Long before the forests rotted, before the Shrines were broken, before the Throne of Beasts crumbled into moss and bone, there was a war of flame and shadow that scarred the heavens themselves.
Ashen — the Last Warden of the Origin Beasts — was not born to greatness. He was forged by it. A child of famine and ash, orphaned by the first ripples of the Void, he grew not in comfort but in resistance, taught by the remnants of the Old Ways.
The Seared One had once been mortal too. A man of ambition beyond the stars, he sought to master what was never meant to be chained: the beasts, the shrines, the flame. He did not understand that the Shrines were not prizes, but pillars holding the world together. In his arrogance, he shattered one, and through the fracture, the Void sang to him.
And he listened.
He became something else — no longer man, nor beast, but a living wound upon the land, a prophet of decay. The skies darkened where he walked. Mountains withered. Rivers wept black blood. The beasts of Origin fled into hiding, their shrines faltering.
Ashen alone refused to kneel.
They met on the Broken Plain — a scarred wasteland where life itself had recoiled. The Seared One was a colossus of twisted flame and rot, a god-thing howling with the voices of a thousand devoured souls.
Ashen faced him with nothing but a sword of dying light and a heart that would not break.
The battle tore through three nights and three days. Each time Ashen fell, he rose again, flame wreathing his body, the spirit of the Beast Shrines roaring through him. Each time the Seared One struck, the land itself howled in pain.
On the dawn of the fourth day, Ashen made his final stand.
He did not strike the Seared One's body — he struck his soul, driving the last pure flame into the wound the Void had made. And the Seared One screamed — a sound that shattered the hills and turned oceans to steam — before he fell into nothingness, leaving behind only a crater of smoking glass and dead stars.
But victory came at a cost.
Ashen vanished. Some say he was consumed by the very flame he wielded. Others whisper he sleeps still, beneath the roots of the world, waiting for the Void's return.
The Shrines were saved — for a time. The beasts, hidden but breathing. The world, wounded but alive.
Yet the mark of the Seared One lingered.
And now, the Void sings again.