Prince Elysael of House Florens…was tired.

  So terribly, impossibly tired.

  It was all she could manage just to sit up on the broad, white back of her personal stallion, Bruce, much less maintain a regal air. Both for the benefit of the masses of her soldiers-no, her people gathered all around her…

  As well as the very unexpected guests who had come to a halt barely a few hundred yards away from the gates of her fair city.

  Nathaniel Hart…

  Truthfully, Elysael had barely thought of the young Precursor much in the last year since she had met him. She had been so, so incredibly busy in the intervening months that she couldn’t spare the attention to wonder at his fate. Elysael had been…a bit concerned when she had heard that the Savoy plantation by the name of Addersfield, where cousin Azarus and his companion resided, had come under assault from what seemed to be a Break-induced monster horde. Enough so that she had dispatched a unit of Rangers to reconnoiter the area, in the hopes she could discover a hint as to what might have happened to her erstwhile cousin, and the figure out of myth that accompanied him.

  Instead, the Rangers had returned with a report very different from what she had been expecting. She had received a clue as to what had happened to her kin, of course. But it had arrived in the form of an almost feral man by the name of Bleddyn, escorted by her Rangers directly to her office. Apparently…the man had been a slave at the plantation.

  ‘Been’, being the operating word.

  Somehow, someway, a man who hadn’t even possessed a Class when she had met him had devised an artifact capable of breaking the mystical bonds of slavery.

  That still shocked her when she had the moment to ponder it.

  When the apparent Calonawr clan member, as Bleddyn had introduced himself to her, had actually presented the odd little bident to her, Elysael had been deeply tempted to confiscate it. After all, here was something that her House had desired for literal centuries. An iron-clad method in which to free the unfortunate from the vile yoke around their souls, suppressing the gift of their Status. Surely it would be a forgivable sin to take this blessing and replicate it? Ultimately, though, a far more pragmatic side of her, something that very irritably sounded like cousin Olag, had presented a different option.

  That option only grew all the more tempting when she discovered that Addersfield had apparently been a Savoy resource stockpile…and that this Bleddyn intended to use it to launch a full-on slave-revolt.

  Investment, her Father had always told her, was the key to the future. As long as you kept a gentle, guiding hand up on it, of course.

  Father had always been far too controlling.

  And so the Unchained had been born, led by a man with vengeance written in his heart and a strange artifact in hand.

  Backed ever so quietly...by House Florens.

  At Elysael’s urging, Bleddyn was even willing to allow the ‘Bond Breaker’ to be examined by her royally employed Enchanters. Under supervision by some of his own people, of course. For all that he was desperate for support, it was gratifying to learn that her new secret partner possessed a healthy degree of suspicion. Little came of it, however. Her Enchanters had been outright baffled by the workings of the Bond Breaker. They described the Spell matrix upon the device as both oddly advanced and terribly simplistic at the same time. It was, apparently, as if a complete novice had stumbled upon the divine grace of the gods' own Enchanting method, and bludgeoned it into place with all the finesse of a clumsy infant.

  Knowing the source, Elysael had no issue believing that.

  They had produced a few inferior copies of the wondrous device, while Bleddyn began his campaign against the slave holding plantations that littered the broader Principality. She had been gratified to discover that, for all of his stated desire for vengeance against those who had branded his fellow Humans, Bleddyn did his best to keep the bloodshed to a minimum.

  …mostly. Sometimes, it was simply necessary to spill the blood of slavers to free their indentured servants.

  As was historically typical of burgeoning slave revolts in the Principality, however, their activities had eventually caught the attention of the slave catchers. Elysael had been viciously amused to discover that they hadn’t taken the Unchained’s efforts seriously, at first. They had apparently only sent a grand total of two of the catchers to stomp this rebellion out. That normally would have even been enough. All of them were equipped with control slates that possessed both a universal tracking spell for all Velancian slaves, as well as a method to activate the ‘culling Enchantment’, as they were sickeningly referred to.

