The Truth Beneath the Ashes

Aldric was only twenty-nine when he became the youngest knight-commander in the history of the Calvareth Empire. The victories he won on the battlefield had made him a living legend in the eyes of the people. As the emperor's most trusted soldier, he guarded the palace gates and answered for the safety of the royal family. But on the night before the Night of Ash, the emperor summoned Aldric in secret and gave him a task no one else knew of: to smuggle Princess Aurelle out of the capital. Aldric did not dare ask why the emperor gave such an order. He heard only one thing: “If you are still here by morning, you will become the enemy of us all.”

Aldric succeeded in saving the princess, but when the palace burned, every proof pointed to his treachery. He was blamed for the emperor's disappearance, stripped of his ranks, and hunted by the very soldiers he had once protected. The one who saved him was his closest friend, Commander Darion, head of the royal guard. To help Aldric escape, Darion had to hand his own family over to the palace executioners. When Aldric learned of his friend's sacrifice, he swore vengeance, yet he did not know against whom to turn it. For his only clue was a black ring bearing the emperor's seal, and upon it the crest of Aldric's own family.

Years later, Aldric stepped once more before those who sought to unite the shattered kingdoms. His aim was not to seize the throne but to find the emperor's true killer. Yet when he learned that Princess Aurelle was no longer among the living, and that the one who bore her identity was someone else, his every belief was shaken. Worse still, the letter Darion left behind before his death revealed that Aldric's family had been among those who guarded the First Throne before the Empire was ever founded. Aldric's fate was no longer a commander's vengeance alone: he would either seal the evil sleeping beneath the throne forever, or set the whole world aflame to protect a secret that ran in his own blood.

Seraphine was found as a child on the steps of an abandoned temple. When the priests who raised her saw that her eyes shone like gold even in the dark, they believed it to be a holy sign. As she grew, she developed a gift that ordinary mages could not: she could see the invisible threads of light that bind people's memories, oaths, and fates together. By weaving these threads she could heal wounds, expose lies, and bring forgotten memories back. But every touch had its price. When she healed another's pain, a piece of that pain settled in her own soul.

On the Night of Ash, Seraphine was called to quench the black flames rising above the imperial palace. She saw that they were fed not by ordinary sorcery but by the life force of thousands. When she used her light to stop them, she found something terrible: a memory torn from the emperor's mind had been sealed within her own soul. In that memory the emperor was speaking with a woman in a black cloak. The woman's face could not be seen, but her voice was the voice of the priest who had found Seraphine years before. The priest was dead; more truly, Seraphine had witnessed his death herself. This impossibility made her wonder whether her whole life might be a lie woven by others.

In her search for the truth, Seraphine met Aldric and saw the emperor's last command in his mind. But the memory did not show what the emperor truly said; it showed only the part Aldric had been allowed to remember. As the two followed the trail of lost memories, Seraphine learned that the Lightweavers had been created not to guard the fate of mankind, but to hide the changes the First Throne had made in the past. Her greatest secret was her own existence: Seraphine was the reborn soul of a queen who had once fought the First Throne and been erased from history. To bring the throne's truth to light she would have to set every memory free; but if she did, the darkest secrets of everyone who loved her would be laid bare as well.

Kaelen was born in the Volkar mountains of the north. His people saw fire not merely as a weapon but as a sacred force that cleansed the sins of the past. His father, chief mage of the mountain clans, had raised him to take his place one day. But Kaelen's fire was unlike the others': its flames did not only burn, they erased the traces that the burned things left behind. The day he lost himself to rage and set his own village aflame, the fire destroyed not only the houses but every memory of the people who lived there. Unable to recall even his own mother's face, Kaelen left the mountains to learn to master his power.

Years later he joined the wars of the Empire and won renown by holding back an enemy army alone during a siege. After this feat he was summoned to the palace. The emperor ordered him to destroy an ancient power imprisoned beneath the First Throne. Believing he was carrying out the order, Kaelen set the seal chamber ablaze; but when the seal broke, what he found inside was not a monster but a man in chains. The man was Kaelen's father. Said to have died twenty years before, he had been sealed away alive for guarding the First Throne's secrets. As Kaelen tried to free him, his father spoke with his last breath: “I did not bear you, my son. I took you out of the fire.” Then he crumbled to ash and scattered.

