins of the old world, gibbering half-words from broken pages. And us - the beares… we walk the knife's edge between man and monster, living tomes of power, desperate to master our story written into our very marrow before it consumes us.
No one knows who wrote the first Scripts.
No one knows why - or where it came from.
But one truth echoes in the bones of every survivor:
The Script is still writing.
Excerpt from the journals of an unknown Script-Bearer, recovered in the ruins of Old Kyoto:
"The Script does not end.
Each night, I feel new verses crawling beneath my skin, waiting and screaming to be read.
I pray that when my body shatters, no one dares to read me"