Chapter 0: The Traces of Fire Left Behind

At the end of the Middle Ages, the witch hunts carried out by humanity came to an end.
The fires were extinguished.
The burning stakes were torn down.
Old laws were revoked, and the human world moved forward as if everything had been settled.

For humanity, it was the closing of history.
For witches, it was the beginning of something far more dangerous.

When the hunts ended, the remaining witches gathered.
They came from hiding places, from the ruins of villages, from the boundary between life and death.
They came carrying wounds that had never healed and losses that had never been counted.

For the first time since the last bonfire was extinguished,
a single shared hope emerged:
if witches stood together, the world would never be able to hunt them again.

The meeting did not begin with shouting.
It began with heavy silence,
with evaluating gazes,
with names no longer spoken because their owners were already dead.

Yet their purpose was one:
to survive—together.

The problem was not the goal.
The problem was the method.

Some witches believed that unity was only possible through strength.
To them, the human world had proven one thing:
mercy always came too late.

They demanded preparation.
Structure.
Power that could no longer be ignored or oppressed.

If the world feared them,
then the world would not dare to attack.

Others rejected that idea.
They believed that displaying power
would only give birth to new fear.

To them, unity meant protection—
withdrawing from the world,
burying their wounds,
and ensuring that the next generation would no longer grow beneath the shadow of fire.

If the world did not see them,
then the world would not attack.

Both sides spoke in the name of survival.
Both claimed to be protecting the future of witches.

And that was where the first misunderstanding was born.

Caution was seen as a threat.
Preparation was seen as an intention to conquer.
Silence was interpreted as betrayal.

No one truly listened,
because everyone was too busy ensuring they would never become victims again.

Tension escalated.
The circle of the meeting turned into a dividing line.
Discussion turned into ultimatum.

And when one side began deploying magic to stand guard—
the other took it as a declaration of war.

The first spell was not cast to attack.
It was cast out of fear.

But fear, once given form,
never looks any different from hostility.

That day, the war began.

Not against humanity.
Not against kingdoms.
But the war that should never have happened:
witch against witch.

Magic that once saved cities
now destroyed the very meeting meant to unite them.

Shields became prisons.
Protective spells became weapons.

There was no grand strategy.
No noble purpose.

Only a single belief shared by both sides:
if we do not strike now, we will be wiped out.

When the battle ended,
there was no victory.

All that remained were ruins,
and the belated realization that no side truly wanted the war.

But it was already too late.

Some witches withdrew from the world,
sealing themselves away on an island and closing every path back.
They called it protection.

Others built their own power,
establishing rigid hierarchies and iron laws so they would never hesitate again.
They called it preparation.

The human world never knew
that while they celebrated the end of the hunts,
the witch race was tearing itself apart from within.

The war that should have united them
became the reason they could never reconcile again.

And from that misunderstanding,
two paths that would never run parallel were created—
both born from the same fear,
and both convinced that they were right.

Meanwhile, Merlin and her group of witches arrived at the ruined village of Valemor.

Wooden and stone buildings lay collapsed without any clear pattern.
Roofs were burned—not by the fires of human witch hunts,
but by magic that had erupted from within the settlement itself.

The ground was cracked,
the air still trembling,
and residual magical energy hung like a wound that had yet to close.

Valemor was not a battlefield.
It was a gathering place—
a village prepared as a meeting point for witches
who hoped to unite after the human hunts had ended.

Now, only destruction remained.

Among the rubble,
the bodies of male witches lay scattered, never having formed a proper defense.
They had come not as soldiers,
but as representatives—
as those who still believed
that unity was the only path to survival.

Not a single one of them was still breathing.

In the corners of the village,
the survivors sat in near-silent grief.
Women, children, and witches who had not made it to the meeting
cried while clutching ash—
the remains of homes,
the remains of family,
the remains of lives extinguished without mercy.

Names were called,
but no answers came.

The fire had consumed everything.

Valemor did not fall in a single explosion—
it was burned and annihilated.

The sound of hooves broke the silence.

A black horse came to a halt at the edge of the ruined village,
ridden by a woman with long purple hair
that flowed down her back.

Her cloak fluttered in the hot wind left behind by the fire.
And from behind the strands of hair falling over her shoulders,
a pair of bright blue eyes stared unblinking at Valemor’s destruction.

She was Merlin.

That gaze was not one of shock.
It was the gaze of someone
who had seen destruction far too often
to still be surprised by it.

Merlin dismounted calmly.
The staff in her hand glowed faintly
as she traced the remnants of magic in the air.

But her spell found no clear trace of an enemy.

There was no attack pattern.
No signs of a siege.
No residue of human magic.

What remained was a single conclusion—
one that was difficult to accept.

Pure emotional outburst.
Wild.
Uncontrolled.
And far too powerful to belong to a trained witch.

“…This was not done by humans.”

Merlin understood it instantly.

Humans killed with fear and hesitation.
What happened in Valemor was carried out with rage—
rage that left no room for anything but destruction.

Someone had lost control.

And an entire village paid the price.

Among the ruins of the meeting hall,
Merlin saw a child.

He knelt on the scorched ground.
His clothes were torn.
His hands trembled—
not from physical injury,
but from something that had just been released
and had not yet fully settled.

Behind the boy,
the bodies of the male witches lay in silence.

There were no signs of escape.
No other enemies.

Only a single center of devastation.

Merlin approached slowly.
She felt no threat from the boy.

What she felt was emptiness—
the kind of emptiness born
when someone loses everything in a single night.

“Who did this?”
she asked softly,
more to the reality before her
than to the boy himself.

In her mind, the answer had already taken shape.

The civil war had begun.
One side had struck first.
And Valemor was its first victim.

She rejected any other possibility.

The boy did not answer.

He lowered his head,
as if the names he wished to speak
had burned away with his family.

Merlin took a breath,
then asked another question—
a simpler one.

“What is your name?”

The boy raised his face.

And in a voice barely audible,
he answered:

“Asuka.”

Lightning struck.

The smoke-covered sky split apart
by white-blue light.
The thunder shook the already fractured ground,
as if the world itself reacted to that name.

Merlin’s horse neighed softly.
Merlin instinctively tightened her grip on her staff—
but the lightning struck no one.

It simply descended.

As a sign.

For the first time,
Merlin’s blue eyes showed hesitation.

Not fear.
Not hostility.

But a heavy premonition
that the child before her
was not merely a survivor of tragedy.

Behind Asuka,
the victims of Valemor lay silent.

The cries of survivors still echoed in the distance,
forming the backdrop to a mistake
no one had yet realized.

Merlin turned her gaze away.

Because if she acknowledged what had truly happened,
then this war had not begun from ideology
or betrayal.

It had begun from the rage of a child
whose family had been slaughtered without mercy.

Merlin knelt before Asuka.

“I will take you away from here,” she said calmly.
“This world… is not yet ready to bear the consequences of your existence.”

Asuka did not answer.

He simply stared at the slowly dying flames,
while within him,
the rage that had destroyed Valemor
began to settle into something far quieter—
and far more dangerous.

No one realized on that day—

that the boy found amid the ruins of Valemor
would become the center of every misunderstanding.

Not belonging to Elystra.
Not belonging to Varkh.
Not belonging to the human world.

But a key
born from a war
that should have united them all.