Before the world was named, before kings carved borders and history was written in blood, the earth was chaos. War tore through the skies like wild fire. Civilizations fell before they could be born. In the midst of ruin, the strong enslaved the weak, and those who survived forgot their names.
But out of ash, something stirred.
A scattered people — torn from lands east and west, north and south — broke free of their chains. Among them were the Ijaw of the Niger waters, the Eastern mountain tribes, desert children from the Silk Roads, and war-battered souls from distant islands. Though their tongues differed, their pain was the same. And pain became unity.
From their gathering rose a man — nameless at first, but strong enough to turn storms aside with his fists and command loyalty with his silence. He was no emperor then, only a survivor. But he founded a dynasty of exiles, of scavengers and stolen bloodlines. He built it on truth, not noble birth. Until one day, truth met temptation.
They captured a princess — skin of pearl, eyes like dusk — and with her, a black slave woman from the far reaches of the burned coast. The man who ruled their rising kingdom saw beauty not just in the princess, but in her defiance. He made her his concubine — not for politics, but for love.
But love does not build empires. Blood does.
His people called for him to marry a "true-born" woman, one of their own, for the sake of legacy. He agreed, but his heart remained elsewhere. Jealousy festered in palace halls. Whispers turned to knives. The first wife — his empress in name alone — plotted with the elders for power.
Then came the plague.
It took the people's strength. It stole the empress's womb. But the concubine carried life within her.
On the night of birth, thunder cracked the sky. The child was born — skin pale as a ghost, eyes the color of a cursed sea, with a single white streak of hair between her brows. The empress saw not a miracle, but a threat. She called the child a curse.
The emperor refused to let the child die.
And so, he died instead.
A coup rose like fire behind locked doors. The emperor was slain before dawn. His death was hidden in silence — but not from all.
The concubine fled with her newborn and the slave's child, whose father — the emperor's brother — had died in the same bloodbath. The black slave refused to run. "I will not leave the bones of the man I loved," she said, pressing her child into the princess's arms. "Raise him in truth, not shame."
By the time dawn broke over the ashes of the dynasty, they were gone.
Four days later, starved, blistered, and broken, the princess collapsed in a strange land.
What began as survival would become legend.