At the top of this unstable and unjust world, the Church reigns supreme.
Its consecrated warriors, the Marshals, wear heavy cloaks embroidered with the symbol of the Five Rays. They are said to have killed more heretics than the plagues themselves.
The Prophets read souls as others read palms, and their word is law. But their most cruel influence lies in sorting children.
In the villages, every birth is followed by a visit. A nun in a white veil, a priest, and two soldiers come together.
When a child shows a Gift, the crowd holds its breath.
"Congratulations," the priest says with a frozen smile. "Your child has a gift for magic. He will serve the Cities."
The baby is taken away before the mother has a chance to name him. Those without a gift are despised.
Or they disappear.
Then there's the Tower of the Virgin. Its name alone is enough to silence conversation.
An old man from the village of Blue Rose whispers, "They...They are the true angels of the church, Not the ones in prayers, but the ones who bring only misfortune."
The knights of the Tower do not speak. They show neither their faces nor their names. Their armor is so white that one might think it was woven from light. Yet, where they pass, death remains, not light.
However, despite the stifling reign of the Church, a few embers of life remained.
Far from the golden cities, after walking for several days through dry hills and dusty paths, a small valley appeared.
There lay the Village of the Blue Rose. It was a name that had become a bitter joke because not a single blue rose had bloomed there in decades.
The inhabitants plowed soil as hard as bone and pulled up stones more often than roots. A gray river flowed slowly on the edge of the village, carrying water with a metallic taste that mirrored the perpetually threatening sky.
The villagers lived with silent caution. Some said the valley was blessed; others said it was cursed.
But they all agreed on one thing: there was a hut that should never be approached, the hut of Baba Amhera.
The Witch.
One autumn evening, as the fields lay dormant under a cold wind, two farmers passed by the river.
"There's smoke coming from the old woman's house again," whispered one farmer, clenching his hand on the wheelbarrow's handle.
"Leave her alone. If she wants to call on the spirits, let her do so as long as she stays away from us."
They quickened their pace and looked away. No one approached Baba. She was respected and feared.
Silence reigned supreme. It was an almost supernatural silence that absorbed the slightest breeze. Only the crackling of a dying fire smoldering in the hearth broke the stillness. And sometimes, the painful wheezing of a breath.
Hayden lay on a mattress of coarse straw, wrapped in a rough fur blanket.
Once a boy who ran through the hills like a deer, he was now nothing more than a frail figure at 22. His usually luminous black skin had become dull. His lips were cracked and his gaze was lost in a feverish haze.
He hadn't eaten in three days and hadn't been able to get up in two.
His ankle bracelets, thin braided leather straps crossed with red threads, the ends of which were decorated with pieces of charcoal, itched intensely. Yet they were his only anchor.
Without them, he defied gravity. He floated above the ground as if refusing to belong to the earth.
It was a strange gift that Baba assumed was linked to a magical imbalance or anomaly.
It was a difference she fiercely hid from the priests. Hayden opened his eyes. The hut spun around him, but he could make out the figure leaning over the fire. Baba Amhera, with her knees pulled up to her chin, was motionless, like a dark wooden statue. Her dark eyes were fixed on the flames, but Hayden knew she was listening to him and had been watching over him during his sleepless nights.
"Baba..." he whispered, his voice thin and broken.
She turned her head slightly.
"My little one. Save your strength."
But Hayden shook his head weakly.
"I'm in pain," he whispered.
He placed a trembling hand on his chest.
"Not here...somewhere else."
He couldn't describe the pain with words. It wasn't the hunger of an empty stomach. It was a primal hunger, a call from the depths of his being.
It was a void crying out for something heavy, warm, and alive. Perhaps blood, but he couldn't even comprehend the thought.
Baba stood up.
Her wrinkled skin had the texture of old leather and was marked by decades of spells, vigils, and held-back tears. Her white hair, tied in a chaotic bun, was studded with chicken bones, dull beads, and talismans that jingled faintly.
She knelt beside him and placed a trembling hand on his forehead.
A shiver ran through her.
"By the Ancestors, you're burning," she whispered.
A tear, as rare as gold in this valley, slid down her wrinkled cheek.
Hayden looked at her, confused and frightened.
"Baba, what's happening to me?"
She closed her eyes.
When she spoke, her voice lacked its usual firmness.
It was filled with sadness.
"You are not made for this world, my child."
She stroked his hair with an almost maternal gentleness.
"This world rejects you because it does not understand you."
A gust of wind hit the hut. The fire flickered.
Above Hayden, an invisible shadow seemed to quiver as if the very air were holding its breath.
