At the edge of the empire's reach, where maps faded into old ink and borders dissolved into myth, there lay a village without a name.
It was not nameless by accident. It had once borne a name, long before swords carved kingdoms and kings sang oaths with blood on their tongues. But names had weight, and the weight of this one had been buried—first under time, then under silence, and finally beneath ash. Now, the villagers called it nothing. Outsiders did not visit. And so, like a whispered prayer lost to the wind, the name faded.
The village survived not because it was strong, but because it was unseen. Like moss on stone, it clung to life in the crevices history ignored. The people farmed the brittle land, fetched water from cracked wells, and lived by rules older than law.
Among these people lived a boy.
He was not yet a man, though his eyes had seen things that men wept to forget. His name was Rael. His hands were calloused, his feet bare more often than not, and his back knew the shape of labor better than rest. He was born in smoke, raised in dust, and fed on the brittle hope of a life that might someday stop breaking.
His mother, Marell, once sang to him under the stars. She had a voice like drifting snow—soft, cold, and fleeting. His father had died beneath the hooves of tax enforcers when Rael was ten. There was no grave. Only blood in the mud and the memory of boots that did not stop walking.
But that was the way of things.
In the unnamed village, people did not cry loudly. They wept with their hands—working longer, planting harder, speaking less. Grief was not a wound. It was a seed buried deep, watered with silence.
---
That morning, the air held stillness.
The sun had not yet broken the veil of mist that clung to the earth like a second skin. Rael stood in the fields, sickle in hand, watching the barley bow without wind. He frowned. Birds were silent. Even the insects dared not chirp.
Something was wrong.
From the east came a sound: hooves, heavy and unhurried. Leather creaked. Metal rang like distant thunder.
Rael turned. And there, rising from the fog like death on horseback, came the banners of Yvard—the empire that owned the land, the sky, and the right to take breath from lungs if it pleased.
There were six riders. No more than needed. Their armor was polished but bloodstained, red cloaks dragging like torn tongues behind them. One bore a spear. One had a ledger.
"Tax season," someone whispered behind Rael. An old man. His voice cracked like dry wood.
No one moved.
The villagers gathered at the center of the village, as they always did. The square was no more than a ring of dirt and stone, where the shrine leaned crooked and the well waited dry. Marell clutched Rael's wrist. Her knuckles were white.
The man with the ledger dismounted.
He looked like all imperial officials: angular, thin, and pale, like a corpse pickled in rules. He read their names aloud, one by one. Some he crossed out without comment. Others he paused on.
"You owe," he said.
"We paid," Marell replied, her voice steady.
He looked up. "No," he said. "You delayed. You now owe more."
"We have nothing more."
"That is not my concern."
The soldier with the spear stepped forward.
Rael felt his body move before he thought. He stepped in front of his mother. The soldier didn't flinch. He only raised the spear slightly, so its tip kissed Rael's throat.
The village held its breath.
Then the official nodded. The soldier stepped back. No blood today. Not here.
Instead, the official marked the ledger with a black slash. Final.
"By decree of Lord Commander Auren of Yvard's Eastern Tax Dominion, this village is now under default status. Failure to produce grain or coin within five days will be considered treason. And treason, as you know, brings fire."
With that, they left. The dust of their hooves swallowed their tracks.
---
That night, the village did not sleep.
Fires were not lit. Voices were hushed. Fear moved from home to home like a quiet fever. Some spoke of fleeing. Others spoke of hiding grain, of digging holes beneath floorboards.
Rael sat at the edge of the well, staring into its dry throat.
Marell sat beside him.
"I won't let them take you," she said.
"They don't want me," he replied.
"They always want more."
He didn't answer.
The stars hung low. A wind had begun to rise—slow, creeping, as if the world inhaled in dread.
In the distance, faintly, they heard screams.
Another village. Another warning.
---
Three days passed.
On the fourth, the sky turned black before noon.
At first, they thought it was smoke from the east. But it came too fast, too heavy. Birds scattered. Dogs whimpered. Rael stood on the roof of the house, staring out over the fields.
And then he saw them.
Not six. Not ten. But an army.
They wore Yvard's colors, but not its mercy. These were Irminheir—burning men, soldiers of flame, fanatics of war. Their purpose was not tax. It was ruin.
The villagers had no time to speak.
Arrows fell like rain. Homes lit like candles. Screams tore through the morning.
Rael ran.
He screamed for Marell. Found her near the shrine, clutching the ledger from the taxman. She was burning.
He tried to drag her, but her body was too far gone. She looked at him, not with pain—but with peace.
"Run," she said.
He didn't.
He stayed until the last breath left her chest. Until the shrine cracked behind him. Until the fire took her.
Only then did he move.
He ran through fire and blood and smoke. Through the field of barley now blackened to ash. Through the corpses of children and old men. He ran until the air choked him. Until his skin blistered.
He didn't stop.
Not when the last house fell. Not when the sky screamed with flame.
He only stopped at the edge of the forest, where the wind died and silence returned.
He looked back.
The village had no name.
Now, it had no life.
Only ash.
Only ghosts.
And one boy, cloaked in a mother's blood and a father's anger, walking into the wild with nothing but ruin behind him.
---
The fire had taken everything. But in that fire, something else was born.
Not hope.
Not vengeance.
Something colder.
Something sharper.
Something that would one day cut an empire open from the inside.