Syd read the journal that had survived across uncounted millennia. It was leather-bound, with pressed reed paper inside, hailing from the earliest days of the war. The relic had been passed down over the ages, from one incarnation of his Exaltation to the next, to remind them of why they fought. He had never possessed a long detailed set of memories of his past incarnations, only moments of extreme emotion had clung tightly to the divine shard he now bore. And so few mementos of those past lives had survived the war and forty-eight hundred years since that he had only the official histories, shot through with propaganda and half-remembered truths, to rely on.
    In those days, the universe had its hierarchy. Humans tended the infinite worlds. The dragon kings looked after the humans. The gods kept the Spiral of Galaxies spinning. The Celestial Incarnae oversaw the gods and mortals. Above them all were the Primordial Titans, the vast beings that had created everything. The universe and all within owed their very existence to them, and therefore should obey unquestioningly. All of existence were playing pieces in their games of divinity. Until one day, the pieces didn't want to play anymore.
    The journal told of the doctor's efforts to best a great contagion that was burning its way through a galactic arm. The doctor didn't care that it was spreading like a baleful green fire, that it was seen as a rightful punishment by some for the gods' rebellion. What mattered to the doctor was that it was killing people. Syd's fingers slowly moved down the page as he read.
    Of course the doctor knew of the Chosen. Who could not notice the weapons of the gods? But none would stop to stem the tide of contagion. There was always a bigger battle to be fought, another assault to turn aside. He wept as his neighbors around him fell, left alone in his village. The doctor's body was being ravaged by the accursed disease even as he feverishly worked towards a cure.
    It was the couple who came with their child that broke him. They were desperate to save the girl, and the doctor had what he believed to be a solution. He knew it was too late to save them, but he rushed to get his cure, shakily administering it. To his horror, it was killing her faster than the contagion. The journal recounted how he cried and screamed as he forced breath and heartbeats into the youth.
    Miraculously, the child had lived and the contagion was cured. It seems, as the doctor's journal continued, that the cure needed to be catalyzed by the magic of the sun and that he hadn't had access to any before. But now the doctor was a Chosen of the Sun and radiated such power.
    Syd closed the journal, running his hand over the worn leather cover. In a strange twist of fate, he had been named for the doctor and now carried the very same exalted shard that ancient Syd once possessed.