The world wasn't always darkness.
There was a time — a brief, dying whisper of a time — when light still fought to survive.
And her name was Arin Veyla.
The first time Arin bled, she was six years old.
She had trusted the wrong people —
smiled at the wrong faces —
believed in promises that tasted sweet and died bitter on her tongue.
Her parents, revered Guardians of Light, were betrayed by their closest allies —
sold to the Guild Lords for secrets they didn't even possess.
Murdered before her eyes.
Not because they were evil.
Because they were inconvenient.
Because they were in the way.
The Guilds didn't kill Arin that night.
They did something worse.
They left her alive.
A broken reminder.
A lesson.
A joke.
They branded her.
A shattered Sigil across her spine —
a cruel mark that chained her to the lowest pits of the Academy dungeons.
There, she was meant to rot.
To break.
To forget.
But Arin did not break.
Not completely.
Somewhere deep inside her tattered heart,
a spark survived.
A stubborn, defiant spark.
Years passed.
She grew stronger —
not through rage.
Through sacrifice.
Through pain.
Through the unbearable, endless choice to hope when every voice told her to despair.
While others sought forbidden powers to conquer,
Arin stole fragments of forbidden Guardian Contracts —
ancient Light Sigils sealed away even by the Guilds themselves.
Magic that could heal.
Magic that could shield.
Magic that could save others —
at the cost of her own flesh, her own life, her own soul.
The first time she used it,
she was fifteen.
The Guild Warden's whip cracked through the air,
aimed at a boy too slow to kneel.
Without thinking, without planning,
Arin stepped between them.
The whip — layered with death curses — should have torn her apart.
Instead, it struck a shield of pure blinding light.
Her body screamed in agony as the forbidden Sigil ignited her blood.
Her bones fractured.
Her muscles tore.
Her heart faltered.
But she did not fall.
The boy lived.
She survived.
Barely.
And from that moment forward,
a myth began to grow in the forgotten places:
The Girl of Light.
The Last Defender.
The Silent Hope.
Arin never sought glory.
Never sought revenge.
She simply refused to let the world devour the last remnants of kindness.
Even as it devoured her piece by piece.
And somewhere deep within the abyssal currents of the collapsing world,
a second myth was rising.
A King of Ruin.
A Sovereign of Darkness.
Two destinies, born from the same rot.
Two answers to the same betrayal.
Two weapons forged by grief.
They did not know each other yet.
But fate had already written their collision into the bones of the universe.
One would fall.
One would rise.
Or perhaps both would burn.
Far away, as Asura's abyssal coronation shattered cities,
Arin Veyla stood on a broken wall at the edge of the ruins,
watching the night bleed into the sky.
Her hands trembled.
Not from fear.
From understanding.
From inevitability.
She whispered into the cold air,
as if speaking to a ghost she had not yet met:
"**If you are the end…
Then I will be the last to fall.**"
The winds carried her vow into the dying night.
And the world shuddered,
knowing that its final war had begun.