Storm clouds strangled the moon the night House Midgar ended.
In the capital's upper district, the royal banners hung heavy in the wind, trembling as though they sensed what was coming. Behind the palace walls, torches hissed and shadows danced the king's secret squad moved like silent vultures, their blades drinking the rain before the blood.
Far from the marble estates, down in the slums where drunken laughter tried to drown misery, a woman hurried through the back door of a worn-down pub. Once, she had been a duchess. Once, she'd walked halls of polished stone, her name spoken with reverence. Now she was only a rumor a forgotten face serving ale to men who never knew they bowed to her husband's murderer.
But tonight her past had finally found her.
A messenger had arrived barely an hour earlier, pale and trembling as he delivered the warning: Someone leaked her location. The king's hounds were coming.
She didn't panic. She'd always known this day would come.
In her tiny room above the pub, she knelt before her sleeping son. 3 years old. Small. Fragile. Completely unaware of the bloodline burning inside him the blood of the rightful heirs.
Her fingers shook as she pressed the memory seal to his forehead. A soft glow. A tiny breath. His past gone. Locked away. Only one trigger remained: the ruins of his father's manor. The place where the truth slept beneath ashes.
She kissed his forehead, whispering everything she could not say aloud. Then she fastened her pendant around his neck the last symbol of their house.
By the time her mercenary friend arrived to smuggle the boy away, her eyes were already dry. A mother didn't have the luxury of tears tonight.
The boy was taken under the cloak of darkness, heading toward the distant, dying lands of Baron Aldric a man who owed her late husband his life during the Dark Forest Siege.
She stayed behind.
When the king's secret squad kicked open the door, they found her sitting calmly in the center of the room, waiting. She didn't plead. Didn't scream. She simply stared at them with the quiet pride of a woman who'd saved her child.
Hours later, the king toyed with her severed head like it was a trophy. His laughter echoed through the throne room, drowning beneath the thunder outside.
And far from the capital, in a cold wagon rattling toward a struggling border county, a nameless boy slept unaware that the world had just branded him a ghost. A remnant. A vestige of a line that should have ruled.