It was…vindicating. That was the emotion most dominant in Damon’s heart as he watched his granddaughter rip through armies of Ethermen. The words of his colleagues and peers among the Central Authority bureaucracy had whispered for so long, yet here she was, disproving them all thoroughly.

For a moment, he couldn’t help but reminisce. Damon had been raised in the Ten Thousand Empires, but in one of their most far-flung and neglected kingdoms. At the time, the lands that would become the Central Authority were ruled by the Fire Kingdom and the Empires, but not well in either case. The borderlands saw war and death in great abundance as the two major powers battled.

He was born to unshrouded parents, and was shunned heavily for his differences. Not just his shroud, but his generally gloomy demeanor. They were darker times, more suspicious and jaded against the unfamiliar. Even on the continents, so often forgotten in the more modern age, had experienced more than their fair share of fighting.

That was how his entire town was lost one day, a conflict that boiled over from far off, but still managed to slay everyone but him. He’d seen the outpouring ghosts from the fighting and tried to warn his family and his neighbors, but it was not enough. Even those that believed him, like his family, were ill-equipped to survive the glancing blow that shattered their home. Hiding inside was not enough, but what else could they have done?

Damon had pondered that for the day and a half it took his shroud to heal the wounds he sustained. What could he have done differently? That thought brought with it a spark of anger toward those who claimed ownership of their small village. Because the truth was, there was nothing more he could have done. But they could have. And they didn’t.

Slaying a noble of the Empires was no small thing. In doing it, Damon found himself on the run, trying to grow in power quick enough to survive the costs of his actions. It was on that run that he encountered Warick, his teacher. The Dread Salvation had not been so named at the time, merely another hunter of the Empires doing his job. But he was strong, and only getting more so.

He took pity on Damon. Instead of turning him over to the proper authorities, he offered up a corpse instead. No one cared enough to verify the tales of a respected hunter, so Damon slipped his fate, just like that. But he never forgot the weight of what he’d done, the tyranny of the nobility. And so he never stopped training, should they come knocking.

He settled into a new life, one of quietude. His shroud was more than enough to position him comfortably as a guardian of a small ether mine and the town around it. Until the Uprising. At the time, and to this day, Damon wasn’t sure if the Central Authority was a better alternative to the Empires. Both had their own problems, and neither truly changed anything enough to matter.

But…Warick believed in it, and Damon owed the man his very life. So, they went to war. Against two of the most powerful nations in the Starry Sea, at the same time. It was a foolish gambit, one doomed to fail. So he was immensely surprised when they didn’t immediately get obliterated.

It was only later, after all had settled that Damon could reflect and see the obvious. He’d been a soldier on the very forefront, so the actions of those leading their little movement went outside his notice. And those were truly skilled people, in that time. Master negotiators and strategists. They were the backbone of the Uprising, the only real reason it succeeded.

All were gone, now. They’d been in their later years during the Uprising, and had reached their ends tens of thousands of years ago. All that was left was the shallow echo of their glory. The heirs to the Central Council had not lived up to their predecessors, in Damon’s opinion. But no one could choose who received a Throne, and Thrones were needed to stand at the top, lest other Thrones appear.

That had been Damon’s heaviest weight, in the Uprising. For the longest time he hadn’t known about Thrones, like most shrouded. He was unaware of his hidden potential, merely acting as an admittedly above-average soldier.

Yet, Damon could never bring himself to regret those days. Because it was in that catalyst of war that he met Aleia, his shining light. He was an angry man with a dour attitude and little in the way of charm. What she saw in him, he couldn’t guess, even to this day. But she put up with his sullenness long enough to color it with some of her more mild and humorous personality. The world had never seemed brighter.

And they were an absolute menace on the battlefield.

Damon’s abilities at the time were far more focused on infusion than he was now. He’d use formshift to slip through lines and strike from behind, a model assassin. Aleia was a perfect counterpoint. Her mild personality and soft-spoken mannerisms did not extend to the battlefield. There, her Brilliance shroud had her shining like a beacon and fighting with the skill and ferocity of ten of their peers combined. Meanwhile, he slunk through the shadows she so abundantly cast, hamstringing and cutting jugulars.

As with many of their fellow warriors, they moved fast, far faster than they might have in a more peaceful time. Then again, Damon had been raised with little peace in his life, so perhaps things always would have happened the way they did.

It was still years later that their son was born. And less than a year after that, everything else happened at once. In a matter of days, Damon had discovered Thrones, filled his, and lost the love of his life.

It was…A dark time. For him, seemingly alone. The rise of another throne on the side of the Uprising was enough, both militarily and politically, to move the war in their favor. Unbeknownst to him, the minds behind the Uprising had spent the whole duration expertly playing the Fire Kingdom and the Empires against each other. It turned out that both nations had been building settlements in what was, ostensibly, the other’s territory for millenia.

