In a world where only war existed, the heart was a luxury no one could afford.
Men learned to walk before they learned to run, but they learned to kill long before they learned to love.
The mountains still held the scars of the giants. The seas continued to whisper the names of the fairies drowned in ancient battles. The forests grew upon the blood of the elves, and the sky, once blessed by goddesses, had known no truly clean dawn for centuries.
No one remembered how the war had begun.
They only knew it had spent so long consuming the world that even children were born believing the clash of a sword was as natural as the birdsong.
The six great races had become enemies before they became legends.
Humans.
Demons.
Goddesses.
Fairies.
Giants.
Ancient spirits.
Each convinced that the other was the root of all misfortune.
Each begging their gods for a victory that never arrived.
And when hate seemed to have devoured every last corner of the world...
the greatest sin of all occurred.
It was not a betrayal.
It was not a murder.
Not even a war.
It was a demon...
who fell in love.
Melchior, heir to the Demon King and bearer of one of the Ten Commandments, met Seraphine, a young goddess whose mere presence seemed to bring spring back to the withered fields.
He carried darkness in his blood.
She carried light in her soul.
Neither was supposed to exist for the other.
And yet...
destiny had the cruel habit of laughing at what the gods called impossible.
First, they exchanged words.
Then, silences.
Later, promises.
Until one day they discovered it was easier to defy the entire world than to keep pretending their hearts remained intact.
The war ended shortly thereafter.
Not because someone had won.
But because everyone had lost too much.
Corpses covered the earth like a second sky.
The rivers stopped reflecting the stars to reflect only blood.
Prayers stopped receiving answers.
And the love of those two was brought before those who ruled each kingdom.
The Demon King showed no compassion.
The Queen of the Goddesses, neither.
That union was an offense to both worlds.
Thus, the curse was born.
She would die.
Over and over again.
She would be reborn under another name, another family, and another face.
She would never keep the memories of her previous life.
He, however...
would never know rest.
Death would be denied to him forever.
He would keep every memory.
Every loss.
Every farewell.
He would be condemned to find her in every lifetime.
And when she fell in love with him again...
she would die in his arms.
Centuries passed.
Then, millennia.
Three thousand years were enough for history to cease being true and begin to become a fairy tale.
Men changed the books.
Kings wrote new versions.
Temples burned the old chronicles.
The victors molded the world's memory until no one could distinguish truth from lie.
The goddesses vanished.
The demons were declared extinct.
The fairies closed their realms off.
The giants hid among forgotten mountains.
The spirits stopped responding to those who summoned them.
Only humans remained.
Or so they believed.
Because the most powerful kingdom on the continent hid a secret capable of destroying everything.
The royal family...
was not human.
Centuries ago, the true monarchs had been murdered during a moonless night.
The perpetrators were never found.
The new kings appeared as saviors of the realm.
Just.
Benevolent.
Beloved by their people.
No one suspected that, beneath that human skin, ran the blood of the same demons that history claimed to have exterminated.
Since then, they ruled from the shadows.
And no one had lived long enough to uncover the truth.
Within those walls, Asael was born.
The youngest of six siblings.
Prince by obligation.
Rebellious by nature.
While his brothers learned politics, strategy, and diplomacy, Asael preferred to escape the halls to lose himself among the castle rooftops, fight the guards, or disappear for hours among the kingdom's markets.
His greatest virtue was courage.
His greatest flaw...
not knowing when to hold his tongue.
He was unaware that the blood running through his veins belonged to the same lineage the world swore it had destroyed three thousand years ago.
But destiny never moves just one piece.
The same year Asael turned five winters old...
the river brought back a girl.
She was floating inside a small wooden basket.
She did not cry.
She did not look for anyone.
She only gazed at the sky with violet eyes whose intensity made even the priests uncomfortable.
Her hair, of a brown so pale it seemed to verge on white, made many turn their gaze away.
But it was upon revealing her forearms that silence fell over everyone.
There rested a mark.
Black.
Perfect.
Shaped like an eye surrounded by dark spikes, as if it was watching the world from another place.
The elders turned pale.
The priests drew back.
The Holy Knights brought their hands to their swords.
That mark belonged to a legend older than the kingdoms themselves.
It was said that it only appeared on children given to forbidden magic...
and claimed by the goddesses before birth.
An impossible contradiction.
An existence that no sage had managed to explain.
Many demanded she be burned.
Others asked to throw her back into the river.
But the commander of the Holy Knights spoke before anyone else.
He would adopt her.
Not out of compassion.
But because keeping a potential disaster close was safer than letting it grow far from his sight.
Thus began her life.
Not as a daughter.
Nor as an heir.
But as a warning.
While the kingdom
