Centuries ago, humankind whispered the names of the Aetherians as gods. They descended from the skies in shimmering vessels, wielding powers that bent the natural world to their will. For generations, they were worshipped—until the day truth shattered divinity.
They were not gods. They were exiles. Aliens dressed in myth.
The revelation tore through empires like wildfire, and what followed was not peace but chaos. Humanity turned its devotion into suspicion. And when the Aetherians faltered—when civil war erupted among their kin—the survivors were too few to command awe, too broken to command fear. The once-divine became hunted.
Centuries bled into years. Their numbers dwindled. There came a time when only a child remained. A boy with silver in his veins and starlight in his eyes. Humanity named him not monster, nor relic, but Gaidan—the last flame of a dying race.
It was Gaidan who, against all expectation, intervened when war raged once more between two nations. He stepped into the battlefield not as a conqueror, but as arbiter. The fire of his kind silenced bombs, his voice disarmed generals, and for the first time in an age both blood and borders held. The world whispered: savior.
But they forgot one truth about saviors. Even they can fall.
A few minutes ago, Gaidan fell.
The clash itself had been a storm of violence—an enemy faster than expectation, strategies unraveling in the heat of desperation. He had never lost before. Until now. His body broke against steel as he crashed into the sanctum's facility, alarms echoing his failure. Sparks bloomed overhead, and the halls filled with smoke.
Boots clattered on the floor. The butlers arrived, two shadows in immaculate black cutting through the chaos. They had served him since boyhood, guardians of flesh and spirit, sworn not to crown or creed but to the boy himself.
"Butler One!" His voice cut sharp. He knelt at the broken form. "What happened, sir?"
Gaidan tried to speak, but his jaw trembled, words dissolving into raw breaths. No command came. No explanation. He collapsed, eyes rolling toward darkness.
"Get him to the altar," Butler One ordered.
Together, the two men hefted him through corridors until they reached the heart of the facility—the Aethron Altar. A monument of his people's design, it pulsed with ancient energy, a fusion of temple and machine. It was meant to restore; it was meant to test.
The boy was laid across the cold surface. The altar awoke. Pale blue light licked across his skin, threads of energy burrowing inside him. His back arched; a silent scream tore loose. Instinctively, the butlers pressed him down, holding him as though his very body sought to escape itself.
Above them, holographic screens ignited, flooding the room with grim data. Heart rate collapsing, core energy fracturing. Battle footage looped—his footwork sharp, his strikes precise—until the fatal moment froze in cruel detail: his opponent's feint, the hesitation in Gaidan's eyes, then the fall.
"He shouldn't have lost," Butler Two muttered, jaw tight as he studied the screens.
"He underestimated them," Butler One said flatly, though his eyes betrayed something colder. "Or perhaps… himself."
Butler Two glanced at the boy convulsing under the altar's gaze. "He carries the burden of gods and the fragility of man. That balance will kill him if he does not master it."
"Then this was not defeat," Butler One answered. His reflection glowed ghostly against the altar's blaze. "This was correction."
A wave of light surged from the machine, throwing shadows across the chamber. Gaidan's cry broke into the air—raw, piercing, human—and then fell into stillness. For a terrible breath, silence reigned.
Then: pulse steadied. Energy lines reconnected. The monitors flared with green.
The butlers released their hold. The boy lay trembling, his chest rising and falling, alive but not yet whole. His defeat would not be erased. It would linger, burn.
And in that burn, perhaps, the true story of Gaidan would begin