“This child is not a gift,” whispered High Monk Seran, his withered hand hovering over the infant’s brow. “He is a consequence.”
“You are not a weapon,” Seran told him on the eve of his eighteenth naming day. “Weapons break. You are a law. The world forgot its balance. You are here to remind it.” Deva Intro
He had no family, no past, no reflection in still water. The monks of the Silent Peak found him as an infant, wrapped in a cloak woven from nightshade silk, a single obsidian shard clutched in his tiny fist. The shard hummed with a frequency that made the elder monks’ bones ache. They called it Karmic Echo —a fragment of the very weapon that had shattered the continent. “This child is not a gift,” whispered High