Prologue: Feytryn Halifax

  Time: Unknown, Day: Unknown, Week: Unknown, Month: Unknown, Year: Unknown

  The air in my secluded sanctum crackled, heavy with a power I'd spent centuries meticulously cultivating. Every fiber of my being hummed with it, a symphony of Primal Class Founding Stones pulsating around me. I could feel their raw, untamed energy thrumming through my veins, a dangerous but exhilarating current. Confidence swelled within me, a bitter antidote to the crushing weight of every failure, every single loss I’d endured. This was it. The culmination of everything. The way back. The way to rewrite the fates of those I’d failed, to turn back the clock before Aranthu’s monstrous army ever darkened the sky over my village.

  I stretched my essence, pulling the disparate magics together. Light exploded, blinding and deafening, a roar that wasn't a sound but a sensation tearing through my mind. My head felt like it would split apart. Then, through the searing white, a presence coalesced. It was a vast, formless shadow, a void that absorbed all light, yet somehow shone. Two points of deep, blood-red light pierced the darkness – its eyes. My breath hitched. Was it real? Or had the sheer magnitude of the magic simply shattered my perception?

  A voice, not heard with my ears but echoing directly within my skull, a thousand whispers and a single booming command all at once, granted my wish. I felt... nothing. No surge of power, no sudden insight. Just a terrifying, hollow emptiness. And then, the pain. A searing, white-hot agony erupted in my chest as a shadowy tendril, born from the formless being, plunged into me. I gagged, a metallic tang filling my mouth – my own blood. My vision swam. I could only watch, paralyzed, as my heart, still beating, still mine, was torn from my chest. The taste of copper choked me. And then, the unthinkable. It brought my heart to its shadowy maw and consumed it, right in front of my dying eyes. Betrayal, confusion, and a pain beyond anything I’d ever known, consumed me whole.

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  Then, the cold nothingness.

  I awoke to terror. My body, or what felt like my body, was constricted, bound. My wings, my limbs—shackled. Panic flared, a frantic bird trapped in a cage. And then, the realization: I couldn't see. A blindfold, impossibly affixed, clung to my face. I clawed at it, but my hands passed through it, through me. Disorientation swamped me, followed by an overwhelming sense of anxiety. What was this place?

  A world of pure, blinding white stretched before me, an endless expanse of nothingness. But it wasn't empty. Curled on the ground, small and vulnerable, was a boy. He was crying, his tiny frame wracked with sobs. My essence, free despite my constraints, reached out instinctively. As I touched him, a connection flared, brilliant and instantaneous. He was a Nephalem. And in that single moment, every single one of his possible futures slammed into my awareness, a kaleidoscope of destinies, joys, sorrows, triumphs, and failures. It was too much, too fast, a torrent of lives, all at once.

  This... this was the wish. Not control over fate, but to be fate. My essence, immortal now, woven into the very fabric of every Nephalem. The endless white around me was his soul, and countless others. I was everywhere, yet nowhere. Forever tethered.

  — The Curator’s Notes —

  Next chapter arrives when the shadows permit.