Chapter 1 - A World Left Behind
Year of 1209
“Excuse me,” Illaria Longsword asked, her voice calm, almost casual. “What year is it?”
The young waiter paused mid-step and looked at her with thinly veiled irritation. Forgetting the date was understandable. Forgetting the year was not. His eyes lingered on her a moment longer than necessary, suspicion sharpening his expression.
Sensing it instantly, Illaria continued before he could speak.“I’ve been training in the ranges of Kelzar for the past few years,” she added quickly. “I’m returning home now—to the Southern Kingdom.”
Understanding dawned on his face. His posture loosened.“Oh! Young master, you should have said that earlier,” he said with a short laugh. “With the way you’re dressed and all, I nearly took you for some sort of thief—and we got no free food.”
Illaria did not respond. She merely inclined her head.
She was dressed in a long black overcoat, dark trousers beneath it, the fabric worn but well-kept. Half of her long brown hair was tied into a tight bun, secured with a simple wooden pin. A black mask concealed the lower half of her face, leaving only her pale grey eyes visible—watchful, unreadable. The disguise was deliberate. Every detail chosen to keep her identity hidden.
It’s fine, she told herself. No one will look twice. No one would guess that beneath the loose, layered clothing stood a woman, not a man. The disguise had served its purpose well enough. Slowly, she reached up and removed the mask, allowing herself a proper breath for the first time since entering the inn.
The waiter smiled now, entirely at ease. “Today is the fifteenth day of the seventh month,” he said cheerfully, “of the year 1209.”
1209.
The number struck her harder than she expected.
So much time… Illaria had known her stay in the mountain ranges would last no less than five years. She had prepared herself for that. But to realize that seven additional years had slipped past her—unnoticed, uncounted—left something tight and unfamiliar twisting in her chest. The ranges of Kelzar did not mark time kindly. Days had blurred into training, survival, and silence. Still, standing here now, hearing the year spoken aloud, she felt it fully.
She was the royal princess of the South, Princess Illaria Longsword. Years ago, her status, power, and position had been the very things the common folk dreamed of but would never touch. When she was only seven years old, she had done something no one expected of a princess. She had insisted—with a stubbornness far beyond her years -- that her parents, the Emperor and Empress of the South, send her to train in the ranges of Kelzar, just as they had sent her elder brother, Edric Longsword.
The ranges of Kelzar lay to the eastern edge of the continent of Merwan, a vast training ground feared and revered in equal measure. Spanning nearly a million kilometers, the ranges dominated the eastern lands, before narrowing into mountain ranges of Ishtaar, a thousand kilometer long and fifty kilometer wide ridge that stretched inward towards the heart of the continent. That narrow spine of stone ridges split Merwan cleanly in two parts, North and South.
Its placement was almost too convenient.
The jagged terrain of the ranges, coupled with the presence of countless low-level yet aggressive beasts, made the ranges nearly impossible to cross with an army. Any large-scale invasion through Kelzar would be slow, costly, and painfully visible. As a result, the ridges had become more than geography—they were a natural boundary, a living wall. For five hundred years, the Ranges of Ishtaar had preserved peace between the North and the South. North had later split into two kingdoms - Northern and Western Kingdom and they were in constant strife with each other but South – South had enjoyed peace.
The central–eastern region of Kelzar was unlike any other part of the continent. While Auren—nature’s energy—existed everywhere in the world, Kelzar remained one of the few places where it flowed pure and undisturbed. Far from cities, roads, and human interference, the land had been left untouched for centuries, allowing nature’s energy to accumulate densely and naturally.
This made Kelzar an ideal training ground.
The region was home to countless high-level, medium-level, and low-level spiritual and magical beasts, whose presence further enriched the land with Auren. The air itself felt richer here, alive, saturated with natural power waiting to be drawn. Only in places like Kelzar could one truly learn to sense, absorb, and control it without interference. Through years of isolation and discipline, the body and soul were tempered to withstand this external force, eventually forming what was known as a spiritual core—a vessel capable of storing and shaping Auren.