  Only, both of those slave catchers had been torn to literal pieces by Bleddyn and his men. Elysael had been torn herself when the rebellion leader had sent the severed heads of both catchers by courier to their headquarters within the capital of Turchese. It was a provocation, yes.

  But it was terribly difficult to feel an ounce of sympathy for them.

  It had certainly riled them up. They sent far more than two of their warriors this time, but the result was the same. Each time the catchers tried to track down and ambush Bleddyn and his men, they were sent back to their superiors in pieces. Several rounds of this had occurred before the catchers had admitted defeat and pleaded for help from the Principal Convocation.

  Elysael had actually been in attendance at that particular meeting, around the massive meeting table that the Princes of Velancia gathered to govern their nation. Under the scintillating light from the massive stained glass mural above, depicting the ancestral leaders of the Five Houses rising up against the Mountain Thanes to forge a new path, it had been difficult for her to maintain a straight face. She had desperately wanted to laugh at the pathetic mewling from the current General of the Slave Catchers, as he begged for assistance from the slaves who were finally rising up against their tormentors.

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  Naturally, as the representative for House Florens and the city of Rhoscara, she had abstained from voting on the request. Her House had a long and storied history of doing such a thing when it came to matters of bondage within their country. At the time, it didn’t raise a single eyebrow among most of the other Princes.

  Most.

  Anguis of Savoy, the Serpent himself, had long been a canny adversary. While she didn’t hold his relations against him, more and more as she got older Elysael was…irked that she shared even the slightest familial bond with the chain maker. When the vote was called, and the Orsini were instructed to rally the banners to root out these new ‘Unchained’, she had caught Anguis’s eye.

  The calm, knowing look within, as if he knew far more than she thought he possibly could, had sent a shiver down her spine.

  Alas, her premonition had turned out to be correct. When House Orsini had split between the young and the old, the dreamers and the stolid, Anguis had been there to swoop down and rescue those whom the new blood had cast out. While the bulk of the Army and the resources of House Orsini now lay in the hands of the newly elected Prince Dante, the ousted Prince Giovvani has scurried into the arms of the Serpent. There, Anguis had whispered into the shocked old Dwarf’s ears and convinced him that it had been House Florens who had backed the Unchained to the point they could withstand the Army.

  Which wasn't even untrue, really.

  And when Giovanni had leveled accusations against her before a council of Princes she had few allies upon…

  Suddenly, the Principality itself had been on the brink of shattering at the seams. It had appeared as if battle were only months away, with only the formalities needed for the proper declaration of war between the two growing factions. One side held the traditionalists in the form of the Luminarans, the Venier, and first among equals, House Savoy. And upon hers, it was merely House Florens, the forces of the Unchained, and the bulk of the Velancian Army, commanded by the new House Orsini. There had been significant desertions as soldiers fled for their homes, in the face of civil war, unwilling to be part of a potential battle against their kin. But it hadn’t been great enough to decide the fate of the coming conflict. With hers, Bleddyn’s, and Dante’s forces, Elysael had believed it was entirely possible to win the coming war and cleanse the scourge of slavery from her country at long last.

  In the lead-up to the start of hostilities, she had approved Bleddyn’s desire to transport those non-combatants he had freed to the relative safety of Herztalian lands. Their own civil conflict had finally come to a close, and it was…possible, if unlikely, that the apparent new Regent Lord of Herztal would be willing to lend a modest assistance to their cause. She had given her blessings to Bleddyn’s journey, believing him to only be gone for perhaps a month.

  And then the world, such as it was, ended…and nothing was ever the same.

  The death toll alone from that terrifying hour, as the very world itself tried to crush her in the ancestral throne of her people…

  Thousands dead, and just as many injured in the aftermath. And then to learn that the very air outside of Rhoscara’s wards was not poisonous to the very soul? She had nearly assaulted the Aetherologist who had delivered the grim news to the court. Only the iron-clad control over her emotions, drilled into her both by her Father and a distant Uncle from her youth, had saved the academic from a broken jaw.

