The elders say that, before silence took hold of everything, the earth was a stage where giants performed without ceremony. The Gods walked the ground with such force that the mountains groaned beneath their heels, and when they opened their mouths, thunder was no metaphor — it was literally their voices echoing across the sky. But there was a price for all that Olympian glory: chains driven into the raw flesh of the Titans, the most primordial forces in existence, buried deep in the bottomless pit of Tartarus.
The Titanomachy was not a war. It was an apocalypse that touched the very fabric of what exists.
In the final moment of defeat, when the last link was sealed, the Titans did not go quietly. No. They did what the poets would later call The Great Drag — and the name says it all. As the abyss swallowed them, they reached out and seized the fabric of reality with everything they had. They could not drag the Gods into Tartarus with them. But they managed something almost worse: they tore the physical essences of the pantheon from the material plane.
In a single heartbeat, the bodies vanished. Zeus, Hades, Poseidon — the entire pantheon evaporated. They were cast into the Ether, a dimension of pure energy and consciousness where there are no hands to touch anything, no mouth to speak, no eyes to see the world they themselves had shaped.
Humanity was left alone from one moment to the next. And the world, still thick with divine magic floating like smoke after a fire, had nowhere to turn. That is when the Reliquaries emerged.
Men discovered, gradually, that certain objects — chalices, swords, shields — functioned as antennae tuned to the Ether. With these objects and with specific bloodlines, a human could bring back a God's anchor to the earth. But the rule was brutal: a God exists as long as he is remembered. As long as someone represents him. Without a Reliquary, without an heir following his dogmas, the deity loses the thread binding it to the world and dissolves into the Ether until nothing remains.
What came next became known as the Age of Flames. The Gods, terrified of extinction, drove their followers into wars too cruel to be named. Entire clans were wiped from the map so that Reliquaries could be destroyed and the Ether's energy concentrated in the hands of a few. Of hundreds of divinities, only five survived — the most relentless, the ones who did not hesitate when the order came to kill: the Majestic Families.
While the Order of Aegis and the Greed of Fortuna swept the lesser divinities from history, two names remained at the top of the extermination list: Typhon, the Father of Monsters, and Eris, the Lady of Discord.
Typhon was entropy in its rawest form — the storm that does not choose what it destroys. Eris was the precise whisper that makes brothers raise a blade against each other. The Families hated them because their powers did not build empires. They demolished them.
The two met in the ruins of a temple someone had gone to the trouble of desecrating, surrounded by the bodies of the last who still carried their names.
"They will come for our heads, Monster," said Eris. Her voice had the sound of dry wood crackling in a fire. She wore purple rags and turned in her hands a golden apple that no longer shone.
Typhon, a giant who radiated heat like a volcano holding back its eruption, raised his eyes to the sky where the golden towers of Aegis were already beginning to appear on the horizon. "They want a world of slaves with an instruction manual. They want men to dance to the right rhythm in exchange for a bolt of lightning and a little light."
"They will extinguish us because we are the only thing that escapes their control," Eris continued, drawing closer. "But there is a way to survive. A way to create something they will not be able to anticipate."
"Blood?" asked Typhon.
"Blood," she confirmed. "A union that makes no sense within the logic of the clans. If we join your Brute Force with my Discord, we will not produce an heir of dogmas. We will produce an heir of will. Someone who does not need relics to be divine. Someone who does not obey rules simply because he does not recognize their authority."
There, with the stars pretending not to watch and Aegis drawing ever closer, Chaos and Discord were united. They knew the clan would be destroyed. They knew they would be erased from any record that survived. But they planted something — a seed of entropy at the very heart of the Order.
They did not create a savior.
They created a reckoning.
They created Valerius.