Prologue: The Unavoidable Verdict
The capital was a tomb.
The sky, once a shield, now bled fire, casting jagged, spectral light over the ruins. Towers lay gutted, their shadows long and skeletal across the ash-choked streets.
Silence reigned heavy and absolute the vast, agonizing quiet that follows the death of a world.
Only two figures stood in that silence.
The world hung balanced on their two blades.
One wore the color of brute, triumphant gold. His armor was unmarred, radiating a cold, conquering light. He stood tall, his stance effortless, serene.
The other, a figure of shadow, knelt on one knee amidst the pulverized stone. His cloak was torn, his face a mask of weary, resolute calm. His sword was planted deep into the rubble his only visible support.
The gold figure broke the stillness. His voice was quiet, carrying the finality of a god's judgment.
"Look at it," he commanded, sweeping his gaze across the dead city. "It destroys. It lies. It rots. It always has."
The figure of shadow did not lift his head. His voice was low a rasp that cut through the silence.
"Was this the only answer, then? To choose oblivion?"
The gold figure smiled a terrifying, humorless expression.
"There is nothing left worth saving. No path left but mine. I will wipe the slate clean."
The shadowed figure finally looked up, his eyes catching the firelight defiant.
"Then i will build again," he said, his voice gaining strength. "It will be free."
"You are a fool," the gold figure declared. "Clinging to a rotting dream."
"I know," the shadowed figure replied quietly.
No more words followed.
The debate was finished.
Only the verdict remained.
The gold figure moved and power erupted from him, a violent golden torrent that did not flow, but shrieked. It tore stone from the ridge, silencing the distant flames.
The shadowed figure pushed off the ground a blur of motion meeting the surge head-on.
The moment their intentions collided, a silent, staggering shockwave split the air, radiating outward to shatter what remained of the capital.
They stood perfectly still in the epicenter of the ruin, their blades poised inches apart.
Above them, the sky itself split not with thunder, but with a wave of force, as the era bent beneath the weight of their final, world-defining clash.
And then silence.
The kind of silence that comes not after sound,
but after history itself ends.
The light swallowed everything.
Names. Faces. Crowns. Kings.
Until only ashes remained.
But even from ashes, something new will always begin.
The sun never rose gently in Kareth.
It clawed through the smoke hanging over the valley, dragging a bruised orange light across the clouds. The scent of iron and soot drifted with the morning wind the forges had already begun their song.
The village stirred below, half alive. Coughing. Creaking carts. Chickens scattering from tired boots. A mongrel barking at a passing wagon. Somewhere, a child cried, and someone else cursed about the price of grain.
Corin sat on the fence outside Alden's forge, an apple between his teeth and a sword balanced across his knees. The blade shimmered in the weak light mirror-like, beautiful though he hardly noticed. His gaze was fixed on the road that vanished into the horizon, where the world waited.
"Still dreaming with your eyes open?" Alden's voice rumbled from behind.
The old knight's arms were black with soot, hammering a horseshoe that no horse in Kareth could afford anymore.
Corin grinned around the apple. "Just waiting for the world to come fetch me, old man."
Alden snorted. "Aye? When it does, it'll kick your teeth in for being so damned eager."
He dunked the hot metal into a trough. Steam hissed, ghosts rising between them.
Corin laughed easily, tossing the apple core into the dirt. He moved like someone made for larger places tall, broad shouldered, restless. His hair was dark at the roots, sun browned at the ends. His eyes, though young, carried that dangerous thing every old soldier recognized: hunger.
"You'll be leaving tomorrow, then?" Alden asked, quieter now.
Corin nodded, checking the sword's edge. "If I stay here any longer, I'll end up like the others living for the next harvest, dying for the next tax."
"Better that than dying for someone else's war," Alden muttered. "You don't know what's out there."
"That's the point," Corin said, smiling faintly. "If I did, I'd have no reason to go."
The old knight studied him a moment, something unreadable in his eyes. "You've got your mother's stubbornness," he said finally.
Corin blinked. "You knew my mother?"
The hammer stilled mid-air. The question hung like a blade.
"Never mind that," Alden said softly, setting the hammer down. "Just an old man's tongue running loose."
Corin didn't press, though he'd asked before. Still, something in Alden's tone lingered like smoke after a fire.
By midmorning, Kareth was alive with noise merchants shouting prices, wagon wheels clattering, gossip rolling through narrow streets. Corin moved through it all like a spark in dry grass.
"Mornin', lad!" called Mira, the baker's wife, waving a flour covered hand. "You're not leaving us yet, are you?"
"Tomorrow," Corin said. "Save me a loaf before I go."
"Then get here early," she teased. "You'll get what's left otherwise."
Further down the lane, he hefted two sacks of grain for a farmer twice his age.
"You'll break your back carrying both," Corin warned.
"And you'll talk my ears off," the man grinned.
He fixed a broken wagon for children, shared an apple with a hungry boy, and left laughter wherever he passed. They liked him here not for rank or wealth, but because he remembered names and spoke to beggars like equals.
Even the guards at the gate smiled. "Heard you're off to see the world, Corin," one said. "Bring me back a wife from the capital, eh?"
"Only if you can afford her dowry," Corin shot back, and laughter followed him through the gate.
But beneath the laughter, Kareth was crumbling. The houses leaned. The banners above the market were torn. Beyond the walls, the plains were blackened scars reminders of wars fought by men who'd long forgotten why.
By dusk, Corin climbed the northern ridge. From there, the land stretched endless, and far beyond it, faint banners fluttered in the dying light: black and silver. The mark of one of the Great Houses.
War banners. Always war banners.
He sat until the sun bled red into the valley. His reflection in the sword looked older than nineteen.
"I'll come back one day," he murmured. "And no one here will have to starve or suffer again."
The wind carried his words away.
Behind him, Alden stood in the forge doorway, silent. In his eyes was the truth of the black and silver banners a weight of secrets Corin wasn't ready to carry.