SOLVERAK
Book One: The Primordial
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CHAPTER ONE
The Last Cast
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The sea had no name for what was coming.
It was a morning like any other on the Velshan Coast — grey with the particular softness that came before the sun fully committed to the sky. The water lay flat and dark, barely breathing. Fishing boats dotted the horizon like punctuation marks at the end of a sentence no one had finished writing. Gulls circled. Nets dragged. Men called to one another across the water in the lazy, half-asleep shorthand of people who had done the same thing every day of their lives and expected to do it forever.
One of those men sat at the stern of a small, unremarkable boat. His hands were weathered to the colour of old rope. His eyes, half-lidded against the salt wind, watched the line where his net disappeared beneath the surface. He was not thinking about anything in particular — not debts, not family, not the dull ache in his lower back that had not left him in three years. He was simply there, in the way that fishermen learn to simply be, existing in the quiet rhythm between cast and return.
Nobody would write songs about him. Nobody had. He was not a man whom history noticed.
He pulled his net. Checked the weight. Decent haul — silver-bellied fish flopping against each other in the mesh. He allowed himself a small nod of satisfaction, the kind that needs no audience, and began sorting by hand with the practiced ease of someone who had done this ten thousand times before.
That was when the other fishermen began to shout.
* * *
It had no colour at first. That was what the survivors would say, years later, in the accounts that historians and rune scholars would spend decades arguing over. No colour. Just light — a light that seemed to come from inside the sky itself, as though the sky had cracked open and something ancient and enormous was looking through.
The fisherman looked up.
The thing in the sky was falling. That was the only word for it — falling — though no word in the fisherman's language, or any human language on Solverak, had been built to hold the weight of what he was seeing. It was vast. It was close. It moved with the slow, indifferent certainty of something that had been travelling for longer than the planet beneath his feet had existed, and it was not going to stop.
The sea began to pull back from the shore.
The fisherman stood in his small boat and watched the sky fall toward him. The shouting around him had stopped — every man on every boat had gone silent, as though the world itself had pressed a finger to its lips. The wind died. The gulls vanished. The surface of the sea went as still and dark as obsidian.
He did not run. There was nowhere to run to. He did not pray. He had never been a man who prayed. He stood with his net still in his hands and watched the thing come, and in those final seconds — shorter than a heartbeat, longer than a life — he thought of nothing at all.
* * *
The impact did not make a sound.
Not at first. There was a moment — a single, suspended, impossible moment — where the world simply stopped. The meteor struck the face of the planet and the planet did not scream. It shuddered. A deep, tectonic trembling that moved up through the seabed, through the water, through the hull of every boat on the Velshan Coast and into the bones of every living thing within a thousand miles.
Then the sound arrived.
It was not an explosion. It was something older than the concept of explosion — a sound so fundamental that it bypassed hearing entirely and spoke directly to something deeper, something animal, something that had been sleeping in the base of the human skull since before humans had words for what lived there. It was the sound of a world being rewritten.
The sea rose.
The sky cracked. Not metaphorically — the atmosphere itself fractured in a ring spreading outward from the point of impact, and for a few breathless seconds, those close enough could see the darkness of space through the wound. Then fire rushed in to fill the gap, and the horizon became a wall of white.
The fisherman's boat ceased to exist.
The fisherman ceased to exist.
And in the space between one instant and the next — in the silence that exists only when everything has been erased and nothing new has yet begun — something happened that no instrument could measure and no scholar would ever fully understand.
A soul, clean and unremarkable as river water, touched something at the very heart of the dying meteor.
And the heart of the meteor did not let go.
* * *
Solverak broke.
Not all at once. The planet was too large, too old, too stubborn for that. But the fractures spread — visible from orbit as hairline cracks racing across the surface of a world that had never known such violence. Continents that had stood together since the planet's birth groaned and separated. Seas flooded inland. Mountains collapsed. The land that had been one became many, torn apart by forces that cared nothing for the borders men had drawn upon it or the lives they had built along its edges.
In the cities, the machines fired. Cannons, artillery, the great siege engines that humanity had spent two centuries perfecting — all of it turned toward the sky and the falling debris and the things that began to crawl from the burning craters. For a short time, the machines held the line. Humanity, in its stubborn, furious way, fought back against an apocalypse with tools it had built for fighting other men.
Sixty percent of the human population of Solverak died in the first season.
Thirty percent of the dead were not dead in the meaningful sense. They stood up even after death. They walked. They moved. Their eyes were open. But whatever had made them stand whatever quiet fire burned in the chest of a dead person — had gone out. They became part of the dark, shambling tide that swept through the ruins of everything humanity had built, and they did not stop, and they did not rest, and for a long time, nothing could kill them.
The animals changed too. What had been deer became something with too many legs and eyes that burned at night. What had been wolves became something that the wolves themselves would not have recognized. The world was full of things that had no name and needed none — they existed only to consume, to expand, to fill the space that the old order had left empty.
And somewhere deep beneath the shattered surface of the world, something vast and ancient and feminine stirred from a grief too large for human words.
The planetary spirit of Solverak opened what might be called her eyes.
She looked at what had come to rest at the heart of her world.
She looked at what clung to it.
A small soul. Unremarkable. Clean. The kind of soul that asks for nothing and expects nothing and leaves no mark on the world it passes through.
She was silent for a long time.
Then, in the language that exists between stars and the things that are born between them, she made a decision.
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The Dark Decade had begun.
Humanity, bleeding and diminished and furious, did not know yet that it would survive. It did not know that one man, somewhere in the wreckage of the old world, was already gathering the broken pieces of it around him with bare hands and refusing to let go.
It did not know that in a hundred years, a child would be born into a world remade by fire and will and impossible stubbornness.
It did not know what he would carry.
But the planet knew.
She had always known.
— End of Chapter One —