Those words dragged Kaelen into the darkness of vengeance. He burned every archive of the Empire, hunted the nobles who had used him, and at last forged a fragile alliance with Nyx's dark cult. Nyx promised to explain his father's death; in return she asked Kaelen to destroy the First Throne utterly. But when Kaelen showed Seraphine the last memory his father had left him, the truth came to light: Kaelen descended from the blood of one of the throne's first guardians, and his fire was the only power that could break the throne's seals. To save the world, he had to burn the throne. Yet the throne's destruction would set every sealed soul free, and could cost millions of lives.

Vex's true name lay as far away as a childhood memory no one else knew. At only eight years old, Vex's family was killed in a secret massacre arranged by the nobles of the capital. The killers who entered their home that night wore masks; yet as Vex fled, one image was never forgotten: the silver crest worn at one killer's wrist. Vex grew up on the streets, learning to steal and to kill unseen. In time Vex became the most gifted member of the assassins' order known as the Night Blades. The order gave Vex a new name, a new life, and a single purpose: to eliminate dangerous people in order to protect the Empire's secrets.

The most important task Vex was ever given was to kill a scribe who worked in the palace before the Night of Ash. The scribe had written the true history of the First Throne and was preparing to smuggle the documents out of the city. When Vex found him, the man was waiting to be killed. Instead of fleeing, the scribe handed Vex a ledger. In it were the names of Vex's family and the signature of the one who had ordered their deaths: Lord Corvane, founder of the Night Blades. Vex's whole life had been a trap designed to prevent Vex from ever avenging the family. The order had made Vex one of the killers of that very family, and had driven Vex to hunt down its own victims.

When Vex slipped into the palace to kill Corvane, Vex learned that he had died years before. The order was now led by someone else, and that someone was Liora, Vex's childhood friend, as dear as a sister. Liora claimed that the massacre had in truth been carried out on the emperor's orders, and that Corvane had merely been made a scapegoat. Not knowing whom to believe, Vex left the order and joined Aldric's company. But the real secret lay beneath the death order on Vex's own family: Vex's father had been the last cartographer to know the location of the First Throne, and Vex's mother was heir to the hidden dynasty that guarded it. Vex's vengeance would, in the end, depend on bringing to light the secret Vex's own family had hidden for centuries.

Thrag was born in the Blackwood, a place not even shown on the maps of men. Since childhood he was said to speak with beasts and feel their fears and pains. His tribe held this gift sacred, while the neighboring kingdoms saw in him a threat. When an imperial army marched into the Blackwood, Thrag's tribe was slaughtered, the forest was burned, and the beasts were chained and carried off to serve in wars. Thrag escaped, gravely wounded. For years he lived alone in the forest and raised an army of wild creatures against the men who had attacked him. In his eyes, humankind had become nothing but a breed that plundered nature and drowned its own fears in the blood of others.

Thrag's name soon spread through the kingdoms. Of the armies sent to take a single fortress, not one soldier was left to return. But in one of Thrag's assaults he noticed chained children among the soldiers. To save them, he ordered his creatures to fall back. One of the children was Tamsin, daughter of the general who had burned the Blackwood years before. Tamsin told him that her father's order had in truth come from the imperial palace, and that she had found a document saying the creatures of the Blackwood were guardians of the First Throne. Thrag understood that the vengeance to which he had given his life was the result not of one general alone, but of a game of thrones that had gone on for centuries.

His decision to protect Tamsin set Thrag against his own army. Ulgor, his most loyal companion, a great wolf, was mortally wounded in an ambush and threw himself before enemy spears to save Thrag. Ulgor's death seemed to destroy the last pity Thrag held for humankind. But when he learned that the creatures would vanish from the world if the First Throne were destroyed, he was forced to choose: to avenge his own kind, or to save every living thing of the world he hated? Thrag joined Aldric's alliance, but on one condition: when the war was over, no king would ever hold absolute dominion over any forest.

