To build an empire, one must chisel history from stone, bind oaths in bone, shroud ambition in mist, and barter memory with gold—such is the lesson of the Sul Empire.
The Malan sculpted their holdings from clay and coin, transmuting rigid hierarchies into marble pillars and codifying law into granite roads. They proclaim it civilization; others see only cages crafted from ledger lines.
The Dion forged theirs from marrow and mandate. Necromancers, witches, and rulers—they trace authority through veins, binding the living to the echoes of the dead. They preach noble duty, yet their castes are ladders wrought of bone.
The Kiel raised theirs in fog and flame, citadels suspended in canopies, minds interwoven through whispers and dreams. Driven by the burning clarity of Luminary truth, their warriors blaze pathways through lands unwilling to yield.
The Bal bartered theirs into existence. Once fierce nomadic conquerors, now merchants who sell what swords once seized. Their banners flutter above bustling markets heavy with memory, even as whispered slurs haunt their caravans.
Four peoples, one empire. Their harmony is not peace, but tension, ever shifting, ever poised upon the edge of breaking.
– The Harmony of Empires by Liraelin Silverson
Five Years Later
The ground was singing again.
A faint, bone-deep vibration twined with the night wind, weaving through the crowd like a hidden drum-line. Lotem Jarval knelt and pressed his palm to the cool grass of the Nomad’s March, letting the buried rhythm climb his arm and settle against his ribs.
Up-slope, three auspicious hills—the living Eldar Shrines of the ThurBal—waited in moonlit silhouette, each capped by a shrine-city whose terraces glittered with thousands of lanterns. Twin silver moons haloed the peaks so they resembled thrones cut from darkness.
Tonight five thousand ThurBal youths would march those slopes and swear the Sulphen’s imperial oath, crossing the veil from child to citizen. Tonight the empire’s covenant binding citizens to the soul of the world—the Sulphen—would open to them: strength enough to raise forts, carve relics, or, for the boldest, rewrite the legends of power.
Lotem should have felt only pride; instead a copper tang surfaced on his tongue, and a laugh he could not place—his brother’s laugh—skipped across the vibrating earth, then vanished.
He exhaled through the cadence taught by the [Shamans]—four beats in, four out—rose to his full height, and merged with the human river flowing toward the shrines. People parted instinctively to his bulk. He wore no sigils, yet his bison cloak and towering form marked him as Numen—something more than the mainly human throng—even if he only had a touch of the Titan’s blood.
Ahead, [Drummers of the Sky] ringed the first hill, their giant hides taut across rune-reinforced bone frames that glowed with a faint light. One mallet fell—CRACK—and thunder rolled outward. The ground thrummed harder beneath his bare feet, and every loose torch on the plains flickered like startled fireflies.
To his side, lantern-light revealed Malan counting-platforms—lattices of murdered cedar lashed into perfect rectangles, three stories tall—where silk-robed clerks tallied the “barbarian rite.” Bronze gears clicked and quills scratched whenever a youth passed.
A tree should burn or bear fruit, Lotem thought, nausea coiling behind his ribs. On the lowest deck a scribe—hair braided into a cedar-tight lattice—leaned out with a measuring rod.
Lotem kept walking. Behind him the clerk’s voice carried: “Exceptional mass—Numen clearly—but not full-blooded.” The quill bit parchment, and the words bit deeper. He paused nearby, considering.
Drums rolled again. Lanterns swayed. The Eldar Shrines stirred—patient giants of living stone and earth inhaling for the first time in a year. Dust hissed from terrace walls and priests scurried to steady censers before embers spilled.
Silence congealed. Then the night itself brightened as though someone drew back a curtain among the stars. A colossal figure of moonlight and shaman-smoke towered over the plain: the Balar, Khan of Khans. His snow-white bison cloak billowed—a mirror and rebuke to every brown hide below. Kathanka’s white hide was legendary—no other beast had ever had the honor of carrying the Balar into battle.
“Brave sons and daughters of the eternal steppe,” the Balar intoned, voice steady as the drums that had ceased for him. “Eighteen generations ago we rode north in chains of hunger and hope for a land of milk and honey. When the Sul Empire refused us, we broke their reluctance with shrine and steel. We crushed the ivory legions of the Dion [Bone Lords], defeated the Malan sects and their so-called masters, shattered the [Witches of Woven Word], and drove the Luminaries of the Kiel from their lofty towers.”
