"When a banner falls, it is not the cloth that we mourn — it is the dream it carried."— Amir of Vardaan, To Thalia
Isis stood in the upper watchtower of Valeria, the capital of House Myrian, as morning sunlight glinted over the golden plains. Her hand rested on the hilt of her ceremonial blade, though there was no war at her door. Not yet. She had received the raven just past midnight.
The scroll bore three words in a blood-marked seal:"Eirenhold has fallen."
She hadn't read the body of the message at first. She had simply stared at those words, fingers trembling only slightly. Helena was her rival once. Then an ally. Then something like a friend — the sort of friend a ruler learns to keep at arm's length, but whose ideals she had respected.
Isis turned as her brother, General Aramon, approached.
"She fought to the last," he said. "Twelve of her knights survived. The rest…" He didn't finish.
Isis swallowed the rising emotion. "I warned her about Elena. We all did."
"She knew."
"I know." Isis's voice turned bitter. "That's what makes it worse."
Aramon hesitated. "Will we do anything? Act on it?"
"She's fled east, toward Helion territory. Alexios will protect her." She looked down over her people — children chasing wind-blown petals, elders hauling baskets of grain. "But Eirenhold was more than a city. It was a symbol. If Elena can take Helena's walls, what's stopping her from trying for mine?"
Aramon raised a brow. "You're thinking war?"
Isis shook her head. "No. Not yet. But something deeper is breaking beneath us. I can feel it. The ground is shifting under the fifty thrones."
She looked westward, where the clouds grew thick and dark. "And Helena's fall is just the first tremor."
In the frigid towers of Northspire, high above the glacier cliffs of Glastheim, Ragnald read the same raven-sent letter beside a fireplace that barely warmed the stones around him.
His halls were carved from ice and mountain, but the words on the parchment chilled him more.
Eirenhold, once a bulwark of the old noble orders, was gone. And with it, the last major check on Elena's ambition.
He poured a glass of blackroot wine and leaned back in his chair. His breath fogged in the cold.
"She lost the city," he said aloud.
Opposite him sat a visiting advisor from Astrid's court, who said nothing.
Ragnald narrowed his eyes. "Helena was too proud. She should have anticipated the tunnels being compromised. Her maps were always open to too many visitors during her grand councils."
"But the speed—" the advisor began.
"No," Ragnald interrupted. "The speed was irrelevant. This was not just conquest. It was surgical. Personal. Elena didn't want her lands. She wanted Helena disgraced."
He stared into the fire, his mind working through the implications. Eirenhold had served as a neutral buffer between five other realms — its fall meant territorial aggression would rise, border disputes ignite.
"Alexios will take her in," he said eventually. "And when he does, Elena will see it as provocation."
"What of us?"
Ragnald's face hardened.
"We stay out—for now. But make no mistake." He turned toward the fire again. "The wars of ambition have begun. And no mountain is high enough to keep their smoke from reaching us."
Far south, beyond the plains and forest, Amir lay in a shaded courtyard of Ravak, wrapped in linen, sweating from poison's touch.
Even through fevered visions, Helena's name echoed in his skull like a war drum. The message had come while his healers were replacing his bandages. One of his captains read it aloud while dabbing salve across a blistering rash at his side.
"Helena's banner was torn down," the man had said quietly. "The city is lost. Elena's forces are in full occupation. There are rumors she now claims herself the rightful ruler of the Eastern Lowlands."
Amir had barely stirred. His vision blurred. But his voice, cracked and raw, rasped:
"Helena… gone?"
He had bled with her once. Defended her engineers when other kingdoms mocked them. Shared old soldier's jokes around her fires. Now, that fire had been snuffed.
His hand twitched, wanting to draw his scimitar even in bed. The weight of his failure pressed into him.
He had sent no reinforcements. No scouts. No warning.
He had been too focused on Thalia's marriage, on their joint reforms, on consolidating irrigation routes and defense plans.
He looked to the carved ceiling above, where golden falcons of his house flew beside engraved suns.
"Helena deserved better," he said. "We all do."
His lieutenant, standing nearby, bowed his head. "She now fights with Alexios."
Amir managed a ghost of a smile. "Then she still fights."
He reached for a piece of charcoal with shaking fingers and scratched a few crooked lines on a scroll.
"To Alexios. Offer my support. If I fall… let my army march under the banner of Helion. I trust no other with the flame."