The world did not always wear ruin as regalia.
There was a time—golden, opulent, unmarred—when the rivers did not congeal into obsidian veins beneath a sunless sky. When the soil responded to hand and hope, and the skies, though unpredictable, still held promise rather than omen. That time, to scholars and bards alike, was branded The Gilded Epoch.
It was during this age—specifically in its twentieth year, when opulence had grown complacent and silence passed for peace—that the Thronebound Order carved its dominion into existence. The Crimson Fort, massive and arterial.
The Gilded Epoch was supposed to be salvation. A golden age of luminous peace, where blade met sheath, and kings retired to palaces instead of battlefields. For nearly five hundred years, the world basked in abundance: crops flowered without rot, oceans gave their bounty willingly, and even the wildest species emerged from their shadowed warrens to take part in a swelling symphony of progress. It was, for lack of a better word, the world's grand exhale.
But breath cannot last forever.
The Black Winter, Known in different tongues as The Bleak Year, or in the frostbitten north as The Wolf's Reign, it began in 2050—a year etched into the marrow of the world. No flake of snow fell white again. The heavens bled gray, and the sun became but a dying ember strangled behind ashen shrouds. The frost crept slowly, unseasonal at first. Then weeks became months, and months turned into a frozen, unbroken night. Trees refused to bloom. Beasts stopped birthing. The rivers cracked and bled black from beneath their glassy shells. Entire cities vanished beneath snow heavier than history.
But how, in a world stilled by frost and soot, did such many Empires not only exist—but flourish?
The answer lies in the grotesque irony of the Gilded Epoch itself.
For while the world basked in its gilded calm prior to the Black Winter—blessed by unbroken treaties, by the silence of war drums and the fattening of every granary—Empires became hoarders. Vaults were filled to bursting. Stockpiles of food meant for eventual famines, for imagined sieges, for hypothetical disasters. They prepared for everything... except forever.
Even without fertile land, with forests turned to coffins and rivers to glass, the stockpiles proved enough—barely.
And still, no thaw came.
Crimson Fort held its breath—and outlasted the Black Winter.
It was because of this horror that the reputation of Crimson Fort spread across the world.
And amidst the shivering moans of civilization's collapse, three lights burned.
They were not gods. They were simply those who refused to die.
Thessalia Oryn, the one who saw beyond present.
Iden Halrix, the one who organized survival into doctrine.
Rovahn Duskar, the one who stood between chaos and what remained of law.
It was these three—whose hands built and whose names engraved the stones of what would become The Crimson Fort.
And they did not build it as rulers.
They built it as a hearth.
In the earliest days, it was nothing more than a collapsed citadel dug out of a frozen vale. They named it Crimson, not for the walls, but for the blood they spilled keeping it warm. Thessalia, haunted by visions of ice eclipsing time itself, foresaw the slow starvation of countless thousands. She gathered the desperate beneath her roots and spores, not as a prophet—but as a provider.
Iden, meticulous even in mourning, organized the remnants: ration lines, frost-resilient storage chambers, rotating foraging sorties, armed convoys that protected merchant routes still daring the frost. His six hands carried ledger, blade, torch,pens and papers work.
Rovahn—hulking, lava-veined, more monument than man—made himself the wall when there were no others. He fought starving beasts, cannibal warbands, and even the mountain itself when avalanches threatened their new sanctuary.
They did not let the world forget how to live, even when the world had already begun to forget itself.
"We are not saviors," Thessalia once spoke from a balcony of frost-choked vines, voice hollow from sleeplessness. "We are not gods. But we will endure, and that will be enough for others to begin again."
And they did.
The Crimson Fort stood, unshaken, for fifty years of blackened sky. As other cities slowly fell into rot and silence, its hearths continued to burn, its halls continued to echo with music, screams, prayers—life. Even when the last of the frozen grains were measured to the seed, they continued to give. Thessalia cultivated fungal gardens beneath the ice using spores harvested from her own body. Iden arranged bartering networks across desperate provinces. Rovahn opened the gates to any who did not come with murder in their eyes.
And this—their unity, their defiance—became the foundation of The Thronebound Order.
That no throne—kingly, divine, or born of nature—should stand without service to the people it rises above.
They did not seek power to lead the world—but to ensure there would be a world to lead.
They did not crown themselves.
It was those who survived that raised them to what they are now.
They became the mind, the brain, and the body of a world clawing its way out of ice. And they never stepped down.
And so in modern tongues, the Crimson Fort is invoked with reverence or caution—depending on who you ask. But to those who endured the Black Winter, its name bears the weight of myth.
