The air in the mountain palace was a pristine, suffocating silence. Carys stood on an obsidian balcony overlooking a silent world of snow-capped peaks. At sixteen, her ethereal beauty, marked by silver hair and small, jet-black horns, masked a terrifying power. She was the daughter of the Demon Lord, and this beautiful vista was her prison.
Her guardian, a hulking demon named Malkor, stood ten paces back, a silent statue of granite and duty. His presence was a constant reminder of her father's command to stay here, far from the war raging in their kingdom. Her father feared her power, a storm she could not yet control, warning that she would destroy their world in the name of saving it. Frustration was a bitter taste in her mouth; she belonged on the battlefield, not in this gilded cage.
Suddenly, a tremor shook the mountain, a psychic shockwave of pure loss that struck her with physical force. The ambient, reassuring presence of her father in the back of her mind was not just faded—it was severed. A gaping void had been torn in her world.
Father.
The thought was a scream in her soul. The dam of her obedience shattered. Ignoring Malkor's warning step, Carys threw herself from the balcony. She did not fall. She flew.
A silver-streaked blur of raw power, she became a living lightning bolt arcing down the mountainside, breaking the air in her desperate flight. The journey of hours became mere minutes. As she neared the capital, the stench of blood and smoke filled the air. The Royal Palace's massive gates were torn from their hinges, and the sounds from within were not of battle, but of crude, jeering celebration.
She landed in the main courtyard, cracking the stone beneath her feet. Her home was desecrated, the bodies of the Royal Guard strewn about like toys amidst the rampaging enemy. On the grand steps, the enemy leader, a hulking brute, sat on a throne of rubble. He used her father's limp, broken body as a footrest, his armor dented and his regal form defiled.
The world went silent. The sounds of the party faded. All Carys could see was her father. Grief and panic were instantly incinerated by a cold, absolute rage that was as vast as a collapsing star. A palpable pressure radiated from her, and a shadowy aura rose behind her like a phantom mountain, blotting out the sky. The celebrating monsters froze, their drunken glee turning to primal fear.
Carys rose slowly from the ground, her silver hair floating as if underwater, her golden eyes now points of pure, incandescent light. She lifted a single, pale hand.
Energy gathered in her palm, pulled from the very fabric of reality. A ball of light materialized, growing rapidly into a miniature sun, a sphere of roiling, compressed annihilation that warped the space around it. The enemy leader scrambled to his feet, his bravado gone, finally understanding the doom he had invited.
Carys looked at the sun in her hand, then at the world below—a world stained by her loss. Her father's warning had been right. She couldn't save it. But she could cleanse it.
She thrust her hand down.
The light did not explode; it erased. In a wave of silent, white omnipotence, the palace, the enemy, the very ground they stood on, were vaporized. The shockwave expanded, scouring the planet's surface. Mountains turned to dust, oceans boiled away, and continents cracked and burned.
Slowly, Carys drifted down to a new world of her own making. She landed on a ground of blackened, cooling glass as gray ash fell like snow. She was utterly alone in the ruin. The rage was gone, leaving an emptiness more profound than the void of space. She had avenged her father by proving his fears correct. There was nothing left.
A final, cold resolve settled in her soul. There was one last life to take. She closed her eyes, gathering the embers of her power to obliterate the final thing left in this universe: herself.
In another universe, in a dusty attic, a young woman named Elara slammed her palms onto a glowing circle of runes. She was a mage obsessed with forbidden arts, and she was performing the most dangerous summoning ritual known: a spell to snatch a powerful being from across the multiverse at the exact moment of their death. It almost never worked, but she was desperate for some one to be a protectors of this land
"…Voco te!" she cried.
The spell flared, and she felt it lock onto a power far beyond her comprehension—a force of catastrophic grief and world-ending rage.
As the annihilating energy built within her, Carys braced for oblivion. She closed her eyes, ready for the end.
Instead of non-existence, she felt a violent pull, a tearing at the roots of her soul.
Her eyes snapped open.
The fire and ash were gone. She stood on a wooden floor, enclosed in a circle of glowing symbols. Before her, a terrified young woman knelt, staring with a mixture of shock and awe.
Carys, the destroyer of a world, had closed her eyes to die. She had opened them to be summoned.