The snow in the North didn't fall; it hunted. It sought out the gaps in a man's furs, the cracks in his resolve, and the heat in his blood. For Caspian Thorne, the snow was the only kin that had never lied to him. It was cold, it was honest, and it was relentless.
He stood on the battlements of Frost-Gait, a fortress carved into the living obsidian of the Wall of Roots. Below him, the world was a jagged mosaic of white and grey. To the South lay the fertile Valleys of Aethelgard, currently basking in the final, dying rays of the Century-Summer. To the North lay the Dead-Barrens, where the sun had not touched the earth in a thousand years.
"Commander," a young scout called out, his voice trembling—not from the cold, but from sheer, primal fear. "Rider from the South. He's pushing that horse past its heart-rate."
Caspian squinted through the gale. His eyes, a piercing, pale violet—the mark of his bastardy and his mother's mysterious lineage—tracked the silhouette. The horse was lathered in frozen sweat, its breath coming in ragged plumes of silver. The rider was slumped over the pommel, clinging to the mane as if the horse were the only thing keeping his soul inside his body.
"Open the gates," Caspian commanded, his hand dropping to the pommel of *Shard*, his chipped obsidian longsword. "And fetch the Maester. If a messenger is coming to the Wall of Roots at this speed, either the world has ended, or someone is coming to kill us all."
The heavy iron-wood gates groaned as they were winched open. The rider collapsed the moment the horse stepped into the courtyard. Caspian was the first to reach him. He rolled the man over, and the breath caught in his throat. The messenger wore the gold and crimson tabard of House Valerius—the King's own guard—but the fabric was shredded. A deep, cauterized wound ran from his shoulder to his hip. It didn't bleed red; it bled a faint, glowing amber.
"The... the King," the messenger gasped, his fingers clawing at Caspian's leather jerkin. "The Sharding... it has begun."
"Speak sense, man," Caspian growled, leaning closer. "What happened in Oakhaven?"
"Betrayal," the man whispered. His eyes rolled back, revealing whites that were suddenly etched with golden veins. "Your father... the High Sentinel... he struck the blow. He broke the Sun-Glass. The light... it's gone, Caspian. It's all gone."
The messenger's body convulsed once and went still. His skin began to harden, turning into a translucent, crystalline substance that felt like cold glass to the touch. It was the Sun-Sickness—the result of being exposed to raw, unrefined magical energy.
"Commander! Look at the horse!" the scout yelled.
Caspian turned. The horse had collapsed too, but it wasn't the animal that caught his attention. Tucked into a hidden compartment in the saddle was a small, pulsing amber vial. It hummed with a low frequency that vibrated in Caspian's teeth. It was a fragment of the Pure Light—the fuel that kept the Great Cities warm and the crops growing. It was the only thing standing between Aethelgard and a decade of frozen starvation.
And if this messenger was right, Caspian's father, Malachai Thorne, had just murdered the King to get it.
"Sir, what do we do with the body?" the scout asked, his face pale.
Caspian looked at the crystal corpse of the messenger. If word got out that a Thorne had killed the King, the other Great Houses would descend on the North like wolves on a wounded elk. House Valerius would want blood. House Nyros would want the Light. And the Thorne family—his legitimate half-brothers and his father's legal heirs—would likely offer Caspian's head on a platter just to prove their loyalty to the new regime.
"Burn him," Caspian said, his voice flat. "And the horse. If anyone asks, the rider was a bandit. And find Maester Kael. Tell him the Long Night isn't coming in a year. It started this morning."
Caspian grabbed the amber vial. It felt unnaturally warm against his palm. As his fingers closed around it, a flicker of a vision flashed before his eyes: a throne made of ice, a crown of thorns, and a sky so black the stars screamed. He pulled his hand away, his heart hammering against his ribs.
He retreated to his solar, a spartan room filled with maps of the North and half-finished reports on grain supplies. He threw the heavy bolt on the door and sat at his desk, staring at the vial.
The political landscape of Aethelgard was a delicate web of debts and marriages. For a hundred years, the Century-Summer had allowed the Houses to grow fat and complacent. But the Sun-Glass was a finite resource. It was mined from the ground, the crystallized remains of ancient stars. Without it, the "Sun-Shields" that protected the cities from the Northern frost would fail.
If his father had truly broken the Great Sun-Glass in the capital, the shields were already flickering. The panic would start in the South and move upward. Within weeks, the Valleys would be a slaughterhouse of people fighting for the last scraps of heat.
A sharp knock at the door startled him.
"Caspian, it's Kael. Open up."