Yet even this, however, was less cruel than what came after.
For those who survived the Faithrend Epoch knew a different face of annihilation.
The Faithrend wasn't just the fall of kingdoms. It was the unmaking of trust, of truth, of faith itself. It was an era of absolute disintegration where the sky wept ichor and the ground gave birth to beasts that should not have names. An era where The Savrax, with their otherworldly cruelty and endless appetite, carved the living into sigils and made war not for land but for meaning.
"At least during the Black Winter," a former bishop once whispered through frost-chapped lips, "we died with our gods intact."
The Faithrend Epoch? It devoured more than bodies. It devoured belief itself.
And so it was, as the Faithrend Epoch groaned on—an era more dirge than timeline—that many empires, bloodlines, and myth-scarred species sank into ruin beneath the ceaseless tide of the Savrax. Cities that once crowned continents were reduced to skeletal spires, blackened with soot and lichen. Entire races, etched into the geological strata of history, became relics for which no language remained to mourn them.
Yet in this age of erasure, the Crimson Fort endured.
Not by chance. Not by miracle.
But by the will of three titanic figures whose names were whispered with reverence and dread across battlefields, famine-stricken countrysides, and libraries choked with dust: Thessalia Oryn, Iden Halrix, Rovahn Duskar.
The Savrax came, again and again. At least a hundred times, according to the stone-inscribed records of the Fort's inner sanctum. They came with claws sharpened with strategy. Even at the zenith of their dominion—under the reign of the Silent Sovereign, Vhaerax—they could not breach the bastion.
Because it was not merely stone and gate and garrison that held the Fort.
It was prophecy.
It was orchestration.
It was wrath given form.
Thessalia's augury—the mind unmoored from time—mapped every assault before it was born in the womb of enemy council. Iden's unnerving precision and planning, his six-armed mastery of resources and defense, ensured every corner, every trench, every silence in the wind was accounted for. And Rovahn… Rovahn, whose body bore the tectonic memory of volcanic births, whose steps thundered with killing intent—was the bastion incarnate.
But even pillars may crack.
And so it came, the ninety-ninth assault. The breach that almost was. The moment the Crimson Fort tilted upon the blade-edge of annihilation.
It began with blood, as always. The Savrax had razed the Ruka. The massacre was swift—strategic. Among the many casualties was Krellix, right hand to Vhaerax.
The ruse was immaculate. Convincing even to Rovahn.
It was Vhaerax who baited him—wounded, bleeding ichor like liquid twilight, flying crooked across the ash-choked sky, leaving a trail thick with the illusion of vulnerability. And Rovahn, whose heart still housed a nobleman's naivety beneath his lava-crusted chest, believed in endings. Believed that perhaps—just perhaps—this was the finale. The beast broken. The nightmare cornered.
The magma-blooded colossus pursued, limbs thunderous across the charred crags, each stride a cataclysm unto itself. The clouds above churned as though mimicking his fury. The ground split beneath his mass. Crows circled like omens cast in ink.
But then—
A figure from the flank. Swift. Silent. A dagger in the wind.
Krellix.
Alive and whole.
Mocking in his reemergence.
Rovahn's eyes—those twin pits of molten knowing—widened with molten disbelief, the pulsing heat behind them stuttering in rhythm. The realization crashed into him not as revelation, but betrayal. Not his betrayal, but betrayal of the war itself. That this, all of it, had been nothing but an orchestration to draw him away from the Fort. From his post. From the people.
He did not hesitate.
He turned.
And began his thunderous return to the Crimson Fort.
But predators do not release prey.
Vhaerax and Krellix struck as one—fluid, brutal, timeless in their choreography of carnage. One danced along the ridges of ravines, twin sabers flashing like moonlit guillotines. The other descended in arcs of impossible grace.
Rovahn met them in kind.
Stone crashed against blades, lava hissed upon carapace. The fight waged not across moments, but across epochs of breathless combat. Each blow shattered stones older than empires. Each roar peeled bark from trees five centuries dead. The clash was symphonic, a hymn of entropy.
The sky fractured with storm. Lightning danced around them like choirs gone mad. And still—still—the war beneath the Fort raged. Yet the Savrax broke there. Their forces, seeing their generals distracted, slaughtered in swathes by Thessalia's clever trappings and Iden's exquisite kill-boxes, began to unravel like burnt scripture.
When the dust settled, when ash became snow, Rovahn stood upright—cracked but unyielding, smoke streaming from his wounds like incense from a sacrificial altar. His fists were molten and trembling. The enemies withdrew.
But before Vhaerax turned to vanish into the gray horizon, he lingered.
Not out of mercy.
