The carriage didn't stop so much as it surrendered to the mud.
For three weeks, the world had been a blur of receding greens and encroaching greys, but here, at the jagged edge of the Kingdom of Vaelor, color seemed to have been outlawed entirely. Valerius Vaelor pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the window, watching the sleet of Morhen transform the landscape into a charcoal sketch.
He coughed—a dry, rhythmic rattle that started deep in his lungs and vibrated through his narrow ribcage. Each shudder felt like a needle pricking the lining of his chest. Seventeen years of palace life, breathing the filtered, jasmine-scented air of the Great Library and reading by the steady glow of enchanted lamps, had not prepared him for this. The air here was raw, metallic, and tasted of ancient rot.
He adjusted the travel-worn leather satchel on his lap, his fingers tracing the rigid edges of the parchment inside. It was his inheritance. A single sheet of vellum bearing the heavy, crimson Royal Seal of his father, King Asterion.
In the capital, the parchment had been presented to him with grand, sweeping gestures and honeyed words about "responsibility" and "frontier leadership." But Valerius wasn't a fool. The document didn't name him a Duke, a Governor, or even a High Warden. It named him the Baron of Morhen—the lowest possible rung in the peerage. It was a formal exile, a polite death sentence wrapped in the calligraphy of a royal appointment.
A Prince of Vaelor, he thought, his gaze fixed on his pale reflection in the glass. A blemish on the golden lineage. Too weak to wield Aether-veins, too scholarly to lead armies. Now, just a Baron of ghosts.
The carriage door was suddenly wrenched open from the outside, the rusted hinges screaming in protest. The smell hit him first—a violent collision of sharp pine resin and the heavy, humid stench of the nearby marshes.
"Out, your Highness. The horses can't pull you through this muck, and the axle is screaming louder than a stuck pig," a voice barked.
Valerius gathered his robes, trying to maintain a shred of the dignity he had rehearsed in his mind. He stepped out, and reality immediately claimed him. His thin, calfskin boots—expertly crafted for marble floors and plush carpets—vanished instantly into the freezing grey mire. The cold of the mud was a shock, a jagged blade of ice that traveled from his heels to his spine.
Standing before him was a man who looked as though he had been carved directly from the jagged cliffs of the North. He was a mountain of scarred plate armor and matted wolf fur. This was Commander Silas.
Valerius looked up at him, squinting against the sleet. Silas didn't bow. He didn't even remove his iron-studded gauntlets. He simply stood with his legs braced wide, his hand resting with casual lethargy on the pommel of a heavy, notched broadsword. He was the man who had held Morhen together since the previous Baron had died three weeks ago. Looking at Silas's hard, predatory eyes, Valerius wondered if the man had even waited for the body to get cold before seizing control.
"A Prince of Vaelor," Silas said. His voice was a low, gravelly hum that seemed to vibrate in the very mud beneath them. "We expected a battalion of engineers to fix the dikes, or at least a shipment of grain to get us through the black-frost. Instead, the King sent us a boy with a cough."
The soldiers standing behind Silas—men with hollow cheeks and eyes like flint—let out a collective, low chuckle.
Valerius felt the heat of a flush rising to his neck, a humiliating contrast to the deathly whiteness of his skin. He straightened his spine, though his knees felt like water in the wind. He reached into his satchel, his fingers trembling, and pulled out the appointment letter. The paper was light—dangerously light. In this wind, it felt as though it might fly away at any moment, taking his last scrap of legal protection with it.
"Commander Silas," Valerius began. He tried to project a voice of authority, but it came out raspy and thin, punctuated by a wheeze. "I have the King's mandate. I am here to assume the administration of the barony. I understand the previous Baron's passing has left the region... unsettled."
Silas let out a short, bark-like laugh that didn't reach his eyes. He stepped closer, his massive physical presence looming over Valerius like a falling shadow. The Prince had to crane his neck back to maintain eye contact. He could smell the sour ale on the Commander's breath and the old blood on his furs.
"Unsettled? That's a courtier's word, Highness," Silas leaned in, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "The previous Baron died screaming in that manor because he thought a title would protect him from the plague-rot and the men who don't like paying taxes to a dying crown. Here, titles don't keep you warm, and they certainly don't stop a blade in the dark. Do you even know how to hold a sword, Baron?"
Valerius swallowed hard, his throat feeling as though it were lined with glass. "I have studied the art of strategy, Commander. I—"
"Strategy," Silas spat into the mud, narrowly missing Valerius's boot. He looked at the delicate parchment in the Prince's hand with pure, unmasked boredom. "Strategy is for people who have food in their bellies. In Morhen, we have hunger and we have steel."
