The man who would one day be called Cyrus was, at the beginning, nothing more than a shadow adrift. His name, once spoken with warmth among kin, had been eroded by grief until even he could barely recall it. Where once he had lived with purpose, now he wandered the wastelands of forgotten realms — hollow-eyed, half-starved, and driven only by the weight of memory.
Sorrow was his last possession. It clung to him as stubbornly as breath, heavy enough to bow his frame, sharp enough to keep him from the mercy of numbness. He did not seek food, nor shelter, nor the comfort of fire. He sought only the next step, the endless march that carried him further from the places where joy had once dwelled.
The world around him was barren, its skies ash-grey, its winds sharp with dust. Yet to Cyrus it was neither hostile nor kind — merely fitting. What was the worth of beauty when his heart was nothing but ruin?
But one night, as he stumbled through a broken canyon, he found himself standing before something that should not have been. A door — not built of stone, nor wood, but of sheer luminescence. It shimmered like glass, though no hand had shaped it. And beyond it, faint glimmers shone like stars caught in crystal.
Drawn by some thread he could not resist, Cyrus stepped through.
The air shifted. The dust and silence of the wasteland gave way to a vast, echoing hall. Before him stretched endless vaults, each filled with fragments that pulsed softly, like hearts preserved in glass. Sorrow, joy, despair, hope — he felt them all radiating from those shards, alive with meaning.
At the center stood a figure cloaked in shadow and iridescence, chains of light coiled around her arms, eyes blazing golden-orange.
Cyrus fell to his knees, not from choice but from the sheer weight of her presence. His sorrow, the last thing that tethered him, suddenly trembled as if it no longer belonged only to him.
He did not know it yet, but his pilgrimage had ended. His true journey — the Chronicle of Cyrus — had only begun.