The wind that rolled through Morvain that morning was heavy with smoke and frost. Houses of wood and stone trembled under the distant echoes of shellfire. It was early, yet the sky hung low, bruised and gray, as if mourning before the bodies fell.
At the edge of the village, behind a crooked line of frostbitten trees, stood the old healer's house—half clinic, half mausoleum.
Inside, a woman had just died.
Her body lay still on the bed, her breath long vanished, her arms limp and bloodied. But cradled between them was a newborn boy.
He did not cry.
He did not scream or flinch. His skin was pale—too pale. His tiny chest rose and fell in perfect rhythm, silent and still. The midwife—an old woman with years of death in her hands—froze where she stood, staring at the child.
His hair was white. Not the dull, lifeless white of the sick, but a sharp, silky white—like winter woven into strands.
And his eyes—already open—were a deep, dark blue. Not gentle like his mother's sky-colored gaze, but deeper, colder. As if they belonged to something that had seen too much already. Something buried in shadow.
He looked at nothing. Not the ceiling. Not the woman. Not his mother, who lay lifeless beside him.
Just… existed.
Unmoved. Unbothered.
The old woman felt a chill in her spine that had nothing to do with the wind outside.
She had delivered over a hundred children in her time—some screaming, some silent, some gone before they arrived. But none like this.
Alive. Yet distant. Present. Yet apart.
She wrapped him in a worn blanket, her hands shaking more than usual.
"You've got no name," she whispered. "And no one left but me."
She glanced down at the woman on the bed—her hair now matted with sweat and blood, her lifeless blue eyes still open. Even in death, she looked dignified. Regal.
The girl had appeared three moons ago, barefoot, bloodied, and silent, asking only for shelter. She had spoken little. Asked for nothing. Helped with chores, slept by the fire. A ghost pretending to live.
She never mentioned the father. The old woman never asked. Some things, if not spoken, are easier to carry.
Now, she was gone. Another name to the earth.
A low rumble echoed in the distance. The old woman turned her head slowly. Machines.
Stella had come.
The first of their airships cut across the sky—long, black, and gleaming like a blade in the light. The villagers had whispered for weeks, and now the whispers had turned to steel.
Brena was poor. Forgotten. The republic's weapons were decades old, rusting in dirt and memory. It was no match for Stella's iron legions.
The child remained silent in her arms, eyes unblinking, watching shadows shift across the wooden ceiling.
She tightened the blanket around him.
Outside, the world prepared to burn.
And beyond the Great Border, where the realms of magic and man pressed silently against one another, the air stirred.