The sea-spray turned to crimson steam the King Herald of the Ironhand set foot on the southern shore. Known to his court as 'The Unbending' and to his enemies as 'The Destroyer,' Herald led his invasion not for riches, but for absolute dominion. The village of the Sun-Dwellers, a people who worshipped warmth and earth, was engulfed in a hurricane of steel and fire before dawn had broken.Herald stood on a mound of charred earth, his breath clouding in the sudden chill of the pre-morning.
The camp was a furnace of crackling timber and weeping smoke, the screams of the defeated now a muffled echo beneath the crunch of his warriors' boots. Every man who fought was dead; the King permitted no surrender for those who stood against him. The plunder was rich, but the true prize, as always, was control—the breaking of a people's spirit.It was in this ruin that the chieftain's daughter was brought before him. She was bound in coarse rope, but it could not diminish her stature. Her skin, kissed by a sun Herald rarely saw, was taut with defiance, and her eyes—dark, deep, and luminous—held the cold fury of her burning home. She was called Nari, or Fire, and her beauty was a violent thing: striking, flawless, and utterly incompatible with the grime of war. Herald, a man whose heart was forged in the same frost that covered his ancestral land, felt a shift. He did not sell her; he did not offer her to his Jarls. He chained her to his wrist and declared her his personal chattel. She was the cost of his victory, and he intended to possess every part of it.The return to the North was a journey from flame to stone. Herald's great keep of Hrafnheim stood against the sky like a clenched, gray fist, a place of iron discipline and biting cold. Queen Astrid, the ice-veined descendant of mountain kings, greeted the King's war party. She was a woman of fierce, pale beauty, her authority secured by lineage and her unwavering expectation of power.She watched the dark-skinned captive being led across the courtyard. Nari's quiet grace was a disruptive silence in Astrid's stark, ordered world. Initially, the Queen's disdain was pure: the exotic trinket of a brutal campaign. But as the months bled into one another, disdain curdled into a corrosive jealousy. Herald, weary of the predictable comfort of his marriage, spent his evenings demanding service from the captive. He paid her attention, not merely as a master to a slave, but as a rapt spectator to a foreign, untouchable flame. Astrid saw the shadow of Nari in the corner of her husband's eye, a spark of interest that her own glacial dignity could not extinguish.Then came the unforgivable betrayal.
The slave girl's belly swelled with the King's seed, a public declaration of the Queen's failure. When the boy was born, he was neither purely northern nor southern, but a beautiful, vibrant hybrid—a living embodiment of Herald's desire and a direct, breathing threat to Astrid's royal children. The baby's cry in the halls of Hrafnheim was a shriek of usurpation to the Queen's ears.The time for silent resentment passed. Astrid felt the cold, hard logic of necessity settle upon her. A King must have a clear line of succession, and that line could not be sullied by the blood of a captive race. With the calculated precision of a woman who had survived court politics since childhood, Queen Astrid began to weave a deadly snare, her fury channeled into an unshakeable resolve. The Fire-Born girl had to be extinguished, and the price of the King's conquest paid in full—in blood.