The World Pillar, Eldros, does not breathe. It pulses.

  Seven times since the dawn of the manifest, a wave of Primal Aether had washed over the reality-canvas, anchoring the stories of men to the spine of the universe. To the architects of the Seven Citadels, these pulses were life itself. But to seven-year-old Leo, standing on the obsidian balcony of the Oblivion Spire, the eighth pulse felt like a warning.

  “I’m coming, Leo," his father’s voice echoed in his mind—a telepathic thread woven from the very Aether they commanded.

  Leo gripped the stone railing. His father, the man the world called the Beacon of Oblivion, was currently leagues away on a subjugation mission. Yet, the air around the Spire was beginning to hum. The primal Aether—the volatile, all-encompassing energy unique to their bloodline—was reacting to his father’s sheer willpower.

  Down in the Great Ward, Leo’s mother screamed. It wasn't a scream of pain, but of transition. A new life was pushing its way into the Prime Continuum.

  "I'm opening the gate," his father’s mental voice surged with a desperate, joyous heat. "I won't miss this. Not for all the voids in Eldros."

  High above the Spire, the sky began to bleed gold. A circular rift, perfect and radiant, tore through the atmosphere—the signature portal of an Oblivion Master. Leo saw his father’s silhouette on the other side, a titan of a man stepping through the fabric of space to reach his newborn son.

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  But then, the universe flinched.

  For every action in the Prime, there is a debt. For every joy, a shadow. As the golden portal widened, the air turned rancid. A second sound—not a hum, but a shriek—shattered the silence of the Citadel.

  A jagged, obsidian tear manifested directly behind the golden ring. It didn't look like magic; it looked like a wound. It was the Hollow Continuum. It was the Echo of a Sin that hadn't even been committed yet—the sin of a father reaching too far, loving too much, and breaking the laws of sequence to do it.

  "Father!" Leo screamed, his small hands igniting with a flickering, unstable Aether.

  He watched the nightmare unfold in slow motion. The golden portal didn't close—it was consumed. The black rift acted like a cosmic vacuum, its gravity fueled by the collective suffering of a billion "Hollow" souls.

  His father was caught in the middle. One hand was reaching toward the Citadel, toward the cry of the newborn Sora. The other was being swallowed by the jagged black ink of the Hollow.

  In that heartbeat, the sky changed. The "Script" of the world seemed to stutter. Beings—monstrous, distorted reflections of Architects—began to pour out of the black rift like bile from a stomach.

  The miracle of Sora’s birth had just become the dinner bell for the multiverse of Sin.

  Leo fell to his knees as the pressure of the Dual Portal crushed the air from his lungs. His father’s silhouette vanished into the black, his reaching hand the last thing to go.

  The "Peak" had fallen. The Shadow remained.