They called it the Year Without Crowns.
In the north, the banners of Valaris — blackstone and ink — fell in silence, not to foreign armies, but to something made of silence. Something that did not conquer. It erased.
Five months had passed since the fall of Valaris.
Five months since the city vanished from maps, not with siege or plague, but with a hush that swallowed names, titles, prayers, and kingdoms whole.
The Hollow Star — the name given now to the elf whose face no scribe dared paint — had descended upon the world not as a king, not as a warlord, but as the end of a question no court dared ask aloud again: who rules?
No one claimed Valaris' ruins. No nation sent envoys. The city was not annexed, nor rebuilt. It was left as it was — a scar. A void where memory stuttered and old maps blurred.
Rumors spread faster than armies:
That the Duke of Valaris was dead.
That his son, Luceris, had vanished into the mist.
That the gods themselves had turned their faces from the south.
But the truth, as always, whispered behind locked doors and in the chambers of men who thought themselves untouchable.
Luceris Vaelmont had lived.
But not as a prince.
Not as heir.
He had walked away from titles, from bloodlines, from crowns.
And the world — trembling, faithless, desperate — pretended he no longer existed.
Whispers called him The Silent Heir, The Revenant Duke, The Hollow One Who Watches.
But the Hollow Star did not speak for him.
And neither did the dying kingdom that once bore his bloodline.
In the west, the world moved on,
The King of Avaron declared the borders shut.
The Dukes who once allied with Valaris held emergency councils, pretending they were not next.
The Church of Tharos fractured — some still preached in veiled temples, others fled into the mist, never to be seen again.
Merchants redrew trade routes, bypassing the cursed lands of the north entirely.
But none dared say the war was over.
Because wars that rewrite the world do not end. They change faces.
And now, the world changed under the shadow of the Hollow Star.
In the ashes of the forgotten city, something new had risen.
No banners.
No crown.
No king.
They called it The Hollow Sovereignty — a name given in fear, not ceremony.
From the fractured villages and black hills, the elf Lysanthir and his followers built not a palace, but a citadel of blackstone and silence, crowned by no flag but the empty sky.
They gathered soldiers. Monsters. Betrayers. The exiled and the broken.
They did not preach. They did not declare war.
They simply… prepared.
For what?
No one yet knew.
But the mist stirred again.
And in its wake, old powers whispered from forgotten corners of the world.
Kingdoms cracked behind smiling kings.
And in the east, beyond Avaron's guarded borders, the first horns of rebellion sounded.
The Hollow Star had ended one empire.
And the world waited to see which would fall next.