In the heart of Vireloch, where once there was only frost and fear, a new fortress was rising—not of stone, but of will.
Zareena stood before a gathering of magic-bearers, swordsmen, scholars, and misfits. Those too strange for the capital, too dangerous for the Church, or too stubborn to kneel.
Behind her, on a carved obsidian platform, stood Seredin—silent sentinel. Rashid stood at her right. And above them all, the crest of a grey spiral surrounded by a silver ring: the sigil of the Grey Circle.
"You are not here to swear loyalty to a banner," Zareena said, voice carrying across the half-built forum. "You are here because you understand: what's coming is not just politics. Not just war. This is a reckoning. And I intend to meet it standing."
Silence.
Then a murmur. Then cheers.
Training began that same week. Sword and spell. Mind and memory. Zareena herself sparred with the recruits. Rashid tested magical control. Seredin taught ancient magical theory that no one had read in centuries.
The Circle's first tests were brutal—tracking illusions through the mist, resisting memory echoes, decoding runes hidden in physical combat. Some failed. Some were broken. Some... vanished into the forest, never seen again.
But those who remained were tempered.
By the end of the month, the Circle had its first true cadre: thirteen elite defenders of Vireloch.
Meanwhile, far from the frost…
In the Capital: The Storm Without a Throne
The king lay dying. Or so the whispers went.
Behind silk curtains and golden walls, the High Court simmered. Nobles circled like vultures. The Church sent "advisors" into the palace. And worst of all—no heir had been named.
The Crown Prince remained the obvious choice. But many lords muttered that his obsession with the "ice-witch of Vireloch" had made him erratic. Distracted. Dangerous.
Some now whispered of a younger cousin, closer to the Church, born of a noblewoman tied to House Vassren.
Others feared what would happen if a queen from the north—Zareena—married into the line.
A faction of nobles—spearheaded by House Ramires and its scheming matriarch—declared the northern territories "out of control." They demanded that Zareena be recalled, questioned, possibly even stripped of her title.
But Malik Serinov, her father, made his stance clear:
"My daughter defends the frontier from what your pampered guards have never seen. She bleeds for the realm while you gamble for chairs. If the crown will not protect her, the north will."
Back in Vireloch, Zareena read the latest dispatch, eyes narrowing.
The capital was fracturing. War loomed—not by swords or armies, but succession. And in the shadows beyond her forest walls… darker things still moved.
But she did not flinch.
She walked down the stone steps of the Circle's hall. She nodded to the guards, to the market-goers, to the children playing near rebuilt homes.
And to Nasir, she said simply:
"Start sealing the roads. I want no one entering this city without my word. We are no longer a town.
We are a stronghold."