The wind screamed across the high peaks of the Imperium Solis — not a natural howl, but something older. Something hungry.
Above the clouds, where the mountains pierced the heavens like a line of jagged spears, stood Fort Solvane — last bastion of the civilized world. From its iron walls, the earth dropped into a yawning cleft in the mountains, an impossible rift that tore through stone as if carved by a wrathful god. They called it Godscar Pass.
And tonight, it would take another soul.
Chains clinked as the prisoner was dragged forward — bloodied, barefoot, but unbroken. He didn't scream. Didn't beg. Not when they stripped him of name, rank, and rights. Not when they read aloud the decree of exile. And not now, as they stood at the edge of the world.
He had once walked the halls in armor. Raised his hand in salute beneath the imperial banners.
A pawn. A scapegoat. A name buried before it ever rose.
Now, just another body to be thrown to the Borderlands.
He stood under the cracked sun sigil of the Imperium, facing the tribunal that had once toasted his loyalty.
At their center, robed in obsidian armor traced with golden script, the High Warden did not blink.
"You are cast from the Light of Solis. You shall not be remembered. You shall not return."
The sentence echoed like a ritual. Hollow. Rehearsed. But the eyes behind the helmets weren't indifferent — they were afraid.
He saw it. In the way their hands tightened on hilts. In the way their captain stepped back just slightly when he met his gaze.
They feared what he might become.
"Any last words?" the Warden asked.
The prisoner smiled — blood in his teeth.
"Yeah."
He lifted his head toward the sky, where stormclouds gathered over the pass like a curtain waiting to fall.
"Next time you see me… run."
The Warden gave a subtle nod.
And with that, the guards shoved him off the edge.
The wind roared.
Stone and sky blurred past.
He fell through mist, through storm, through light fractured like shattered glass.
The Borderlands opened wide beneath him — a wound upon the world.
He hit the darkness.
And everything went still.
"Thus fell the Exile of Solvane, cast from the light into the hollow. And the world, though it did not know it yet… began to burn."