There are births that happen quietly.
And then there are births that reality never forgets.
Lucien Dreamveil was born on Aetherion, beneath a sky that did not thunder, did not fracture, did not bleed—but paused.
Not stopped.
Paused.
Midday sunlight hung unmoving above the capital district of Elythra Vale, birds frozen mid-flight, wind holding its breath as though the world itself had leaned closer to listen.
Inside a modest estate woven into the roots of a lesser World-Tree offshoot, a woman screamed—not in pain, but in defiance.
"Don't you dare hesitate," she growled, teeth clenched. "If creation wants him… it can come take him itself."
Her name was Seloria Dreamveil.
Not a goddess.
Not a queen.
A woman who had already stared into the White once—and lived.
She had silver-black hair like brushed starlight, eyes the deep crimson of old wine and deeper resolve. Her aura was muted by design, wrapped and folded inward by seals she herself had carved long before pregnancy was ever a thought.
Beside her stood Vaelor Dreamveil, Lucien's father.
Tall. Quiet. Shoulders squared not with arrogance, but certainty. His eyes were the same void-touched blue Lucien would later inherit—not the void of emptiness, but the void of stillness before something happens.
Vaelor did not panic.
He never did.
He simply placed his hand on Seloria's, and the seals around the room tightened.
Outside, something vast recoiled.
Inside—
Lucien screamed.
And the White flinched.
Not descended.
Not manifested.
It recognized.
Across realities, across timelines that had not yet branched, something ancient and featureless acknowledged a fact it had not planned for.
A child had been born already unaligned.
The pause ended.
Time resumed.
And the world went on, ignorant of how close it had come to ending before it ever truly began.
Lucien was not the first child.
Nor was he the last.
The Dreamveil household was small, warm, loud in the way only families untouched by prophecy can be.
Lucien had a sister—
Elara Dreamveil, two years older.
She was all laughter and reckless brilliance, with her mother's eyes and her father's stubbornness. Elara awakened early—not explosively, not violently—but cleanly. Her power expressed itself as perception. She saw patterns in things others didn't. She once told Lucien, at age seven, that the stars were misaligned.
No one listened.
Lucien also had a younger brother—
Kael Dreamveil, born sickly, quiet, and observant.
Kael didn't awaken at all.
And that terrified Seloria more than if he had.
Because Kael was blank.
Not powerless.
Blank.
A space where something should have been, but wasn't.
Seloria knew what that meant.
Vaelor pretended not to.
They loved their children fiercely anyway.
For a time, that was enough.
The Dreamveil lineage was not royal.
It was incidental.
Long ago—before gods learned to name themselves, before Heaven codified cultivation—the White had brushed reality for the first time. Not fully. Not intentionally.
A fragment of it slipped through a flaw in causality and anchored itself to a mortal woman who would later become known as Astra Dreamveil, the founder.
She did not wield the White.
She survived it.
That survival passed on.
Not as power.
As permission.
Every Dreamveil descendant carried a faint, imperceptible resonance—an echo that said:
This one is allowed to look.
Most never did.
Some glanced.
A few stared too long and went mad.
Seloria had stared—and sealed her memories of it away.
Vaelor had felt it—and chosen silence.
Lucien, however—
Lucien was born with the White already aware of him.
Not inside him.
Not empowering him.
Watching.
Waiting.
The world didn't end all at once.
It cracked.
On Lucien's tenth birthday, the sky over Aetherion split—not with lightning, but absence. A wound where color bled away, where sound died mid-echo.
Monsters poured out.
Not beasts.
Not demons.
Things that did not belong to causality.
Cities fell in hours.
Nations followed.
And humanity did what humanity always does when pushed to extinction—
They changed.
Awakenings erupted across the world.
Some gained elemental dominion.
Some bent space.
Some touched concepts they could not name.
Power flooded into mortals without guidance.
And chaos followed.
The Calamity wasn't just an invasion.
It was an initiation.
Lucien awakened late.
Painfully.
During a raid that tore through Elythra Vale, a creature without a face reached for Kael.
Lucien moved.
And reality folded.
Not shattered.
Folded—like a page bent by careless fingers.
The monster vanished.
Lucien collapsed.
When he woke, Seloria was staring at him with naked terror.
Vaelor said nothing.
That night, the seals around their estate doubled.
And the White smiled.
The Day His Parents Disappeared -
Lucien was nineteen.
The world was barely holding together.
Civilizations had reorganized around power. Cultivation systems had begun forming naturally as humanity tried to imitate what gods once did instinctively.
Lucien had grown strong.
Too strong for his age.
But he was still human.
Still laughing. Still angry. Still loving.
That night, Seloria kissed his forehead.
Vaelor hugged him longer than usual.
Elara was already gone—lost during a Calamity surge three years prior.
Kael had died quietly in his sleep months earlier.
Blank to the end.
Lucien went to bed feeling… watched.
He woke to black.
Not darkness.
Erasure.
His consciousness was pulled inward, stripped of memory, stripped of context. He felt himself falling through layers of self he didn't know he had.
The last thing he heard was Seloria's voice—
not this Seloria—
Older.
Colder.
"I'm sorry. This was the only way."
Then—
White.
Much later—after endless monsters, after blood and silence, after Lucien began remembering fragments of a mother he couldn't place—she appeared.
Seloria.
But not his Seloria.
This version bore scars carved by void exposure. Her aura was fractured, layered with timelines that had collapsed. Her eyes held grief measured in eternities.
She had come from a timeline where Lucien never woke in the White.
Where the Sole Exception never existed.
Where the Creator won.
She crossed realities by burning herself away, anchoring to Lucien's presence as a fixed point outside narrative.
She stayed only moments.
Enough to tell him:
His parents didn't abandon him They sacrificed their existence in this timeline to push him outside the system The White wasn't a prison—it was a failsafe
She touched his cheek.
And vanished.
Lucien screamed into the White that day.
And for the first time—
The White answered by remaining silent.