Every World Has a Beginning. This One Was Buried.
Before recorded history, the Origins System was the sacred source from which life and power spread across the stars. Civilizations forgot it. Records buried it. The Dark Ash corrupted the road back. When witness-line courier Revik Sol races toward Aurienne with proof of a plot against Avaren Vale, the Dark Ash silence the warning and turn the assassination into justification for the very control Avaren opposed. Yet his death awakens the Light Core, calls the Protector Blade, and reveals Kael as heir to a duty he was never prepared to carry — and to a living ancestral vessel that recognizes conscience as surely as blood.