One winter dusk, a courier in a blue hood collapsed at Cael's feet, clutching a scroll stamped with the broken crest of the Sylvared Court. She had run from the border where the wood still breathed. "They cut the sap-blessings," she whispered. "They poison dreams with shining knives. The Court sends no letters. They want you, Cael. They say only you have the mark and the memory to find it."

The night the sky split open, everything changed. A thing older than the Court itself slipped through the tear: no beast, exactly, but a presence that drank light and rewrote matter. The Court's wards fell ill of silence; trees dropped their leaves overnight and never remembered their shape. Cael was on the temple steps when the light struck—saved, somehow, but branded with a blackened sigil across his chest. He awoke with his palms raw and a taste of iron on his tongue, and the moon refused him its favor. The Court called him "the Fallen" and cast him out.

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