Vathis was a world of devouring gods and forgotten graves. A place where the sky never knew true light and the earth whispered with the voices of the damned.
A world where divinity was not eternal, but ravenous—where gods did not rule by birthright, but by the weight of their hunger.
And it was in this world of madness and hunger that Aeron Velorian was born.
A child of a priest and a heretic.
A child that should never have been.
And the New Gods would make sure he suffered for it.
---
The Priest and the Heretic
Aeron's father, Malik Velorian, was not merely a believer.
He was a vessel of faith, a man sculpted into devotion incarnate, his soul bound in servitude to a god who demanded not worship, but submission.
Ozrath, the Sleepless Tyrant.
An Old God, one of the fallen pantheon that had once ruled Vathis before the New Gods rose from the abyss and devoured their thrones.
Ozrath had once bound the world in law. He had forged the great chains that kept the heavens from splintering, had imposed order upon the chaos. But the New Gods had called it tyranny.
And so, in the God-War, they had cast him down.
But faith was not so easily extinguished.
Ozrath's name was forbidden, his temples burned, his worship driven into the shadows—but he had not been erased.
And Malik was one of his last faithful.
He had hunted the followers of the New Gods. He had waged the Devouring Wars, slaughtering those who dared to kneel to the usurpers. He had burned temples, razed empires, torn the tongues from the mouths of those who whispered the New Names.
But faith was not eternal.
And Malik had learned this truth too late.
For it had been in the depths of a ruined city, amidst the dying screams of a world being unmade, that he had met Elira—the woman who would unravel him.
The woman who should not have survived.
A scholar of the New Gods. A heretic to his faith.
And Malik had made the greatest mistake a disciple of a god could make.
He had hesitated.
---
The Heretic and the Forbidden Library
Elira Velorian had once been a scholar of the Forbidden Library.
She had once held the keys to truths that no god wished remembered.
And knowledge was a power far older than divinity.
She had seen the First Writings, the records that the Old Gods had sought to erase, the forgotten histories that whispered of a time before them—a time before hunger, a time before the world had become a thing of chains and conquest.
She had seen the writings of the Nameless Pantheon, of the ones who had shaped the world from the bones of the void, only to be torn from their thrones and devoured.
She had known.
And for that, she had been hunted.
For that, she had been branded heretic.
For that, she had been cast into Hollow's Reach, the city of the exiled, where the faithless were left to rot beneath the weight of the gods' indifference.
She should have died there.
But she had not.
And Malik had found her.
And that was where Aeron was born.
---
A House of Chains
Aeron did not grow up knowing kindness.
His world was a cage of stone and silence, built upon the bones of the faithless.
His father was a man of unyielding law, a man who saw strength as something that had to be forged in agony.
"Faith is not given. It is proven," Malik would whisper, his fingers tightening around Aeron's wrist like a shackle. "The weak pray for mercy. The strong endure without it."
And Malik would make sure Aeron endured.
His training began before he could walk.
Cold water at dawn. Prayers to a god who did not answer. Bare feet on broken glass. The Pit—a hole beneath their home, where the unworthy were left to rot.
"Three days." That was the command.
Three days in the dark.
Three days of hunger gnawing at his stomach like a rabid beast.
Three days of whispers that were not his own, of things in the void pressing against the edges of his mind.
Three days before his father pulled him out, his face blank, his voice like iron:
"You are not yet strong. But you will be."
Aeron did not understand.
Not at first.
But understanding was forced upon him.
---
The Heretic's Fear
His mother saw what his father did not.
She saw what lurked beneath Aeron's skin, what stirred in his blood, what twisted in the spaces between his thoughts.
She had felt it the first time he had cried, the first time she had looked into those golden eyes, the first time the air around him had shifted without cause.
She had seen it in the way shadows bent toward him, in the way his whispers carried weight, in the way his father looked at him like a prophet waiting to be carved into a weapon.
She had spent years hiding it.
But Malik had noticed.
"He is strong," Malik had said, his voice thick with zealotry. "Ozrath has blessed him."
But Elira knew better.
She knew what happened to those who bore gifts the gods had not given.
She had seen what happened to those who were too powerful.
The ones the New Gods feared.
And so, she made a choice.
A choice that would damn them both.
---
The Sealing
The night before Aeron's sixth birthday, his mother took him from their home.
She did not explain.
She only ran.
Through the streets of Hollow's Reach, through the ruins beneath the city—the graves of the Forgotten, where even the priests of the New Gods feared to tread.
"I love you, my son," she whispered, pressing her forehead against his. "And I will not let them take you from me."
And then she sealed him.
The spell was carved into his flesh, a brand upon his soul, a shackling of something vast and unknowable within him.
It was pain beyond pain—his bones turning to ice, his breath burning in his throat, his very existence shrinking into something less.
He screamed.
And when it was done—
He was empty.
The power that had once whispered beneath his skin was silent.
He was nothing but a boy.
"Forgive me," his mother sobbed, pressing a kiss to his forehead. "Forgive me for what I have taken."
But Aeron did not understand.
He only knew that something was missing.
And he would never know what it had been.
---
The Betrayal
She should have run faster.
She should have left him behind.
But she had waited too long.
The priests of the New Gods had followed them.
His father had followed them.
"Elira," Malik whispered, his voice like the crack of a whip. "What have you done?"
She pleaded.
She begged.
But Malik was not a man of mercy.
And the New Gods did not forgive.
The last thing Aeron saw before the chains wrapped around his throat was his mother's body breaking beneath divine fire.
And the last thing he felt—
Was nothing at all.