The War Elves came swift, silent, and tremendously daunting.
From across the Endless West, they descended upon the City Realm like a storm no sky had ever held. For centuries their existence had been a rumor - wandering songs of sailors, half-drunk tales of merchants who claimed to see impossible ships on the horizon.
The Realms scoffed. Cities rose, markets bustled, laughter filled the air. Who feared shadows across the sea?
Then the shadows took form.
They struck Hearthdom first. A city of spice-markets and glass-domed gardens, built on the warmth of trade and never on the bones of war. Children played in fountains when the first of the Elven Leviathans rose out of the mist. Black, skeletal ships, sails etched with silver runes that shimmered as though alive, their hulls whispering as if full of voices.
The War Elves brought with them no thunder of drums, no roars of men. They came like silence sharpened to a blade.
Their constructs struck first - towering insect-like machines, six legs hissing as they tore into cobbled streets, blades lashing with impossible precision. Siege-beasts, part metal, part living monstrosity, slithered behind, their armored backs bristling with black-feathered archers who loosed storms of arrows that blotted the sun.
Hearthdom fell in a day.
By the week's end, the banners of the War Elves - black thorns woven with crimson silk - hung over its towers. Survivors whispered in alleys, hands trembling. Many believed aid would come, that Hearthdom was a tragedy but not the end.
Then the Elves marched east.
Stonecross stood as a fortress-city, famed for its bridges carved over roaring canyons. Soldiers tried to bar the crossings, their pikes lowered, their war-horns braying.
Yet the War Elves unleashed their Iron Serpents, long segmented war-chariots powered by shrieking crystal hearts. They smashed through stone like paper, bridges crumbling under their weight. The defenders broke. Stonecross was swallowed in fire.
Three days later, Brightharbor, the jewel of the northern coast, burned. Its shipyards and markets turned to ash under the wings of the Skyreavers, vast bronze-and-bone constructs that screamed through the skies like banshees.
Their talons dropped urns of flame that burst into black fire, fire that water could not quench. Fishermen's boats became coffins upon the waves.
Then the tide turned inward, toward the heart of the Realm - toward Lunaris.
Lunaris was a marvel, a city of white domes and glittering canals where humans and Draemarians lived in uneasy harmony. A place of music, trade, and starlit festivals. A place that had never tasted blood in its streets.
Now, it drowned in it.
The War Elves entered not with fury but with inevitability. Their Voidbringers - towering, faceless constructs clad in mirrored steel - patrolled every boulevard, their steps like falling hammers.
Obsidian Cradles, rolling prisons shaped like iron coffins, rattled down alleys collecting dissidents. Families vanished overnight. Resistance meant death, dismemberment, or a fate worse, as whispers told of those carried westward in chains - never to be seen again.
For months, the people of Lunaris endured. For months, they waited.
Messengers were sent to the Kingdom Realm, begging for aid. No answer came. The lords across the mountains turned their backs, muttering: "It is not our war."
And so despair settled like ash upon the City Realmers.
It was on the fiftieth night of occupation that their true tyrant appeared.
She stood on the balcony of the conquered palace, her armor silver-black, her hair light brown. Her beauty was both a weapon and a cruelty, her presence both magnificent and unbearable. She was known to her people as Saeloria Veylith, the Iron Bloom of the West.
Behind her stood her honor guard - the Thorn Sentinels, their glaives thrumming with blue fire - and the war machines that had made her name legendary: the Hollowthorn Engines, spindly constructs whose limbs dug deep into the palace stone, their glowing eyes unblinking as predators.
Saeloria's voice rang first in the Elven war dialect, harsh, grinding, and rhythmic like steel dragged across bone:
"Kael'vri oss'dael! Varith en'rahl, tresmora vel drakthir!"
The sound alone made mothers clutch their children, as though the words themselves could wound.
Then she spoke in the tongue of men and Draemarians alike, her lips curled with the faintest smile.
"Your fate is sealed. Hearthdom. Stonecross. Brightharbor. Lunaris. All bend now to the Dominion of Saeloria Veylith. There will be no rescue. There will be no rebellion. You will kneel… or you will vanish."
The crowd bowed, broken. Some wept. Some stared blankly into nothing, as though their souls had already fled.
But among them stood a young man whose eyes did not lower.
Rex Landsworth.
Poor, war-torn, his clothes little more than rags. Yet handsome, his gaze sharp with stubborn resolve. He was not a soldier, nor a noble, nor anything the world would ever call a leader. But in that moment, as Saeloria's words dug despair into the marrow of his people, his heart burned against it.
The fire of defiance.
The first spark of rebellion.
And though no one yet knew it, though even he did not yet believe it - that spark would one day set the Realm aflame.