Those disputes, combined with a solid resistance and other concerns, gave rise to the circumstances that allowed the Central Authority to form. Damon’s Throne was the final push that collapsed all resistance and made the Uprising more trouble than it was worth. After all, the land they were claiming was so superfluous that neither force had noticed the other country invading for several thousand years.

That didn’t mean the fighting stopped. This was still the Starry Sea, and the other nations acknowledging the existence of the Central Authority only meant that they stopped treating the situation as an uprising. The new country very much had to fight for the right to exist. Damon had no doubt that the Fire Kingdom and the Ten Thousand Empires of the time had relented to the CA’s claims only because they saw it as an opportunity to sweep in and cement their own claims on even more land.

Things obviously did not go their way.

It was in this time that Warick and Damon established themselves as the Dread Salvation and the Ghost of Authority. Warick was finally given free rein to live up to his own ideologies, and he pursued them with a vengeance. And Damon had a massive amount of newly acquired power mixed with the rage and grief necessary to continually throw himself into battles he shouldn’t have won.

In those days, it was only the constant support of his mentor and the presence of his son that brought Damon home more than once. Losing Aleia had broken him for a time, even her ghost’s presence could not sooth that loss. Their relationship continued, of course. The ghost was truly Aleia’s spirit, with her mind and will intact. But it was not the same as her being there, living and breathing.

Besides, Aleia’s ghost could assuage his grief, but she did nothing to suppress his rage.

It was a bloody time, a constant battlefield that saw Damon’s power increasing by orders of magnitude as the nature of his Throne pushed him more and more toward an aura focused fighting style. Soon, he alone could hold an entire front against anyone less than another Throne. And even some of them feared him.

In the face of his rapidly spiraling power growth, the Fire Kingdom and the Empires backed off their assault, seemingly realizing that this was no longer the easy sweep they’d wanted. A fortunate shift, because Damon’s attention steadily shifted more and more toward his own home. His son was struggling.

It was a known thing that no two shrouds were ever truly the same. That being said, most shrouded born to shrouded parents would see their shroud taking a similar direction to one of their parents, or showing as some combination of the two.

In modern times, and in the last thirty thousand years or so, it had become popular among the elite of most nations to have many children until one emerged with a shroud similar enough to their parent to inherit some core combat techniques. Damon abhorred this methodology, as it resulted in most children being cast aside as useless or extraneous.

And much of that arose from his own troubles with his son. The boy had taken on aspects of Damon’s Ghost and Aleia’s Brilliance, but he suffered from something that all shrouded parents with strong shrouds feared. Overwhelming domain. Damon’s son had the Ascension shroud. A domain so potent and esoteric that he could barely use it. In fact, for a long time he couldn’t use it at all.

That was when the whispers began. Overwhelming domain wasn’t something that could be hidden, and many began to call Damon’s blood cursed. His shroud was too strong, none could handle its might. Patently ridiculous notions, as Damon had lived most of his life as slightly above average at most. It was his Throne that had propelled him so high.

But that was not a fact he could spread, lest he draw down the wrath of every nation in the Starry Sea for revealing the hidden strength their leaders relied on. Indeed, Damon didn’t tell his son this either, for fear that the boy would tell others in a moment of anger. And he might have, as Damon’s son did not deal well with the whispers.

Despite Damon’s fears, his son’s Ascension shroud, while not being something that he could ever use in combat, did offer him the lifespan of a True Shroud. What minute amounts he could leverage gave him a healthy and long-lived body.

Damon was almost glad that his son never set foot on a battlefield. After all, a better life had been exactly what he’d fought so far for. But his unwillingness to have more children lowered his standing in the hierarchy that emerged in the CA, where some families had truly ridiculous numbers of children to essentially jump-start entire dynasties.

That stigma pushed him into the position of Headmaster. There, Damon resolved to do his best to rectify the attitudes of the elite and elevate some of the unfortunate shrouded born to unshrouded parents. He’d hoped to eliminate some of the biases that existed and prepare young shrouded for the battlefield before they were simply thrown into the grinder like he was.

The school developed nicely, and did much to take things in a more positive direction. Even though the Academy became a political battleground unto itself. His son even found someone to stand with him after a time. Far longer than Damon would have hoped, but he was always held back by his lack of strength.

Damon was devastated when his son slipped away. His shroud’s strange ability to sustain his youth eventually failed, and it did so not long after Hekate was born. Meanwhile, his son’s wife never achieved Embodiment, and her life reached its natural end like an unshrouded. She was already in her later years when she’d met Damon’s son.

And that left Damon to raise a child, once again on his own. And once again, she seemed to be affected with an overwhelming domain. There was no way to express the joy Damon had felt when she found friends among her fellow students. A joy that was only equipped as he watched her surpass the overwhelming domain to become a true powerhouse.

He watched, pride and vindication shining in his eyes as Hekate unleashed power enough to give even him pause.

How far she’d grown.