Baba Amhera remained motionless for a long moment, her hand clenched around the small leather pouch that she had just taken from the old wicker trunk. The leather was so worn that it seemed to hold the whispers of all who had touched it before her.
Her usually lively gaze trembled with terror.
"I swore..." she whispered in a broken voice. "I swore I would never do it again."
Hayden, lying on his bed, frowned. The memories were slipping away, but he knew this story, the one Baba always refused to finish.
Five years earlier, she had been summoned by the City of the East. They had asked her to read the future of Senna, a young elite and the only daughter of Dame Maria, the Mother of the Tower of the Virgin.
However, the divination came to nothing; an ancient being lurked behind the veil of destiny and crossed her vision. It was a shapeless shadow with a dark, purple gaze.
Since that day, Baba had given up divination.
She broke her habits and renounced her rituals. The Shadow, she said, had never really left her.
But now she had no choice.
The remedies of the valley did not help Hayden. The plants, the infusions, the prayers, nothing could reach the silent evil devouring her adopted grandson.
She did not understand the nature of the fever burning him or the strange hunger drying him up from within. Without understanding it, she couldn't save him. So, for the first time in five years, Baba reopened her trunk.
She spread a piece of black cloth, stained with wax and white dust, on the floor. She unrolled her sacred tools with respectful slowness.
There was a deck of cards carved from thin ivory plates and engraved with ancient runes; a bowl of dark water with no reflection on its surface; and a handful of pale gray ashes, like bones.
Hayden watched her, his eyes heavy with fever.
"No, Baba, don't do that," he whispered imploringly. "Don't do it again. You said it attracts something evil."
She did not answer.
Her silence was heavier than anything she could have said.
She dipped her fingers into the bowl and slowly traced archaic symbols on the hearthstone. The icy wind seeping through the cracks seemed to stop suddenly, as if holding its breath.
Then she closed her eyes.
Her lips began to murmur words that no human ear was meant to hear. The hoarse, trembling words snaked through the air, as ancient as the world itself.
The atmosphere thickened and the fire flickered.
Hayden felt an invisible pressure squeezing his chest.
Finally, Baba took the ivory cards between her gnarled fingers. She shuffled them; the plates clattered like small bones. Then she threw them onto the black cloth.
The divination began. Outside, the sky changed color.
At the exact moment the last card hit the cloth, a sharp noise pierced the silence.
Like a tear.
The light outside suddenly went out, leaving the valley in a premature storm.
Baba Amhera was seized by a violent spasm. Her muscles stiffened as if an invisible force were pulling on each tendon until it snapped. The symbols she had traced on the ground lit up dark red and pulsed like an exposed heart before collapsing into smoke.
The wind howled, lightning flashed, and thunder rumbled.
Embers swirled and flew up to the ceiling like frantic fireflies.
"Baba!" Hayden cried out, sitting up despite his fever.
But Baba could no longer hear him. His body shook and his head tilted back.
A thin trickle of blood ran from her nose, not a stream, but a trace. It was a sign that her mind had crossed a threshold it should never have reached.
She was in a trance.
She could no longer see the hut, let alone its wooden walls or straw mat.
She was floating in an immense, boundless space where lightning tore through a black sky without pause.
A low rumble filled the air, like a drum beaten by spirits.
She saw the sacred cities. Not as they were, standing tall and shining, but as they would become:They were collapsed, in ruins, and silent. A crater of broken stone.
The Marshals, giants of authority, lay motionless like dolls. The once invincible Tower of the Virgin crumbled under the assault of indistinct figures.
Though the blood was not shown, she could sense its weight and smell it in the air of her visions.
The Proletarian Lands were becoming fields of corpses, traversed by an implacable, dark will.
She desperately searched for a glimmer of hope. That was when she saw the source.
A figure stood at the center of the chaos. It was a malevolent, terrible being, as terrifying as a living storm.
Its dark skin, marked with ancient tattoos, seemed woven from raw magic. Its glowing purple eyes devoured the light around it.
She held a ball of dark purple wool in her hands. It was heavy and seemed to be alive. Gigantic needles escaped from it and moved on their own, weaving luminous threads through her vision.
He smiled.
It was not a cruel smile, but a confident one, the smile of someone following a plan written long ago.
His voice needed no words. It entered Baba's mind directly, like a thunderclap:
"You seek healing, old witch . . . you have found only death."
The Shadow.
The Shadow from five years ago.
The being who had observed her divination of Senna. It was him. He had returned.
"The child you took in was not born of this world. He is a Voyager. A wandering spirit, bloodthirsty. His illness is not an illness. It is his nature calling for what it has lost."
A glimmer appeared in the vision: Hayden, transformed.
