A Note from Phainon

To my friend , "A hero once set his own flesh and blood ablaze, forging a longsword to cleave the darkness." Back in the wheat fields of Aedes Elysiae, my mother told me this nursery rhyme when I was young. She said that the hero never really died and would one day come back to us. And I believed it with every fiber of my being. But he never came when raging fires burned the fields to ash. He never came when the endless black tide swallowed the world whole. I have lost count of the hopes I've held, the prayers I've sent. Yet the hand of the clock, dripping with golden blood, reset again and again, leaving tomorrow a dawn that will never break. When dawn fell to earth, it was you who showed me the way forward. It was you who shouldered the weight of countless Coreflames for me. It was you who saved me from the hell built of withered bones, and wrote a new tomorrow for Amphoreus. It was you... the hero I've been waiting for. And it was also you who showed me that I, too, could become the hero within. To forge my own destiny, just like you. Please accept this creation forged in the same furnace as the Dawnmaker, proof of our battles fought side by side. A nameless mass of molten iron, hammered by scars and tempered in suffering, spinning through countless cycles of time, finally taking shape under your gaze. May it give you the courage to believe in the arrival of dawn, my hero. Phainon