**Prologue: The Fall of Eden**
The apocalypse arrived not with a whimper, but with a symphony of screams. Skies that once blushed with dawn's gold now hung like a funeral shroud, smoldering clouds bruising the heavens with their rot. The earth, cracked and blistered, exhaled plumes of ash that clung to the ruins of cities—skeletal remains of steel and glass clawing at the void. And in the silence between thunder's growl, the world mourned what it had lost: life, light, the fragile lie of order.
Yet amid the desolation, a boy moved.
Marverick Daveson, barely fourteen, dragged his boots through cinder and bone, his threadbare coat flapping like the wings of a wounded crow. His face, smudged with soot and defiance, betrayed no fear—only the sharp glint of a mind forged in survival. Hunger carved his ribs, but curiosity kept him alive. It was that hunger that led him to the carcass of the Old Library, its vaulted ceilings collapsed like a fallen titan. There, beneath rubble and the ghostly fingers of dead ivy, he found *it*: a leather-bound tome, its cover etched with symbols that writhed under his touch like serpents.
The book *breathed*.
When Marverick pried it open, the pages burned cold against his skin. Words slithered into his vision, not ink but liquid shadow, whispering secrets older than empires. *Angels*, they hissed. *Demons*. Not myths, but architects of this ruin. The air thickened as he read, the ground shuddering as if the earth itself recoiled from the truth. The war between heaven and hell had never ended—it had merely retreated, festering in the cracks of reality. And humanity? Collateral. A temporary stain scrubbed clean by divine indifference.
But as Marverick staggered back into the wasteland, the tome clutched to his chest, the shadows *stirred*. They coiled around his ankles, viscous and alive, as whispers slithered into his ears—not from the wind, but from the dark. *"They see you,"* the voices crooned, a chorus of razors and rot. *"The Thrones. The Seraphim. The Horde. You carry their death, little moth. You carry their spark."*
Above, the clouds fractured. A shaft of sulfurous light speared the ground, and in its glare, silhouettes flickered: winged behemoths with eyes like dying stars, and things with too many teeth, their laughter a cancer in the air. The veil had frayed. The guardians of paradise and the architects of perdition were coming—for him, for the book, for the last flicker of a world they'd failed to erase.
Marverick's breath hitched. Not in fear, but in fury. This was not his end. It was a beginning, carved in blood and shadow. Somewhere in the ruins, a spark ***crackled***—not of hope, but of reckoning. Let the angels descend. Let the demons rise. They would learn what a boy with nothing left to lose could do.
The game was set. The pawns were moving. And the apocalypse? It had only just begun.