I have watched many rise and fall… but only one began with a dream.
Long before the stars marked his path—before his name became a whisper in the dark—he was simply Kor.
He was born beneath the crushing skies of Korranthis, where gravity pressed upon the bones like the weight of a mountain, and the very air sought to claim each breath. Alone he came into the world—unseen, unguarded, untouched by any hand that might have called him son.
His people had no word for “dream.” No stories. No songs. No sky beyond the grind of survival. They were children of instinct, shadows moving through shadows. But Kor was different.
He watched.
He listened.
And sometimes… he dreamed.
No Korranthisian had ever dreamed.
Then, on a day when the winds ran silent, the sky split open. From the rift descended the gods of metal, their vessels clothed in fire. His people knelt, certain the judgment of the heavens had come.
But they were not gods.
They were human—though not as Earth had known them.
Earth was dust by then, its oceans gone to vapor a hundred millennia past. Its children had wandered the stars, carrying shards of memory… and the arrogance to shape other worlds in their image.
One such world was Edson, now little more than a ghost in the Authority’s ledgers—its myths discarded, its legends left to die.
When they found Kor’s people, they named them “primitive.” They scheduled their salvation.
Kor saw the gift for what it was—a net woven in mercy’s thread. He tried to resist, but the soldiers came like a tide of iron.
A shadow swallowed the sun. Engines roared like storms. The air burned with the scent of hot metal.
And then—light. Cold, blinding light.
Before he could even move, they had bound him in steel and silence.
In the sterile chambers of the Authority, their machines shuddered and faltered—or so it seemed.
What was meant to be a narrow graft of obedience became a flood. The knowledge of ten thousand worlds poured into him in an instant—enough to shatter every mind before his.
Some in the Authority called it a malfunction. Others never found the cause.
But I know this: the weave of fate seldom tangles by accident.
It should have shattered him, too.
But Kor endured.
And in that silence, something began to grow—a storm behind his eyes, hidden from every watcher.
They thought him simple.
They did not see what was coming.
He would be renamed. Hunted. Changed. He would lose all he had been, and gain what no other soul possessed: the sight to look beyond the weave of time.
Kor would become more than a boy. More than a survivor. More than a myth.
He would become Vear—taking the name of a hero from an ancient Edsonian tale, a story whispered long before the world understood it was his own.
A legend without a past.
The first dreamer of a forgotten world… and perhaps its last hope.
And I remember it still. For I was there, though unseen.