Once formed, this core allowed a warrior to channel nature’s energy through their body or into tools such as swords, daggers, and spears, transforming even ordinary weapons into conduits of immense power. Since Auren was drawn from nature, its volume was vast—limited not by availability, but by the wielder’s endurance and control.
Alongside Auren existed another form of power, far more common and far more accessible—Myrenn.
Unlike Auren, Myrenn was internal energy, generated and circulated from the force of the body itself. It formed the foundation of most battlefield magic and was widely used by warriors, generals, and lieutenants of the armies. The greatest advantage of Myrenn lay in its simplicity. As long as one possessed decent physical strength, it could be learned in six to seven months, either through manuals or under the guidance of a master.
Yet this convenience came at a cost.
Because Myrenn relied on predefined spells and techniques, its applications were rigid. One spell performed one function—no more, no less—and very few understood how to create new ones. On rare occasions, a master who had devoted over fifty years to the study of magic might develop a new technique, but such dedication rarely bore fruit.
Myrenn possessed many intriguing forms, but it proved far less effective in direct combat—especially against Auren users. The sheer adaptability and scale of nature’s energy overwhelmed the limited reserves of internal power.
Some claimed Myrenn could be forced into extreme, destructive forms, but doing so required significant sacrifice, often inflicting lasting damage upon the caster’s body. For this reason, most soldiers treated Myrenn as a secondary skill—an emergency measure rather than a foundation. In war, they relied primarily on physical strength, formations, and numbers.
The common folk practiced neither art.
Though Auren was unquestionably superior, acquiring it demanded four to six years of isolated training in Kelzar, enduring relentless exposure to nature’s energy and the dangers of its beasts. All princes and heirs of royal blood were sent to Kelzar at the tender age of seven or eight, tasked with training their bodies and minds and, above all, with forming their Auren spiritual core. Soldiers and military commanders trained there as well, usually to refine their abilities, but never at such a young age. Families would not permit it unless the trainee was already strong enough to defend themselves against wild beasts—or old enough to choose such a dangerous path on their own.
And there was a good reason for that.
Survival in Kelzar was no small feat. The land obeyed no rules, offered no mercy. A single moment of carelessness could lead to instant death. During Illaria’s own years in the ranges, she had been wounded by beasts more times than she could count. Each time, she had been forced to survive on her own—searching the terrain for herbs and medicinal plants to treat her injuries.
Fortunately, Kelzar was also a land where rare and exotic herbs flourished, making healing possible—if one knew where to look and lived long enough to find them.
That begged the question: why were royal children sent into such danger so young—and how did they survive?
The answer lay in the nature of Auren itself.
The ancient texts described a simple, unforgiving truth: the earlier one began cultivating Auren, the stronger one could become. Just as a child’s body grew faster and adapted more easily than an adult’s, so too did spiritual power. A young core expanded more rapidly, shaped itself more fluidly. Furthermore, Auren did not grow through meditation alone. Danger mattered. Near-death experiences mattered. Every brush with death refined the core, sharpening not only strength but awareness, vigilance, and adaptability.
A spiritual core was not merely a reservoir of power—it was the culmination of instinct, perception, and the ability to evolve one’s techniques to suit one’s own nature.
But how, then, did children survive such brutality?
Because the danger was absolute, royal families deployed “secret guards.”
These guards were assigned to each young prince for three purposes. The first was obvious: to ensure the survival of the royal heir. Princes often fought beasts far stronger than themselves and could suffer grievous injuries. In truly life-threatening situations, it was the guards’ duty to intervene.
The second purpose was protection from assassination. Rival kingdoms had no shortage of reasons to eliminate heirs before they could grow into rulers.
The third was to control the training environment itself. As the child grew stronger, the guards subtly altered the surroundings, gradually introducing beasts that were faster, stronger, and harder to kill, ensuring steady and relentless progression.
Yet the princes were made to believe they were entirely alone.
