"In the beginning, there was no fire, no crown, and no House.
There was only a boy… and the darkness that feared what he would become."
— From The Ashveil Annals
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I.
In the frostbitten cradle of the southlands, where winter clung stubbornly to jagged hills and wolves sang their dirges under a veiled moon, there stood a small, wind-warped village named Dawnmere.
It was not the kind of place bards would remember. No mighty walls. No towers crowned in gold. Just cracked stone homes and hearths barely warm enough to keep the shadows at bay. Here, the people were quiet folk, with bowed backs and calloused hands, who had long since stopped speaking the names of gods — for the gods had stopped listening long ago.
Yet, on the eve of the crimson eclipse, a cry pierced the silence.
It was not the wail of a babe.
It was a roar — as if a beast had slipped from the womb and cursed the heavens for being born.
Thus came into the world Reginal J. Ashveil — son of no king, but heir to a forgotten war.
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II.
Time passed like a slow knife carving bone. Reginal was unlike the other children. He did not dream of swordplay or glory — he dreamed of fire.
Not flame, but something deeper. Older. He would wake with his palms smoking, the bedsheets smoldering, the very air warping with heat no hearth could match.
He bore no Core Sigil on his flesh — no divine mark to declare his allegiance to one of the Sacred Paths. The priests called him Voidborn. The townsfolk whispered worse. Demon-child. Falseling. Curse made flesh.
But Reginal bore it all with a warrior's silence.
His only true kin were two souls — as different as day from night, yet bound to him by blood deeper than blood.
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III.
Milo Wade, a boy raised by wolves — not metaphorically, but truly. Found in the woods wrapped in the pelt of a dead direwolf, teeth sharp, eyes feral, heart loyal. He spoke little, fought fiercely, and had a gift for knowing when death approached… and how to meet it halfway.
Kammy Noxmoor, daughter of a traveling blade dancer and a duskborn enchantress. Her laughter could melt the frost, but her eyes held secrets too old for her age. She moved like mist and struck like moonlight, never where one expected, yet always where it mattered.
They did not mock Reginal. They did not fear him.
They followed him.
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IV.
And so it was, on the seventeenth winter of his life, the sky wept blood once more.
The moons aligned — the omen of old. The Church of the Hollow Flame rode into Dawnmere beneath banners of pale fire and chains forged from soul-iron.
> "Deliver unto us the Nullborn," said the Inquisitor in robes of bone and gold.
"Or we shall cleanse the land of your sin."
No one moved.
Not until Reginal stepped forward. Bare-chested. Bare-footed. Bare-souled.
> "I am the sin," he said.
They bound him in cold chains and dragged him through the snow like a beaten dog. They took him to the stone altar outside the village — a slab stained with the regrets of past heretics.
The Inquisitor raised his blessed blade.
The moons watched.
The villagers wept.
Kammy screamed.
Milo howled.
And then…
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V.
The blade fell.
But it did not cleave flesh.
It shattered.
Reginal stood, eyes wide and glowing with a red so deep it bled into the stars. His skin cracked. Not from cold — from within. Blood poured from his pores like molten ink. His chest split open, not with pain… but birth.
A sigil rose from his sternum, carved in ancient fang-runes — blacker than pitch, older than gods.
> The Crimson Fang.
The armor did not fall upon him. It grew from him. Symbiotic, living, hungry.
It wrapped around his limbs like memory made flesh, forged of bone and hatred, smoking with forgotten warfire.
The Inquisitor stepped back. Too late.
Reginal opened his palm. A blade — part spine, part flame — leapt from his flesh.
> "I am no heretic," he said.
"I am the end of your kind."
And he devoured them.
The Church burned that night.
The snow melted for miles.
The village slept silent and safe, guarded by three figures cloaked in red and ash.
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VI.
Thus began the rise of the House of Ashveil.
Not from gold, but from ruin.
Not from law, but from legacy.
And not alone.
For at his side stood the Howler and the Ballad.
The war to come would shake the roots of Val'Khora itself.
But this…
This was only the beginning.
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[End of Chapter I]
Chapter II – "The Path of the Fangborn" coming next...