The world did not begin with a bang or a whimper. It began with a flicker.
For five millennia, the world has been a cold silent prison for an entity that once called himself a king. In the modern age, men call him a myth, a shadow. or a trick of light. They had forgotten that before there was soil, there was heat. Before there was breath, there was the fire.
Deep within the shifting tectonic plates, or perhaps in the spaces between the human heartbeats, Lord Gramb stirred. He was no longer the radient being who had offered hid flame to the celestial fort. He was a hollowed out hunger...a king of cinders. he looked out of the earth crust and saw a world of eight billion people. To humans, they were a civilization. To Gramb, they were an endless forest of dry wood; waiting to be lit.
"The Jewels are cold" he said, his voice like the crackle of a dying hearth "and the guardians are tired"
Across the globe, in a quite antique shop hidden in the bustle of the megacity, a man and a woman froze. Cyrus dropped a glass vial, Hestia felt a phantom burn across her palm that had not been there for three thousand years.
They didn Somewhere out there, in the wreckage of high speed crash and the silence of a grieving home, the Jewels were waking up.
The war had returned.