They say the boy from the slums was the first.
Not the first to die and not the first to see the monsters but the first to fall so completely that the world heard it. The monsters that devoured all meaning wherever they stepped, dreams decayed. Memories frayed. Names were erased from tombstones; hope had been drowned. The birth of The Graven.
Within a year, the skies remained black. The sun did not return. Cities fell like dominoes. Every defence had failed. Bombs did nothing, and bullets passed through monsters like smoke. Even nukes turned the air sour but left the dark untouched.
Then came the Veil Plague. That's what they called it—what took Papa and Mama and billions more. Some say it was Arc poisoning what they want to call this new force... Others believed it was divine punishment! But the result was the same: rot from the inside out, eyes bleeding, voices splitting into tongues not known by man.
Humanity was broken.
Until they came.
The Crowned.
No one knows who the first was. Stories say a woman in a scorched desert walked through fire to save a town and left the blaze unburned, her head wreathed in a halo of golden light. Others speak of a man who shattered a mountain with ease.
We call them First Generation Crown bearers now, the predecessors to the crown born. The ones who awoke to arc and were given eyes to see this now dark, dismal world.
Arc was born of our desperation, shaped by our trauma, and the last remaining hope.
Crowns formed above the heads of those strong enough to dream against extinction. Each crown was given its unique affinity, some fragile as glass and some as vast as oceans.
The first crown bearers had their legacies forever put in stone. They conquered. They turned back the tides by manifesting their will into reality. They built the Artifex bastions, cities born from imagination and the last fortresses of humanity.
The monster advance was slowed, but it had never stopped.
Centralis, once just a university town, became the site of a miracle. An ancient, dormant machine was reawakened, fused with Arc and repurposed into one of the grand artefacts; it had become a place to train the next generation of Crown-born, sponsored by every remaining government.
But the world was no longer ruled by nations.
It was ruled by clans. Dynasties descended from the First Crownbearers, those whose families' crowns had evolved over generations. Their bloodlines warped by Arc believed themselves to be some sort of gods in human skin. Branded with crown crests. Powers sharpened through selective birthing, psychological forging, and cruel education...
One billion humans could still bear crowns, while two billion could not. The latter were called the Hollow. Arc rejects them. They suffer in its presence, the sole inheritors of the veil plague being tormented. They claim it's like bones grinding in flame; they wither under Crownlight like they are rejected from this very world. But they are still needed. "The best labour is the ones that can't fight back."
The monsters never left. They walk this godforsaken planet as we do, creating ecosystems, evolving, and infecting . They nest in fallen cities. Some even claim they've grown smarter, that they build now. Plan and wait... The strongest Crowned are tasked with claiming the old cities lost to them—many of which now pulse with inhuman energy.
The world order has shifted. The only last signs of disposition in this word are the crowned becoming more than human, but only those with thrones—and even palaces—can hope to command artefacts. The rest, even with crowns, can become lambs to slaughter.
The boy from the slums who died first has no name. But his scream echoed through generations, marking the end of the world we knew and the beginning of the one we crawled from.
Now we live by new laws... Crowns? Are might. Will has become a weapon. And monsters are only the beginning.