**—Beneath the Ice—**

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**Prologue**

*Eternia, 10,000 BCE*

The wind howled across the frozen tundra, carrying whispers of a dying star. Arathor, his celestial form cloaked in shadows darker than the void between galaxies, knelt in the snow. His massive fingers—each taller than the pines trembling in the glacial wind—pressed against the chest of a human woman, her breath ragged. A shard of iridescent crystal pulsed in his palm, its light bleeding silver into her veins.

*"Forgive me,"* he rumbled, his voice echoing like tectonic plates grinding. The woman's tribe lay scattered around them, their bodies twisted and frozen mid-scream, unable to withstand the Kryptonian DNA torn from a dying multiversal traveler. Only the child in her womb still lived, its heartbeat syncing with the crystal's rhythm. Arathor's brethren would call this heresy. A Celestial did not *create*; they judged. They culled.

But Arathor had glimpsed the future—a shadowed titan with a golden gauntlet, a universe screaming as it dissolved to ash. This child, this *abomination* of human grit and Silver Age divinity, might one day tip the scales. He sealed the fetus in a chrysalis of starlight and buried it deep beneath the ice, where even time hesitated to tread.

*"Grow strong,"* he whispered, as the glacier swallowed his sin whole.

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