Prologue
Drakkoria ruled the world once.
Unlike the other kingdoms of Erythralis, who had powerful kings with strong armies, it ruled through fire.
At the southernmost edge of the known world, past waters that swallowed most ships whole, the Drakkorians had made their home on the continent Phyrros. They were an ancient clan of shapeshifters. Scale replacing skin. Wings unfolding where arms had been. Fire where there was only breath. They called it the Shifting, and they did it as easily as blinking.
Other kingdoms paid tribute and bent the knee. No king was foolish enough to refuse or disrespect them. Armies meant nothing against a kingdom that could turn a city to cinders before the first sword was drawn.
Drakkoria collected its tributes and left the rest of the world alone. It had no interest in other territories. What they had was enough.
Then came the massacre.
The two kingdoms, Paegonia and Milentha, arrived as guests and left as butchers.
They had studied the Shifting in secret and learned its weaknesses: blades forged not from steel but from something older and crueler, something that found the seams between scale and flesh. They struck on the night of the Ember Star, when the wine was flowing and the fires were lit in celebration of the founding of Drakkoria. The sky burned red for three days and the streets ran so thick with blood that it went into the river, and the river carried it out to sea. Drakkoria’s king was brutally murdered on his throne while his queen died trying to protect their children.
But they didn’t slaughter everyone. Because a slaughtered clan could become a martyred one. So instead, they made them slaves. Wings were severed at the joint mid-transformation so that they would never be able to shift again. What remained of Drakkoria was bought and sold across the kingdoms of Erythralis by the very rulers who had once bent the knee to them.
But there were a few lucky ones who were able to escape Phyrros during the cleansing.
They went to places no one would follow. Frozen wastes. Scorching deserts. Forgotten Islands. Caverns that swallowed light whole. They raised their children in silence, teaching them that the fire inside them was a secret no one should ever find out, and prayed that the world would forget them entirely.
And for a while, the world did forget.
It was a manuscript that undid the forgetting. Scholars in Paegonia and Milentha, sifting through old collections, kept arriving at the same rumour: a temple, buried somewhere beneath the ruins of Drakkoria, and inside it an artefact capable of granting eternal life and dominion over every kingdom in Erythralis. Two kings who had once shared toast over Drakkorian blood found themselves, within the year, at each other’s throats. The war between them has not stopped since and neither has reached the temple.
In the royal archives of Aeretreia, an island off the coast of Aelaephos, is a single book holding the names of every kingdom and queen since the first age of humanity.
Drakkoria’s final page lists four names: a king, a queen, a crown prince, and a princess with her child.
But the name of the child has been torn from the page.
And somewhere in Erythralis, that heir may still be alive.
