A Vow on the Eve of Ruin (Pre-Chapter)

*"You should not exist. Your very being disrupts the Crown's order. The rebels see you as a symbol. We see you as a threat. Our leader… a possibility.

Yet you cling to a selfish dream of peace, while the world demands change. You will never find peace. This is reality. The world owes you nothing.

And should my people fall… surely I will do the same.

So tell me—what is the meaning of life?"*

— A vow spoken on the eve of ruin

The sky wept ash.

Rain never came. Only silence — the kind that lingers before history shatters.

Above, clouds writhed like an open wound. Lightning flared, white and voiceless, stripped of the thunder that should have answered.

The earth lay scorched, desolation spreading across the land until even the world seemed to bend beneath its weight

Names were long devoured by silence. The wind carried only ash, only the stench of blood. Around it all, the proof of ruin pressed down, final and wordless.

And amid that ruin, Kazuo sat.

His hands rested on broken stone, his gaze lowered beneath a storm he could neither escape nor deny.

The shattered walls around him spoke enough.

Beneath that colorless sky, he remained — silent, unmoving.

Still. Waiting.

And when the storm finally broke, the world itself seemed to forget it had ever lived.

—