Chapter 0: Prologue

Translator: Willia

It is but one answer. To the question of why one must live.

As my answer to why one must live, I intend to end my own life.

My name and title are Valery, 14th Prince of House Vǫlsungr. Yet until I turned twenty, I grew up not knowing who I was, raised as a bastard of House Winsloe.

The reason lay in the kingdom's method of Royal Succession. Princes were torn from their mothers' arms the moment they were born and raised without knowing who they were; only when the King died did they learn the truth and enter the competition among brothers.

Put plainly, one had to kill every other brother and nephew, survive alone, and inherit the throne. Age was of no consequence. They all had to die. Or else I myself would die.

Call it peculiar, call it barbaric, this method of succession endured because the customs of the tribal era still clung to the kingdom. To begin with, the kingdom was one founded only some sixty years earlier through the conquest of this land of Astria.

The original inhabitants of this place, now the conquered people, the Astrians, called us Nordics.

The Royal Succession was at once the most solemn of laws and a kind of religious rite. House Vǫlsungr was the last bloodline of the Dead Gods, and the people believed that when a single prince survived to become King, those who swore loyalty to that King would go to Heaven.

Only, before the Royal Succession began, princes enjoyed special protection; once the King had died, they did not.

When the King died, lords and nobles, in order to set the prince they supported on the throne, would not shrink from any manner of plot, assassination, or even open war. Royal Succession sounded well enough in name, but in truth the whole realm was cast into a struggle for power.

And it was far from a fair contest. Some princes sensed their identities early and gathered forces in advance, while others were simply too young to compete at all.

In my case, on the day the King died, the man I had believed to be my father, Count Aethelred, at once set about killing me. The reason was that the Count's liege lord supported a different prince.

That was when I knew. That I was a prince. And that House Vǫlsungr carried a trait passed down only through the father's line.

Newborn princes had light shining from their eyes. In time that light faded, yet they said that with something like ink, or by peering closely in a very dark place, the faint glimmer could still be found lingering.

The world regarded this trait as sacred. Some said the men of House Vǫlsungr were born with swords set into their eyes; others called the light the Stars of Dawn.

But sacred or not, it was not the sort of thing that helped one survive. On the contrary, it was something that had to be hidden with the greatest care.

Having barely escaped from House Winsloe, there was nothing I did not turn my hand to. Cold and hunger were pains beyond compare, and they made of me a man capable of anything. I begged. For a single piece of bread, I killed a man.

When I joined the Thieves' Guild things grew a little easier, but there was a quota. Coin that had to be handed up to the guild, whether from pockets picked or from outright theft. Fail to fill the quota, and a finger was cut off.

Out of pure kindness I helped a few of the fellows, and for that I lost two fingers. The little and ring fingers of my left hand.

Perhaps six months passed. When the shadows of night no longer frightened me and fit me like a well-tailored garment, I took my first assassination job.

A dog-keeper at a pit-fighting ring, skimming the stakes, was it? After killing him, for disposal I hacked the corpse into pieces and threw them to the abused dogs.

Apart from him, usurers, corrupt priests, traitors within the guild, incompetent pimps, deviant mages, and so on; I killed all manner of men.

If working as an assassin taught me anything, it was, first, that there was no man in this world who could not be killed; and second, that to measure men on a scale of good and evil was meaningless.

But the guild chose its marks purely on business grounds. That was why their limits were so sharply drawn. However they lorded it over the back alleys as objects of terror, in the world of giants they could hardly escape being mere rats.

Three years after the King's death, the civil war was steadily intensifying. When some prince's army seized a city and set to butchering its people without distinction, there was nothing the guild could do. Nothing, that is, but be trampled to death beneath soldiers' boots.

The guild killed men for business, but the true giants needed no particular reason to kill.

Then do I need a reason either? What is there that I cannot do? I, too, am a prince.

I assassinated that prince, the one who had seized the city, my own brother, forthwith. Then, before the soldiers, I said:

'I am the 14th Prince, Valery. Choose: kill me and offer my head to another prince, or follow me.'

I told them to choose, but in truth they had no choice. It took a rare sort of nerve to lay hands on a prince directly, and more than that, the only thing that could replace a prince one had followed was another prince.

I gave the order at once to seize the guild master and his officers and hang them by the neck. The wealth they had amassed, and the flow of the city's finances, I redirected so that not a drop was lost, and every stream ran to me alone.

With that, the army could be maintained for some time without resorting to plunder.

What I did next was to purge the nobles beneath me. Those who had followed the previous prince could not be trusted.

Their lands I stripped from them, and I redistributed the fiefs, above all to the capable field commanders and knights.

Once the army was wholly in my grasp, I began to enlarge my forces. The strong, I bent by seizing their families as hostages; the worldly, I won over with bribes; the honorable, I ruined by slandering their names.

It was dressed up in the wrapping of a War of Royal Succession, but in truth it was nothing more than robbery and extortion. In such matters I had a keener hand than anyone.

And in battle I never lost. I defeated forces many times my own. This was because I knew that if one rushed the enemy into haste, deceived him, and sowed division within his ranks, great numbers ceased to be an advantage and instead became a burden.

When I took the County of Winsloe, where I had been raised, first I had the family cruelly executed before Count Aethelred's eyes, and then, at the very last, I had the Count himself drawn and quartered.

Astonishingly, I felt nothing. I had thought it would be more cathartic.

From then on I moved ever more freely. Whatever I could lay hands on, I used. Money, honor, rank, desire, love, friendship, anything.

I used them for all they were worth, then cast them aside when they were no longer needed. Whoever stood in my way, however many they were, I killed them all. To flush out a single nephew, I burned an entire city to ashes.

Some said no man could ever do such things; others said it was an honor to stay loyal to me to the last.

Every one of those who followed me became wretched, and every one of the women who passed through my life was left in misery.

And yet I became a being ever harder to defy. When at last I had killed every brother, every nephew, the people called me this: 'The Heartless Valery'.

Tomorrow was the Coronation. Yet even on the eve of the Coronation, the royal castle was filled with nothing but a heavy silence. That was because noble and lowborn alike feared me all the same.

The King's bedchamber, without the common tapestries, without a single ornament, was spare to the point of excess. No, from the outset it resembled less a King's bedchamber than a bleak barracks.

The heavy curtains left the interior dark. Between them, sharply sliced shafts of sunlight slipped through. Red. The setting sun was crossing over my toes.

People cradle something called hope in order to live on toward tomorrow. One such hope was the belief that the King would lead them into Heaven.

But alas, I have no hope. Now that the royal bloodline had been wholly severed, only one thing held meaning for me.

I took in my hand the sacred sword of the royal house, the one in which the legend of a slain dragon lingered. A sword by the name of Gramr, meaning Wrath.

I drew the blade and studied its edge. A thing a hundred years old, yet the edge stood as keen as new. The red of the setting sun ran along the blade and gathered at its tip into a single drop.

I set the hilt against a corner of the floor, placed my throat to the point, and without hesitation bore my weight down upon it.

To end the royal bloodline with my own hand. For that, indeed, was my wrath, and my answer, toward the matter of living.

Prologue – One Answer.