Ash fell on the torn earth in large, greasy flakes like dirty black snow, indifferently covering the faces of the dead and the still living. It was the year one thousand and ninety since the founding of the Avalon Empire, and Ancient Trinity had turned into the stinking, gaping maw of hell. Once, capital bards who had never left the cozy taverns of Avalon composed ballads about this place as a prosperous crossroads of worlds. Trinity stood at the very foothills of the great mountains of the Kingdom of Asgard, serving as the golden artery of the continent. For decades, heavy, iron-bound dwarven wagons from Nidavellir had traveled along its wide tracts. The air here always smelled of coal dust, strong ale, and clinking coin, and on the counters, one could even see the dull glimmer of blades forged from heavenly metal — Nur-Tyomor, also known as Mithril. Old men whispered that if you wandered far to the west along forgotten goat trails, you could stumble upon the invisible borders of Alfheim. But those trails had long been overgrown with thorny bushes and the bones of fools; Trinity lived by pragmatism and trade.
But today, the trade was over. The sky above the northern borders of Asgard had lost its cold, leaden color. It was obscured by a thick, suffocating shroud of smoke from burning forests and collapsed barns. Trampled by thousands of heavy boots and clawed paws, the ground was no longer soil. It had turned into a crimson, squelching slush. It was so deeply soaked with human and non-human blood, bile, and spilled entrails that every step was accompanied by a sickening wet squelch.
The Great Breakthrough of the non-humans spared no one. They came from the wild north, from the impenetrable wastelands beyond the mountains — the orcs. But these were not the pot-bellied, green-skinned creatures from children's fairy tales that effeminate lords in the capital used to scare each other. These were the true monsters of the North. Gray bastards whose bumpy skin, the color of wet granite and caked ash, made them look like living pieces of rock. Their hypertrophied muscles rolled under their thick hide, and crooked, yellow fangs protruded from their lower jaws. They knew neither formation nor military etiquette. They pushed onto the spears with a fanatical, primal rage, oblivious to their wounds. And behind them, shaking the earth, strode giant mountain trolls, breaking through the defensive lines of Asgard's hirdmen and crushing entire squads with a single swing of their primitive, uprooted tree-clubs.
The stern northern warriors, clad in chainmail, held the famous shield wall with their last ounces of strength. But there were no shining knightly orders of the Avalon Empire here. There was no steel-clad heavy cavalry of Eisenwald. The Crown did not care what was happening at the edge of the world as long as taxes steadily flowed into the treasury of Avalon. The northerners bled alone. The front line broke, bent, and bled. The air trembled with the frantic, gurgling screams of dying men, the ringing of breaking steel, and the guttural, visceral roar of the gray monsters. This cacophony of death tore at the eardrums and shattered the sanity of the sweaty, filth-smeared soldiers.
And yet, the Center was invisibly present here, albeit as a cruel mockery of fate. Cast right into the maw of the meat grinder were those who shouldn't have been here at all — newly minted cadets from the elite capital Academy of Aetheria. The arrogant heirs of the Great Houses had arrived at the border for a combat internship, expecting to organize an easy horseback hunt for scattered packs of goblins. But they fell right into the heart of the Great Breakthrough. Their romantic illusions about war, inspired by courtly tournaments in Valois, shattered in the very first seconds of the slaughter when they saw a stern northern decurion cleaved from collarbone to groin by a rusty cleaver. The polished armor of the cadets became covered in foreign blood, and their young, pale faces contorted with animal terror.
But all this was over there, in the center of the massacre, where a squad of regimental mages, coughing up blood from exhaustion, frantically tried to maintain shimmering protective barriers. And here, on the far left flank, on the outskirts of a burning nameless village, a lone warrior fought desperately. Cut off from the main forces. Abandoned. His two-handed sword, chipped and dulled against gray orc flesh, which just this morning felt like an extension of his arm, now weighed like a millstone. The young man's breathing broke into a whistling, bloody wheeze, escaping his chest along with small clouds of steam. He was exhausted beyond the limits of human capabilities. His legs, shod in heavy, completely soaked boots, gave way, and he was ready to collapse dead right into this crimson mud.
