Far north of Yainna, in the depths of the Welch Lands, memories stirred in Virvo like dust rising from the bones of the past. The wind carried more than frost tonight. It whispered names long buried, oaths long broken, and dreams long rotted. As he stood at the edge of a blackened cliff, his eyes fixed upon the horizon, the howls of the Vemonids behind him faded. Silence took him back.
He had been one and nine when first named a knight. Not for titles, nor blood, but for the unmatched gift in his hands—he had never lost a fight, not once. Born of no noble house, born with no land, no name worth song or scroll. But he had a sword, and a will forged in hardship. A lean boy, wiry and fast, with long brown hair he kept tied behind his neck, and eyes that once gleamed with hope. He had not always been the shadow he was now.
He remembered the dust of the streets of central Yainna, the way the rain bit colder when you had no roof.
"Please," he had whispered once, a boy of six, lips cracked, skin flaking from the sun's cruel kiss. "Gods, don't give me another tomorrow. If this is life, let today be the last."
He'd laid there, ribs visible through dirt-smeared skin, and watched the sky blur from thirst. The clatter of hooves had come like thunder from the heavens. Then a shadow. A man, cloaked in silver and steel, dismounted. The boy could not raise his eyes. He blacked out.
When next he woke, he was fed, warm, inside stone walls. A knight of the guard had found him and brought him to the barracks. He was trained because he asked for it with nothing but his fists. And when he fought, no one could stop him. He earned it all—the sword, the armor, the name.
So when King, Thalia's grandfather, prepared his famed voyage into the Welch Lands, Virvo insisted on joining.
"You are tasked with guarding the prince," said Ser Makrros, a commander with greying hair and narrow eyes.
"Then let someone else guard him," Virvo retorted. "Let me earn my legend. A knight must rise through flame, not velvet."
Makrros scowled. "You would risk disobedience for glory?"
"I would risk all for remembrance."
And so he went. His name was not written in the official retelling, not even in the king's final journal. A forgotten knight, unnoted in the scrolls, present on that doomed journey.
They rode deep into the Welch mist, where the skies were always grey and the trees crooked like fingers. The nights grew colder, the days shorter. It was on the seventh eve when they found the ruins of an ancient temple, and inside it, something found them.
Virvo had taken watch that night. The others slept within their tents or drank by the fire. He heard a rustle. A flicker of movement. He turned, sword drawn. A cloaked figure stood at the edge of the tree line.
"Who goes there?"
No answer. Just the sound of breathing.
He stepped forward, blade raised. The figure didn't flinch.
"Are you of the Welch tribes? Speak now."
Then the figure moved—not walked, not ran, but glided forward. Virvo struck first, steel flashing. The figure dodged, again and again, until Virvo was panting, sweating. Not a strike had landed.
Then, in the blink of an eye, she was before him. Floating. Towering. A woman cloaked in black, her face revealed—skin as dark as the void, eyes red as coals. Her hair hung in long, black locks like serpent strands, moving in the windless night.
"You fight well," she said, voice like silk over a blade. "But you bleed better."
Her fangs elongated, and Virvo's scream was cut short.
Darkness.
He woke in snow. His armor shredded, his chest torn open. Blood trickled from his neck and shoulders. Every breath was agony. He tried to move, but his limbs betrayed him. He gazed up at the sky, pale and cold.
And he remembered. The streets. The burning sun. The prayer he whispered.
He wept.
"You did not answer," he murmured. "You gods. I asked you not to give me a second chance."
His tears steamed against the cold. He rolled onto his side. The temple was gone. The others... were gone.
"But you did. You gave me back. And now look at what I am."
In the silence that followed, something moved beside him. The woman. She had not left.
"You asked to die," she said. "I gave you eternity."
He tried to crawl away.
"I did not want this."
"You wanted to be remembered. I will make you unforgettable."
And then she vanished.
Years had not passed. He had not survived.
Virvo had died.
His body had grown cold beneath the bleeding snow of the Welchlands, the wound in his neck pulsing one final time before all went black. There had been no light, no voice, no hand reaching from Lakima to lift his soul. Only silence.
He remembered that silence.
It was endless.
What happened next… he could not speak of, for it had no shape, no name, no time. There was pain—yes—and then there was something else. Something wrong. Something unholy. He had prayed for the gods once. In the street, under the burning sun, with cracked lips and a hollow stomach, he'd whispered to the skies:
"Do not let me live again."
But something else had heard him.
Not the gods. Never the gods.
And it had granted him exactly what he did not ask for.
Now, standing above the frost-swept cliffs of Viscro, with the black river of Lishna cutting between worlds, Virvo opened his eyes to the wind.
His breath did not fog the air. His heart did not beat. The cold did not bite him. His flesh was not warm. Yet he moved. Yet he spoke.
"I prayed," he said quietly, voice deep, cracked like old stone. "I was a boy… I thought a pure heart would find Lakima."
The wind howled back in mockery.
"But there is no Lakima." His voice broke into a growl. "There is only this. And Hell."
Behind him, his scouts—creatures twisted and lifeless—stood in perfect stillness. Waiting. Unbreathing.
"If Hell is what man hath made of this world…" he looked across the horizon, where the Welchlands gave way to the green softness of Yainna. "Then I shall not fight it."
He turned his head slightly, eyes glowing with a strange, cold fire.
"I shall lead it."
His right hand, pale and veined like ancient marble, clenched into a fist.
"I am not cursed. I am chosen." His voice rose with each word. "By fire. By hunger. By the gods who never answered."
The wind carried the sound of whispers—barely there, as though the dead still echoed around him.
He drew his blade—blackened steel with no maker's mark, no honor to its name—and pointed it toward Yainna, toward the lands of kings and sons and bloodlines that had written him out of their tale.
"Let them remember me now."
He stepped toward the ring of corpses, their blood frozen in the earth around them, their faces twisted in death.
"Let them remember the knight who was promised nothing."
As his mouth began to move, forming words not spoken in the tongue of men, the sky above Viscro darkened. Clouds swirled unnaturally, a crack of thunder roared across the heavens, and the wind died into a breathless still.
The scouts turned their heads toward him, as if sensing the threshold of something terrible being crossed.
Virvo stopped speaking. His eyes, now burning brighter than any fire, met the sky.
And in that dead silence, the land heard it—the final, bitter truth whispered from lips no longer human:
"The devil got there first."