Before the frost, there was fire.
The Kingdom of Theralis once stretched across golden fields and rivers of crystal, kissed by sun and song. Its people lived in warmth, protected by the light of their ruler—the young and radiant Prince Vael Therion.
Vael was the kind of ruler the bards sang of. Just, brave, and impossibly alive. The youngest heir in a long line of warrior kings, he brought peace not through fear, but through loyalty. Even his enemies admired him. They called him The Sun Prince.
But the light often blinds before it burns out.
Vael's downfall came wrapped in silk and starlight. Her name was Aelira, a sorceress from the northern snows, daughter of the Frostlands, where winter never ended. She came as an envoy, her voice soft, her presence serene—snow in summer. She spoke of treaties, of union between kingdoms, of lasting peace.
Vael, young and unguarded, fell in love with her quickly. Too quickly.
He never saw the war behind her smile.
She moved through the court like a dream, and within months, the nobles adored her. Within a year, they were engaged. Aelira never spoke of her homeland, never of the ancient magic in her blood, nor the blade she would soon drive into the heart of the kingdom.
On the night of their wedding, the skies cracked with thunder—and the gates of Theralis opened to invaders.
Northern warriors cloaked in ice and steel flooded the capital. The guards, charmed and bound by sorcery, fell without raising blades. Temples burned. Children screamed. The city of warmth died in a single night.
And in the center of it all, beneath the shattered pillars of his ancestral palace, Vael knelt in chains.
Ash clung to his skin like grief.
He looked up and saw her—Aelira, standing over him in silver armor, her hair like snow soaked in blood. The woman he loved. The woman who destroyed him.
"I spared your life," she said softly. "But not your soul."
Her lips brushed his as she whispered the words of a curse.
A scream rose from his chest—choking, raw, not from pain, but from something worse.
His heart began to freeze.
Veins turned white. Breath turned to frost. Memories shattered like glass. He was not dying. No… that would have been mercy.
He was becoming something else.
For three days, he lay silent, buried in the wreckage of what was once a kingdom. When he rose again, the sun fled from him. The wind carried only silence. The earth cracked beneath his footsteps.
Where he walked, snow fell.
Where he breathed, winter spread.
He crossed the northern mountains and built his palace of ice atop the ruins of a forgotten god. He crafted a throne from frozen bone and ancient grief.
And when his name was whispered, people trembled:
Vael, the Ice Emperor.
He took no lovers. Trusted no allies. Spoke rarely, and ruled with absolute power. Those who saw him swore his presence chilled the soul—that his eyes were not merely cold, but utterly empty.
Yet deep within, beyond the ice and power, beyond the curse itself, remained a spark.
A memory.
The boy he used to be. The prince who once believed in love.
And that was the cruelest part of all.
He remembered.