Lotem could feel a rush of pride at the Balar’s words as he stopped to listen near enough to one of the counting towers to make out the uncertain shifting of the Malan and Dion attendants. Good, Lotem thought, remembering the Malan’s dismissal, we are as much citizen as you.
“Sixteen generations ago, we ratified the Treaty of Swallow’s Grace and claimed our rightful place in the Sul Empire. This land belongs to all its peoples now—but never forget, it was Bal blood that sealed its soil. Peace was won at the tip of a sword—as it always must be.”
The Balar raised an arm, and hundreds of torches atop each shrine flared—a blue the shade of midday sky, the crimson of shed blood, and the gold of glittering coins. A heartbeat later, every torch across the Nomad’s March echoed the transformation, casting three great rivers of colored fire up the hills.
“Choose your path,” the Balar declared. “Blue is the mark of the builder and artisan—those who will shape our cities, raise our shrines, and heal the wounded. It represents the endless potential of sky and sea. Take the Sulphen’s oath, serve the empire with craft and mind, and earn your full citizenship in peace.”
“Red belongs to the warriors. You will swear an oath to defend the realm. You may man the colored forts along the Diontel or face the Tul beyond the Diontel. Good. The Tulunganar always need new warriors. Yours is the path of discipline, sacrifice, and lasting honor—for what is an empire without soldiers to guard the gates?”
“And gold,” his voice deepened, “is for those who believe they can become something… more. It is for those who will enter Aslavain—the imperial training realm—this very night. You will form triumvirates with others across the empire and compete in the Eternal Contests. The boldest of you will rise swiftly—but every victory demands power, and Imperial power always takes something in return. Before you commit to Aslavain, ensure you are ready to never return. Not all who enter the training realm leave.”
Five thousand youths surged as the Bal’s words faded along with his image in the sky. Most moved towards the blue lights that promised safety or the red that promised military service. Few moved down the golden path that led to the central shrine. Only the best of his people. Lotem’s bare feet felt every beat of the Eldar’s heart as he waited, considering and deciding. Not that he hadn’t come prepared.
Blue was for artisans—not for him. Maybe if his brother had survived he could have joined the herds. Could have gone back to driving his cart pulled by Wilson and Warma to the markets to sell the products of the herds. That life had died alongside his memories, not that his parents had ever understood.
Red was for soldiers—necessary, certainly, but not enough for his goals. Soldiers would fight the Tul when they raided the empire. They would scout the lands across the Diontel and do their best to ensure that no innocents died. But soldiers merely followed the course of the empire, they did not set it.
Only gold promised him what he truly wanted. He had sworn an oath, dripped his lifeblood onto the carven stone that served as the only memorial his brother would receive. Lotem Jarval would kill the Tul to the last. He would be the one to destroy the Empire’s greatest foe. Nothing less would satisfy him.
He took a step forward, moving towards the golden path ahead. Behind him parchment scraped.
“They always chase gold,” the Malan clerk sneered to a robed companion. His words rode the hush to Lotem’s ears. “Mark another half-breed as choosing Aslavain.”
Lotem turned—slow, deliberate—until the quill froze mid-stroke. Memories buzzed at the edge of his hearing. Something inside him flexed, hot and bright.
“Write this instead,” he said, voice low enough only the clerk could hear. “Another Bal to beat the sects and Blood.”
Lotem’s shadow stretched long as a spear, pointing straight toward the central hill where the golden torches beckoned. Up there lay Aslavain, crucible of triumvirates, arena of empire-wide contests, forge where legends were tempered—and where, rumor claimed, even the Bal could find powerful friends.
The emerald sword his brother had won in Aslavain glimmered inside his mind’s vault, the talisman he had woven hanging from its grip. The memory sent a pang of loss and then, fury through him. How was it fair he could remember his brother’s sword, but not the man himself?
He set another foot upon the gold path. He would swear the Imperials oaths. He would enter Aslavain. And one day the Tul would choke on the name they had stolen from his mind—even if he had to carve it first into his own flesh.
Sylva Strenath remembered first the sensation of silk—dry, coarse, improbably supple—dragging across freshly woven skin. No voices christened her; only the thunk-and-shush of an automated loom echoing in the bare chamber, weaving her existence thread by patient thread like a great spider in the bowels of the sect. The warp had smelled faintly of vinegar and bruised lilacs, a scent that had haunted every breath since. Creation, she learned, began in solitude—and solitude sharpened into competition.
