CHAPTER 1 - THE FORBIDDEN BALANCE

Prologue — The Embrace of the Void

Before the world, there was the void. And in the void... a will that should never have awakened. There was no sky, no ground, no light, no shadow. Only two forms of the absolute, two primordial entities, as vast as the silence between the stars. Nerya, pure darkness, The Primordial Mother of the Void, of silence, of the refusal to be queen of nonexistence. Solen, absolute light, Father of Truth, of awakening, of the source fire, King of Existence. They existed separately, for their essence was incompatible. One absorbed, the other revealed. One disappeared, the other illuminated. Their union was forbidden. And yet... for an instant... a heartbeat... a shudder in the multiverse, they touched. There was no cry, no light, no divine roar. There was a silence deeper than Nerya and a flash older than Solen. And in this paradox, a child appeared. Not born appeared. He had no fixed form; his body alternated between pure light and inverted darkness. His gaze contained no reflection. He was not born of the world; he was born against the world. Dimensions trembled, the fabric of reality bent under his existence. Laws collapsed in worlds that had not even been named yet. He was unstable. He was divine. He was alone. His name did not yet exist. The child felt not joy, not fear, but something heavier: an instinctive knowledge. "If I remain whole... the world will break." So, he chose. Without counsel, without a model, without a voice, he fragmented himself. His soul, too vast for this world, shattered into five shards, five reflections of himself, five masks, or multiple forms, five guardians of a being who could not exist whole. The center, the heart, the will, he named Kael. The fragments remained bound but dormant, hidden within a human body, fashioned to contain the impossible. Kael was left in a world below, a world where magic and science walked hand in hand, unaware that a fractured god lived among their children. And in the shadow of the sky, neither Nerya nor Solen ever spoke again of their mistake. "He was not meant to exist, but so that the worlds could continue to exist, he chose not to be whole."