Caspian let the old man in. Maester Kael was nearly eighty, his robes stained with ink and herbal poultices. He took one look at the vial on the desk and sank into a chair, his face turning a ghostly shade of grey.
"It's real, then," Kael whispered. "The prophecy of the Dimming. I thought I would be dead before the light failed."
"My father is being blamed," Caspian said, pacing the small room. "The messenger died saying Malachai killed the King. But why would he send this vial here? To me? The bastard son he hasn't spoken to in five years?"
Kael leaned forward, his eyes sharp despite his age. "Because you are the only Thorne who isn't being watched by the Royal Spies, boy. Your brothers are in the capital, surrounded by Valerius 'guests.' Your father knew that if the Light was to survive, it had to go to the one place nobody cares about. The edge of the world."
"They will care now," Caspian countered. "When the sun doesn't rise over Oakhaven tomorrow, they'll look for the missing piece. They'll follow the messenger's trail. They'll come to Frost-Gait."
"Then you cannot stay here," Kael said, grabbing Caspian's arm with surprising strength. "You must go North. Into the Barrens."
"Into the Dead-Barrens? That's suicide. Nothing lives there but the Echoes."
"The Echoes are the least of your worries, Caspian. If House Valerius finds you with that vial, they won't just kill you. They will use your blood to craft a new Glass—a Blood-Glass. It's an old, dark alchemy. It would keep the lights on, but it would turn the Empire into a graveyard to fuel it."
Caspian looked out the narrow window. The wind was howling louder now, a mournful sound that seemed to carry the screams of the dying King. He thought of his childhood—the cold glares from his father's wife, the mocking laughter of his half-brothers, and the quiet, stoic lessons from his father on the battlements. *A Thorne is the root that holds the earth,* Malachai had told him. *Even when the tree is burning, the root must hold.*
He realized then that his father hadn't sent him a gift. He had sent him a burden that would likely end his life.
"How long do I have?" Caspian asked.
"The Gold-Guards have the fastest griffins in the realm. If they left Oakhaven at noon, they will be at the gates of Frost-Gait by dawn," Kael replied.
Caspian nodded. He began throwing essentials into a leather pack: dried meat, a bedroll, and a heavy cloak of shadow-fox fur. He strapped *Shard* to his hip. The sword was old, made of volcanic glass that was said to be able to cut through the spirits of the Dead-Barrens. He had always thought those stories were myths meant to scare squires. Now, he wasn't so sure.
"What will you tell them when they arrive?" Caspian asked the Maester.
"I am an old man, Caspian. I've lived through a hundred years of light. A little darkness doesn't frighten me," Kael smiled sadly. "I'll tell them you died in the blizzard. I'll give them a charred body from the morgue. It won't buy much time, but it's all I have to give."
Caspian reached for the vial. As his fingers touched it this time, he felt a strange, cold acceptance. The "Throne of the Sunless" was a title no man wanted, yet the game had begun. The pieces were moving across the map of Aethelgard—armies were mobilizing, assassins were sharpening their blades, and the very sky was beginning to bruise into a permanent purple twilight.
He walked to the hidden postern gate at the rear of the fortress, the one that led directly into the jagged teeth of the mountains. He looked back at the flickering torches of Frost-Gait, the only home he had ever known.
"The North remembers the light," he whispered to the wind. "But the darkness is mine."
He stepped out into the storm, and the shadows of the Dead-Barrens rose up to meet him.
Behind him, in the distant South, the Great Bell of Oakhaven began to toll. It was a sound that carried for miles, vibrating through the Sun-Glass foundations of every city in the realm. It was the "Death-Knell," the signal that a monarch had fallen.
But as Caspian disappeared into the white-out, he knew the bell wasn't just ringing for a King. It was ringing for an era. The Century-Summer was dead. The War of the Sunless had begun.
Five hundred leagues away, Princess Elara Valerius stood on the balcony of the Royal Palace, watching the sun dip below the horizon. It didn't look like a normal sunset. The colors were sickly, orange bleeding into a bruised, necrotic black.
She turned to the man standing in the shadows behind her—a man whose face was hidden by a mask of polished silver.
"My father is dead," she said, her voice devoid of emotion. "The Bastard has the Light. Tell the Lords of the Valleys that the North has rebelled. Tell them that for every day the Sun-Glass is missing, I will execute a Thorne."
The man in the silver mask bowed. "And the High Sentinel, your Highness? Your father's murderer?"
Elara looked back at the blackening sky. "Keep him in the Iron-Well. I want him to watch the world freeze from the bottom of a hole. I want him to know that his 'Bastard' failed."
The first snow of the Great Winter began to fall on the capital, and for the first time in a thousand years, the streets of Oakhaven went dark.