10 parts Ongoing The world did not mourn the weak.
Kael learned that truth as a child - when the sect recruiters tested him and saw nothing. No fire, no water, no strength. The elders shook their heads and called him hollow. His parents lowered their eyes in shame. The other children marched away to grand halls and immortal masters, while Kael was left in the dust, a failure before his first breath of life had even settled.
When the raiders came years later, no one came back to defend the village. The chosen ones were gone. The strong were far away. The weak burned.
Kael staggered through the ruins, smoke in his lungs, his eyes raw with grief. And then - he saw.
It was not fire that caught his gaze, nor the gleam of blades. It was light within bodies. The glow of energies hidden in bones and veins, affinities no elder had noticed, paths that had been ignored. He saw it in the dead: the farmer who had strength like stone, the girl whose blood shimmered with healing water. All wasted, all discarded.
That was the moment Kael awakened - not to power, but to truth.
There were no trash people. Only a trash system.
He swore then, knee-deep in ash and silence, that no one else would be abandoned. He would forge paths for the forsaken, kindle flames in the broken, and prove that the world's so-called chosen were nothing but blind fools.
And when his own light rose - the Lantern Sovereign - the forsaken would rise with him.
