Prologue: Ashes of a Forgotten World

  The planet his parents once called home — the world he never truly knew — had turned into a living, sentient machine. It policed the remnants of civilization with unfeeling precision, its skies stitched with metallic eyes, its soil humming with the pulse of something ancient and predatory.

  Caelus stood among the ruins, where the earth cracked and smoked like the last breath of a dying god. They spoke once of fields and oceans, of laughter and peace. But he had only heard the screams of war, only known the endless cycles of planetary decay. The sky was not blue here. It bled.

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  As he came to the ridge that revealed the path ahead — the final walk toward the Coders and Soul-Stealers who had enslaved the world — he believed the journey was ending.

  He thought this was the last step in a long war.

  He hoped either to die in their halls or to stand atop their corpses.

  He did not know that beyond that corridor, something ancient waited for him.

  Something older than war.

  Something that did not seek his death — only his decision.

  For ten long years, he had fought the living world. As a boy, he had been broken by fists meant to protect him. As a man, he rose — not to reclaim what was lost, but to end the betrayal that life itself had become.

  Tonight, he would reach the ones who controlled the world’s soul. The coders. The architects of the nightmare.

  He would not beg.

  He would not speak.

  He would destroy.

  But within the hollow halls of the enemy, buried under the weight of countless fallen empires, he would find something more. Something ancient. Something waiting.

  The world thought it had extinguished him.

  It had only awakened him.