Morwen was bound up with death from the day she was born. Her father was a gravedigger, her mother a physician at the royal court. When she said she heard her little brother's voice at night, long after his early death, no one believed her. But at sixteen she discovered that she could summon the souls of the dead. At first she used the gift to speak one last time with those she had lost; then she tried to raise the victims of plague and war. But a piece of every soul she called back remained tied to the world, and the boundary between the living and the dead grew thinner. When the court learned of her gift, they took Morwen into secret service and used her to learn the emperor's darkest secrets.

During the Night of Ash, Morwen was summoned to the crypt beneath the palace to find the emperor's body. But there she saw not a single corpse; she saw the bodies of hundreds of emperors. Each had lived in a different age, and each bore the same face. When she called their souls, every one spoke the same sentence: “The throne did not kill us; we died to keep the throne alive.” Morwen learned that the imperial dynasty had, generation after generation, brought the same person back into the world, and that each new ruler fed on the memories of the one before. She understood that the emperor who vanished that night had not died; he had only left his body. But Morwen's own power was bound to this secret: the reason she could speak with spirits was that her own heart had been brought back when it died in her childhood.

When Morwen realized that the souls she had raised in the past had not been helping her but guiding her, there was no turning back. Her mother's spirit above all was trying to lead her to the First Throne. In the early days of the Empire, her mother had given up her own soul to protect the throne, and had bound her daughter to it with a supernatural tie. Morwen faced two choices: to raise all the dead one last time and lay the throne's secrets bare, or to bury the truth forever and keep the dead at peace. But if the throne were destroyed, every soul that lived within Morwen would be set free. Her brother was among them; to lose him a second time would be the heaviest sacrifice she had ever made.

Grimhold's true name was forgotten behind his iron mask. He had once been one of the palace's greatest smiths, forging armor for the royal guard. One day, on his master's orders, he was taken down into a secret chamber deep underground. There he saw a black ore that was no ordinary metal, one that echoed with human voices. His master told him that the ore had been quarried from the remnants of the First Throne, and that weapons made from it would grant their bearers immortality. Grimhold realized far too late that this was a lie. When the first armor forged from the ore was set upon his own body, the metal fused to his skin and made him a living fortress. He no longer tired, aged, or felt pain; yet the armor could never be taken off.

After the Night of Ash, Grimhold was given the duty of guarding the door beneath the throne. For a hundred years he stopped everyone who passed; kings, mages, and assassins fell beneath his blade. In time he forgot the names of men, but never once questioned what it was he guarded. One day an old woman came to the door and told him that a man still lived inside his iron armor. She was the daughter of Grimhold's old master, and she carried the ledger her father had written before his death. It said that Grimhold's armor was in truth the lock of the door, and that if the door were opened, his body would be torn apart. Worse still, behind the door Grimhold guarded there was no monster, but the throne's true heir, imprisoned.

When Aldric's company reached the door, Grimhold stood for the first time between fulfilling his duty and doing what was right. Seraphine examined the threads of light in his armor and found that Grimhold's heart still beat. To free him meant opening the door and waking the heir who had been hidden for centuries. At last Grimhold laid his sword upon the ground. When he opened the door, his armor began to crack, but he did not die as he had expected. The heir who stepped out said to him, “You never guarded me, Grimhold. You guarded me from my own people.” These words made him question his entire life. Now his final duty was not to close the throne's door once more, but to bring an end to the order that had made him.

Sylvara was one of the last children of the Wild Folk, who existed before the borders of the old kingdoms were drawn. Her people made pacts with the spirits of trees, rivers, and beasts, and kept the balance of nature. But as the Empire grew, the forests were felled, the sacred springs were drained, and the ancient pacts were forgotten. Sylvara's mother tried to strike a bargain with the Empire to protect her people, but the palace envoys declared her a traitor. One night their villages were burned, and her mother was executed before Sylvara's eyes. For years Sylvara remembered her mother's last words: “Nature does not take revenge, my daughter. It only collects its debts.”