They were told that survival rested solely in their own hands. This illusion was deliberate. Independent survival was essential to forming a strong spiritual core, and more importantly, it forced young royalty to experience fear, hunger, injury, and hardship firsthand. A ruler who had never struggled beyond palace walls had no right to rule. The aim was clear: to ensure the next emperor would not be a fragile tyrant or an ego-driven maniac sheltered by privilege.
These protectors were called “secret guards” not only because the princes were unaware of their presence, but because only the king himself knew their identities. What lives these guards lived outside Kelzar—where they went, who they were—remained a mystery.
During Illaria’s years in the ranges, it took her six full years to realize she had been watched all along. And the day she finally sensed their presence was the day her training ended—the day she returned home to the South, to the national capital, Starfell.
She returned not just as a princess, but as the only princess across the entire continent of Merwan to have completed Kelzar’s brutal training.
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But such a path was reserved solely for royalty. Common folk could not afford this luxury. Their children had to wait until they were capable of fending off at least low-level beasts. Most military personnel seeking advancement eventually traveled to Kelzar as well—but only as adults, hardened enough to survive its cruelty. Kelzar did not raise children. It forged rulers.
After her return, Illaria had spent three peaceful years with her family—years of laughter, routine, and leisure—until the event the world would later name the War of Betrayal erupted.
By the time the war ended, everyone in her family was dead.
Everyone except her.
In moments of brutal honesty, Illaria often wished she had died with them. She had come close. The blade that struck her had pierced deep, missing her heart by no more than a breath. Life, cruel and unasked for, had spared her.
And it had not done so kindly.
This second chance did not fill her with gratitude. It left her with only one purpose: revenge. She wanted the blood of the Northern and Western royal families, of their allied houses, of every name and banner that had played even the smallest role in her family’s destruction. There would be no mercy, no exceptions. Nothing would stop her.
When she finally woke up after the war, she found herself back in the ranges of Kelzar. Her spiritual core was completely destroyed. That much was expected. In the chaos of the battlefield, she had come terrifyingly close to invoking something that should not exist. Calling it a forbidden technique would be dishonest—this was something far beyond her knowledge.
She had named it Doomed Soul.
Even now, she did not understand how she had drawn such overwhelming, unnatural volumes of energy into herself. The force was monstrous, suffocating, absolute. Had she not been stopped, the entire Western Kingdom would have fallen. Her survival would never have been an option. Her body would have been obliterated—and worse, her soul torn apart so completely that she might never have entered the cycle of rebirth, if such a cycle truly existed.
Sometimes she wondered if that destruction should have happened back then. At least she would have been gone. At least the pain would have ended.
She had come so close to succeeding.
Yet something—someone—had stopped her.
What it was, she could no longer remember.
The past, however, no longer mattered.
Her core was shattered, yes—but not beyond repair. After waking, she spent seven long years in Kelzar, rebuilding her spiritual core from nothing, piece by agonizing piece. The process was slow, brutal, and lonely.
But it worked.
She emerged stronger than she had ever been before. And now, only one task remained. To hunt down those who had destroyed her family and make them pay.
“Which city is this?” she asked the young lad.
“You are currently in Tyria,” he replied. “It lies under the First Noble Family of the West, in the western region of the continent. Now, our young master from the South must be tired and eager to return home. Let me fetch you some food.”
“Yes… thank you,” Illaria answered quietly.
The word home felt empty. A place like that no longer existed for her.
As she waited, her thoughts drifted southward—toward what remained of her kingdom. How much military strength was left? Would it be enough to bring down the North and the West, or had too much already been lost?
Her thoughts were cut short by a sudden commotion at the tavern’s front door.
A young soldier, barely twenty, dressed in pristine white robes, stormed inside and barked, “All of you—out! The King of Bluecrown, of the Southern Kingdom, has decided to rest here. Your presence pollutes his. Leave. Now.”
Illaria froze.
The words struck her like a slap across the face.
