Chapter 1
1165 Words
AETHERIA
Before there were crowns, there were no kingdoms.
Before there were borders, there were no territories.
And before the land had a name, the five races simply called it home.
The land was vast.
Forests stretched across its heart, mountains rose beyond the plains, rivers divided distant regions, and the sea surrounded parts of the land like a wall of blue. The five races lived throughout it, each with abilities and ways of life unlike the others.
There were no kings.
No queens.
No royal families.
No thrones.
Only the races, their communities, and the land they shared.
For generations, that was enough.
Until Zyvara came.
No one knew where the creature had come from.
It was unlike anything the races had ever encountered. An ancient fox-like beast with five long tails, dark fur marked with silver, and pale golden eyes that seemed far too old.
Zyvara was not simply another creature of the land.
It was a threat.
Where it appeared, fear followed.
The five races tried to stand against it, but their combined strength was not enough. One by one, their efforts failed, until two people stepped forward.
They were not kings.
They were not queens.
They had no crowns, no armies, and no titles.
They were simply two people willing to face what everyone else feared.
Their names were Azriel and Aurora.
Azriel possessed the power of fire.
Aurora possessed an ancient power of ice.
Neither power was ordinary, and neither of them fully understood how important their abilities would become.
Together, they faced Zyvara.
The battle spread across the land.
Fire collided with the darkness surrounding the creature. Ice covered the ground as Zyvara moved through it with unnatural speed. The force of their abilities shook the earth beneath them.
For a long time, neither side gave way.
But eventually, Azriel and Aurora succeeded.
Zyvara's physical body was defeated.
The creature fell.
The battle was over.
Or so it seemed.
Because Zyvara was not truly gone.
Its physical body could be defeated, but its soul could not be destroyed.
The elders of the five races understood the danger immediately.
They gathered together and used their combined power to contain what remained of Zyvara.
The surviving soul was sealed inside a single ancient object.
The Onyx.
The Onyx became its prison.
Zyvara's physical body was taken far from the people and buried deep inside a hidden cave, where it would remain untouched and forgotten.
The five races were safe.
For the moment.
Azriel and Aurora had saved them.
And the people remembered.
The elders eventually gathered once again.
This time, they did not come to fight.
They came to honor the two who had protected their people.
But the gathering became something greater than a tribute.
The elders realized that the events surrounding Zyvara could not simply become another story passed from one generation to the next. Too much had happened. Too much had been lost. And too much could be forgotten.
So they began recording what they knew.
The five races.
Their origins.
The powers that existed among them.
The battle against Zyvara.
The sealing of its soul.
The Onyx.
Azriel and Aurora.
And the bloodline that would eventually come from them.
The elders created a collection of ancient writings known as the Ancient Riddles.
They were not simple stories.
They preserved knowledge.
Generations later, scholars would study them to understand how their world had been formed, how the races had lived before kingdoms existed, and what had happened during the earliest days of their history.
But there was still something missing.
The land had never had a name.
It had been home to the five races for generations, yet no single name had ever been given to it.
The elders decided that it was time.
They gathered once more.
Together, they gave the land a name.
Aetheria.
For the first time, the unnamed land had an identity.
The name spread from one settlement to another.
From the forests to the mountains.
From the plains to the cliffs.
From the rivers to the sea.
The land was Aetheria.
And a new age began.
The elders who had once represented their people eventually became the first rulers of the kingdoms that rose across the land.
Kings.
Queens.
The first royal bloodlines were established.
The land was divided into five kingdoms.
Avaloria.
Ravaryn.
Tharion.
Cindervale.
Orynth.
Borders were drawn.
Palaces were built.
Thrones were established.
The races that had once lived across the same unnamed land now belonged to kingdoms of their own.
Yet the Ancient Riddles remained.
They were protected, studied, and passed down through generations.
As the centuries passed, the story of Azriel, Aurora, and Zyvara slowly changed.
For some, it became history.
For others, it became legend.
And for many, it became nothing more than an old tale told to children.
But the seal remained.
And so did the warning.
The crown could not belong to just anyone.
If it fell into the wrong hands, the ancient prison would begin to break.
Few people still remembered the reason.
Even fewer understood what the warning truly meant.
Time continued to move forward.
Kingdoms rose.
Families grew.
Bloodlines continued.
And the world moved further away from the events that had shaped it.
Until one night, centuries later, something changed.
***Kingdom Avaloria***
The royal palace was quiet.
Most of the kingdom had already fallen asleep beneath the night sky.
Inside the palace, however, one room remained awake.
The queen sat beside her newborn son, holding him carefully in her arms.
He was quiet.
Peaceful.
Completely unaware of the history that surrounded his bloodline.
The queen looked down at him with a small smile.
For a moment, everything seemed normal.
Then one of the candles flickered.
She looked up.
The flame bent to one side.
Then another candle flickered.
The queen frowned.
There was no wind.
The windows were closed.
Yet the flames continued to move.
She looked back at her son.
Something was different.
A faint glow had appeared against his palm.
The queen froze.
The glow grew brighter.
Then, before her eyes, a tiny flame appeared in the child's hand.
She stared at it.
Her breath caught.
Fire.
Not an ordinary flame.
A power that should have belonged only to the stories.
The queen slowly lowered her gaze to her son's hand.
She knew the Ancient Riddles.
She knew the story of Azriel.
She knew about the ancient bloodline.
For centuries, the power had been nothing more than a legend buried beneath generations of history.
Until now.
The queen looked at her child again.
The flame disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.
But she had seen it.
And she knew what it meant.
The ancient bloodline had awakened.
Far away from the palace, beyond the kingdom and deep beneath the land of Aetheria, another part of the old history remained untouched.
The Onyx was still there.
Silent.
Unmoving.
Holding the soul of a creature the world had almost forgotten.
Zyvara.
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