Fire.
Water.
Earth.
Wind.
Once, these were whispered only in myths, the forgotten fragments of an older tongue. They were said to be the Four Pillars of Creation, the breath upon which worlds rested, the sacred bones of existence itself. Yet when the Twenty-Fourth Century ended in ash and silence, when steel towers fell and oceans swallowed continents, those myths were all that remained.
Humanity—broken, ragged, hunted by the rage of nature herself—teetered upon the edge of extinction. Storms devoured the skies. Firestorms turned cities into shrines of bone. The soil split open, vomiting forth molten rivers. Seas swelled until they drowned the cries of nations. This was no single apocalypse but a thousand deaths in a single century.
And yet—something happened.
An unknown force, nameless and immeasurable, fell from the heavens like a wound torn open in the sky. It seeped into the earth, the oceans, the winds, and the marrow of every living thing. The world, scarred beyond repair, began to mend. Forests sprouted where glass deserts had stood. Oceans quieted, and mountains rose anew, though jagged and strange. But this restoration was no mercy. It was a rebirth—unnatural, alien, and perilous.
From the healed lands crawled beasts never recorded in the tomes of old. Horned leviathans roamed the waters. Serpents coiled within the thunder. Shadows walked upright, with human shapes but empty eyes. The world had repaired itself, but it had not restored what once was—it had rewritten the script of creation.
And humanity, fragile and wandering, discovered the truth too late.
Those who lingered too long near the places where the sky's wound had fallen were changed. At first, it was small: eyes that glimmered faintly like embers, veins that pulsed with silver light, breaths that seemed to stir the air unnaturally. But in time, some awakened to something greater—an affinity to nature itself.
This affinity was no single gift but a scale, a spectrum of inheritance, each step binding flesh more tightly to the Pillars of Creation. The ancients carved their names in blood:
Dormant Affinity – the weakest spark, a whisper never kindled.
Faint Affinity – a flicker, fragile, easily broken.
Common Affinity – the breath of water, the heat of fire, the most widespread gift.
Keen Affinity – sharp and cutting, a will that bends the elements to motion.
True Affinity – rare and revered, mastery over one's chosen pillar.
Mythic Affinity – a bond etched into the soul, wielders spoken of as walking calamities.
Primordial Affinity – the highest, oldest resonance… a theft of the gods themselves.
At first, humanity believed exposure determined the strength of affinity—the longer one walked beneath the scar of the heavens, the greater one's gift. But soon, the truth bled through. Children, born of conjurers, carried affinities from the moment they first wailed into the air. Some babes opened their eyes and the winds shifted. Some cried, and fire licked across their cradles.
Affinity was not mere chance, nor the length of exposure—it was blood, inheritance, and fate.
And then one man, the first of them, rose from among the scattered tribes. He did not only feel the call of an element. He stole it. He tore flame from the marrow of the world, bent rivers against their flow, and sundered stone with the curl of his fingers. Humanity trembled before him, not as before a savior, but before a thief who dared to seize what belonged only to the gods.
Thus they were named:
The Thieves of Creation.
Neither blessed nor cursed, but condemned to walk the line between man and myth, salvation and damnation. In the shadow of their power, kingdoms would rise, empires would shatter, and blood would paint the pillars red once more.
For the world had been remade in tragedy, and humanity's second dawn began not with prayer—
but with theft.