"The Blood Moon and the Broken Kings"
The stars wept the night the realms shattered.
Beneath a sky torn raw by a blood-red moon, two armies burned into the earth. Forests, once ancient and untouchable, stood blackened as broken spears. Rivers choked on the bodies of knights who had sworn oaths in golden halls now reduced to ash. And at the heart of it — between the thrones, between the dying banners — rode a lone figure wrapped in battered iron and smoke.
Kael.
Not a king.
Not a god.
Not yet.
The Reckoning had come.
He rode a horse the color of storm clouds, its flanks streaked with blood that was not its own. In his hand, Kael carried no banner, no sigil. Only a blade — chipped, darkened — that drank the light.
Above him, the gods watched in bitter silence.
Below him, men screamed and bled for causes they had already forgotten.
Kael urged his horse forward, heart beating in the rhythm of a war drum. His vision blurred between life and death, memory and myth. Each clash of steel, each broken cry, was stitched into the fabric of the world — a wound that would never truly heal.
To his left: Seric Blackthorn's Third Army, armored in obsidian, surging like a living flood.
To his right: the fractured banners of the twin kings, their warriors clinging to order with bloodied hands.
Ahead: the Sword in the Earth — the relic of an age when men spoke with gods, when honor meant more than crowns.
Kael did not shout.
He did not raise his blade to rally them.
He simply rode.
And in his silent charge, something ancient stirred — older than kings, older than gods. The memory of a time when one man, choosing neither throne nor altar, could bend the course of history.
They called him the Keeper of the Realm that night.
But Kael knew the truth.
He had not saved them.
He had only delayed the breaking of the world.
Peace would come, yes — but it would be stitched from sorrow and worn thin by betrayal. He could feel it already in the way the wounded looked at him: not as a man, but as a symbol. Something they could hang their hopes on. Something they could crucify when it failed.
Above, the blood moon bled its last light across the smoking fields.
Below, Kael dismounted, his boots sinking into the torn earth. He knelt before the Sword in the Earth — the blade said to have been planted by the Last Queen herself — and laid his battered weapon beside it.
"I am no king," he whispered. "I am no god. I am only the hand that holds the line."
The wind carried his words away.
Behind him, the shattered armies gathered, uncertain whether to kneel or to kill.
Ahead, in the gathering darkness, new seeds of hatred stirred.
And far, far away — under the same blood-red moon — a newborn cried out in the arms of a dying woman. His name would be Iven. And he would be raised to end everything Kael fought to build.
But that was a story for another night.
Tonight, the world held its breath.
And the mortal crown was born.
[End of Prologue]