The oak bucket that collided with Kaelen Valerius's face did not contain only water; it was winter melt, mixed with urine and the sludge from the garrison latrines. The impact landed with a dull crack that split the silence of the dormitory. Before air could return to his lungs, the boy was hauled up by the hair.
— Wake up, carcass — hissed Watch-Sergeant Hurn, whose teeth were rotten tombstones in a mouth that reeked of smoke and bile. — Your lineage's gold has dried up, and so has my patience.
Kaelen was dragged, half-naked, through the corridors of the Academy of Gold and Ash. The place was a cathedral of war devoted to discipline, but that morning it looked like a slaughterhouse. The stone walls of Vallenburg, damp with winter sweat, echoed the sound of his heels scraping against uneven granite. Through the slits of the arrow loops, the dawn brought no hope; it was a pale, sickly light, like the skin of a corpse.
When they entered the Hall of Broken Blades, the silence was so heavy it felt tangible. Three hundred cadets—his former companions—formed a corridor of iron and indifference. At the center waited High Marshal Vorn, flanked by inquisitors in scarlet robes.
— Education is the privilege of those who sustain the Kingdom, Kaelen of House Valerius — Vorn's voice was a restrained thunder. — For three lunar cycles, your family's tithe has failed to reach our coffers. The new Wall Edict has raised the cost of blood and steel. Your father, it seems, prefers insolvency to duty.
— My father sent three harvests to this place! — Kaelen shouted, his voice breaking as the sergeant drove a knee into his back, forcing him to kneel on the coarse sand. — The increase in tuition was theft! No lord of the Iron Vale can pay it under the new dogma!
— Then let them rot in the dark — the Marshal rose. — The Academy does not train beggars. You are a Nobody.
The Ritual of Martial Excommunication was swift and brutal. The master-at-arms approached with a blacksmith's pincers and tore the leather epaulettes from Kaelen's shoulder, ripping the flesh beneath. He was spat out through the South Gate with nothing but a torn linen tunic and a thirst for answers that burned hotter than the wound in his shoulder.
The Vale of Ashes and Betrayal
The walk to the Iron Lands took two days of agony beneath a fine rain that seemed to carry the weight of lead. But when Kaelen climbed the final ridge, he did not find the welcoming smoke of the hearths of his childhood. He found the smell of burning human fat.
The castle of House Valerius had not been besieged by an army, but devoured by a political plague. At the center of the village square, betrayal lay on display.
The peasants—the same ones his father had protected during the droughts, the same whose children Kaelen knew by name—were huddled in a corner, eyes cast down, hands stained with blood that was not theirs. To rid themselves of the collective debts imposed by the Crown, they had delivered their lord.
At the center of the square, the body of his father, Baron Valerius, was stretched out upon an improvised butcher's table. It had not been a dignified execution. He had been torn apart by the mob before being finished by the "Gentleman" sent by the Crown: the Inquisitor-Abomination, Sir Malphas.
Malphas stood over the corpse, his ebony armor engraved with sacred scriptures that glowed with a sickly radiance. He was a Nephilim of accursed blood, a creature of demonic lineage kept on a short leash by the Church through magical seals driven into his own flesh. He was the perfect executor: a monster used to punish those who failed to pay their tithe to God and King.
Kaelen watched, hidden among the remains of a barn, the final horror unfold.
— Where are the females? — Malphas's voice sounded like glass shattering.
— Here, my lord… please, our debt is paid? — begged the village blacksmith, dragging forward two chained figures.
It was them. His mother, her dignity reduced to filthy rags, and his younger sister, whose eyes were empty with pure shock. They would not be killed. Valerius blood was ancient and pure; women of the nobility, even "ruined" ones, were valuable commodities on the Church-sanctioned black market or in the luxury brothels of the cardinals in Vallenburg.
Kaelen watched as Malphas seized his sister by the throat, checking her teeth as if she were a beast of burden, before throwing her into an enclosed wagon bearing the royal crest.
— Take them to the port of Ostrava — ordered the Inquisitor. — The luxury slave market will pay what these traitors could not produce in gold.
Kaelen drove his nails into the earth until they bled. He had no sword. No allies. His father had been delivered by those he loved, and his women sold as flesh by a demon with divine authorization.
As the wagon departed and the peasants began to burn what remained of his inheritance to erase the past, Kaelen felt something change within him. The morality the Academy had taught him died there, in the mud. If the Church used demons to collect debts, he would have to find something far worse to claim his vengeance.