The woman I love is dead.
I am Mikhael Val'Rhayne, and today marks the four hundredth year since my Rose of Vraycia was taken from me. Four centuries without her have felt both an eternity and a heartbeat. In all my ages, never once has there been one like her. I have memories that stretch beyond the birth of empires, and of them all, hers is the one I have held most dear.
Only now can I speak of her in past tense. For now the time has come for the world to remember her story, for hers was a life that shaped the world.
I am no poet. No great master of words. I am a warrior. Along with my brothers, I was born and bred to kill. That is what I do well.
Perhaps that is why I have waited so long. Why my hand, so steady with a blade, has trembled over blank pages for nearly a century. I fear not only that my words cannot do her, or her story justice, but also because once I write her name, once I shape her story into words and bind it between covers, then she becomes history.
Fixed.
Finished.
Gone.
But time has come for this old warrior to put his sword down and put pen to paper, for the world deserves to know—to remember—the Rose that shattered an Empire.