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Chapter 1 - The Silence of Stars

The sky had not spoken in seven years.

To the villagers of Thalen's Reach, that silence meant little. The rains still fell in spring, the sun still baked the harvest golden in autumn. But to Caelara, high atop the cliffs of Vael'Shara where the wind carved songs into stone, the silence was a scream.

She was the Last Oracle—marked by a sigil of starlight that shimmered beneath her skin, haunted by visions she could no longer trust. The stars, once her guides, now flickered erratically, as though resisting the very fate they had once shaped. And fate, it seemed, had grown weary of Virelia.

Her sanctuary, once a thriving temple to the goddess Virelle, had crumbled into ivy-covered ruins. Her acolytes had fled long ago, taken by plague or despair or the seduction of the false prophets rising in every dying city. Only Caelara remained, cloaked in solitude and silence.

That night, as the crimson moon rose—a harbinger of calamity in every ancient tome—Caelara felt the stirrings of prophecy again. Not in the stars, nor in the wind, but in the tremble of the earth beneath her feet.

It began with a whisper.

"The Harrow comes."

The words etched themselves across her mind like fire in parchment. She fell to her knees, hands pressed to the moss-covered stone. Images flooded her—cities burning, oceans turning to ash, children crying into a void that offered no answer. And standing at the center of it all, a figure cloaked in shadows and flame.

The Harrow.

She did not know who—or what—it was. But she saw clearly that it would end the world.

Unless she stopped it.

But how could she? Her visions were fractured, her voice ignored, her name all but forgotten.

Then she saw him.

A boy.

A spark in the dark.

His eyes mirrored the old gods—golden, fierce, filled with unyielding hope. He was not of any kingdom she knew, dressed in rags and crowned by the wind itself.

He was the key.

The vision faded. Caelara gasped, the cold air biting her lungs. She looked to the horizon, where distant storm clouds gathered.

The world had begun to end.

And her journey to save it had just begun.

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