The world did not collapse by accident, nor by the wrathful punishment of some furious god; it unraveled because the Great Frankish Empire, cornered by an endless war against the Germanic Empire, chose to believe that history could be bent without breaking. The war had endured for generations; the armies were exhausted, the fields had turned barren, and the faith of the people had become nothing more than an empty shell repeated out of habit. It was then that the imperial sages, with the consent of the throne, broke the seals of ancient magic, a power not created to defeat enemies, but to close entire eras and rewrite the order of the world.

  From that act was born the Summoning of the Twelve, heroes torn from other destinies and other stories. The men were like Homeric figures: tall, with bodies forged like bronze, steady gazes, and voices made to command armies; they seemed born for war and glory, natural bearers of legendary swords and eternal oaths. The women, by contrast, possessed an almost divine beauty, not only in body but in presence; they were like goddesses descended into flesh, radiant and magnetic, inspiring devotion and desire, capable of bending wills with a single word or glance. All of them appeared destined to be sung of, to occupy thrones, to become symbols.

  And yet, there was one more.

  One who was simple, silent, without heroic aura or epic brilliance; he inspired neither songs nor reverence, nor did he command respect at first sight. He observed far more than he spoke, and that made him invisible. The emperor and his family never acknowledged him as an equal, and under the pretext of studying the origin of the heroes’ power, they handed him over to hidden hands, far from the court and from official memory.

  That sacrifice proved most useful; great advances were achieved—more precise rituals, enchanted weapons, armies reinforced by fragments of stolen power, and techniques that drew the Empire ever closer to its long-dreamed victory. For years, no one asked about the price, because no one asked the questions—and in truth, no one even remembered that there had been twelve.

  For five years, the simplest one was subjected to the cruelest experiments; stripped of identity, memory, and compassion, opened and rebuilt again and again, exposed to rituals that tore his mind apart and procedures that shattered and reshaped his body. Pain ceased to be a sensation and became a language; reason broke, and what remained of it slowly transformed into pure hatred. In that induced madness, at that threshold where a destroyed mind was deliberately reforged, his vision became simple and absolute: revenge.

  It was then that his true magic awakened. It was neither the mighty magic of the heroes nor the vulgar sorcery of imperial mages; it was a dark and divine magic, born of absolute resentment and a profound understanding of death—a force that did not seek to dominate life, but to deny it entirely. In that instant, the Lich King was born, not as a lord of mindless corpses, but as a sovereign of negation, a being who no longer walked for ambition, glory, or conquest, but moved with a single, inevitable purpose: death.

  “Or at least, that is the official history as it is known.”

  .

  .

  The last war against the Lich King was not, as many wished to believe in the brightly lit halls of our capital, a struggle against a being of blind hatred or a mere aberration without soul or thought. That was our first and gravest mistake, the one that blinded us like sand swept across the tracks of the dunes. We were not fighting an unleashed impulse nor a curse advancing without direction, but a cold, patient mind of profound cunning, as ancient in its calculations as the world we still tried to defend with swords and spears was young.

  For many long years we interpreted—or allowed it to be interpreted—that he was not a thinking being, that his realm was sustained solely by the inertia of death, like a shadow spreading without will across withered grass. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The Lich, whose true name few knew (and those who did paid for it with tongues of eternal ice), thought and analyzed with the precision of an astronomer tracing the orbits of dead stars. He crafted plans that unfolded like Persian carpets woven with threads of betrayal and patience, far superior to our own, which were forged in hurried councils and withered pride.

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  The western kingdoms fell one by one, not always with the blare of trumpets and the clash of open battle, but with the heavy silence of forests felled to feed his cold forges, with the slow abandonment of cities whose towers emptied like hollow shells beneath the pale moon. Exhausted embassies came, crossing the snowbound passes of the Mountains at the End of the World and seas gray as lead, begging for soldiers, for armies, for any hand still able to wield sword or bow. They carried banners torn by wind and blood, rings sealed with ancient oaths, words spoken through tears and the dust of forgotten roads. But their pleas always arrived a little too late, like messengers who find the gates already closed and the torches extinguished.