When Sylvara grew up, she gathered a small company of hunters, soldiers, and fugitive mages from the kingdoms. Hidden deep in the forest, they raided the caravans that carried the Empire's resources, freed captives, and defended the sacred places. Sylvara's greatest enemy was General Hargrim, who had killed her mother. When she finally had the chance to kill him, she saw that Hargrim was old and ill, abandoned even by his own soldiers. The general told Sylvara that her mother had not truly been executed; she had given herself up to sever the bond the First Throne had forged with the forest. That sacrifice had been made to pass all the power of nature into a single child. Sylvara understood that her own powers had begun with her mother's death.

Sylvara's fate changed when her path crossed Thrag's. At first the two saw each other as threats; Thrag counted all of humankind his enemy, while Sylvara still believed change was possible. In time a deep friendship grew between them. When Sylvara discovered that the roots of the First Throne ran beneath the forest and that it was draining the world's life energy, she understood that destroying the throne might kill all of nature too. Yet to keep the throne alive meant the forests would slowly perish. In the final battle Sylvara resolved to bind her own life to the ancient trees and cut off the energy that fed the throne. Thrag tried to stop her, but Sylvara's choice was not vengeance; it was the way she would pay the debt her mother had left her.

No parent had witnessed Nyx's birth. She appeared twenty years ago, on the night the sky split open above an abandoned observatory in the north and all light was drawn into a single point. The priests who found her noticed that the infant did not cry, and that the flames of the candles around her went out on their own. As Nyx grew, she discovered that she did not merely command darkness; she could summon into the world things that did not exist. She could erase not an object's shadow but its very being. But for this power she paid with pieces of her own past. The first time she sent a person into the void, every memory of her childhood was wiped away. The second time, she forgot the name of the only person whose face she still remembered.

When Nyx rose to lead the secret cult that stirred in the Empire's dark corridors, they named her the Voidcaller. The cult believed the First Throne was no instrument of rule but a chain that tore the world from reality. Nyx's aim was not to seize the throne but to destroy it utterly. For this reason she offered to reveal his father's secret to Kaelen, and had Vex's order steal the imperial archives. But not everyone in the cult served the same end. Her right hand, the Masked Scribe, secretly gathered the memories Nyx lost with every spell and hid them within his own body. The Scribe's true purpose was to take her place once he learned fully who Nyx was.

When Nyx met Aldric and Seraphine, she saw them as enemies. But Seraphine found in her soul memories of events from before she was born: Nyx had lived in the age when the First Throne was made, and had been the daughter of the mage who first sealed it. Reborn again and again across the centuries, each time she had tried to destroy the throne. She saw herself as a savior, yet with each rebirth she had brought new calamities upon the world. Nyx's final plan was to turn all of reality into nothingness for a single moment and erase the First Throne from history. But if that happened, there was a chance that no one, herself included, would ever have existed. For the first time, Nyx had to choose between finishing her vengeance and preserving the existence of those she loved.

Zephyr was born in the Asterion Isles, where the sky is forever veiled in storms. Zephyr's people tried to read the future in the direction of the winds and the voice of the lightning. But unlike the other seers, Zephyr could see not a single future but every possible one. The first great prophecy glimpsed in childhood foretold that a storm bearing Zephyr's own name would destroy a kingdom. Frightened by the prophecy, Zephyr's family shut the child away in a temple. Living for years apart from the outside world, Zephyr learned that prophecies do not reveal the future; sometimes they make people's fears real. On the night of escaping the temple, Zephyr returned to the isles to find family and people gone. Only a mark carved into the sky remained: a black star.

When summoned to the imperial palace as a seer, Zephyr discovered that the Emperor had foreseen his own death long before the Night of Ash. The more Zephyr studied the prophecies in the palace archives, the more clearly all the great events seemed steered by a single hand. The rulers who would take the throne, the generals who would win the wars, the allies who would be betrayed: all seemed fixed before they were born. To break this order, Zephyr began to help Aldric; yet every piece of knowledge given led only to another calamity in the future. In the end Zephyr learned that Orien, the most trusted apprentice, had sold them out. Orien had stolen Zephyr's prophecies and sold them to the kingdoms, regaining his own family's claim to the throne in return. As a result of this betrayal, the isles where Zephyr was born had been destroyed by the imperial army.

