Not our world. Renaissance in spirit: city-states, alchemy as a living science, oil paint still wet on chapel ceilings. Two moons in the sky: one copper, the other pale. The sea seems darker than it ought to be. A beautiful, fractured world — holy in places, rotting in others — where God and the Devil gamble with human lives.

Eli is a Nephilim. An unwanted son, cast out of his home, driven by a thirst for recognition and the constant fear of being caught by cultists or the Inquisition — even though neither has any idea whom they're truly hunting. The chapels of the Inquisition display frescoes where "The Son of Betrayal" is depicted as a scaled beast, tower-high, with a maw vast enough to swallow a galleon whole. Eli sometimes steps into such cathedrals, sits on a pew, and stares at those images for hours. In those moments, he feels a bitter irony: the world fears what he is not, and remains utterly blind to the one sitting right before them — a broken, ugly in his "humanity," half-god, half-devil.