  Instead, she had delivered onto them a command. Find a way for someone to survive within this catastrophe.

  And find it now.

  Elysael disliked wielding her authority like a cudgel, but desperate times bred desperate rulership.

  It was in the midst of all of the panic, fear, and confusion brought on by the event her people had taken to calling the Judgment that a messenger was brought to her court.

  A Savoy messenger. Somehow, the stave-bearing Dwarf had not only been able to traverse the corrupted atmosphere outside the safety of the wards, but he had been suspiciously close to Rhoscara. Enough that he had already been on the way to the city when the event occurred, and had arrived unhurried and uninjured when he did so.

  Elysael deeply disliked the implications of that, but her mind couldn’t help but make the connection.

  The Savoy had something to do with this. What it was, the messenger wouldn’t say.

  But what he did…

  Well, it had been an ultimatum, directly from the mouth of Anguis himself. He wouldn’t admit to having anything to do with this catastrophe, of course. That would have been foolish. Instead, the Serpent had tried to appeal to a sense of emergency. It was time for House Florens to stand together with their fellow Dwarves, and in the face of possible extinction, cease their support for the Unchained and deliver their leader. If they agreed and altered their House charter to allow the institution of slavery, then a method to survive outside the wards would be delivered to Rhoscara en masse. Furthermore, the Principality would once again lend its resources to the people of her city.

  Ridiculous.

  Of course, she had refused and promptly ordered the messenger arrested. They weren’t intending to kill him, of course. Merely…investigate just how the Dwarf could survive out in the open air of Vereden.

  Unfortunately, he still died, through somewhat mysterious means. The stave-wielding Dwarf had abruptly seized when it looked like he would be captured, and before the disturbed eyes of the court, had begun to bleed out of every orifice on his head. In moments, he had slumped to his knees before the Raven Throne, dead from some form of compulsion laid on him by Anguis.

  However…her Enchanters had found something interesting upon the corpse of the messenger. A strange sliver of magenta crystal, not unlike the lightning that now dominated the heavens. Through researching the foul thing, her Enchanters had managed to devise a somewhat…inconvenient solution to surviving with the corruption of the Judgment.

  Still, it was something. Although the method wasn’t available to every one of her citizens, it was to her forces. And with that, Elysael had made a snap judgment of her own.

  It was time for Rhoscara to strike out on its own. No longer would they be shackled to the ill morality of Velancia. Through extremely expensive methods of communication, Elysael had formalized an alliance of severance with Prince Dante and his armies, far away in his own seat of power.

  House Florens and House Orsini…withdrew from the very nation their ancestors had helped to forge. They did this with the full knowledge that the remaining great Houses of Velancia would never allow such a thing to happen. The union of the Principality was meant to be inviolate.

  They would come for them. And apparently, according to the exhausted Ranger who had sprinted into her throne room just yesterday…

  They were, and they had Nathaniel Hart and his strange caravan to thank for the news.

  Along with dear cousin Olag, his forces, a veritable Herztalian army, and great, extremely mysterious tagalongs. Elysael had never seen so many cloaked and masked individuals, and she couldn't help but be curious about them. Still...something about the animal features of the masks tickled her memory, but nothing was coming to mind in her exhausted state.

  Still...all of them were coming to the aid of Rhoscara. And that's what mattered most.

  What strange winds fortune had blown their way.

  Elysael was determined not to waste it.

  And as Nathaniel and his commanders, the missing Bleddyn, and cousin Olag approached her position in front of the armies of Rhoscara, she afforded them her best royal smile. “Hail, and well met, my long-journeyed friends,” She said, injecting as much regal aplomb into her voice as possible, as Mother had taught her long ago.

  “Be welcome in the city of Rhoscara, free and proud…and ready to stand against all who seek her end,” Elysael turned her head slightly to look at her city. “Please, follow me to my palace.”

  “We have much to discuss.”