Now, on the summer solstice, she stood beneath the Chamber of Ascension’s vaulted dome, again acutely aware of fabric: a ceremonial robe whispering over mosaic tiles that depicted triumph cracked alongside disaster. Thirty-six initiates formed the circle with her; moonlight spilled through the oculus, silvering the air. Incense spiraled upward, curls collapsing into phosphorescent glyphs that shifted in rhythm with a crystal harp’s melody.
A glint of steel broke the tableau. Meris of Clan Torthen—another silkborn—rested his palm against a longsword whose thorn-knot guard snarled in the moonlight. Steel among silk. Sylva’s lip curled slightly, noting the blade with disdain. Weapons meant reliance on strength, not subtlety. She marked him carefully, understanding that he would prove either obstacle or ally.
“Friendship is friction,” she whispered, reciting the catechism learned the day mock friendships turned to rivalries. “Friction sharpens.” Every victory had cost a would-be companion; each loss, when it came, would cost the self she’d built from those victories. Maybe outside the sect’s walls she could form real friendships. She refused to allow the hope to fill her.
The harp fell silent. Elder Valinsa stepped forward, silver robes drinking moonlight until she seemed forged from it. Her voice stretched like silk drawn close to tearing. “Initiates, you stand at the precipice of greatness. Yet greatness is a blade upon which only the worthy balance. Failure,” she paused, letting the word hum like taut wire, “is not permitted.”
Sylva’s Lifethread—the braided filament buried along her spine—tightened, sending an electric shiver through her body. She inhaled slowly, maintaining outward calm despite the sudden tension.
Valinsa lifted her hands. Invisible strands caught and bowed to her will; the smoke bent, weaving briefly into flowing glyphs of the Scholars’ Script, the imperial script considered most worthy by the Sect of Silken Grace. It fluttered between past and future tense, unsure which history it sought to tell.
“The Sect of Silken Grace does not forgive mediocrity,” Valinsa declared. “Three champions emerged last year—three from dozens. Unacceptable. Your struggle is not merely against rivals but against centuries of expectation.”
Sylva’s gaze dropped to a cracked emerald tile recalling the last champion bearing that color and their failures. Rumor said poison; rumor whispered Clan Torthen. She swallowed. What if she didn’t earn the emerald she had been trained for? What if she was forced into mediocrity before it even began?
Valinsa’s right hand snapped. Smoke converged on the initiates, soaking into black silk. Color bloomed across the three dozen robes—scarlet, cobalt, ochre—until it struck Sylva and ignited into a deep, living emerald. Warmth flooded her, envy made tangible.
“Eisentor,” she breathed, almost tasting fresh rain and starlight through silken tunnels. The City of the Woven Word, seat of the Scholars’ Script, where magic she’d only glimpsed in story awaited. Eisentor represented freedom—to study magic openly, unconstrained by the sect’s strict hierarchy.
“Mark this night,” Valinsa commanded. “You have been assigned to Shrined or Eternal Cities to compete in the Eternal Contest. Form your triumvirate with initiates from other parts of the empire. Ascend as many times as Aslavain allows. Earn the mentorship of Paragons and pursue Veneration. Arrive at your city’s gate before the fall equinox, the sect demands nothing less. We have earned that much obedience.”
Valinsa’s gaze sharpened, voice cutting through incense-heavy air. “Triumph is your only acceptable outcome. Your lives belong to this task.”
Pride rose in Sylva, chased by dread. Nine moons until spring—nine months to claim the magic she’d been denied. Nine months to ascend beyond any in her year.
The circle dispersed into whispers and footsteps. Sylva lingered, steadying her racing heart. She glanced across the chamber. Meris’s sword flashed once more in the moonlight before he turned away silently, his robes the dark gray of Ylfenhold, the City of the Veil.
“Made to triumph, or not made at all,” she whispered again, grounding herself.
She breathed deeply, recalling countless nights she’d imagined stepping free from sect walls. This journey wasn’t simply about victory—it was about freedom, magic unbound by elders’ limitations. She would seek every ascension, court the mentorship of Paragons, and claim a place no elder could deny her.
Sylva felt a golden warmth blossom around her, beginning softly, like the first rays of dawn. It intensified rapidly, enveloping her completely until nothing else remained visible. The chamber, rivals, elders—all faded into irrelevance.
Heart racing with possibility, Sylva smiled. Her destiny had begun.