He was no longer weak or sick. He descended from the sky, surrounded by an overwhelming magical aura. When he touched the earth, the laws of the world shattered around him, not in bloody, explicit images, but in a total implosion of everything that existed.
Aël reached out to Baba, who was still in shock. Seven tarot cards appeared in his closed fist.
• The Fate Weaver
• The Death Seller
• The Voyager
• The Healer
• The Fallen Angel
• The Frost Eater
• The Sand Maker
The Seven Forgers of Evil.
"Two centuries ago, the Church genocide and locked my people away in stone. They took our souls, our bodies, and our names. I demand justice! You cannot undo what I have wrought."
His gaze sharpened.
"Your grandson will join me. I have come for him...and the others."
The vision shattered. A column of light fell from the sky, and lightning struck above the hut.
Baba was thrown backward, torn from her trance as if her soul had been ripped from her body. The black cloth slipped from the mattress. The cards rolled across the floor, scattered like ominous bones.
She coughed violently, her body shaking with spasms.
"Baba!" Hayden tried to support her. "What's happening?!"
She placed a trembling hand on his shoulder and gently pushed him away. She had to see for herself. She had to confirm what she sensed. She dragged herself to the skylight of the hut and looked up at the sky.
The clouds were swirling. Not naturally, but in a spiral, as if an invisible force had torn the fabric of the world.
Between two gaps, a ray of sunlight fell straight down, frozen like an accusing finger.
A magical tear, an opening. A call.
Baba Amhera swallowed, her eyes wide.
"The end is near..." she whispered.
His words sounded like fate. Baba Amhera stood frozen for a moment, breathless and still clouded by Aël's visions. The echo of the Weaver's voice reverberated in her mind like a death knell.
But when she looked at Hayden, terror gave way to fierce resolve. She couldn't tell him the truth.
Not that he was a Spirit, nor that he wasn't born in this world, nor that his destiny was that of a cosmic predator.
No, she had to save him. Even if it meant lying to fate itself.
"Honey," she said breathlessly, "you have to get up. Now."
Hayden tried to respond, but his throat was dry.
"I...I'm too weak, Baba..."
"No!" she cried, cutting him off.
Her voice was hoarse, like old wood, and it echoed through the hut. Her determination was palpable.
"We have to find another place to live. Anywhere but here."
Hayden wiped the sweat from his forehead and tried to understand.
"Baba, what did you see? What's going on?
She shook her head sharply.
"He knows where to find me, to find us."
Her voice trembled slightly.
"He knows where we live. We can't stay here any longer."
She quickly and almost nervously gathered up the ivory cards and sacred tools and put them away in the leather pouch. With each talisman, ash, and card put away, it seemed like a step against fate.
"Get ready, Hayden. No questions."
She pointed to the door with a dry, authoritative finger.
"We're leaving now."
The young man wanted to protest, but suddenly, the earth shook beneath them. There was a distant rumbling, like a muffled cry from the mountains.
In the village, dogs began to bark. Even the gray river seemed to pause for a moment, as if the world were holding its breath. Hundreds of kilometers away, in the immaculate corridors of the Tower of the Virgin, magic tore like overstretched fabric.
The Master Prophet, an old man dressed in white whose blue eyes seemed to see through souls, was slowly walking towards the relic room when an invisible shockwave hit him head-on.
He collapsed onto the marble floor, wind knocked out of him. His disciples rushed toward him, but they did not have time to touch him.
The vision engulfed him immediately.
He could not see Aël's features, but he sensed her presence: an abyss, ancient malice, and the vibrations of destiny like the strings of a broken instrument. Above all, he sensed the awakening of the Seven Forgers of Evil.
A burning heat tore through his skull.
The vision expanded to show the Sacred Cities crumbling under a magical storm and priests screaming amid the flames. Above it all was a gigantic purple thread woven into the very sky.
The end.
He came to, gasping for breath and with blood dripping from his nose.
"Master Prophet!" a disciple moaned, supporting him.
He sat up with difficulty, his eyes wide and his breathing shaky.
"Someone has broken the seal," he whispered, his voice trembling with fear.
"An ancient war that the Church buried has just been unearthed."
The disciples exchanged terrified glances.
The Prophet stood completely upright, his fingers clenched like claws. He had never felt such a deadly threat.
"Quick! Alert the Five Marshals! Prepare the sacred ravens! Send messengers to the church and the Imperial City!"
With an imperious gesture, he pointed to three disciples.
"You, go to the cities and contact the Marshals. This is a matter of the utmost urgency. I will ride to Dame Maria. We must find the source of this fortune telling before it engulfs the world."
He looked up at the immense stained-glass windows of the tower, where the sky had just darkened abnormally.
"The war is upon us."
The entire tower seemed to shudder.