But out of conviction.
He hovered there, like tattered banners carved from the marrow of shadow, their edges curling with a wind that did not stir the air. Each beat was too slow for nature.
When he spoke, his voice slipped forth not like a sound, but like a hand brushing the spine, low and dry, yet pressed with a weight that made the ribs tighten.
"I do not hate you," he said, head slightly lowered, chin tucked with unsettling calm. "No. None of us do."
He drifted closer—not in approach, but in presence, as if the very idea of him leaned nearer. His eyes—double-ringed with glimmering void—held no warmth, only the cold clarity of a predator that had transcended hunger.
His voice bore no tremble, no barbed insult, no false grief. It was clean. Clean like an autopsy.
"Before the great wars... we were prey."
His lips barely moved. But the memory behind those words stirred through every inch of his posture—the slight lift of his jaw, the flicker in his eyes like flinching muscle memory, the almost imperceptible tightening around his left eye as if recalling generations of running, of hiding.
"Our ancestors—once soft and simple—were hunted to the brink of memory by stronger kinds."
His fingers unfolded slightly, claws flexing open as if re-living the blood-soaked reflex of evolution.
"So we changed. We adapted. We learned not peace—but permanence. No alliance—only survival."
He turned his face slightly toward the wind, as if tasting the word survival, then met Rovahn's gaze once more.
"We did not evolve to coexist."
That line struck like a judgment, not against Rovahn—but against nature itself. And in it, his shoulders rolled back—not in pride, but in finality, like a creature long past the stage of apology.
His voice, still quiet, hardened—not louder, but edged. Serrated with intent.
"We evolved to out-strategize… to outlast… to out-eliminate."
Now his eyes narrowed, no longer distant—they were predatory, locked fully onto Rovahn.
Rovahn, cracked and aflame, stood rooted—yet not from defiance.His fists had clenched not from wrath, but from something more bitter.Understanding.
He saw it now—not in Vhaerax's words, but in the stillness between them.The truth of a species that had not been cruel… merely inevitable.
A silence fell, broken only by the distant groan of thunder behind the horizon.
Vhaerax tilted his head—a fraction.Like a curious child before a dying beast that refused to scream.
Then, gently, like whispering into a grave he'd already dug:
"Existence is war," he murmured. "And war only ever ends… when only one side remains."
The sky behind him blackened—with erasure.A velvet curtain of void descending, swallowing starlight.
Then came the final strike—not of blade, but of belief.A blow buried straight into Rovahn's mind.
"There can be no rivals beneath the sky."
And with those words, Vhaerax did not smirk nor smile.Because to him, it was not a victory.It was truth.
And truth, he knew, required no applause.
And with that, Vhaerax vanished—leaving only wind, smoke, and silence in his wake.
Rovahn stood there, unmoving for a long while, the lava in his chest dimming faintly, a mimic of what churned inside.
He was not shocked by the cruelty.
He was stunned by the clarity.
A phrase. A creed. A war cry that was also a eulogy for coexistence.
And that—more than any wound—was what hollowed him.
Jorin recall his memory.
He began with the first.
Thessalia Oryn.
Even her name felt like rusted silk on the tongue—beautiful, but unnatural.
A woman—no, not a woman. An Ozyriad. One of those forest-born creatures—once serene, now corrupted, gnarled by unnatural bloom. Bark in place of bone. Blossoms blooming from old wounds. Elegance wrapped in rot.
Yet she had found power where none had expected it.
Her species—meant only to command dead plants, to spread poisonous spores—had never been favored on any path of enlightenment. And yet she had chosen the Path of Prophecy, a current thought too strong for her roots.
But she did not turn away.
She fell in love with it. Married herself to its cruelty. Drowned in its illusions. And in time… it changed her.
No one knew what she had done. What ritual. What kind of sacrifice.
But the rumors whispered that she killed herself—if only for a moment—just to touch the place beyond breath. Just to reach some fold in reality where fate and god held counsel. And there, she took something. Power? Knowledge? Madness?
No one knew.
But she returned. Changed and alive somehow.
And with her return came a series of predictions. Some vast. And some that shook the world.
Even the Faithrend Epoch had been among them.
Yes—the Crimson Fort was old.
And the Thronebound Order is as old as Crimson fort.
And both had roots deeper than history dared to remember.
Jorin exhaled—long, steady. The pressure in his skull dulled to a distant ache.
That is what matters now. Not the flowers. Not the gods.
But the steps I must take.
The second—yes, the second pillar upon which the Thronebound Order rests—was none other than Iden Halrix, the Absolute High Chancellor.
