In a world carved by the hands of elemental gods, the four kingdoms of Fire, Water, Earth, and Air stood as monuments to power and pride. Each realm worshipped its patron element, their people born with flames dancing at their fingertips, rivers flowing in their veins, stone fortifying their bones, or storms singing in their breath. For centuries, the kingdoms thrived in fragile harmony, bound by old treaties and older grudges. But harmony, like fire, is restless—and it takes only a spark to unravel.
That spark came in the form of the mixed-born: those rare souls cursed with two elements, or worse, none at all. To the pureblooded rulers, they were abominations, threats to the sacred order. Hunted and scorned, the mixed-born hid in shadows, their existence a whispered rumor. Until the day a boy with hair like winter and eyes like the deep sea was born in the smoldering heart of the Fire Kingdom.
They named him Tucan.
From his first breath, he was an omen. His white hair, a blasphemy in a land of crimson and ash, marked him as other. Children hurled embers at his back. Priests declared him a void-soul, a drain on the Fire God's blessings. Only his mother, a weaver with calloused hands and a voice like smoldering coal, dared to love him. "The world fears what it cannot name," she told him, stitching courage into his bones with every word. But even her love could not shield him.
On the eve of Tucan's thirteenth summer, the Fire King's soldiers came. They accused his family of harboring a mixed-born traitor—a lie, but truth mattered little in a kingdom hungry for scapegoats. Tucan watched, frozen, as his father's throat was slit, his mother's body fed to the royal pyre. Something snapped inside him then, a thread of time unraveling.
When the soldiers turned to him, blades glinting, the air shuddered.
A pulse of silver light erupted from Tucan's hands.
And the world stopped.
The flames froze mid-leap. The soldiers' screams died unborn. Tucan stood in a silent, still universe, his breath the only sound. He reached out, brushing a soldier's blade—and it crumbled to rust, centuries of decay compressed into a heartbeat. Power surged through him, wild and ancient, as if the stars themselves had slipped into his blood. Time, he realized. Not an element, but something older, something the gods had never meant to leash.
When time lurched forward again, the soldiers were gone—reduced to dust and memory.
For years, Tucan wandered, a ghost with a crown of secrets. He found others like him: a water-blessed girl who could boil blood with a glance, an earth-shaker boy whose touch rotted crops, a storm-caller whose lungs drowned in rain. The outcasts. The cursed. The powerful. Together, they became a whisper in the dark, a rebellion stitched from rage and hope.
When Tucan's army finally stormed the Fire Kingdom's citadel, he did not burn it. He aged it. Walls cracked like dry parchment. Swords rusted in their sheaths. The Fire King, once a titan of wrath, withered into a skeletal husk, begging for death. Victory, however, tasted of ash. The other elemental kingdoms, trembling at Tucan's unnatural power, offered their firstborn heirs as hostages in exchange for peace. He accepted, not out of mercy, but exhaustion.
Thus, the Timeless Kingdom rose.
Tucan's closest followers—a cunning strategist, a mercenary poet, a shadow-smith, and a healer who communed with the dead—founded the Four Clans, pillars of his new empire. Yet as decades blurred into centuries, Tucan retreated into his sky-piercing castle, a labyrinth of frozen clocks and forgotten memories. The curse of his power gnawed at him: forever twenty-three, forever watching lovers, friends, and enemies turn to dust. His heart grew heavy with the weight of endless days, his laughter a relic of a dead past.
Then, in the 103rd year of his reign, a child was born in the Fire Kingdom's royal nursery. Her first cry echoed with the crackle of wildfire. They named her Hafa, "the Unquenchable."
When she was delivered to Tucan's gates at age eighteen, swathed in silk and defiance, the Timeless King did not bother to greet her. Servants were fleeting, their lives as brief as candle flames.
But Hafa, with her tempest of auburn hair and a tongue sharper than any blade, would not be ignored.