  The Persian Empire, vast and ancient as the very days of creation, never became involved. It was not out of ignorance, but from a cold and serene calculation. It had no interest in distant nations beyond its sphere of influence, nor in wars that promised neither lasting gain nor stability for its perfumed gardens and silk caravans. While the Frankish Empire collapsed in flame and despair, while the Germanic Empire burned like dry oak struck by lightning, and the lesser kingdoms withered like roses without water, Persia remained unmoved. In silence, it allowed the western states to fade one after another, like lamps whose oil runs dry, watching from its ivory towers and mirrored halls as the balance of the world tilted without ever touching its borders of sand and mountain.

  And yet, the Lich King was not only mind and strategy. To our surprise and horror, he was also lustful in a dark and twisted sense. Within his fortress of obsidian and bone, he gathered a harem of hundreds of beautiful women, taken from fallen courts and ravaged villages. Those he hated most—those who had wielded swords against him or spoken curses in his name—he turned into beasts of burden, chained and yoked like warhorses, forced to drag his funerary chariots beneath the whip of his undead servants. The rest, those who retained some measure of grace or beauty, were allowed a fragile dignity: scant garments of black silk and stolen gold, torn veils that barely concealed their humiliation.

  He had captured the six heroines summoned from other worlds, those we believed lost or dead in earlier campaigns, their names still sung in sorrowful ballads beside the fire. The others he killed, or so we believed. In truth, he kept the other six summoned ones suspended between life and death, only their heads preserved in an eternal horror of un-life, floating in vessels of black crystal, their eyes forever open in a silent scream. Thus spoke the few soldiers who survived the slaughter of the last great battle of our empire, their voices broken and their faces ashen.

  As the weeks passed, we uncovered more truths: they were not prisoners. They were his generals. Not mindless slaves, but beings shattered and reforged with forbidden magic to serve his cause with absolute devotion. Each commanded legions of the undead and of traitors, executed orders with lethal precision, and, according to the reports of scouts who managed to return alive, took part in orgies of flesh and shadow alongside their master, where pleasure and power intertwined in a macabre dance beneath torches of cold fire.

  The army of Persia—our army—committed simple, unforgivable errors born of arrogance. We assumed we were fighting mindless hordes, fragile bodies animated by crude sorcery. We advanced confident in numerical superiority and in a morale we believed unbreakable. There was no flexibility in our lines, no true reading of the battlefield, no adaptation to an enemy who shifted like the desert wind. What we faced was not chaos, but pure strategy, tactics sharpened like a scimitar.

  He knew our strengths and weaknesses as if he had read the books of our own maesters. He used betrayal as his principal weapon: allies we believed steadfast turned to his side in the night; nobles in whom we trusted turned their backs on their own men, hurling their soldiers against the rear of our mighty army. It was all a calculated betrayal, woven over years, like a Persian tapestry where every thread conceals a dagger.

  In a single day, an army of two hundred thousand men—excluding the nearly one hundred thousand of our allies—was lost in a matter of hours. The plains were stained red and black, the banners fell into the mud, and the silence that followed was more terrible than any battle cry. The Lich King had not triumphed through brute force, but by having understood, long before we did, that true war is won in minds, in shadows, and in time.

  I was lost in those dark, overly profound thoughts when I ran into my best friend… and the idiot who had asked for the stupid wish.

  Prince Ciro.

  “—Ardeshir?” he asked, with that cheerful voice only someone who has never paid the consequences of anything can have.

  I approached slowly. I won’t lie—it was refreshing to hear someone remember my real name instead of “Ariadna, Ariadna, Ariadna” repeated like a curse or a prayer.

  He came closer, happy, smiling.

  I smiled too.

  That should have been a bad sign, but Ciro was never quick at recognizing obvious danger.

  We met halfway, walking toward each other.

  “Hello, Ariadna,” said one of the odalisques who attended him, greeting me with a kind smile, completely unaware of the historical drama about to unfold.

  That was when Ciro really looked at me.

  Not as a friend.

  Not as a prince.

  But as someone who, for the first time in his life, actually started to think.

  I saw it in his eyes: his mind began making calculations—slow, clumsy ones, like a drunk scribe trying to add two plus two. His steps shortened. Mine grew faster. His smile froze.

  “Shit…!” he said.