This world has endured countless changes and the structures and directions of every world bound to it.
Civilizations rose and fell, laws fractured and reformed, entire systems of meaning collapsed under their own weight.
Yet among all of them, there was a first change, a single turning point so absolute that every transformation afterward has been measured against it.
That moment is known as the Era of Dawn, often shortened by historians to simply the Dawn.
It was the point at which existence first learned how to move forward rather than remain whole.
Before it, the world persisted. After it, the world progressed, fractured, and evolved.
It was during the Dawn that Adam and Eve came into being.
Not as symbols, and not as parables, but as beings of immense antiquity whose existence altered the direction of reality itself.
They were not merely the first humans.
They were the first to think with awareness, to act with intent, and to choose with consequence.
Through them, rational life learned what it meant to know.
All thinking life descends from them. Not only by blood, but by inheritance of condition.
What set Adam and Eve apart was not divinity, but proximity to the world's earliest truths.
They were the first to encounter the Fruits of Harvest, and the first to bear them within their own hands.
Those Fruits were necessary for evolution, not of flesh, but of awareness.
To hold one was to grasp a concept so completely that it could no longer be separated from the self.
Nicole believed this was the true origin of their influence.
Adam and Eve did not rule the world. They shaped it because they fully embodied what they consumed.
Through the Fruits of Harvest, they gained complete authority over the concepts they held.
Refinement, definition, judgment, choice, consequence. These were not ideas they preached. They were states of being they lived.
The cost was immeasurable.
Their refusal of God was not an act of rebellion born from arrogance, nor was it corruption.
It was a decision made with full awareness of what would follow.
By choosing knowledge over obedience, they accepted permanence.
The knowledge of good and evil did not merely inform them.
It altered them entirely, engraving consequence, guilt, mercy, cruelty, and responsibility into the core of their existence.
From that knowledge, sin was born.
Not as a crime, and not as punishment imposed from above, but as a condition of awareness itself.
Sin was the fracture that forms when understanding surpasses innocence.
The moment one knows, one becomes capable of judgment. The moment one judges, suffering becomes possible.
Because they knew, death gained meaning.
Because they understood, pain could be inflicted deliberately. Because they could choose, cruelty could be justified.
Adam and Eve were not destroyed for this choice.
They were cast into the world as it truly was, stripped of abstraction, stripped of protection, forced to endure what they had made possible.
Humanity did not inherit a curse. It inherited a condition.
They became revered as the origins of mankind, not because they ruled, but because everything that followed traced back to them.
They no longer shaped the world through action, but through the systems they had set in motion.
Reality itself continued to obey the structures born from their decisions.
They were not monsters.
They were founders who paid the price first.
Humanity never chose to inherit their failure. It was born into it.
Every generation carries the weight of two decisions made before time learned restraint, bound to consequences it never agreed to bear.
That was why this world fractured under its own systems.
Why power demanded suffering. Why survival so often felt indistinguishable from guilt.
"This world was never broken by accident," I said quietly. "It was built this way."
My fingers curled slightly, resisting an impulse even I did not fully trust.
"A god who creates a world where suffering is inevitable is not benevolent. He is cruel. He knew what would follow, and he allowed it to stand."
I exhaled slowly, grounding myself against the weight of the thought.
"If this was his design, then darkness was never a failure. It was the destination."
Silence followed.
"No world should be forced to justify its existence through the mistakes of its founders," I continued.
"No matter how ancient or necessary they were."
I settled into stillness then, my expression no longer shaped by anger, but by understanding sharpened into resolve.
"Thank you for showing me that this world was never meant to remain as it is, and that breaking it may be the only way to make it just."
Oliver looked at me uneasily, unsettled by the sincerity behind the words.
He stepped back. "Terrifying," he muttered. "Simply your gaze. It is truly terrifying."
I rose slowly, my eyes drifting to Jennifer's lifeless body. I wondered what could have been.
Whether I could have saved her. Whether there was ever a path where this end did not exist.
The truth settled heavily in my chest.
I was her killer.
When I looked up, I saw beyond the world. My eyes bled as I peered into the Unknown, into absence given form.
The sight burned away all light until there was nothing left to see.
And in that blindness, my vision returned.
I reached outward. Whatever Oliver saw made him step back again.
"A monster," he whispered. "A monster indeed."
He was not wrong.
My eyes had seen all things, and before the depths of this world and the vastness beyond it, everything was dark.
So dark that no light could survive within it.
I gathered my hair into my palms. Its color shifted, turning a dull, unnatural green.
My eyes began to drip, fine cracks forming beneath them.
From those fractures, wings took shape, bone and ash, white and lifeless. Not graceful. Only present.
I brought my hands together once. When I pulled them apart, a spear existed between them.
Its head resembled the elongated skull of a serpent, shaped more like intent than craftsmanship.
It was not elegant. It was made to end things.
The shaft resembled a long bone, jagged, uneven, yet firm, as though it had never known weakness.
Around it coiled an endless strip of dark cloth, wrapping without covering, bound by obligation rather than purpose.
At its end rested a skull so dark that light could not remain within it.
It was not a weapon of beauty.
It was a symbol, born from my most corrosive envy.
My mark burned as the spear settled into mind, body, and soul.
Not as something I wielded, but as something I became. The boundary between us collapsed completely.
This was absolute synthesis.
My Regalia did not merely manifest. It fused permanently, without the possibility of withdrawal or decay.
My heart ceased, bound in chains of envy, and I did not mourn it. Life no longer held relevance.
My eyes turned white, not from light, but from its absence.
When I spoke, reality recoiled.
"Ancestral Spear of Envy: Iscara."
Before Oliver could acknowledge my movement, I drove the spear through his heart.
"Oliver," I said calmly, "this is the reward I give you. My final gift. A swift death."
He dropped his sword and lifted his hands to my face. "You will not live in peace. You have abandoned everything for this power."
I tilted my head. "Everything? You just took my everything. What need would I have for anything else?"
I twisted the spear and withdrew it. In that final moment, as his life faded, Cradella abandoned me.
I looked forward instead, the paths before me were blurry with desperation.