The Ash-Forged Soul

At the start of the Balance Cycle following the Equilibrium, when the last flame of Isturoth flickers, threatening to consume itself in a final, agonizing gasp, the world will be nought but a husk. Great kingdoms will crumble to dust, their grand spires left as jagged teeth against a sky perpetually bruised.   It is in this twilight, this dying breath of an age, that a prophecy will be whispered from the cracked lips of forgotten oracles. Not of a chosen hero, nor a triumphant king, but of an Ash-Born, a soul forged not from the warmth of life, but from the chilling embrace of the fading flame itself.   Deep within a sunken city, where Jokhoš (god of destruction and rage) births a chaos of fire and twisted abominations, a lone figure toils. She is not of the living, nor truly of the dead, but a remnant, a shard of a forgotten people, her form a silhouette against the smoldering ruins. Her name is lost to the ash-choked winds, but the few, mad cultists who still lingered called her the Veiled Mother of Ash.   For cycles, she gathers the dying embers and charred bones, the cold, brittle remnants of souls consumed by despair. She sifts through the dust of the fallen and the calcified remains of forgotten heroes, seeking the purest essence of what remained: the will to endure, even in utter desolation.   Her womb, a cavern of petrified roots and weeping stone, pulses with a faint, sickly light. It is there, amidst the gnawing silence and the stench of decay, that the Ash-Born stirs. Not with a cry of life, but with a faint, resonant hum, like a distant funeral bell.   The birth is not of blood and pain, but of calcification and slow, agonizing emergence. The Veiled Mother does not push; rather, her very essence withers, her form turning to ash as the nascent being draws sustenance from her fading vitality. The air grows heavy, thick with the scent of ozone and the metallic tang of ancient sorrow.   When the last mote of the Veiled Mother dissolves, leaving only a faint impression on the scorched earth, the Ash-Born lays still. It is not a soft and vulnerable babe, it is a form already hardened, its skin like cooled slag, its eyes, when they finally open, twin points of dull, smoldering light, reflecting the grey world around it.   It carries no grand lineage, no divine blessing. Its birth is a testament to the Balance Cycle itself: a desperate, grim necessity, a final, defiant spark in the face of absolute oblivion. The very air around it trembles, burdened by the immense, terrible weight of its existence. It is the Ash-Born, a child of the dying world, destined to either rekindle the last embers, or witness their final, eternal fade.