The skies of Aetheris were no longer blue. For the past three days, the sun had been buried behind toxic technomagical smog, while dimensional rifts gaped in the heavens like festering wounds. At the peak of the Watchtower, Kael Veygar—a living legend now reduced to a shadow—stood at the edge of ruin. In his hand, he gripped the Aetheris Core, a black-purple crystal pulsing with the screams of thousands of souls trapped within.
"You can't do this!" cried the Arkanis queen, her obsidian wings broken, golden blood seeping from the wound in her chest. "That Core will consume your soul… and our child's soul!"
Kael gazed at the infant in his arms—Rael, with hair as dark as his mother's and electric blue eyes that had glowed since birth. Outside, the sounds of technomagical bombs shook the floating city. The Lumen Faction had arrived, armed with annihilation weapons designed to wipe out the Arkanis to their very roots.
"Better I become a monster than let them win," Kael hissed, pressing the Aetheris Core to the baby's chest. The crystal fused with Rael's skin, forming a glowing spiral tattoo. "Listen, my love," he whispered to the dying queen. "Take him. Erase his memories. One day… he will correct all of our mistakes."
The Arkanis queen screamed as Kael sacrificed the last of his strength to open a dimensional portal. But before the child could vanish into the light, the Lumen Faction fired a devastating projectile. The explosion obliterated the Watchtower, burying Kael and the queen beneath the rubble, while the newborn's cries were swallowed by darkness.
Twenty years later, in the black market of the Lower District, a young man in a worn leather jacket clutched a cracked medallion. The spiral tattoo on his chest throbbed wildly whenever a dimensional rift appeared.
"You're neither human nor Arkanis," whispered a shadow merchant before him, his eyes narrowing at the sight of the tattoo. "You are the Correction—a flaw in the universe that must be cleansed."
In the sky, purple lightning cracked. Rael stared at his palm, where blue-purple energy churned. Some called this power a curse. But deep within his heart, he heard unfamiliar whispers—a woman's voice with crystal wings calling him to the Nexus, the center of all dimensions.
That night, as a dimensional rift above Aether yawned wider than ever before, Rael understood one thing:
His blood was the key.
His blood was the weapon.
And the world would never forgive his existence.
"Sometimes, the brightest light is born from a cursed shadow."