Prologue

This story is about broken people learning how to keep loving in a reality that keeps trying to take everything from them. About protecting what’s left, even when it would be easier not to.

A little history matters—not because everyone agrees on it, but because they don’t. Because everyone inherited a different version of the same disaster, and most of those versions were trimmed down, polished up, or buried on purpose. This is the type of story that changes shape depending on who’s telling it. So the truth will come slowly. The way old lies are untangled: layer by layer, until there is finally something small enough to accept.

Long ago, the continent was whole. Eidotypes in Elaris. Humans in Concordia. Hematypes in Umbra. Different territories, different rulers, different ways of surviving. But the borders were never as absolute as later generations liked to pretend. Trade ran between the lands. Faith did too. So did ambition, debt, desire, and every other thing people carry across frontiers whether they are wanted there or not.

Cities were not cleanly divided. People shared markets, roads, DNA. What humans later flattened into words like elves and vampires had never been that simple. They were not bedtime monsters, and they were not myths. They were people. Just shaped by different relationships to time, magic and survival.

For centuries, peace held because breaking it served no one.

Until the War of Hate.

Nearly nine hundred years ago, a Great Calamity named Elexi poisoned the hearts of kings and queens and turned power into appetite. War spread across the continents without needing a reason noble enough to survive the telling. Kingdoms burned. Alliances folded. Families disappeared. History later tried to dress those years in strategy and banners and grand political language, but most of it was simpler than that. It was pain, repeated often enough that people started calling it faith.

The war ended when a warrior defeated Elexi.

That part is real.

What came after is harder to forgive: their name was erased from every record that mattered, as if silence could pass for gratitude and forgetting could count as peace.

And here’s the part the bedtime tales skip: hematypes were never the biggest threat. Not even close.

Before life itself learned language, there were only two driving forces moving through existence: the urge to protect, and the urge to consume. Much, much later, people gave them names. The Blessings and the Calamities. Opposites, if you want the easy version. Mirrors, if you want the truer one.

The Blessings once guided the world. Or interfered with it, depending on who you ask. They answered desperate prayers with rare acts of kindness. They bent weather, healed famine-struck land, nudged life back toward itself when it threatened to collapse. People built entire religions around them because people will always look for comfort in anything that saves them at the right moment.

But faith rots when it is overused. So does devotion. So does trust.

The Blessings were asked for too much, blamed for too much, and respected too little. Their patience thinned. Most of the Greater ones—the ones said to have shaped coastlines, forests, cities, and mountains—fell silent, vanished, or withdrew so completely that the difference hardly mattered.

Only smaller fragments remain now. Smaller Blessings. Dimmer ones. Flickers instead of gods, doing what they can with what they have. Holding a train back just long enough for someone to get off before it is too late. Stopping a chain collision on a busy road. Guiding a lost child toward a familiar hand in the middle of a packed supermarket.

Quiet work. Corner-of-the-world work. The type of hero you might pass around the corner. The kind that survives precisely because nobody builds temples around it anymore.

The Calamities never had that problem. They survived the passage of time. They keep every memory intact, and they do not need worship to matter.

They feed on mortal things. On everything a person can give away and should not: memory, will, years of life, fear, love, identity. They offer power in exchange for humanity.

Only six of the Greater ones remain now, though their countless lesser kin still slip freely through cities, leaving ruin behind and receiving names like “bad luck.”

Three hundred years ago, the seventh Great Calamity—Astra—vanished after striking a secret bargain with the ruler of Concordia.

In exchange for his life, the human civilization received a leap forward. Not literally. Technologically. New weapons. New machinery. New systems of defense built for an enemy that never arrived.

The bargain was forgotten. The proof disappeared. The price of the exchange was filed away under the word “progress” and never spoken of again.

But danger does not vanish just because a deal is hidden. It learns, patiently. It changes shape. It waits for people to forget and become comfortable enough to call it peacetime.

Now the balance between Blessings and Calamities is fractured.

And inside that fracture live the people trying to survive it. The tired. The hopeful. The bitter. The faithful. The ones who know more than they should and still keep trying.

Humans, with their shorter lives and demographic weight, forgot first. Not because they were foolish. Simply because short lives forget fast, and crowded civilizations forget faster.

The old balance became folklore. A distant myth no one considered worth keeping alive anymore. The consequences of touching forces no mortal was ever meant to control were reduced to badly told stories, if not erased entirely.

The world kept moving, and so did the dangers around us.

♥︎