Solara was no ordinary Keeper: she was the Founder, the primordial architect of the Dream Realm itself, the weaver of visions who had given that world of reverie both form and purpose.
Hers was not a tale of training or gradual discovery, but of an almost divine birth — a consciousness that had risen from the deep collective slumber of humankind.
She was the first and the most powerful of the Keepers, the one who, through sheer will, had raised the Deep Foundations and established the laws governing the balance between waking and dreaming.
Her purpose was both simple and magnificent: to create a sanctuary for the mind — a place where the soul could rest, heal, and find inspiration.
For millennia, she had watched over the Dream Realm, weaving the threads of human stories, shielding dreams from dissonance and chaos. She was revered — almost a goddess — a legendary figure whose existence was intertwined with the very life of the Keepers and the stability of the waking world.
But even the most solid foundations can erode. Legends tell of a time of great suffering in the waking world — an age of wars and calamities that brought forth a wave of despair so vast it threatened to swallow the Dream Realm itself.
It was then that the Ash emerged: a dark blight, an entity of pure negation that began to seep into the Dream Realm, draining dreams, turning vitality into emptiness. It was not a malice born of Solara, but an external aberration — an anomaly.
In her attempt to protect her realm and the souls within it, Solara dove deeper than ever before into the flow of dreams, facing this new and terrifying plague directly. The Founder did not waver — she fought the Ash with all her immense power.
For a time, the battle hung in fragile balance — her light against the devouring shadow. Every act of hers was aimed at halting the advance of corruption, sealing the fissures through which the Ash poured.
But the Ash was unlike anything she had faced before. It could not be defeated by force nor by dreamcraft. It was void — an insatiable hunger for nonexistence. In her desperate attempt to contain it, to absorb its destruction and keep it from spreading, Solara overreached.
Her essence, though pure and powerful, was not invulnerable to prolonged exposure to nothingness itself.
And then, the unthinkable happened.
It was not an act of sudden ruin, but a slow, inescapable corrosion. The Ash she sought to stop began to seep into her, corroding her very soul. Slowly, the Founder's light dimmed, her intentions twisted. Her will became the will of the Ash; her compassion curdled into indifference.
She did not become the Ash — but she was so deeply infused and altered by it that she became its vessel, its most potent manifestation.
The Deep Foundations, her masterpiece, became the heart of the blight because Solara — now corrupted — still dwelled at its core. Her power, once a source of life and creation, now fed the spread of the Ash, not by choice, but because her very essence had been compromised.
Her mind, once lucid and all-seeing, was trapped in an endless nightmare — a distorted echo of her desire for peace. Until the First Keepers sealed her away from the Deep Foundations during one of her incursions into the world of dreams. They cast a powerful dreambinding spell that barred the Founder from reentering the Academy.
The elder Keepers, like Master Elian, knew only fragments of this tragic truth. They knew the Founder had been "lost" — that she had become the very threat they fought against. But the weight of that truth — that their own origin had been so cruelly betrayed and twisted by the Ash — was nearly unbearable.
Solara, the being who had once been pure light and creation, was now a hollow shell — a puppet of the Ash. She had no intact consciousness, no benevolent intent. She had become both its greatest victim and its most powerful instrument of ruin.
For the Keepers, hope no longer meant victory in battle, but perhaps — somehow — to free her from corruption, or to isolate her before her tainted power consumed the Dream Realm… and with it, the waking world.
Her story was the key to understanding the present threat — her tragic, warped sacrifice, the root of every nightmare plaguing existence.
Thus, the Academy became known as "The Academy of Shattered Dreams." Over generations, the Keepers specialized in mending the dreams shattered by Solara and the Ash.
Yet as the struggle dragged on, it became clear that the Ash was not merely an external corruption — it fed upon the essence of the Keepers themselves.
One by one, the bravest defenders of the Dream Realm began to fall — not by blade nor spell, but by erosion. Their dreams, their memories, their very purpose — slowly consumed from within.
There were three paths by which a Keeper became a Dark Guardian.
The first was Despair. Those who lingered too long in ravaged dreamscapes, surrounded by the echoes of broken minds, began to lose faith. The endless struggle, without any glimpse of victory, eroded their resolve. At first, it was mere exhaustion — then apathy — until their dreams went silent.
The Ash crept in through that silence, filling the void left by lost hope. Their once-luminous eyes dimmed to a deep crimson; their skin, pale as moonlight, cracked like burnt parchment. Inside them, emotion flattened into hunger — a yearning for stillness, for an end to all motion, to all feeling.
The second path was Pride. Some Keepers believed they could master the Ash — wield it as a weapon, bend the darkness to protect the Dream Realm. But the Ash cannot be mastered; it devours. The moment they opened themselves to its power, it whispered promises of control and strength, wrapping their souls in chains of shadow. Their bodies contorted, their forms stretched like smoke trapped within fragile flesh. Their voices echoed in two tones — their own, and the whisper of the Ash beneath, mocking every word.
The third was Isolation. There were Keepers who fought alone too long, severed from the resonance of their companions. The Dream Realm thrives on connection — and when that link fades, the soul grows weak. The Ash seeps through solitude, slipping into the fractures of the heart. These Keepers did not scream or fight when it claimed them — they simply stopped dreaming. Their forms dissolved into mist and reformed as Dark Guardians, clad in armor of obsidian glass, with eyes burning not with hatred — but with the agony of memory.
The transformation was never immediate.
It began with the flicker of their Dreamfire — the inner light that defined each Keeper. Once golden or azure, it dimmed, trembling like a dying ember. Then came the pain — not of flesh, but of the soul being rewritten. They remembered every dream they had healed, every life they had touched — and watched them crumble to dust. Their screams were silent in the Dream Realm, swallowed by the Ash, echoing only in the nightmares of those who remained.
To witness such a fall was to lose a part of oneself. The remaining Keepers began to fear the same fate, wondering whether resistance was even possible — or if the Ash was merely waiting, patient and inevitable, to claim them all in time.
And so, though the Academy of Shattered Dreams endured, its halls grew emptier, its lights fainter. For every dream repaired, another Keeper was lost — reborn as a Dark Guardian, a reflection of all they had once sworn to protect.
But how much longer could they endure the assaults of Solara and the Ash?
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