First Heir of the Soul-Linked Line, Keeper of the Mirror Tongue, Last Scholar of Pure Descent
Three thousand years ago, before the corruption of war and the infection of ignorance, my ancestors thrived in what we now call the Contested Realm. It was not “contested” then; what was there to contest in a world without lies, theft, or violence?
We were telepathic, empathic, and unified. Our minds linked as clearly as voices in a small room. There was no privacy, and thus no crime. One could not lie when thoughts were shared like air. This was not oppression; it was perfection. A trust made real. There was no word in our vocabulary for compassion, for it was the natural state of things; as all civilizations should have been.
Cities soared into the clouds, sculpted not by strong hands but by symphonic will; hundreds of architects thinking as one. Our culture flourished with refinement, knowledge, and beauty that today’s petty kingdoms can only imitate with their rusted chisels and tarnished coins.
This was the world that birthed my forebears. And it was into this harmony that the Silent One was born.
Margin Note Justicar Gray:
Using the Detect Truth miracle, I confirmed that Ni’a Outspring’s link to the original inhabitants of the Contested Realm is tenuous at best. The Outspring are, for the most part, pure Soulit by lineage and exhibit no latent telepathic ability. This claim of kinship seems designed to lay political claim over the Contested Realm rather than express true ancestry.
He had no name, or perhaps too many, records vary. But all agree on his affliction: he was born without telepathy; a mute soul in a world of webbed thought. One can only imagine the isolation of such a mind. And yet, perhaps that isolation shaped him into something new.
His gift did not lie in minds, but in places: specifically, the bridging of space. Where we touched each other’s thoughts, he touched distant lands. With vision, genius, and perhaps some loneliness-driven madness, he forged the first stable local portals. He linked town to town, academy to academy, guild to guild, and in doing so, made movement as seamless as memory.
But sadly, genius is never satisfied. So he looked beyond his world.
While I have always admired his innovation and claim him through my own lineage, descent from his first apprentice, I cannot condone what followed.
Margin Note: Justicar Gray:
In Mythic archives, the Silent One is worshipped as the god of travel. He appears in over a dozen pantheons under names like “The Walker Between,” “Pathfather,” and “Shepherd of Roads.” Interesting how Ni’a never mentioned this in his book.
The Silent One opened the first true Rift Gate, a connection between our world and another entirely: the world we now call the Kindred Realm.
They were not like us. They were fast, strong, animal-like in their instincts and customs. Non-telepathic, naturally. Their society was primitive, rooted in dominance, tribal structure, and conflict. I do not say this to insult, only to report what I, and my family’s archives, have observed. Their values clashed fundamentally with ours.
At first, there was trade: timid, polite. We offered knowledge; they offered muscle and ore. We taught them bronze-working, for they were still primitive and hadn’t yet learned to cast metals. They taught us… Well… That there is power in bones and other dead creatures’ remnants, though we had already surpassed such things through technological advancement.
But peace did not last. It never does when fear overrules comprehension. And the Kindred, robbed of the crutch of empathy, could only ever understand the world through conquest. War followed, mostly between different Kindred tribes fighting over the new knowledge we gave them.
This, I believe, was the first crack in our Harmony. The moment we learned that death can be brought in thousands. That not all minds wish to be known, and not all hearts deserve to be heard.
Margin Note: Justicar Gray:
I have never seen someone believe this vehemently in his bigotry. He reduces an entire people to beasts and calls it “reporting.” The Kindred developed advanced cultural systems of honor, kinship law, and oratory that predate their contact with the Contested Realm.
It was through the second great Rift, blessed be the Soul Archive of Mirah, that we first contacted the realm now known as the Soul Realms. I refer specifically to one of the Cyan-Haired Souldealer and Soulseer, a people far more compatible with our traditions than the brutefolk of the Kindred wastes.
Though they lacked telepathy, they compensated with extreme precision of perception and a deep understanding of the self. It was from them that we learned the foundations of soulcraft, how Souldealers could harvest monster souls, a resonance of power echoing with potential.
This partnership reshaped our destiny. And from that golden age of exchange emerged my revered ancestor: Le’a of the Outspring Valley. He was the first to bind knowledge into harvested essence, weaving the techniques of the Soulseers with the superior insight of the Ancients. It was he who etched the first true script of power, and from him emerged the entire school of Soulscribes.
I take no shame in stating that this sacred art is not just my inheritance; it is our obligation to guard it against dilution, misuse, and misinterpretation by lesser minds.
Margin Note: Justicar Gray:
He keeps calling the Kindred people beasts, when the Soulit realm is the only one where slavery still flourishes.
At least five independent families, including the Winterbloom and the Stoneleafes, claim earlier Soulscribes. Also, the first soul inscriptions were directly inspired by Kindred bonecrafting rituals, which Ni’a conveniently forgets.
