Before the Academy had a name, before the first student found the door that shouldn't exist, there was only the Spark. Some call it the first light. Others, the breath of beginning. The ancient texts—those few fragments that survived the Hollowing of the Third Age—speak of it differently: the Spark is not light, not breath, not energy at all. It is attention. The universe, for one impossible moment, looking at itself and choosing to remember.
Every soul carries a fragment of this original attention. Not power. Not magic. Simply the capacity to be seen—and to see in return. This is what the Devourer hunts. Not the body. Not the mind. The witness within. When a soul is hollowed, what remains is a vessel that moves and speaks but no longer truly perceives or is perceived. A ghost made of flesh.
— Attributed to Stella, First Keeper
The Six were not chosen for their strength or their bloodlines. They were chosen because they had been forgotten—by families, by friends, by the cruel machinery of a world that measures worth in usefulness. In their forgetting, they learned to see what others could not. The door. The room. Each other.
And in that seeing, the Spark remembered itself.