(because I’m a huge believer in fic snippets as worldbuilding, among other things)
No one can recall what the name he was born with was.
We know he was a scholar.
We know he was a good man. We know he was a father.
But the First War was not a good time for good men, or for fathers, children, or anyone.
In the latter days, the Annurian Empire, desperate for more people to fill the ranks began forced conscription. Press gangs grabbed whomever they could from towns, villages, and refugees and shipped them off to man oars in the Annurian fleet, or to march with the infantry.
We know he was taken. That he was put onto a boat sailing away from the only home he’d known, only to see that home burn that same night as the Sorcerer Midrath reached it with his army. We know he watched as his world and his family burned.
The Annurian Navy believed in success through ruthlessness. Through cruelty. Like the other oarsmen, he would have been whipped. Starved by day and worked long into the night to push the ship ever faster to reach the defense of the capital.
Hardship has a way of turning keys that have only sat unused in locks for years. The man was no sorcerer before, but Somehow during that short voyage, between his sorrow and his rage, he tapped into a power he never knew he had before. But he took his time. In his cold anger, he waited. And he prayed.
We do not know which god answered. So many were killed in the First War. But we know one did, for we know what happened when that ship reached the Bay of Storms and the capital of Annur. Fire and fury broke the ship from the inside out, leaving one man who strode across the water, burning every other vessel that came near as he stepped over the tides and into the streets of Annur.
We do not know how many fell on his way to the Palace. We know he took up swords from the fallen, and folded them together with his hands into a massive blade that flew along in his wake. We know that he did not stop until every last High Councilor and every family member of the Emperor was dead. And as he succumbed to the many wounds he took, he drove that blade through the Emperor himself, down through the granite of his throne, and into the earth.
The sword still rests there to this day. Shot through with veins of fire that will never fade. Named Throne-Shatterer by the people later, it remains the final challenge to any who would assume the mantle of Emperor again, and burns any who may attempt to remove it from the throne to ash.