Silas turned his gaze toward the manor—a skeletal ruin of black stone that seemed to be melting into the fog. "Since you're here, you'll stay in the East Tower. It's the only part of the manor where the roof hasn't collapsed yet. My men will bring your trunks. Don't wander the halls after sunset, Baron. My guards have itchy trigger fingers, and they aren't used to seeing silk robes in the shadows. We wouldn't want an... accident... on your first night."
Without waiting for a response, Silas turned his back, dismissing the Prince of Vaelor as if he were a common peddler.
Valerius stood alone in the rain for a long minute, clutching his useless letter. He felt smaller than he ever had in the vaulted silence of the Great Library. He looked at his hands; they were shaking so violently that he had to tuck them deep into his oversized sleeves.
The walk to the manor felt like a journey through a tomb. The interior was worse than the outside. The air was thick with the smell of damp stone, burnt tallow, and something metallic—either old blood or rusted iron. There were no servants to greet him, only the sound of his own squelching boots echoing off the vaulted, soot-stained ceilings.
He passed through the Great Hall, where the tapestries were nothing but shredded ribbons of mold. A few of Silas's men were sitting around a pit fire in the center of the hall, roasting something that smelled suspiciously like rat. They didn't look up, but he felt their eyes tracing his movements, measuring the weight of his travel cloak, calculating how long a boy like him would last before the cold took him.
He found the East Tower by following the draft. The spiral staircase was narrow and treacherous, the stones worn smooth by centuries of footsteps. His lungs burned with every step, and by the time he reached the third landing, he had to stop, leaning his forehead against the damp stone until the world stopped spinning.
When he finally pushed open the heavy oak door to his chambers, the wood groaned as if in pain.
The room was a hollow shell. A single, narrow bed with a moth-eaten wool blanket sat in the corner. A heavy wooden desk, scarred by ink and knife marks, stood near a window that lacked several panes of glass, allowing the sleet to whistle inside and coat the floor in a shimmering layer of ice.
Valerius closed the door and leaned against it. The silence of the room was a physical weight. Suddenly, the mask of the scholar broke. He slumped to his knees, a violent fit of coughing taking hold of him. He pressed a white handkerchief to his mouth, and when he pulled it away, it was flecked with bright, arterial crimson.
"So this is it," he whispered to the empty room. "The end of the line."
He stood up shakily and approached the desk. He began to unpack his few belongings with obsessive care. He laid out his pens, his inkwell, and a few precious books on ancient alchemy. He needed order. If he could create a small circle of logic in this room, perhaps he wouldn't drown in the chaos outside. He spent an hour wiping the dust from the desk with his sleeve, his movements frantic and precise, as if the cleanliness of the wood could save his life.
But as the single candle he found on the desk flickered and died in the wind, leaving him in a suffocating darkness, Valerius realized that "order" was a luxury he no longer possessed. He was cold—a cold that went deeper than his skin, a cold that felt like it was turning his very marrow to slush.
He reached into his sleeve and pulled out the Forbidden Scroll.
It didn't feel like parchment. It felt like sun-warmed skin, pulsing with a low, rhythmic vibration that matched his own faltering heartbeat. He had found it in the deepest, forgotten vaults of the Royal Archives, a relic of an age before the "divine" Aether-veins, when men traded their souls for a whisper of power.
He laid it on the desk. In the dim moonlight filtering through the broken window, the scroll seemed to swallow the light around it.
"I am dying anyway," he muttered, his voice cracking in the dark. "What is a little more rot if it buys me the time to see them burn?"
He reached out, his fingers hovering over the seal. To open it was to invite a parasite into his soul. To open it was to admit that the Prince of Vaelor was dead, and something else was being born in this tower.
He bit his lip until he tasted blood, then pressed a crimson-stained thumb against the seal.
The room didn't explode with light. Instead, the shadows seemed to thicken, drawing toward the desk. Valerius felt a sudden, agonizing heat in his left hand—the hand that touched the scroll. He watched in horror as the skin on his fingertips began to turn a bruised purple, the veins darkening until they looked like black ink beneath the surface.
A voice, or perhaps just a thought that wasn't his own, echoed in the hollow of his mind.
The Tax is paid. The Gate is open.
Suddenly, the cold didn't matter. The coughing stopped. His vision sharpened, the darkness of the room peeling back to reveal the world in shades of violet and grey. He could see the thermal heat of a guard pacing in the hallway outside. He could feel the vibration of the wind against the stone.
But as the power surged through him, a memory slipped away—the sound of his mother's voice singing a lullaby in the library. He tried to grab the memory, to hold onto the sound, but it dissolved into grey smoke, replaced by the cold, hard logic of the scroll.
Valerius looked at his blackened hand. He didn't feel pain. He felt... efficient.
He turned his gaze toward the door. Commander Silas was down there, warm and confident, believing he had broken a boy.
Valerius picked up a quill. He didn't need a candle anymore. He began to write, his movements no longer trembling. The ink on the paper glowed with a faint, sickly light.
The Baron of Morhen had arrived.