Rather than kill Orien, Zephyr resolved to change the future he had seen. In the last battle upon the First Throne, Zephyr prepared a spell that would reveal every possibility of the sky at once. But each possible future carried its price: in one Aldric died, in another Seraphine seized the throne, in yet another the world was drowned in an endless storm. When Zephyr saw that in no future did Zephyr survive, Zephyr, for the first time, felt no fear. For the one thing prophecy could never show was the sacrifices people choose to make for others. By starting the final storm with Zephyr's own life, the other heroes could be given back their free will. But in doing so, not only Zephyr but every seer who sees the future would lose their power.

Isolde was heir to one of Calvareth's oldest noble houses. Her family had stood beside the throne since the founding of the Empire, growing in political power through marriages with kings. But Isolde's family were no ordinary people. Generations ago, drawing on the power of the First Throne, they had made a pact with their own blood and created a line that death could not rule. This immortality gave them power and long life, but bound them to the life energy of others. When Isolde learned the truth as a child, she thought her family a dynasty of monsters. Her mother told her, “We did not become monsters. We learned to survive in a world ruled by them.”

Isolde took the title of Blood Countess after her father's death. She mastered the games of thrones at court, bought the secrets of kings, and defeated her enemies more often than not without drawing a sword. Before the Night of Ash she had struck a secret bargain with the emperor: she would help him crush a rebellion within the Empire, and in return the curse binding her family's blood to the First Throne would be lifted. But on the night the bargain was signed, the emperor vanished, and every informant Isolde had sent into the palace was killed. The blame fell upon her. Worse, it emerged that Lord Valerian, the counselor she had kept at her side for years, was the very man who had ordered her father's death. Valerian did not want the throne destroyed, for he owed his own immortality to its order.

To take her revenge, Isolde set all of Valerian's allies against one another and began a hidden war among the kingdoms. But when Seraphine found in Isolde's blood the memories of one of the throne's ancient rulers, she discovered that her family's curse was not a price but an oath of guardianship. Isolde's ancestors had used their own blood as a seal to keep the being within the throne from reaching the world. If the curse were lifted, immortality would end, but the seal would weaken too. Isolde's greatest desire was to be free; yet as the last of her line, she was bound to carry this burden. In the final battle she would have to choose between killing Valerian and taking his place to found a new dynasty of blood. Either choice would make her powerful, but in only one could she truly be free.

Maren was once ruler of the seaside kingdom of Lythara. Her people knew her as a just and merciful queen. In time of famine she gave the royal treasury to the people, freed prisoners of war, and signed peace treaties with neighboring kingdoms. But peace harmed the interests of the nobles within her palace. Chancellor Caedmon used an ancient ritual dedicated to the sea gods to overthrow her reign. One night he had the water channels beneath the palace opened and left the queen to drown in the throne room. As she died, Maren saw her own guards lock the door from the outside. With her last breath she noticed the ring on Caedmon's hand: a ring given in the Empire only to servants of the First Throne.

Maren's body was never found. Years later sailors began to tell of the old royal ship drifting through the mists, and of a woman standing on its deck, dripping seawater. Maren had returned to the world of the living, but she no longer breathed or ate, and when she came ashore, seawater streamed from her body. To avenge herself on those who had killed her, she took command of sunken ships, sea monsters, and the souls of drowned soldiers. The coastal cities named her, in fear, the Drowned Queen. But Maren's vengeance changed with time. Caedmon was long dead, and her kingdom had been divided among other dynasties. Her true enemy became the ancient order behind the men who had killed her.

When Maren learned that one of the dead Morwen had summoned was her own former counselor, she reached the secret beneath the throne. The counselor revealed that Caedmon had been only a puppet, and that the true aim of Maren's murder was to sever the bond between the sea and the First Throne. Her kingdom had guarded one of the ancient sea seals that balanced the throne's power. With her death the seal had weakened, and a being sleeping in the depths of the oceans had begun to wake. Maren no longer sought only vengeance for her own death; she wished to save the survivors of her people. To do so, she would have to sacrifice her palace beneath the sea and her entire ghostly army along with the seal. Maren's final choice would not be a queen reclaiming her throne, but a queen who would not abandon the people she once ruled a second time.

