Before the curse. Before the fall. Before the veil of lies and the shroud of time, there was Alicia—the girl with light in her heart and fire in her hands.
She had always been strange.
Not strange in the way others feared—but the kind of strange that made trees lean in when she passed, books flutter open when she walked by, and the stars blink twice on nights she cried. She was born in the city of Velyra, far from the chaos of realms torn by war. It was a quiet place... until the sky broke.
She was seven the first time the light spoke to her.
It came not as a voice, but a hum inside her bones. A calling. She followed it to a forgotten temple buried beneath her grandmother's house. That night, she touched the staff—her staff—for the first time. And the moment her fingers wrapped around its grip, it burned with purpose. The light chose her.
From then on, Alicia became more than a girl. She was a beacon. And beacons, she would soon learn, attract both the lost and the damned.
By fifteen, she was a prodigy in magic and swordplay, mastering light spells no mortal had recorded in centuries. Her bond with the staff was unlike anything her mentors had seen. But even power has a price.
And that price... was time.
Years Later — The Fall
Alicia had taken on an apprentice—Jian. The girl reminded her of herself: strong-willed, curious, with shadows behind her smile. They trained, they fought, and they laughed. In another life, they might've been sisters. But Alicia had been seeing signs—fractures in the world, glitches in reality, moments where time looped and then broke.
The light warned her.
It whispered of someone she'd forgotten—someone not dead but misplaced. A friend. A boy. A flame she'd buried beneath duty and magic. Jackson.
And when she finally looked into the truth, when she finally tore through the veil that had hidden his past lives, she saw everything: His death. Her mourning. His punishment. Lilith's curse. The countless worlds he was forced to live through.
That's when Alicia did the unthinkable.
She used the light to tamper with time—not to save herself, but to change his fate. She shattered the staff, fracturing her soul with it, hiding her identity beneath layers of memory and illusion. She disappeared from Jian's life, and from the world itself, leaving behind nothing but a myth. The mentor who vanished.
But time doesn't forget.
And neither do swords forged with sorrow.