But he kept standing. He stayed on his feet only through blind, primal northern stubbornness and the last, pitiful drops of his depleted Aura. The energy that boiled in his veins was called the "Blood of the Gods" here in stern Asgard. Legends said it granted the fury of a berserker, but the local jarls and konungs jealously guarded their secrets behind the high stone walls of their halls, passing breathing techniques only to their children. Kain was not born in silks. Being a commoner, a peasant who imagined himself as something more, he opened his internal channels barbarically, intuitively, breaking himself through the unbearable agony of night training in the forest. The channels through which the pitiful remnants of energy now flowed had dried up and become covered with microscopic cracks. Every call upon the "Aura" echoed inside with such pain as if broken glass mixed with boiling acid had been let into his veins.
A huge gray orc, covered in old whitish scars, pressed upon him. The monster swung a crude, heavy cleaver, aiming straight for his unprotected neck. Kain, feeling his overstrained ligaments tearing, dodged the blow, his boot sliding on the slippery mixture of mud and guts. He put everything he had left into his lunge. With a foul, wet crunch, the blade of his sword pierced the coarse leather armor and went deep into the non-human's thick neck, severing the artery with a snap. Hot, thick black blood shot out under pressure, covering the young man's face and breastplate in a sticky, musk-reeking layer. The orc gurgled, dropped his weapon, and heavily, like a chopped centuries-old oak, crashed into the slush. Kain staggered. The world before his eyes spun in a nauseating carousel, the outlines of the burning houses blurred. He slumped heavily, stepping back, and leaned his back against the trunk of a charred tree to catch his breath, if only for a moment. The ash-soaked air burned his lungs like fire.
But his rest was an illusion. Through the ringing in his ears and the distant cries of the dying, he heard a sound that slashed at his bare nerves more painfully than any orc blade. He heard laughter. The familiar, refined, mocking laughter of those he had the naive folly to call his Academy comrades. Those who were supposed to cover his flank, and from whom he had expected reinforcements until the very end. Kain, with tremendous effort, slightly opened his eyelids, which were sticking together from sweat and blood. Before him stood they — four noble sons of the Great Houses. The heirs of those who had ruled this world for centuries. Their elegant, custom-forged knightly plate armor miraculously remained almost clean. They hadn't waded into the worst of the mud, preferring to sit out behind the backs of the local "cannon fodder," and now, evidently, they were fighting their way to retreat.
"Just look, this peasant survived," the group's leader drawled slowly, with undisguised disgust. It was a tall, handsome blond man, on whose blue enameled breastplate proudly shone the Golden Falcon — the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Valois. His aristocratic eyes slid over the sitting guy's hacked armor as if it were a pile of excrement. "It seems he really believed he became a knight of the Crown. Wow, he managed to squeeze a spark of aura out of himself. What a ridiculous parody of nobility.".
The aristocrat curled his thin lips in disgust. For him, born in the luxury of the castles of Aquitaine, the mere fact that a lowborn northern peasant could ignite an aura within himself and break into Aetheria was a personal insult. It was a desecration of their divine right to rule. He shifted his cold gaze to his companion. The latter was clad in a rich mantle embroidered with silver threads. "Rufus, tie this carrion to the tree," the blond tossed carelessly, as if giving an order to a stable boy. "Let's leave a little gift for the savages. Let them be delayed while they devour him.". Rufus, an arrogant youth with empty eyes, nodded silently. He lazily raised an open palm. The air around his ring-adorned fingers instantly trembled. Intricate, white-hot crimson runes flared up in the space with a quiet, ominous crackle. At that same moment, a thick, pulsating magical rope materialized around the body of the exhausted Kain. It didn't just wrap around him — like a living, burning python, it tightly constricted his chest, arms, and thighs, digging straight into his open wounds. The magic mercilessly burned his skin.
