It was the Moonfeast. The longest night of the year in Dal’Kaldera. Silver bells rang from balcony eaves. Holy women in white veils chanted verses to Wintival, offering frozen lilies to her statues. Snowdrifts filled the alleys in silent tribute. This was the empire’s holiest night, when warmth was forbidden and silence honored the chill of divine stillness.

Liora wore pearl-tinted silk and pomegranate perfume, her laughter echoing through the upper galleries of Dal’Kaldera like the memory of spring. She was beautiful in the way broken glass can catch moonlight… sharp, dangerous, fleeting. She’d been a courtesan of some renown in Glacikaldr. She knew how to dance through frost, to sip from silver goblets, to speak in courtly riddles.

King Drogo Raewyn, the blue-eyed monarch who walked like a wolf through the night, had taken her only once during Wintival’s Moonfeast, an act of passion or loneliness, Liora never could say. He vanished before the sun had rose, leaving behind nothing but memory and the stirrings of life within her.

Nine months later, beneath a blood moon that carried whispers of the fall of Wintival and the rise of Zeolix, she gave birth to a boy wrapped in wolf-fur and fear. The priestess on duty looked at him, and then at Liora, and offered only silence. There was no record kept, no royal decree, no coin sent. Only the distant hum of midnight bells and the hungry red eye of the moon watching through frost-streaked windows.

She named him Tyr. Short for tyrant, she once spat, in a moment of clarity too cruel to forget.

“It’s what your father was,” she muttered, wrapping the newborn in the pelt of a gutted wolf. “A tyrant. Beautiful, cold, and convinced the world owed him everything. And now I owe you.”

She laughed then… dry, bitter, unmotherly. The sound echoed like cracking ice across the bare stone of the chamber.

Tyr was born under candlelight in a silk-curtained chamber, but that was the last warmth he’d know for years.

As he cried, snow gathered on the sills.

No one claimed him. No lords came. No coin arrived. There were only rumors and ridicule. The other courtesans whispered behind their fans. "She thinks she bedded a king." "Poor girl… clinging to a bastard for a ladder out."

They weren’t wrong.

By the time Tyr could speak, Liora had fallen from favor and into debt. The Capitol was a cruel city, and it showed no pity to women without patrons or children without fathers. When Liora was evicted from her workhouse, she and Tyr lived in alleyways, empty storefronts, and beneath the archways of collapsed towers. She still dressed herself in old silks, delusions of grandeur wrapped around thin bones. Her perfume masked the smell of pipe-smoke and rot.

She would tell Tyr strange things when the moonshine dulled her.

"You should have been a prince."

"They'd have crowned you if I had any spine."

"Why did I keep you... gods, why did I keep you?"

Tyr, all ribs and frostbitten fingers, didn’t answer. He already knew.

By age seven, he could beg with a convincing limp and pickpocket without being noticed. By ten, he could gut a rat and boil it into stew without flinching. He made friends with stray dogs and beat older boys with rocks tied to string. His mother grew thinner, quieter. She would disappear for days on end, and when she returned, her eyes were hollow, her teeth stained with cigar tar.

Then came whispers. King Drogo had vanished. Lost to the peaks of the north, some said, others blamed the war with the Emeraldites, or a betrayal within his court. Liora's eyes lit with desperation. A storm of ambition overtook her. She stitched together every scrap of nobility she still possessed, scrubbed Tyr’s face clean, and marched up the palace gates.

"He is the King’s firstborn!" she shouted through the iron bars. "Older than Remus! His blood is royal!"

For a heartbeat, Tyr thought they’d listen. The guards paused. Messengers were sent.

Then came the order: Exile.

For the sake of peace, the court could not allow the whisper of illegitimacy to take root. If Tyr was Drogo’s son, he was a threat to Remus. If he was not, he was a dangerous rumor. In either case, he and his mother were branded liars and exiles.

They were cast out of Glacikaldr that same day. No coin. No escort. Just a warning and a shove into the white.

Snow swallowed the road behind them. Liora walked ahead, her silks flapping like torn flags, muttering prayers to a goddess who had never answered. Tyr followed, silent, his hands deep in his pockets, already learning what it meant to walk alone.

Above them, the moon turned dark, dead and careless. And far off in the trees, something howled.