It wasn’t fear of being recognized that shocked her. She was dressed as a man, her long hair pinned into a tight bun, her posture deliberately unassuming. Seven years had passed. To the world, she was either dead—or worse, alive but broken. A princess without a spiritual core was nothing more than an ant, easily crushed by any trained Auren user or even a competent Myrenn practitioner.
No.
What truly unsettled her was something far worse. Why was a sworn noble family of the South—one that had once served under her father—present in the West? Bluecrown had been loyal. They had fought under her father’s banner before the war. And now one of their kings sat openly in a western city, as though this were natural.
The eastern reaches were consumed entirely by the ranges of Kelzar, but the rest of the continent was divided into the North, South, and West. Each region was ruled by a single emperor. Beneath them stood four to five noble families sworn by blood and oath, each governing between a hundred and two hundred cities in their emperor’s name.
The South had four such families.
Bluecrown was one of them.
Each noble family was ruled by a regional king sworn to their emperor. One emperor per region. Four to five kings beneath them. And now, one of hers sat comfortably in enemy territory.
Illaria had once shared a close connection with the Bluecrown family. Her mother, Marielle Longsword, had been the eldest daughter of the previous head of Bluecrown. After her maternal grandfather’s death, the title of king was passed to her uncle.
Illaria had never liked the man.
There was something sharp and calculating about him—something that unsettled her even as a child. He was cunning, and though no grave crimes could ever be proven against him, the unease he inspired never faded. Still, he was family. And without evidence, Illaria had never spoken against him.
Marielle Longsword died giving birth to her third child—Prince Robert Longsword.
Illaria had been barely four years old at the time.
She could not understand where her mother had gone. She did not understand what death meant. For a long while, she simply waited, believing her mother would return.
One day, her father—Ryan Longsword, Emperor of the South—sat her down and explained the truth. Her mother was not coming back. She was gone.
That day, Illaria learned that death was a natural part of human life.
And that it came easily—especially for those born into royalty.
From that moment on, her love for her family deepened into something fierce and unyielding. While her mother’s death had been unavoidable, Illaria swore she would never allow the rest of her family to meet the same fate. She would do anything to protect them. Anything.
That was the day she vowed to grow stronger. Strong enough that even if she failed to protect her father or her elder brother, she would at least be able to protect her youngest sibling—Robert.
It was then that the desire to go to Kelzar stopped being a dream and became a necessity.
Robert, however, was never sent to the ranges. Part of it was his own choice—he enjoyed palace life and had no desire to train among beasts and blood. But more than that, the family was overprotective. After losing Marielle, her father, her elder brother, and Illaria herself guarded Robert closely, unwilling to risk losing him as well.
Besides, Robert’s talents lay elsewhere. He excelled in art and literature rather than swordsmanship. Edric Longsword, the crown prince and heir to the throne, had already trained in Kelzar for five years and become an exceptional swordsman. With Edric as the future emperor, no one in the court pressed for Robert to undergo the same brutal training.
After her mother’s death, Illaria began to distance herself from the Bluecrown family. They reminded her too much of Marielle.
And her uncle’s lack of honour—now made evident by his loud, arrogant presence in enemy territory—only confirmed the discomfort she had felt toward him all along.
“Why is the southern Bluecrown family here?” Illaria asked quietly as the young waiter ushered her out of the shop, obeying the orders barked by the soldier. “Even if this were related to trade, why would the head himself—the King of Bluecrown—be present?”
The waiter hesitated, then glanced around before lowering his voice. “Young master… Do you know about the War of Betrayal?”
“Yes,” Illaria replied evenly. “I left for training during the war. To be precise, after I lost my family in that bloodshed, I had no will left to continue living as before. So I abandoned everything and went away.”
The waiter’s expression softened. “I’m very sorry to hear that. I suppose it makes sense that you trained all these years, especially when you had no one left.”
He let out a quiet sigh before continuing.
