CROWNED BY BLOOD
The document was old, its edges crumbling at the slightest touch. The ink had faded to a rusty brown dried blood. As my eyes scanned the names hidden within its folds, I saw something.
Lord Aldric.
The name appeared again and again, echoing through centuries of documentation, repeated under aliases, masked beneath false identities and forged alliances that stretched back to the founding of our oldest kingdoms. He had been orchestrating this war long before I drew my first breath. He had moved the pieces of this grand game like a master tactician, patient as stone, weaving through centuries of conflict like a spider at the center of an impossibly complex web always in the shadows, always uns