Prologue – The Unavoidable Verdict
The capital was dead.
Only smoke remembered it.
The sky bled orange and gold, burning where it used to be blue. Towers that once scraped the heavens now lay gutted, their bones jutting out of the earth like broken ribs. The streets were quiet—not the calm of peace, but the silence that comes after the world itself gives up.
Only two figures stood among the ruins.
Two blades.
Two choices.
The end of one age, and the birth of another.
One stood bathed in gold, his armor catching the last light like a funeral pyre. He didn't look tired—he looked finished. His calm was not peace but judgment.
The other knelt in the rubble, cloaked in ash and shadow. His greatsword was driven into the cracked stone before him, its weight the only thing keeping him upright. The wind shifted, carrying embers between them like dying stars.
"Look at it," said the golden figure, voice low but steady. "This world devours itself. Lies. Rots. Always has."
The kneeling man lifted his head slowly. His voice came out raw, but firm.
"Then your answer is to destroy it?"
The golden man smiled a small, cruel curve.
"There's nothing left to save. Only to end."
The man in shadow closed his eyes for a heartbeat, then met the other's gaze.
"Then I'll build it again. From what's left."
"You're a fool," said the golden one. "Still clinging to ghosts."
"I know," the other replied softly.
That was the last thing either of them said.
When they moved, the air cracked open.
Light met darkness, not as enemies but as inevitabilities colliding. The ground split, the sky screamed, and everything between them ceased to exist.
Then silence.
Not peace just absence.
The kind that comes after history stops breathing.
The light swallowed all of it.
Names. Faces. Crowns. Empires.
And from what remained, dust settled.
And from that dust—
something waited to begin again.
PRESENT DAY
The sun never rose gently in Kareth.
It clawed through the haze, dragging bruised orange light across a sky thick with smoke and ash. The air carried the stench of iron, and the forges were already alive—their rhythmic hammering echoing through the valley like heartbeats in a dying body.
Kareth wasn't dying all at once. It was the kind of slow death that crept in with routine—the cough of a miner, the creak of old wood, the muttered curse over the price of grain.
Corin sat on the fence outside Alden's forge, a half-eaten apple between his teeth and a dull practice sword across his knees. He wasn't watching the forge, or the town. His eyes were fixed on the dirt road leading west on the world that waited past it.
"Still dreaming with your eyes open, boy?" Alden's voice came from behind, rough and heavy, the kind of voice that carried soot even when the forge was quiet.
Corin grinned around the apple. "Just waiting for the world to come fetch me, old man."
Alden snorted. "When it does, it'll kick your teeth in for being so damned eager."
Steam hissed as he plunged a hot horseshoe into water. The forge glowed red for a moment, then dimmed again.
Corin laughed. It was the kind of sound that didn't belong in Kareth anymore—too bright, too alive.
He tossed the apple core into the mud, eyes on the horizon. "Better that than rotting here."
"You think you're ready for what's out there?" Alden muttered, still working the iron.
"You don't even know what 'out there' is."
"That's why I have to go," Corin said. "If I knew, I'd have no reason to."
The old knight paused, hammer halfway raised, and studied him.
"You've got your mother's stubbornness," he murmured.
Corin blinked. "You knew my mother?"
For a second, Alden's face hardened. Then he set the hammer down. "Forget it. Just talk from an old fool. Go on."
Corin didn't push it. He'd learned long ago that some answers only came after you left.
By mid-morning, Kareth was awake. Merchants shouted, carts groaned, and smoke rolled down the streets. Corin moved through it all with that easy smile people trusted. He lifted sacks for farmers, shared jokes with the guards, even handed a plum to a starving child by the well.
People liked him because he still looked at them like they mattered.
By the time dusk painted the sky red, he was on the northern ridge. The wind up there was cold, sharp enough to sting the lungs. Far south, he could just make out banners in the fading light—black and silver, moving like scars across the horizon. The mark of the Great Houses.
War banners. Always war banners.
Corin rested the sword against his shoulder and stared out into the dark.
"I'll come back," he whispered. "And when I do, no one here will ever have to bow or starve again."
The wind carried his vow away just another promise lost to the plains.
Behind him, Alden stood at the forge door, silent, watching. The firelight flickered across his face, revealing an expression no one in Kareth had ever seen something between pride and dread.
Because Alden knew the truth about those banners.
And he knew what kind of world awaited a boy like Corin.