The third stable Rift revealed a world unlike any I had imagined, even in deep study. An archipelago of floating islands adrift in orbit over a small, brilliant sun, encircled by a far greater ocean of water that behaved like a sky. Sunlight was reflected onto the land by the Sky Ocean. Rains came from great ocean waves; winds spiraled outward; and gravity obeyed different laws.
I visited this realm personally, in sanctioned scholarly capacity, and I must say it left a curious impression.
When the Silent One arrived in this realm, the Dreamers did not share dreams. That ability had not yet bloomed in them. It was my Ancestors, sensing how similar the power of those Dreamers was to our telepathy, who attempted to teach them our path. It was this bold, sacred effort that accidentally wove what the Dreamers now call the Great Dream, a collective unconscious built not from thoughts, but from symbols, stories, and shared memory.
The Dreamers’ magic is slower, less rigid than ours, but it reveals truths that speech obscures. I respect them, even if they remain difficult to categorize.
Margin Note: Justicar Gray:
He keeps referring to telepathy as “our path” even though there is no confirmed sighting of a true telepath in thousands of years.
If he found their dreaming “frustrating,” it’s because Dreamers speak in imagery and layered meaning. In that, they are in many ways similar to us Mythics. Perhaps too similar for Ni’a’s comfort.
It was the Silent One who opened this next Rift, and it was no accident. He wished to attempt a Rift from somewhere other than his own birthplace and chose the Kindred Realm as a testing ground.
What he found was a world structured by belief and hierarchy: a realm of gods, now called the Mythic Realm.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
There, divine beings walked in flesh and stone, beings who granted power in exchange for devotion. Each claimed authority over concepts: war, justice, storm, and silence. These entities were not illusions. They were real. And dangerously inconsistent.
I make no apology for my revulsion. These so-called gods offer miracles like merchants offer trinkets. Worse still, they demand faith over reason, and ritual over logic. It is the Soulit stance, and mine personally, that power granted by worship is power stolen from the Soul.
The Silent One did not linger. Nor did he gain anything of worth in that realm. But the Kindred embraced it, as they always do, seeking power without discipline, and promise without comprehension. You only need to walk the slums of Hano to find them full of half-Kindred, half-Mythic children.
Margin Note: Justicar Gray:
This account barely hides its fear beneath arrogance. The Mythic Realm wasn’t just powerful, it was ordered. Temples were repositories of living law, and the gods kept each other in check.
Also, the Silent One stayed long enough to be worshipped across different pantheons. It’s worth noting that Ni’a’s own ancestors later adopted minor divine contracts under the guise of “soul pacts.” And some priests of Law intermarried with them, so much for purity.
There was one more Rift.
I dare not spick of it even now, it was a terrible place. We sealed the Rift. Then buried it under rubble and destroyed the records. Yet even still, legends about that place still haunt us.
Even I do not object to its sealing. Some truths must not be known.
To this day, the Satori family, the only people with portal powers, teaches all children the Law of Three Seals: No wild gates, no full Rifts, and no experimentation with trying to find a new realm.
Margin Note: Justicar Gray:
This place was worse than he admits. We have legends about it, even in the Mythic realm. Some call it the world of doubt, as in the opposite of Faith, a complete antithesis to the Mythic Realm’s source of power. Another thinks it’s a realm where all magic combines, the most credible recording claim that the sealed realm Rift can bring people back from the dead if used correctly.
Also, for all his pride in his Soulit lineage, Ni’a failed to mention that the Silent One requested help from the High Priestess of Perseverance to seal the Rift, and not from any powerful Souldealer..
Of all the Rifts, the last was the most tragic and perhaps, in the long lens of history, the most transformative.
The Rift opened in what is now Hano, long before it became a fortified military city stronghold. Back then, it was a tranquil southern province rich in stone, river-fed, and serene.
The realm it connected to was, at first, a savage wasteland. The Elemental Bloodline Realm, as we now call it, was controlled by intelligent monsters: tyrannical apex predators who carved kingdoms of cruelty across a broken ecosystem. Air pressure and gravity were unstable. Mana saturation caused spontaneous mutations in lifeforms and terrain alike.
Foremost among these horrors were the Dravak, the feasting monsters who gained intellect by consuming sentient beings. Rather than grow through time, they sharpened with each kill, refining both mind and cruelty.
And yet, from this violent origin arose the realm that now rivals the Soulit in both military and arcane advancement. The Bloodline Realm is our greatest ally precisely because of its abundance of monster souls, which means raw material for Soulbooks.