On the eve of his twentieth summer solstice, Hadrian of Cutra knelt on planks hewn from trees the Sul Empire had never taxed, and the insectile Brood still whispered were theirs. Resin roughened his kneecaps, but his spine stayed straight, hands resting on his thighs, the way Cutra’s sword-masters drilled into the young. Far below the gray veil of fog, a faint rasp of chitin on bark throbbed like a distant war drum—reminding him that tonight’s rite trespassed on contested ground. Pride, not fear, filled his lungs. The Ceremony of Loss would mark both his exile and Cutra’s first step toward acceptance.
Years ago, a weather-gnarled courier had wintered in Cutra, his breath smelling of sea salt and copper coin. “Imagine a hill that walks, boy—its crown a Shrine bright enough to guide stars,” he’d said, describing the ThurBal festival where three Eldar strode beneath the night sky. Grass supposedly spilled from their stone shins, and herbalists, alchemists, and farmers wrestled for every sacred clump. Hadrian, who had never set foot on real soil, could only picture a fog-blurred dream—until the dirge around him yanked his thoughts back to the plank beneath his knees.
Cutra—“the Village of Untamed Mist,” as elders half-joked—clung to the upper boughs of the Fologian Forest, a thirty-year labor of rope, fire-shaped trunks, and quiet defiance. Its people called themselves Sul citizens, though no imperial inspector had ever climbed this high to stamp their approval. Shell-glass lanterns—blown from the molts of glow-wing beetles—swung between homes hollowed into living wood, each sway revealing how far the platform perched above the fog that hid monsters whose ape-like screams or insectile music never truly faded. Hadrian had never touched the forest floor, but he would soon walk far beyond it—and make the empire acknowledge the village it preferred to ignore.
He hungered for textures no Cutran child had ever felt—dream-textures he pieced together from travelers’ tales: the cool crumble of real soil between toes, the musky wind stirred by Bal herds thundering over prairie stone, the sun-warm grit of empire-carved avenues. He wanted all of it—yet every vision stabbed like a hooked barb. The moment the rite flung him through a distant Shrine, he would be barred from home until he forged one of his own. The ache sat in his chest like a lodged arrowhead: adventure on one side, the faces he loved on the other.
Cutra’s future balanced on one missing link: a Shrine to lock the village into the empire’s lattice of gates. Last year, only five caravans dared the hundred-mile slog beyond the Spine to barter for fog-flare silk—the iridescent thread that heated homes and was woven into great crafts of the empire. Without a Shrine, no trader would risk more, and no Cutran youth flung out by the Ceremony could ever step back across the threshold. Forge a Shrine, and the plumes of silk would flow like water; fail, and the village would dangle at the empire’s edge until the Brood decided to cut the ropes.
He knelt in the village plaza—a platform of cedar planks slung by dozens of rope lines that thrummed whenever the night breeze shifted the giant trees they called home. Living chambers hollowed by Luminary fire ringed him, their doorways glowing like ember-edged mouths. Far below, each fog gland exhaled a steady ribbon of gray that slid through branches and spilled west as a river of mist. Glow-wing beetles traced lazy spirals around the drips, green pinpricks in the dark.
Woven-rope bridges and balconies fanned out from the plaza. On them stood every soul he had ever loved, shoulders brushing, breaths held on the same heartbeat—an entire village balanced above an unseen floor, unified in silence.
One flute exhaled a low, dusk-heavy note—drawn out until it seemed to steady the whole platform. A second voice climbed in, brightening the air like the first lantern lit at twilight. The third cut through both, sharp as a hawk’s cry, and the strands braided into a dirge that was half goodbye, half battle hymn. At the first crest of harmony, dozens of wooden pendants struck chests in unison, a soft clatter like rain on hollow leaves.
Three arrows hissed down from the canopy, striking their waiting pyres in measured succession. With each impact, a pillar of Luminary fire surged upward, until blue, green, and crimson columns ringed Hadrian in a triangle of light. Their promise was silent yet overwhelming—power granted at the cost of self-mastery.
The first flame shimmered sky-blue. Cool air swept across his brow, and every stray thought slowed as though submerged in deep water. The serenity prickled his skin with the bright sting of possibility, insisting he weigh each future step with lucid calm.
The second blossomed leaf-green. Warmth pulsed into his limbs like sap rushing up a trunk in spring. Risk suddenly tasted sweet; the unknown felt less like a void and more like fertile soil eager for roots. Hadrian’s heart drummed, urging him to leap farther than caution allowed.