If Thessalia Oryn stood as the mind of the Order, riddled with visions and crowned in oracles, then Iden was its brain—cold, calculating, and colossal. A master of logistics and unseen strings, he was the architect of all hidden scaffolds upon which Crimson Fort was built—not with hands, but with will, and not with stone, but with severed certainties and rewritten inevitabilities.
He was a Zerathi—an ancient, half-forgotten lineage of abyssal elegance and horror. His lower half coiled and undulated like a serpent god exiled from oceans long unspoken of, scales inked in constellations too old for names. Smooth, ripple-skinned, iridescent with oil-sheen blacks and greens, his tail alone could crush bones and cradle secrets.
The upper half, however, was the bloodline's tapestry—and in Iden's case, that tapestry was frayed with the monstrous grandeur of the Gnorlveth.
The Zerathi—Jorin recalled now, lips twitching faintly at the bitter taste of reverence and repulsion—were whispered to be the progeny of union between a dying sea serpent and something... else.
What 'else'?
That was the riddle.
Some claimed the progenitor was a drylander whose voice could soften thunder, whose prayers were so pure they echoed into the deep and moved the sea beast's heart. Others spoke of a parasitic race that hijacked emotions, and thus seduced the serpent by rewriting love into its bones. There were even those who believed Zerathi came not from affection, but from cruelty—a binding, a sacrifice, an old god's failed experiment.
None of it mattered to Jorin.He had no time for rootless conjecture.
"What's the worth of digging for seeds when no tree is promised?" he muttered to himself, rubbing the back of his temple as the thoughts lapped at the edges of his focus.
Even now, even while thinking of Iden's strange birth, his mind reeled back toward the High Chancellor's father: Gnorlveth.
That name alone scratched the soul like a bone hook.
The Gnorlveth were monsters made in mirrors of war, as though flesh itself was tired of fragility and carved something else. Towering—easily twice the height of most men—they walked not as beasts but as burdens the world could not yet cast off. Their hides bore the stony resilience of forgotten fortresses, scales so thick and dull they reflected not light, but despair. Their jaws—gods, those jaws—were malformed maws of evolutionary rebellion. Hinged too far. Stuffed with tusk-crowns and fangs layered in spirals like serrated temples. It was said they could speak while devouring, and that their devouring was, in truth, a form of prayer.
And from these came Iden's blood.
His father's arms were not born but claimed—and here was the grotesque tradition: the Marrow Howl.
A rite that Jorin shuddered to imagine.
Gnorlveth chieftains did not grow arms like trees grow branches. No. They ripped them from their own kin while still living, still screaming—not out of rage, but ritual. The limb had to be consumed whole, sinew by sinew, marrow slurped like sacred wine before it cooled. Then came the pain—a beautiful pain, the songs said—when the new arm ruptured from one's own chest or side, a malformed bloom of bone and strength.
These arms were not simply limbs.They were ghosts, still whispering inside the flesh.Every arm worn by a Gnorlveth warlord was a memory made muscular.
Jorin exhaled sharply, pulse tightening.
"And this..." he murmured, eyes narrowing, jaw tightening like a vice, "is the man who governs policy, diplomacy, and economic...?"
His voice carried disbelief, yes—but also a strange flicker of something close to awe.
And Iden?
Iden Halrix did not simply exist. He loomed. In his chambers of obsidian parchment and ivory ink, he orchestrated the world's bureaucracy like a god too bored for miracles but too sharp to allow failure. A being of silence and stillness. It was said that Iden had not raised his voice in over seventy years, and yet armies marched when his pen tapped the desk. His mind was not made for empathy or emotion—it was a machine, spined with old violence and veined with cold dominion.
And Jorin...
Jorin could not help but twitch his fingers, as though imagining the ink-drenched commands sliding from Iden's six-fingered hands. The man wrote in three languages at once. Each hand wrote a different directive, and none were wrong.
"He is the brain of the Order," Jorin whispered again, more to himself than anyone else, "but that brain is built from muscle, stolen from fathers, and written with the patience of serpents."
The candlelight trembled across his features. His throat tightened. The image of Iden Halrix bloomed larger in his mind than any prophecy or beast.
And it scared him more than Thessalia ever could.
As for Iden Halrix, it was no mere coincidence that he bore six arms—each one a testament, a grave, a record of conquest inscribed not with ink but bone and betrayal. For a Gnorlveth, six arms did not simply imply rank—it screamed of ritual victory, of four siblings or kin devoured in ceremony, each limb carved from still-breathing brethren, consumed while their eyes still held horror, and worn now as silent witnesses.