Margin Note: Justicar Gray:
It’s recorded that the lost Ancestors chose not to seal the Bloodline Rift, not out of mercy, but greed. Mana was the first visible power source. Unlike Faith or Dream-inspiration, mana left marks. They wanted to harvest it, regardless of the cost.
I write this not just as a historian, but as one whose blood recalls.
Our ancestors, true telepaths of the Contested Realm, shone too brightly. Their minds, so vivid and resonant, were like beacons to the Dravak. And the Dravak came.
They did not merely kill. They feasted. Life by life, link by link, until the grand mental lattice, the psychic union that defined our people, was torn apart.
Even worse, the Dravak attempted to expand their dominion beyond the Bloodline Realm. But unlike us, the other Realms had long histories of war. The Soulit, the Dreamers, even the Kindred, barbarians though they are, fought them back with ferocity. Only we, with our idealism and open minds, were overrun.
The Silent One, brilliant and flawed, believed he could negotiate with them. He believed knowledge could outwit hunger. In the end, it was his mind they consumed last.
Margin Note: Justicar Gray:
He omits survivors, likely to dramatize. Not all telepaths died. Some fled to other realms, their blood diluted by native populations. Others hid underground. The people of the northeastern continent of the contested realm may be the closest genetic descendants of the lost Ancestors.
The Dravak's mistake was arrogance. They began intermingling with captive humans to create smarter heirs. Their logic was simple: why lose a hundred humans to produce one clever Dravak, when you could breed a smarter heir with just one?
But from this horror came an unexpected salvation.
Some hybrids, the first of their kind, awoke with human will and Dravak strength. They were cunning, fierce, and unshackled by monstrous instinct. These were the founders: rebels and visionaries who toppled their progenitors and seeded the first noble houses: Agame, Zanka, Lore, and others now hidden behind noble ceremonies.
They founded towns, then cities, then kingdoms. They taught scattered Bloodline humans to unite, and their uprising marked the decline of Dravak rule. The hybrid heirs became both liberators and rulers.
Margin Note: Justicar Gray:
The Contested and Bloodline realms were only liberated because of the hybrids. The Soulit nearly closed their Rift in fear of the Dravak, and the only ones who welcomed the challenge were the Kindred, who saw it as an honorable test of strength.
The rebellion ended most of the Dravak, but not all. A handful survive to this day, three thousand years later. Among them:
- The Colossus, though he is no longer as smart as he once was after being cursed by his own hybrid son.
- The Emperor of Flames, thought to have retreated into the magma halls of the southern Agame blood cliffs.
- His hybrid son, Kitchi Agame, founder of Hano, breaker of Dravak rule, and the first hybrid to rebel.
Their long lives lend weight to the ancient theory: if one perfects their soul, refines it beyond limit, they may escape death.
There are only a few confirmed immortals across the Seven Realms. Most are Dravak or their direct descendants. But others deserve mention:
- The Lady of the Holy: She originates from the Mythic, but was never a true goddess, merely an ascendant Mythic human who persists even after two thousand years.
- The Sleepless Father, a Dreaming Realm mystic who has not aged in recorded memory.
- Ion the Phoenix, whose last public act was soaring into the Sealed Realm two centuries ago.
As for the other gods of the Mythic Realm, though powerful, their bodies are avatars. They remain in the world only for minutes at a time before retreating to their divine domains. Immortal? Perhaps. But not present.
Margin Note: Justicar Gray:
Ion the Phoenix wasn’t just “last seen.” He declared, before witnesses across all realms, that he would stop a rising calamity in the Sealed Realm. Even if he dies, he claims he has multiple revival contingencies, as befits a true Phoenix.
I closed the thick, sun-faded volume and exhaled hard through my nose.
“History of the Seven Realms,” I muttered. More like one man’s manifesto wrapped in half-truths and superiority complexes. There wasn’t a shred of objectivity in Ni’a Outspring’s tone; just barely concealed contempt dressed up in ornate language.
But Justicar Gray’s scrawled margin notes told a different story. One full of contradictions, buried truths, and uncomfortable connections.
Still, something was starting to click. Seven realms. Seven magic systems. Seven human-like sentient peoples. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
I thought about how I got here: wishing on falling stars, kneeling in a garden in Tunisia with no ritual circle, just my desperation and the night sky of Sidi Bou Said.
Was that Mythic magic? Divine inspiration? Or something else entirely?
Was I pulled here by a dream, or did I make a small Rift, like the Silent One? My sky affinity, the weird way a shooting star still made my mana tingle even here, the power I felt in my bones when lightning cracked through my aura, it all pointed to something bigger. Something I hadn’t unlocked yet.
Could I reproduce it? Could I go back?
Maybe even hop between here and Earth?
If so… I need to go back to the stars. Observing them. Tracking patterns. Maybe somewhere better than Hano, with less light pollution, or more sky mana.