🌫️ Chapter One: Ashes of the Throne
Scene 1: The Last Loyalist Stronghold
"Smoke was the kingdom's new crown, and ash its loyal subject."
The mountain outpost was already burning.
Elira bent behind the shattered remains of a ballista cart, flames licking the wooden supports above. Wind screamed down from the pass, hurling snow and smoke in equal measure. The smell—burnt leather, scorched stone, and blood—choked her nostrils, but she did not flinch.
"Two riders left the gate alive," barked Captain Hareth beside her, voice gravelled from smoke. "We saw their horses run down. No signal since."
Elira squinted through the smoke. Shapes flickered in the haze—soldiers in black-and-gold, her uncle's crest gleaming on their shields. His shadow stretched even here, far from the capital. Loyalists who had refused his rule were being hunted like foxes.
"Then we go in," Elira said. "If there's one still breathing behind those walls, we don't leave them to die."
"A bold move," Hareth said, "for a princess with no crown."
She gave him a cold smile. "I've never needed a crown to bleed for Elarion."
With a war cry, she rose.
Swords clashed with swords. Smoke stung her eyes as they charged the breach. Her sword—Kings_terror, forged in the old flame—sang as it cut through armor. The enemy was well-fed, well-trained. But Elira fought like a flame made flesh, each motion honed in the crucible of exile and loss.
One of her men fell beside her. Another picked up his spear and pressed forward.
The fighting lasted minutes. It felt like hours.
When it ended, the strongholds inner courtyard was a ruin—black snow, red stone.
Only one survivor.
He was an old knight named Ser Daern, barely clinging to life. Elira knelt beside him, brushing snow from his brow.
"You came…" he whispered, voice thin as parchment.
"I did."
He grasped her wrist. "The boy… Kael… he was here. Two nights past. Said he was looking for… something. Not his father's orders."
Elira's heart stilled.
"Did he say what?" she asked.
"Only this…" The knight pulled a carved bone token from beneath his cloak. A serpent twisted around a stone eye. "Said it called to him. Said he dreamed of fire beneath the throne…"
And then Ser Daern died.
Elira stood alone in the ruined courtyard, the bone token heavy in her hand. Around her, snow fell like ash. The fires crackled down to embers. Her war-band waited behind her, silent.
She stared toward the southern mountains, where the capital lay hidden in winter fog.
Kael. The boy they said was lost to her uncle's will.
But what if he was something more? A weakness in the king's armor. A thread to pull.
King Vaelen – the usurper king, once charismatic, now decaying from the inside.
Kael – his son, torn between love and blood, touched by darkness but not fully claimed.
The Shadow (The One Beneath the Stone) – a presence that exists just out of sight, speaking only in whispers.
🩸 Scene 2: Inside the Cursed Throne Room
Location: The Hall of Crowns, now cold and silent despite its opulence.
The throne room had once been carved of goldleaf and hope. Now it sat in silence, its high ceilings crusted with frost, the stained-glass windows dulled like mourning eyes. Cold crept through the flagstones, unseasonal, unholy.
At the far end of the hall, beneath a canopy of black iron twisted into the shape of withered branches, sat King Vaelen.
đź‘‘ KING VAELEN THE FALSE
He was still beautiful—that was the lie that made him terrifying.
His skin had the pallor of snow left too long under a full moon—white, but faintly gray around the lips. His hair, once raven-dark, had gone to silver far too soon, though it gleamed in the torchlight like it had been polished rather than aged. He wore black-and-gold robes lined with sigil thread, the crown upon his brow fashioned from obsidian and bone.
But the rot was there, beneath the polish.
His eyes had turned gold—not the warm gold of sunlight, but molten and unnatural, burning faintly in the dim hall. A trickle of dried blood curled from his left nostril, so faint it might be missed by all but those who watched too long.
His smile was pleasant. It never reached his eyes.
And when he spoke, his voice echoed—not with power, but with company.
"Tell me again, Lord Rhaud," he murmured to a noble kneeling in fear, "why your men were two days late delivering my tithe."
Lord Rhaud was shaking. "Sire, the roads were frozen. The horses—"
"The roads." Vaelen's fingers traced the armrest of his throne, carved with screaming faces.
He didn't raise his voice. He never had to. The shadows in the corners of the hall twitched.
"The roads. The roads. The rads," whispered something, mocking, in a dozen dead voices.
The One Beneath the Stone was listening.
Vaelen's head tilted. Then he smiled too gently, and made a slicing motion with two fingers.
Lord Rhaud screamed once before a blade—unseen—opened his throat. His blood ran black across the icy floor.
Vaelen sighed. "See that his family receives his full inheritance. A lesson paid in blood deserves interest."
🩶 PRINCE KAEL
Standing just behind the throne, eyes fixed on the dying noble, was Kael.
He was taller than his father, broader in the shoulders. His skin was warmer, his hair dark copper—not red like Elira's flame, but rich and earthy. He wore a light coat of black armor over a tunic with a faded crest: the old royal tree, now cracked down the center.
His face was handsome in a quiet, severe way—except for the haunted look behind his eyes.
They had once been forest-green. Now, they flickered with slivers of gold that shimmered whenever the shadow moved.
He didn't speak. He hadn't spoken all day.
But as the blood crept toward him across the floor, he took a step back—not from fear, but from revulsion.
The Wyrm's presence made his skin itch.
"You hesitate," his father said without looking.
Kael didn't answer.
Vaelen turned then, eyes sharp. "Be careful, boy. The creature beneath the throne knows the taste of doubt."
The shadow on the wall behind them shivered. A second shadow—wrong, with too many limbs—slid up behind Vaelen's own.
It didn't speak in words. But Kael heard it.
"Your heart burns for the girl. Red fire. Broken crown. You will betray him, soft thing."
Kael flinched, just barely. Enough for Vaelen to notice.
He smiled that gentle smile again. "Dream of her again last night?"
Kael's hands clenched.
"I said nothing—"
Vaelen laughed.
"You don't need to, Kael. The One Beneath the Stone listens to all things unsaid."