The third flared blood-crimson. Heat crowded the other colors, beating in a tempo that matched his pulse. A copper scent, sharp as fresh iron, filled his nose. The blaze vibrated with grievance—demanding payment, demanding justice. In its rhythm he heard the savage howls of the Simians below the fog, creatures ruled by rage alone. Fear tightened his jaw, and he forced himself to turn back toward the cooler flames, refusing to let that primal anger claim him—at least, not tonight.
A single drumbeat rolled across the plaza—whump…whump—and with each pulse, the bonfire light spilled into the gray mist, turning it into liquid stained glass. Crimson rage, verdant hope, deep-blue logic boiled together, trapped inside the fog as surely as breath inside a lung.
To the silent onlookers, the swirl was mesmerizing, a painter’s dream hung in midair. Hadrian, though, felt the Luminaries’ craft digging under his ribs. He knew the theory: Fogland masters could lace flame with emotion the way loom-workers wove color into silk. He had strung Cutra’s own white-flame lanterns along narrow bridges, tiny guardians of optimism, and he’d heard travelers describe the Bridgelands to the east where such lanterns ran for hundreds of miles, an unbroken constellation of hope.
He had thought that prepared him. But those lantern flames had been no more than dewdrops. The bonfires before him were floodwaters. Each drumstroke drove the torrent harder, dragging him first toward an urge to laugh, then to sob, then to scream—with all three impulses crashing together in his chest.
For endless heartbeats, the rite made a battlefield of his soul. Then, abruptly, the drum fell silent; colors drained from the fog as if someone had pulled a plug, and the emotional river subsided into three ordinary columns of orange flame that crackled and popped like campfires on a calm night.
The sudden stillness felt wrong. Without the flood of color, his chest echoed hollow—an empty drum waiting to be struck. What if this is the last time I see these flames? Experience this depth of emotion?
A familiar voice floated from the bridge to his right. Hadrian turned, eyes adjusting to the gloom until his mother stepped into a pocket of lantern light. One hand rested over her heart; the other gripped the rope rail so tightly it creaked in protest. Today would almost certainly be the last time he saw her. They both understood the odds: he lacked the formal schooling, the influential patrons, and the sprawling web of allies required to win admission to Aslavain. He might never climb far enough to kindle a Shrine.
Yet she believed—utterly. She believed he would pierce the veil, that his triumvirate would fold Cutra into the empire, that he might even spark the first wave of expansion since Hirion. The quiet conviction in her eyes set tears burning behind his own.
“Have you made your choice, Hadrian?” Her voice was steady, but her knuckles were white on the rail. “Will you carry our mist in your lungs, accept Cutra’s dream as your own, and swear to return only when you are strong enough to form a Shrine?”
Hadrian drew a breath that tasted of smoke and fading color. His practiced words rose clear and steady, filling the hush beneath the canopies.
“I swear—on the trees that cradle us, on the people who shaped me, on my very life—to strive without rest toward the dream we share. An empire cannot survive without expansion; all realms and rulers know this. Yet those now in power hoard the reins of destiny, shrinking from the cost of claiming our birthright.
“The first Luminaries crossed the canopies east of the Spine, defying Malan garrisons, Dion constructs, even the secretive Weavers in the north. The greatest of them, the [Champions] who formed Hirion—the City of War—forged not merely a Shrine but an Eternal City sung the world over. The time for a new surge has come—and Cutra shall stand at its leading edge.”
His voice rang against the taut ropes and high balconies, a declaration large enough to echo through fog and memory alike.
A baritone rolled out of the fog to Hadrian’s left. Lantern fire revealed his father’s broad silhouette, forge-scar glowing faintly across one cheek, smoke-gray eyes locked on his son. For an instant Hadrian’s vision blurred—this might truly be the last time they shared the same breath in Cutra’s mist.
“Your oath has been witnessed and accepted, my son. You have the blessing of everyone who has known you, and throughout your journey, know that you have our support, no matter how distant it may seem.”
The very instant his father’s final word faded, the Summer Solstice answered. Hadrian’s stomach lurched as though the earth itself had been yanked from beneath his knees as a golden light enveloped him.
Eyes squeezed shut against the dizzying tilt, Hadrian fixed two images in his mind: his mother’s unshaken smile, his father’s forge-smoke eyes. I will not fail you, even if it costs me every drop of strength and every breath of fog in my lungs.
A final breath of cool mist brushed his face—half ember-warm, half river-cold—and then the light swallowed him, bearing him away toward the unknown.