The guy twitched instinctively, growling hollowly through teeth clenched to the point of cracking enamel. His muscles bulged, desperately trying to break the bonds. But his internal channels were absolutely empty, burned to the ground by the battle. He had nothing with which to answer a trained mage. The magic squeezed him like a ruthless steel trap, squeezing the last remnants of oxygen from his lungs. One of the lackeys stepped forward and with mocking ease kicked the tied man's weakened arm with his spurred boot. Kain's fingers involuntarily unclenched. His two-handed sword — the only valuable thing the guy had obtained through blood and sweat — fell into the mud with a dreary squelch. The aristocrat from Valois disgustedly picked up the weapon by the crossguard with two fingers, smirked, and tossed it over his shoulder like an amusing trophy. They turned around and began to unhurriedly walk away.
Suddenly, the leader with the Falcon crest stopped. He slowly turned back and looked straight into the tied warrior's hate-filled eyes. "When these gray degenerates come here and start tearing your flesh from your bones alive," the lord said, stamping out every syllable, "then your dirty soul will finally understand an immutable truth. A commoner shouldn't have intruded into the Academy and tried to become something more than what was predestined for him by the gods. Remember this: you were born in the mud... and in the mud you will die.". Spitting bloody saliva, the aristocrat turned around. Soon their silhouettes completely dissolved into the thick clouds of acrid black smoke.
Despair, thick and sticky as tar, began to inexorably flood Kain from the inside. For years, he had tortured his body for days on end in the depths of the forest, breaking bones, in order to escape the poverty of his village. And now it was all over. Life was ending here because of the wounded ego of a bunch of overdressed capital brats.
After some time, a new sound pierced the pre-death silence in his head. The ground beneath his feet trembled slightly, but in an inevitable rhythm. Boom... Boom... Boom.... It was a northern mountain troll. The colossus had broken through the main defense line of Asgard and was now charging straight through, sweeping aside the skeletons of burned houses, running directly toward the tied guy. Kain, with tremendous effort, lifted his heavy head. Through the dissipating gray smoke, a mountain of bumpy, stony flesh was hurtling toward him. The troll was clad in pieces of thick, rusty steel. In its massive hand, a giant cleaver was raised high, from which shreds of entrails hung thickly. Time slowed its pace. The creature came so close that the guy distinctly felt the monster's fetid breath. Small, pig-like eyes, bloodshot with primal rage, focused on the victim.
In the blink of an eye, fragments of his harsh life began to rapidly flash before his mind's eye. The face of his mother, Martha, her hands forever roughened by work in the frozen field. The frightened eyes of his little sister, Mia, on that autumn day when he promised her he would return as a true knight of the Empire. And those very first training sessions with a heavy crowbar under the cover of night, until his bloody blisters burst. His name was Kain Alseif. He hailed from the forgotten-by-all village of Oxen. And his story was supposed to end ingloriously right here, in a puddle of his own blood and filth.
The troll let out a deafening, triumphant roar and, with incredible speed, brought the monstrous weapon down straight onto Kain's head. The rusty blade cleaved the air with a funeral whistle. But in that very elusive moment when inevitable death was supposed to split his skull in half, the space above the troll's ugly head distorted unnaturally and terrifyingly. The air compressed with such pressure that it popped his ears, and suddenly a blinding, furious flash of pure, primordial light flared up. It had nothing to do with that refined magic of the aristocrats. It was power of a completely different, frightening order. Such a deafening explosion rang out that the tormented earth literally reared up. A monstrous shockwave struck Kain's chest with the force of a blacksmith's hammer, instantly knocking the oxygen out of his lungs. The crimson magical runes on his body burst with a pitiful crackle. The light burned his retinas. Kain's vision instantly went dark. The last thing his fading mind perceived was the disgusting, wet sound of the multi-ton flesh of the troll being torn to pieces, its blood vaporized even before it touched the ground.
And then the ruined world around the young man shuddered and plunged into an absolutely profound, saving darkness.