Jorin had only seen him once from newspaper, in the marble atrium of the Emberglass Court. That glimpse alone had frozen his stomach into lead. For Iden's silhouette alone was monstrous—an asymmetric tower of calmly folded limbs, each with its own poise, fingers twitching faintly like they harbored secret intentions. His frame was hulking, sinuous in places and grotesquely structured in others, shoulders too wide, spine too straight, movements unnaturally fluid, as if made not of bone but tightly braided serpents.
Yet somehow—somehow—his appearance did not provoke fear at first glance.
It was the artifice. The disguise. The deliberate civility stitched into his every fiber.
Attire. A high-collared coat of blackened velvet, trimmed in dusk-silver threads that shimmered like fog. Its sleeves split and tiered to accommodate his numerous arms without disruption—layered like officer regalia, each fold shaped to drape elegantly. Polished bracers cupped his lower forearms, etched with the Order's glyphs—words of discipline, balance, and silence. His chest bore a sash of ashen gray, not slung across in pride, but pinned modestly beneath a brooch shaped like a serpent devouring its own tongue.
A ceremonial hat always crowned his head—something between a high marshal's shako and a philosopher's cowl. Tall, rigid, with a narrow plume of silver feathers tucked to the side, it shaded his eyes so thoroughly that one could never quite discern where he was looking.
And when he spoke—ah, the voice—
It was a paradox. soft as falling dust, smooth as oiled steel. Each word was measured, every sentence pre-assembled in the cathedral of his mind before being allowed to exit his lips.
"A firm hand, like a firm law, must never tremble. Not from rage. Not from fear. Only from the weight of restraint."
He bowed often, his movements cultivated like calligraphy—no gesture without intent, no expression that betrayed his reptilian core.
And beside him, in jarring contrast, stood the third.
Rovahn Duskar. The Insanity Marshal.
If Thessalia was the mind, and Iden the brain, then Rovahn was unmistakably the body—the engine, the muscle, the executioner's arm. The part of the Thronebound Order that bled, crushed, marched, and devoured.
He was Rallun.
A species born not in wombs, but in infernos.
Their story was a testament to cruelty as transformation: creatures that fell into volcanoes, whether by fate or choice, and endured. Those that did not perish outright began to fuse with the very heart of the earth. Their skin hardened to stone, not through layers, but through erosion—the burning away of all softness. Nerves melted. Eyes disintegrated. Joints calcified.
And if they lasted long enough—if they screamed for days without lungs, clung to identity without flesh—then the fire would answer. And they would be reborn.
Their original forms were forgotten—burned to irrelevance—leaving behind a molten core, sheathed in obsidian and living stone. Some grew larger with age, and larger still with conquest, devouring others of their kind to assimilate their mass, their heat, their soul-embers.
Rovahn had become... something colossal.
He was no longer man-shaped, but rather shaped like a monolith torn from a mountain during a god's tantrum.His body was a walking pillar, basalt-black and fissured with magma veins, each pulsing rhythmically like a war drum heard from beneath the earth. These glowing streams webbed his limbs, encircled his chest, and throbbed behind the grotesque aperture that was his face.
No true eyes.
Only two cavernous holes, carved like sockets that once belonged to something else—now filled with burning light, endless and hollow. His jawline was razored, stretched wide like a war-mask, and though he rarely smiled, when he did, the cracks in his face split wider, oozing steam and laughter both.
"Bones break. Bricks crumble. But a good scream?"His voice crackled like molten rock meeting snow."A good scream stays in the walls."
His hair—if it could be called that—was lava, coiled back tightly, as if combed by tongues of fire. Every inch of his form radiated heat and tension, a man-shaped furnace that never cooled.
Rovahn delighted in conflict. Not in chaos, but in the ritual of resistance. He did not speak of diplomacy. He did not negotiate. He was not interested in philosophy, law, or balance. He existed to ensure compliance through force, and to reward loyalty with protection so absolute it felt like imprisonment.
He had once asked Thessalia, during a particularly sharp exchange:
"You dream of gods. I don't. I dream of fists. Does that offend your little prophecies?"
And when Iden had once questioned the excessiveness of his punishments, Rovahn responded with a chuckle that cracked the flagstones beneath him:
"You have your paper blades, Chancellor. I have real ones. They bleed."
He was the army incarnate. The prison walls and the lash both.The executioner's slab and the body it caught.
Unlike the others, his body was not flesh. He did not sleep. He did not bleed. He did not fear poisons or dreams.
He simply waited for the next command—or the next excuse to indulge his obsession. Combat, Breaking, Purifying through pain.
And in that way, the body of the Order was never at rest.