I worked in silence at my desk, my hands moving almost automatically after years of the same endless routine. I had been trained for this since I was five, and by now the motions felt less like choices and more like instinct.

Golden sunlight poured through the tall windows of my study, casting warm rays across the marble floors and reflecting against the gilded pillars and ornate picture frames that lined the walls. Everything in Solarae glowed beneath the sun’s touch. Everything except my thoughts.

My gaze drifted beyond the window, past the shimmering ocean, to the distant outline of Fullcrest. The kingdom of darkness.

I had always wondered what it was truly like there. What the people were like. Whether the endless night felt suffocating… or strangely comforting. But my mother never allowed me to ask such things aloud.

She called them ruthless. Cold-hearted monsters who fed off our power to keep the Crystal of Soltaine alive at its fullest strength—the ancient force that kept our worlds divided and the barrier between us unbroken.