Ksarra was sovereign of a vast underground civilization stretching beneath the world of men. Her people, the Hiveborn, were thousands of living creatures bound to a single mind. Each individual had thoughts of its own, yet all their memories and feelings were joined in the mind of the Hive Mother. For centuries Ksarra had kept her people away from humans. As the kingdoms of men dug their mines, the Hiveborn's tunnels were shattered, their eggs crushed, and their sources of food destroyed. At first Ksarra tried to make peace with humankind, but when her envoys reached the palaces, they were imprisoned as living specimens. After that, the Hive Mother declared the surface world an enemy. She planned to seize the cities of men and bind every living being to her hive.

After the Night of Ash, Ksarra felt a strange change beneath the earth. The eldest of the hive began to dream the same dream: thousands of insects kneeling around a black throne, and a king with no head. After the dream, some of the Hiveborn began to lose their will and defy Ksarra's commands. When she learned that the effect came from the First Throne, she sent a scouting party to the surface. Its leader, the young warrior Vhara, returned in a form no longer human: shards of black metal were fused to the body, and the mind was filled with another voice. Vhara told Ksarra that the throne could control the Hiveborn more easily than humans. Ksarra was forced to kill her, but in the last moment she heard her own mother's voice in Vhara's mind.

With Seraphine's help, Ksarra discovered a terrible truth about the Hiveborn's origins: their shared mind was the result of an experiment the First Throne had made in the earliest ages. The throne had sought to join the thoughts of all living things and create a perfect sovereignty, but when the experiment failed, the Hiveborn fled underground. For this reason Ksarra's ancestors had become the throne's fiercest enemies. Now, as the throne stirred again, the Hive Mother's mind was in danger of losing the will of thousands. To save her people, Ksarra would have to sever the shared bond for a time. This would give every Hiveborn freedom, but could end forever the tie between Ksarra and her thousands of children. To remain queen of her own people, or to let her people live on their own? This was the true battle before Ksarra.

Ixion was born on a night when no star could be seen. The seers who studied the heavens recorded that at his birth every constellation vanished for a moment. As a child, when he looked up at the sky, he saw not lights but voids. While other seers read the future in the stars, Ixion could see what the stars were hiding. To him the universe was not made only of what exists; unrealized events, forgotten worlds, and people never born also left their traces somewhere. For this reason he named himself the Starless Seer. In his youth he published a prophecy: “One day all the kings will unite to slay the same enemy, but in the moment of victory they will forget who their enemy was.” The palace banned the prophecy, and Ixion disappeared.

Years later Ixion resurfaced in abandoned observatories and forgotten libraries. In the archive of every kingdom, documents written in the same hand began to appear. They told the Empire's true history, and that the First Throne had never belonged to a single ruler. When Aldric found one of these documents, he learned that Ixion had been following him for years. But Ixion was no ally; his plan was to make all the heroes betray one another so that the throne's true power would be laid bare. To him, friendship was a weakness that kept people from seeing the truth. For this reason he had stolen Seraphine's memories, altered Zephyr's prophecies, and delivered the old documents of Isolde's family into the wrong hands. Every betrayal brought him a little closer to the great outcome he had calculated.

Ixion's true identity came to light through a memory gate that Seraphine and Nyx opened together. He was one of the seven seers who created the First Throne. After its creation he had sacrificed his own star and name to preserve the reality of the world, and so had stepped outside every future. But watching the future for thousands of years had changed him. Seeing people repeat the same mistakes in every age, he came to believe that the only way to save the world was to take away humanity's ability to choose. If he seized the throne's power, he could end war, betrayal, and pain forever. But the price was the death of free will. In Ixion's eyes this was not tyranny but mercy. For Aldric and the others, the greatest enemy was no longer a dark creature but a savior ready to destroy goodness itself in order to abolish all evil.