“Young master, you may not be aware, but three days from now the Festival of Aris will begin. It is a full week-long celebration in honour of the god and goddess of war.”
Illaria remained silent as he spoke.
“As you may know, about a hundred years ago, the Western Kingdom was part of the Northern Kingdom. It was only after a rebellion against the rulers of that era that the West broke away and became an independent kingdom. Even so, most people here still follow Northern customs and traditions, including the worship of the same gods.”
He gestured vaguely toward the city around them.
“In fact, even the people of the North and West look alike—brown or black eyes, dark hair, and light-coloured skin.”
He paused briefly, then went on.
“The Festival of Aris is the most important celebration we have. After the War of Betrayal, in which the West and the North together defeated the Southern Kingdom, the two realms realized they were stronger united. They chose to set aside their old grievances and forge a new alliance. Since then, every year at this time, the Northern royal family and noble houses celebrate the festival alongside the royal and noble families of the West.”
Illaria’s fury simmered as she watched her uncle—cunning, smug, and unashamed—move through the city as an honoured guest. She could no longer hold back.
“Even so,” she demanded sharply, “Bluecrown is a southern noble family. This festival isn’t even part of our culture. The South fought against the North and the West—why are they invited at all? And shouldn’t Bluecrown hate them?”
Her voice tightened.
“The late Empress of the South was from Bluecrown. Her husband—the late emperor—and their children were killed by Northern and Western hands!”
The waiter stopped walking.
“Young master,” he said slowly, almost cautiously, “you truly don’t know how the war ended, do you?”
Illaria’s heart sank.
“The one who killed the late Emperor of the South,” he continued, “was none other than the current head of the Bluecrown family—King Usher himself.”
What?
The one who killed her father was her own great-uncle. A member of a sworn family—her mother’s family—had turned their backs on the throne they had pledged to protect.
“During the war, killing the late Emperor of the South was no easy task,” the waiter continued quietly. “Though his forces were dwindling and his defeat was inevitable, he was determined to inflict as much damage as possible upon the North and the West before he fell. And he did.”
His voice dropped further.
“Some say he slaughtered over twenty-five hundred soldiers with his own hands. But continuous battle left him gravely wounded. That was when King Usher approached him—pretending to offer aid, to shield him from enemies, to heal his wounds. Instead, he drove a dagger straight through the emperor’s heart.”
The waiter swallowed.
“The emperor died within seconds. No one knows whether it was from the betrayal itself… or from the wound.”
Illaria found herself unable to speak. It truly was a war built on betrayal.
“Ever since then,” the waiter went on, “King Usher has proclaimed that Emperor Ryan Longsword had been secretly plotting war against the West, that he cared nothing for the lives of his soldiers. He claimed the South could never defeat the combined forces of the North and West, and that ending the war by killing the last pillar of the Southern royal family was the wisest choice.”
A bitter smile crossed the waiter’s face.
“Since that day, he has clung to the Northern and Western royal families like a leech. People say he has neither honour nor loyalty—only an instinct to side with whoever is winning.”
Illaria reached into her clothes and pulled out a small pouch. Opening it, she took out two or three carefully preserved herbs.
“Brother,” she said quietly, “thank you for telling me all of this. I don’t have any coin to pay for the food, but these herbs were gathered in Kelzar. If you trade them, you’ll have more than enough to cover my meal—and keep the rest for yourself. I must be on my way.”
“You’re leaving already?” the waiter asked, surprised. “Then… have a safe journey, brother.”
Illaria did not look back. She feared that if she did, she would no longer be able to restrain herself from killing that traitorous king on the spot.
As she walked away, her thoughts churned.
Going back South? How naïve. How foolish.
What had she been thinking?
No. There was no reason to return. If they were all gathering here, starting this year, festival of Aris could be remembered as Festival of Death. There was no reason for her to leave. The other southern sworn families would have been killed or undoubtedly betrayed them. The traitors who lived, their punishment could wait.
For now, the North and the West, they better prepare. This would be the last time they celebrated this festival.