Before there was a "Monarch of the White Flames"…
There was a boy named Edrik Vale.
Edrik wasn't born under omens.
He wasn't born under shooting stars.
He wasn't born with noble blood or hidden artifacts.
He was born in the wrong part of the wrong city, on a night of acid rain that corroded the rotten wooden roofs and flowed down the alleys like dirty tears. His mother died when he was five. Fever. Cold. Hunger. It was hard to tell which of the three had won.
His father?
A name. Nothing more.
Edrik learned early that the world wasn't cruel out of malice.
It was cruel out of indifference.
He stole bread before he even understood what guilt was. He learned to run before he learned to write. He slept among boxes, under stairs, inside abandoned warehouses—anywhere the wind wouldn't find him.
He was small for his age. Too thin. His eyes were too big for such a thin face. But there was something that didn't match his frailty: he observed.
