PROLOG
There was an empire everyone knew, and everyone feared.
Its flags still flew over every city, its armies still marched with enough force to shake the ground beneath them. From the outside, nothing seemed capable of shaking the Crimson Empire.
But behind the marble palaces and gilded crowns lay fear. Beneath the empire’s magnificent exterior lay a people ruled by tyranny.
Children had learned to bow their heads before they learned to read. Villages were crushed under impossible taxes, and even the emperor’s closest allies weighed every word before they spoke it.
The empire did not stand because its people loved it.
It stood because they were too afraid to imagine its fall.
Until one ordinary morning, beneath the same rising sun, two boys were born into vastly different lives.
One in the heart of the empire. The other in an unremarkable village.
No one knew it then — but the fates of these two young men had been written as one. They shared a birth, and they would share a death. But most importantly, their meeting would change the fate of the empire forever.
