The Paduk continued:
"In the forest, the boy sought refuge beneath a great fallen tree—its bark stripped and body hollowed by years unseen.
The blood-suckers scattered, their hunger briefly sated, but the venom still clung to him. His vision dimmed, growing clouded and sharp with pain.
And still, he ran—through thorns, shadow, and silence—stopping only when fate itself seemed to strike.
A tree, heavy with rot and malice, came crashing down upon him—as though the land itself sought to halt his journey.
This time, it was not the cuts or welts that made him scream, but the sickening snap of bone. Trapped beneath its weight, the boy could do nothing but cry out into the dead wood of the forest.
Yet the cry did not go unanswered.
From within the undergrowth, drawn by the scream and the crash, came the night hunters of the Morrier family. They found the boy broken, barely conscious, and claimed him without a word. Their eldest daughter, infertile and their son, slain at the hands of their rivals.
So they took the boy as their own.
And now, Li… we move to the tale of another child"
Li swallowed, and blinked. The heat of the sun was washing over him now.
Just like the other boy, this child too was born into hardship—raised upon an impoverished world. Yet unlike the first, he dwelled not in utter isolation, but amidst the ragged threads of civilization's outer weave. His name bore a gentleness, a serenity that had once soothed him in times of unrest—especially in those early days, when he discovered powers he had never sought nor desired.
He had been a quiet, soft-spoken child, delicate as dusk. But as the weight of his gifts bore down upon him, he changed. The hush gave way to fire; from still waters he became storm—brash and oblivious.
And now, the tale begins when he meets his first love.
It was a clear night, though clarity on this world meant only that the clouds of red smoke were momentarily still. Unlike the Lost World, where night came in silence, here it arrived beneath a sky of crimson unrest, ever-churning with storms and strange winds.
The boy stood alone upon the outer balconies of the community tower—one of many titanic spires housing near a million of his kind… your kind. And on this night, as he gazed upwards, he beheld a meteor more graceful than any before. It danced through the scarlet skies, and something in his heart reached out to it—yearning, just as the other boy once dreamed.
It would be two long years before he saw it again.
But when he did, it did not merely pass overhead—it fell. It landed upon the very balcony where he once stood in longing. And from that descent, she emerged.
The girl. With a smile that shattered the silence within him.
Her face bore the scars of a chase long and brutal, and her heart bore wounds he could not yet see. But from the moment he saw her, he knew—he was not alone in this suffering.
And though he did not yet understand it… she loved him too.
Each night after, she returned to the sky from which she came, vanishing as dawn crept in. Their time was stolen, borrowed from fate, and destined to end. One day, the enforcers came—cold, unrelenting servants of law. They entered his dwelling while she was there, and though she carried herself swiftly to the sky, he could not follow.
Before they seized him, he turned to her and spoke his final words:
"Keep them safe."
For cultivating a power he had never asked for, the boy was condemned.
Fifty thousand years.
That was his sentence—enslaved to serve his captors, forced to hunt other children like himself under threat of torment and death.
Two years passed in this shadowed servitude before he broke free.
Along his flight he found allies—others who bore the same brand, the same pain. Together, they fled, rebelled, and hid. And though now a fugitive, the boy returned to the one he loved. She, too, had been working in silence—helping children escape the chains of the enforcers, keeping the flame alive.
Every day, they saved another. Every night, they bought time for the hidden ones to live another dawn.
But the world does not spare the brave.
In their deepest moment—in the hour of his final capture—she came to save him.
And in doing so… she died.
Felled by the very hands that once bound him, her blood now stained the Covenant he had never accepted.
And so, the boy—no longer a boy—raised his head to the storm and swore beneath the shattered sky:
He would bring their empire to ash."