The night the Prince was exiled, the castle rang not with mourning, but with iron.

Torches hissed as rain crept down their shafts, staining the marble halls with smoke and shadow. The throne room felt smaller than it ever had, its vaulted ceiling pressing down like a judgment already passed. At its center stood the King—crowned, unmoving, carved from cold certainty, while his son knelt below, wrists bound in silver runes that burned against the skin.

“You are unfit for the light of this world,” the King declared, his voice echoing where warmth once lived. “Let the world beneath teach you what mercy cannot.”

Not shattered, folded. Stone bent inward like paper obeying an unseen hand, revealing a chasm where gravity twisted and light fell upward instead of down. Wind roared from the abyss, carrying whispers in a language the Prince somehow understood… and somehow forgot the moment he tried to name it.

He was falling before he could scream.

When he woke, it felt as if the sky was beneath his feet.

Castle Ruglia loomed over in the distance, its towers distorted, roots of stone reaching into an unknown void. The air is heavy with the screaming of creatures of doom. Bells rang with no hands to pull them. And somewhere deep within his chest, a hollow ache throbbed where memory should have been.

He did not remember his name.
He did not remember his crime.
But the world remembered him.

From the forest that grew upside-down to the creatures that watched with knowing eyes, everything here seemed to wait—patiently—for the Prince to realize that banishment was never meant to be an ending.

It was an invitation!!!