The scent of smoke lingered long after the flames had died.
Kaelion Valen, last prince of the Valen Empire, stood alone beneath a bleeding sky, his once-pristine ceremonial robes scorched and ragged. The palace walls that had once echoed with hymns and flattery now crumbled around him, silent witnesses to a betrayal centuries in the making.
They had come not with armies, but with lies.
One by one, the nobles of the Grand Council turned against the throne they had sworn to protect. Accusations of tyranny, blood rituals, and corruption spread like wildfire most of them fabricated, the rest… inconvenient truths better left buried. Kaelion was only seventeen, yet the burden of a dying empire had been thrust upon his shoulders when his father was poisoned during a diplomatic banquet.
They didn't kill him in the battle. No. They sentenced him to something far crueler.
"Sign the decree," Duke Maeron had said, his voice calm, his blade drawn. "Confess to treason. Accept the blame. Die a martyr, and we'll let your people live."
Kaelion remembered the silence that followed. The tremble in his hand as he signed the false confession. The mockery in their eyes. The promise they broke hours later when they torched the capital anyway.
And then… death. Not heroic. Not even tragic.
Just ash, blood, and silence.
But death was not the end.
The world returned in fragments.
Pain bloomed in his chest. Air sharp and cold rushed into unfamiliar lungs. He gasped, eyes shooting open, only to be blinded by sunlight.
Stone walls. Dust. Screaming. A whip crack.
"Get up, boy!"
A kick to the ribs followed. Kael curled instinctively, then froze.
That voice… it wasn't the drawl of a noble, or the polished accent of courtly speech. It was coarse. Uneducated. Familiar in its cruelty, but not in identity.
He looked at his hands.
Calloused. Dirtied. Small.
This wasn't his body.
Another blow came. He did not feel rage or fear. Only confusion… and a creeping, overwhelming awareness.
I died. And yet… I'm here.
Memories rushed in like a broken dam names, faces, battles, betrayals all flashing behind his eyes. But mixed with them were fragments not his own. Memories of this body's life: a street rat named Kael, born to a brothel maid and a drunken knight. Beaten, starved, forgotten.
And now… something new. A whisper in the back of his mind, not a memory, but a presence.
We remember you.
The old magic.
The forbidden language of the Valen kings.
It had survived.
Kael coughed blood onto the stone floor, and smiled through cracked lips.
The gods had thrown him into the gutter, stripped him of his name, his title, his bloodline.
But they had also given him something far more dangerous.
Anonymity.
He was no longer a prince. No longer a threat.
And in a kingdom that feared the forgotten arts of the empire they destroyed… a ghost could do far more than a king ever could.
He would rise. Not as royalty, but as ruin.
And when the crows circled the royal palace once more, they would feast on the bones of those who laughed at his fall.