Eryshae

  Prologue: The Seven That Fell

  In the beginning, there was only Law.

  Not kindness. Not cruelty. Not warmth, nor void; only the cold symmetry of balance.

  A single perfect equation stretched across the face of nonexistence, unbroken and eternal.

  It was not life.

  It was not death.

  It simply was.

  Then came the Crack.

  A fracture in that which could not fracture.

  A sliver of Will where none should exist.

  From that impossibility came Desire.

  And with Desire, choice.

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  From choice came the First Sin.

  They did not call themselves gods; not at first.

  They were architects, parasites, dreamers.

  They fed on the fracture. They multiplied. They fought.

  They carved names into the nameless and bled meaning into the meaningless.

  And with every act of creation, they etched imperfection deeper into the lattice of reality.

  And so the Seven Wounds were made:

  Pride, the Treant’s Roar, who declared himself above all and fell first from the Seat of Unity into Limbo.

  Envy, the Green Mirror, who drank another’s beauty and shattered their own.

  Wrath, the Burning Fang, whose hatred carved the first scar into the dark.

  Sloth, the Hollow Root, who watched all others toil and became the first grave.

  Greed, the Devouring Maw, who gnawed meaning into value and life into hunger.

  Gluttony, the Endless Feast, who drowned paradise in want.

  Lust, the Crimson Bloom, who turned harmony into longing—and longing into ruin.

  They fell.

  Or they were cast down.

  No one remembers.

  Their names became rot. Their dreams, poison.

  Their bones seeded the realms with echoes.

  And in the wake of that divine collapse, the worlds twisted.

  Not into order.

  But into rot.

  Not into meaning.

  But into myth.

  Among the cracks and roots of ancient soil, something stirs.

  Not a god. Not a monster.

  What was once a man.

  Sam Faeloc.

  He was not meant to find the Seed.

  He was not meant to bleed upon it.

  He was not meant to return to the place before time.

  And yet; he will awaken the First Root.

  He will crack the bark of the Old Dream.

  He will take the shape of what he was never meant to be.

  This is no tale of heroes.

  This is no tale of redemption.

  This is the tale of a man who touches eternity;

  and becomes something else.

  The forest remembers.

  The Seed waits.

  And the roots… hunger.