Long after the Temple declared the Celestials forgotten, a small frontier town clung to life at the edge of the Ashlands — a wasteland where nothing grew, and the ground still shimmered faintly with divine burn marks.
The town was called Ravaryn.
Its people were poor, their sky always gray, and their nights haunted by whispers carried on the wind. Yet they endured, because they had no choice.
Among them lived Elias and Mareth Verrin, glass-workers who shaped beauty from ruin.
They crafted stained windows for the Empire's cathedrals — glass that caught the light and burned like captured dawn. But their craft was not born of faith. It was born of penance.
Elias's family had once served the old Celestials, and Mareth's blood carried faint traces of the Mark of Fire — a shimmering sigil said to appear only in those touched by divine remnants. The Temple tolerated them only because they worked for its glory.
It was in that fragile peace their son was born — Kael Verrin.
A child with ashen-gray eyes, pale skin, and a faint burn-like mark over his heart that glowed faintly when he cried.
The midwives whispered that the Celestials had cursed him. His mother called him a gift. His father said nothing.
When Kael was six, the Inquisition came to Ravaryn.
They claimed to be searching for heretics hiding relics of the Ashen Sin. In truth, they were looking for those still marked by divine remnants — those like Kael.
The Verrins tried to flee that night.
Elias carried Kael through the smog-choked alleys while Mareth stayed behind to destroy their work, hoping to erase any trace of their craft. But fire spreads quickly in a town of glass.
Ravaryn burned.
Kael remembered only the light — the way it shimmered in broken glass as his father pushed him into the hands of a passing pilgrim and told him to run.
When morning came, there was nothing left of Ravaryn but cinders.
The Inquisition declared the town "purged of corruption."
The Temple called it an accident.
And Kael Verrin — the boy with the fire-mark over his heart — vanished into legend.
For ten years, he drifted from one ruin to the next, growing into silence.
He learned to hide his mark beneath bandages, to speak little, and to never pray.
Those who saw his eyes said he looked like he'd seen the world end — twice.
When he was sixteen, a messenger of the Empire found him scavenging in the ruins of a burnt chapel.
He was offered a place at the Imperial Academy of Faith and Sciences, a school that trained gifted orphans to serve the Empire's holy cause.
He accepted — not out of loyalty, but because the chapel where they found him still whispered his name when the wind passed through the glass.