Aureum was once a world filled with light. The bright blue, cloudless skies always reflected the mood of the mortals below it, happy, fulfilled and safe.
For centuries, the gods guided Aureum, granting rain to the farmers, strength to the warriors, wisdom to the scholars.
Their presence was everywhere: in the rise and fall of the sun, in every gust of wind and in the hearts of those who prayed.
But nothing lasts forever.
One day, their prayers suddenly started going unanswered. Then another, and another. The gods had suddenly gone quiet.
The temples grew quiet, their flames dimming to ash. The divine markings that previously proudly graced the skins of the priests, started to dim and fade away.
At first, the mortals believed it a test, a trial of their faith. They built grander shrines, offered greater sacrifices and even begged for forgiveness.
But a reply was never heard from the heavens.
And as the years turned to decades, hope slowly turned to grief and grief turned to rage.
They felt abandoned and betrayed by their makers, but they soon learnt that the gods leaving them wasn’t the only thing they should have feared.
From beneath Aureum, monsters the mortals never heard of started crawling out.
Created by the imbalance caused due to the absence of the gods, these monsters were abominations born from the fractures in the world’s divine order.
They did not belong to any known realm. Neither beast nor spirit, they were creatures of corruption born from endless darkness molded into flesh.
The mortals called them Eclipsed, for wherever they walked, the light dimmed and the air turned cold.
Due to them, entire villages vanished overnight. Cities that once stood proudly with massive unbreakable structures crumbled overnight.
The people cried out once more to their absent gods. But no divine hand reached down, no miracle came.
It was truly humanity’s end.
But humans were anything if not persistent. Driven to the absolute brink, with their numbers dwindling to barely a billion, the humans turned their desperation into defiance.
If the gods would not save them, they would become their own salvation.
It began with a spark an idea born from both madness and desperation.
A group of scholars, inventors, and heretics gathered beneath what remained of the old world, uniting under a single, blasphemous goal: to steal the sun.... No, not it’s light, but the sun itself.
And against all odds, they succeeded.
They built colossal towers that reached for the heavens, equipped with engines capable of capturing and siphoning the very essence of the sun.
For seven years, those towers, later called The Pillars of Dawn, burned day and night, drawing down rivers of golden fire from the heavens.
Even the world itself trembled at this abominable act and the sky slowly grew darker but this didn’t stop the mortals as they were determined to either gain unlimited power, spite the gods or die trying.
And when the light finally faded, the mortals looked up and saw what they had done.
The sun was completely gone.
In its place hung an artificial orb an enormous construct forged from divine residue1 and mortal technology, powered by the very energy they had stolen.
With that, humanity now held the power of the sun in the palm of their hands1 and that day marked the dawn of a new age: The Solar Era.
With the stolen sun, now known as the Helion Core, as their eternal power source, humanity began to rebuild.
They designed machines that harnessed Solar Energy (S.E.), channeling it through radiant weapons, armor, and even entire cities.
With such innovation, the humans were finally able to fight back against those creatures of abomination.
They formed defenses around their cities, ones that the monsters couldn’t go past, they created weapons to push back the monsters and for the first time in centuries, humanity was gaining an upper hand in the war against the Eclipsed.
But such power always came with a price.
With the absence of a real sun came the evolution of the Eclipsed. They grew stronger, faster, and more intelligent, with their numbers seemingly increasing everyday as their relentless attacks on humans continued.
To survive and prepare future generations for the war, the Solar Confederacy founded [The Radiant Academies], institutions dedicated to training Solar Knights, humans capable of withstanding a Helion Core planted in them and wielding Helion-powered weapons.
These knights were the new warriors of mankind, the front liners of the war and the deciders of victory or defeat.
They stood as humanity’s new hope, the new light that drove away the darkness. They successfully pushed back the monsters, allowing humanity to reclaim most of its lost lands.
They rebuilt their cities again and Aureum was once more, a world that belonged to the mortals... It wasn’t as colorful as during the age of the gods, but at least humanity had survived.
At Aureum’s heart stood Solara Prime, the capital city and home of the first and greatest of the Radiant Academies — [The Solar Academy]
It was here that the brightest minds and strongest wills of the younger generations were molded into warriors of humanity.
Solar Knights, engineers, and scholars, each one trained to master the gift humanity had stolen from the heavens.
To the public, the Academies were symbols of hope, monuments that ensured the survival of Aureum, they were like gods among them, each capable of weilding the power of the sun itself through their weapons.
Though the victory against the Eclipsed was only temporary, as they kept evolving and rising in numbers, seemingly unending.
The Solar Confederacy, the ruling body of Aureum, hid this truth from the public. To the people, the war was progressing. The cities stood taller, the Academies flourished.
But beneath all that, the Eclipsed were getting closer and closer to evolving past what, even with their tech powered by the stolen sun, humanity could handle, soon enough, they would be brought back to their last leg and whether they would beg for their gods to return again or survive as they previously had, through desparation, remains to be seen.