Before she was the Seventh General,
Before her voice became silence and her name was unspoken,
Before the Void claimed her,
She was Elari of Sol'Thara.
And she burned brighter than any star.
Sol'Thara was a Realm of perfect light.
Bathed in seven suns, its skies shimmered with crystalline auroras. Its people — the Solari — were beings of radiant harmony, living in towers of sunstone and cities that floated on beams of photonic wind. They did not need war. They did not need Flame.
They had Symphony.
Elari was born a prodigy of the Aether Choral, the sacred order of harmonic manipulators. While others learned to weave sunlight into bridges or dreams, Elari crafted entire realities of sound and song. With a breath, she could call birds from distant skies. With a hum, she could move mountains.
But brilliance comes with danger.
Because in the heart of Sol'Thara, buried beneath its endless daylight, something ancient stirred.
The Deep Chime.
An artifact left behind by the Architects — older than light, older than time. It was said to contain the First Dissonance. A sound not meant to be heard.
Elari, curious and ambitious, sought it out.
She found it.
She listened.
And in that single, fatal moment,
her Symphony fractured.
The sound broke her — not just her body, but her mind, her soul, her connection to Sol'Thara's light. Her harmony reversed, becoming anti-tone. A void-song.
And something in the dark heard it.
The Void-King watched from beyond.
He saw a soul unmoored, powerful but unanchored, once of light, now twisted in grief. He offered her what the Choral could not:
Clarity, Purpose, Freedom.
He did not speak lies. He never needed to.
He simply amplified the silence within her.
And in that silence, Elari changed.
She reforged her broken Symphony into a weapon — a manipulation of time through tonal dissonance. Her voice no longer soothed — it erased.
She wrapped herself in twilight armor, forged from the echoes of dead timelines. Her mask was built from frozen moments, a reminder of the time she destroyed to rebuild herself.
She became the Seventh General, the Void's most unpredictable hand.
A being not of destruction,
But of correction.
Where the Flame wove stories and kindled growth,
She erased inconsistencies.
She pruned possibilities.
And she never spoke her name again.
But sometimes… in the moments between missions…
When stars went quiet,
And the Realms fell still,
She remembered.
A tower of sunstone.
A song her mother used to sing.
A field of mirrored reeds swaying beneath seven suns.
A name once spoken with pride:
Elari.
Then the mask would hiss with temporal pressure.
And the memory would collapse.
Because the Void allowed no past.
Only silence.
Only now.
Only nothing.
Yet, when she faced Lyra — when the Prime Flame pushed her back — something inside her faltered.
Not fear. Not doubt.
Recognition.
The way the girl stood, fire wrapped around resolve…
…it reminded her of herself, long ago.
And that terrified her more than any blade.
Far across the Realms, in the Dreadspire's silent hall, the Void-King stood before his tapestry of Realms.
He traced a finger across the Shattered Flamechain.
"Elari is trembling," he whispered. "The past tugs at her."
A voice from the shadows asked, "Shall we send another General?"
"No," the Void-King said. "Let her tremble. If she breaks, she breaks stronger."
He turned toward the Realms.
"The Prime Flame has chosen its bearer. The dance begins."
And in her chamber of frozen moments, the Seventh General sat in stillness, mask beside her, eyes closed.
She hummed a single note.
Soft.
Mournful.
And then destroyed the sound with a breath.