The morning corridors were still half-asleep when Eryndor made his way toward the library. A few scholars drifted past with their arms full, heads down, already lost in whatever problem had followed them out of bed. The stone floors were cold underfoot. Somewhere ahead, a window had been left open through the night, and the air carried the faint smell of damp earth and early light.
He found himself in front of the library door before he had quite decided to stop walking.
It was a massive thing — dark wood bound with tarnished brass, old enough that the grain had hardened to something close to stone. Above it, carved into a pale slab set into the archway, a plaque read:
WISDOM SANCTUARY
"The world is full of ancient knowledge and wisdom," Eryndor murmured, cynicism curling his tone, "yet we claim our scrolls and papers are the only true source."
He pushed open the door and stepped inside.
The scent of parchment washed over him — dry, sweet, ancient. Rows of shelves rose like pillars into shadowed heights, and light streamed through the high windows, filling the air with slowly drifting motes of dust. The library held five floors in total. Eryndor, despite more than a decade of service, was permitted access only to the first and second — a boundary he had long since stopped pretending not to resent.
He walked toward the librarian's desk near the entrance. An elderly woman sat behind it, spectacles perched low on her nose, attending to a ledger with the focused calm of someone who had been doing exactly this for a very long time. She looked up as he approached and offered a thin, professional smile.
"Looking for something, young man?" she asked, adjusting her glasses.
"Could you tell me where to find records from before the Kingdom Era?" Eryndor asked. "The historical archives, not the mythology section."
The librarian studied him over the rim of her spectacles for a moment before answering.
"I've seen you in the reading room before," she said. "You already know where they are."
"Those are the myths and legends," Eryndor said. "I'm looking for genuine historical records. Pre-Kingdom Era. Primary sources." He paused. "Though I suspect the Temple doesn't actually have them."
Something shifted in the room. The librarian's smile remained exactly where it was, but something behind her eyes hardened, like frost forming quietly over still water. When she spoke again her voice was lower, and slower.
"We don't have them, Eryndor," she said. "And take my advice — don't seek beyond your faith."
A silence settled between them. Eryndor held her gaze for a moment, then nodded, murmured his thanks, and walked deeper into the library. He could feel her eyes following him long after he had turned away.
He exhaled once he was out of earshot, irritation settling flat in his chest.
"Was that a warning or a threat?" he muttered. "Hard to tell anymore."
He shook his head, found an empty table near the back shelves, and pulled down one of the volumes he already knew by heart — the legends of the ancient wars.
The stories described a time long before the Kingdom Era, at the dawn of what the texts called the Legendary Era: a period when mortals of Terra Proper first became aware of what lay beyond the veil. Other Beings existed, the legends claimed — the Malakh, seemingly shaped from light; the Assura, wreathed in living flame; and the Svapada, savage and untamed as the wild itself. Mortals had a name for them collectively, though scholars debated what it meant.
Eryndor turned a page slowly. He had read this passage dozens of times. He knew what came next.
At first, the accounts described coexistence: silent envoys crossing between realms, ancient ruins appearing overnight, divine storms threading the sky. A strange and fragile peace. But in what the texts called the Epic Era, curiosity curdled into pride, and pride into arrogance, and arrogance into war. What had begun as diplomacy between worlds descended into conquest.
In the end, wonder became fire.
All four Beings had invaded one another's Plates. Wars raged across heaven and the deep alike. Cities of light were swallowed by darkness, rivers ran with divine blood, and civilizations that had taken millennia to build were consumed in what the texts described as a single, terrible generation. The age of legendary heroes — and their consequence: the Age of Void. A time when nothing moved. No war, yet no progress. Only collapse, and exhaustion, and rotting faith, as though the world itself had chosen to sleep rather than continue.
Each realm had retreated into its own Plate and licked its wounds.
Slowly, mortals had rebuilt. Villages became towns, towns became kingdoms, kingdoms became empires. The cycle continued until the present age, in which six Great Nations ruled the landmasses of Terra Proper — each one an inheritor of fragments from those ancient Eras, whether they knew it or not.
Eryndor set down his pen and looked at the cover of the volume in his hands.
Records of Ragnarok: When Gods Marched and the Sky Bled.
Most people in Terra Proper — especially here in Matrabhumi Ayoga — dismissed these accounts as folktale. The Temple of Radiant Memory classified them as mythology, outright denying the existence of the other Beings. Modern civilization accepted, more or less without question, that recorded history began in the Void Era — sometimes called the Era of Creation — when mortals had first appeared. Everything before that was legend at best, and fantasy at worst.
Eryndor had never found that convincing. The myths were too rich, too internally consistent, too specific in their geography and genealogy to be mere invention. He had read far more than most — more than his rank technically permitted, though he preferred not to dwell on that — and the picture that emerged across dozens of unconnected sources was not the picture of fantasy. It was the picture of something deliberately buried.
"Nearly ten thousand years since this nation was founded," he murmured to himself, "and no valid records have ever surfaced to confirm any of it. Or none that the Temple will acknowledge."
He turned back to the page, pen moving again, and his eyes drifted across a passage he had read before without much thought:
"For the High King of Mortals was not born of throne or title, but of blood that remembered what lesser men had forgotten. His line did not end with the Age of Void. It was only broken."
Eryndor's pen stopped moving.
He read it again. Then a third time.
Your line was broken. But not ended.
The words from his dream sat in his chest like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples he couldn't account for and couldn't quite ignore.
He told himself it was coincidence. He had read this passage before — it had simply lodged itself somewhere in the back of his mind and resurfaced as a dream. That was all. That was the only reasonable explanation.
His eyes moved back to the page, but his hand stayed still, and the pen did not move again for a long time.