Far beyond the reckoning of time—whether it was a forgotten past or an unrealized future, no one could say.

It was a land born of true sorcery. Not myth. Not folktales handed down through generations. This was a world that breathed magic.

Dozens of floating isles hung suspended above a silver-lit earth, Moonlight spread—liquid metal over stone, silver drowning dark. The ground below had no name. But above, the people called it Grimoire.

Cascades of enchanted waterfalls poured from the cliffs of each island, breaking into radiant motes before they touched the air. Veins of energy streaked across the sky, a lattice of light resembling the nervous system of a slumbering god. Trees were alive—not merely growing, but watching, whispering, knowing far more than most of the archmages in their council dared to claim.

Across the ridges encircling this aerial realm, the world revealed towers of impossible design—structures that fused hovering geometry with the archaic grandeur of the ancients. At its heart stood a school of magic: fortress, museum, and battleground all at once.

And there, within the highest sanctum of its tallest spire, an event was about to unfold.

The grand chamber was silent, its stillness broken only by the echo of a single breath against walls of white-silver granite. At its center stood a desk hewn from the living trunk of the Ash Tree, older than kingdoms and empires, its roots pulsing faintly beneath the stone floor.

A man in robes of ivory sat behind it. His presence was statue-like, monumental—an effigy of eternity itself. His gaze fixed upon the runes drifting in midair, as though peering past the symbols into the fate of worlds.

The vision before him played out in cruel fragments: ruins scattered across scorched earth, Cosmic City reduced to ash, the screams of Eden swallowed by silence so suffocating it begged to be broken by a single cry.

“All you have built will fall…” A voice spoke from the shadows behind him.

The robed man did not turn. His hand clenched into a fist, then loosened slowly—as though trying to release something his heart refused to let go.

His eyes gleamed beneath the hood, a steel glimmer against the void. “I will not allow it.” The words rang in the emptiness, not spoken so much as sworn.

He went utterly motionless, gathering not only power but will, and intoned the incantation that had not crossed his lips in centuries:

“~Alarumis Lenthrós.~”

And the world shuddered again.