Chapter One: The Culling
The stars died screaming.
From orbit, Viltrum's blood-red moon glowed faintly over a planet awash in slaughter. The sky—once gilded with banners of conquest and imperial honor—now rained with the dismembered bodies of its own.
Not enemies.
Not invaders.
Their own.
The Great Culling, they would call it.
A purge to ensure that only the strongest remained.
To the Empire, it was purification.
To Nolan, it was madness.
He stood at the edge of the Citadel's upper ring, its silver stone cracked beneath his boots. His armor—grey and white, the mark of a soldier—was splashed with the arterial mist of men and women he'd trained beside. That he'd laughed with. That he'd once called brothers.
Behind him, the screams didn't fade. Not entirely. They just became… background. Like wind. Like breath.
Thirteen hours ago, the Royal Edict was given:
"Let the unworthy bleed.
Let the strong define what remains.
From this day, weakness will be sterilized."
And it began.
Blades. Fists. Bone-crushing roars and power that tore through titanium like parchment.
It wasn't war.
It was execution.
And Nolan knew… the moment he saw the blood drip from his mentor's mouth — the man who had taught him how to fly, to think, to stand tall among conquerors — that this was no test of strength.
This was the Empire devouring itself.
"Nolan!"
He turned at the voice.
Teal — taller, broader, his armor charred, his right gauntlet missing.
His face was cut, lip torn, but his eyes still held the storm that refused to be broken.
"Vela's made it out of the inner ring. Merrick too. The others… scattered. I think Alexandra got Lyanna clear. Gabe's still watching the sky for flare movement. We don't have long."
Nolan said nothing. He looked down once more from the Citadel edge, where the corpses of tens of thousands of Viltrumites created a red halo around the planetary capital.
Teal stepped forward, hand on Nolan's shoulder.
"You said this empire was a lie.
You were right.
So let's stop dying for it."
The rebellion didn't have a name yet.
But it started in silence.
Hours later, thirteen stood in orbit.
Ships abandoned.
Weapons discarded.
Just their breath, and the sense that they had chosen wrongly — or maybe, finally, right.
They faced one another.
Nolan. Vela. Teal. Merrick. Alexandra. Lyanna. Daniel. Luke. Kelly. Fimmel. Nira. Gabe. Illyria.
Some were bloodied. Some hadn't killed at all.
But they were all traitors now.
"Where do we go?" asked Gabe, quietly.
His eyes not on the others — but on the dying blue-white sun of Viltrum.
Nolan answered.
"Wherever the Empire cannot follow."
They didn't know the wormhole anomaly would take them to another universe.
They didn't know what Earth was yet.
They didn't know they had just become myth seeds — gods with no temples, immortals with no altar, legends without a name.
But they would.
Oh, they would.
⟢
In the dense forests of what would someday be the Himalayas, a man with eyes like twin comets pulled his blade from the body of a tiger large enough to crush a house.
The tiger had struck first. He had simply… answered.
His name would never be recorded.
But the myth of "the man who killed the god-beast" would travel by firelight for centuries.
Fimmel walked on, not as a hunter—
—but as a shadow who would never die.
In the shimmering heat of the Sahara, a well opened in the middle of the desert.
A caravan stumbled upon it, water glistening like a divine gift.
They never saw who had struck the ground with her fist.
They only remembered a woman with eyes like obsidian stars, vanishing on the wind.
Nira returned to her silence, the lives saved already forgotten by her…
…but not by the generations who called the oasis sacred.
In deep caves across what would become Greece, constellations were carved before humans had even named the stars.
Each night, a woman would gaze upward, study, and draw.
She did not sleep. She mapped.
And Lyanna never once spoke to the shepherd boy who wandered too close.
But he would later return to his village and tell the tale of the Star Witch —
—whose eyes held the sky, and whose silence named the moon.
The Legion spread.
They did not rule.
They observed.
They crafted.
They walked through myth like ghosts wearing crowns made of restraint.
The Empire was gone.
The Oath had been made:
❝ No offspring. No interference. No conquest.
Only silence.
Until the stars call us again. ❞
And so the Thirteen waited.