Six years ago nobody was ready.
The Nine Kingdoms on the western coast had been squabbling with each other for decades. Border skirmishes, trade disputes, the usual. Small wars between small men with small ambitions. Nobody had fought a real war in living memory. Nobody had needed to.
Then the longboats came.
Thirty of them. Fifty soldiers to a boat, give or take. Fifteen hundred fighters, total. That’s all. You’d think fifteen hundred soldiers landing on a continent full of kingdoms would be a joke, a raid at best, pirates looking for an easy score. You’d be wrong.
The invaders are — something. Nobody’s quite agreed on what. They’re built slight, five and a half feet, slender. Men and women both, and it can be hard to tell which is which at a distance. Their skin is white as milk. Their hair too, worn long and tied back. And their eyes. Steel blue, with pupils that sit too large in the iris. Elfin, some people said. Not quite right, others said. Whatever they are, they are not soft, and they are not afraid of you.
They didn’t sneak in. Every village, every city gate, every garrison, they made the same offer, loud and clear: Swear loyalty to the Legate’s master, and you get protection, trade licenses, land after the war’s won. Fight in our armies and earn title. Keep your shop, keep your trade, keep your head. The only thing you give up is religion. That’s all they asked. Early on, most people told them to go to hell.
Those people got defeated, then enslaved. The lesson spread fast.
The first year the invaders swept through like fire in dry grass. The Nine Kingdoms weren’t unified, weren’t ready, and they paid for it. But by the second and third years, things tightened up. The kingdoms found their footing. There were real victories. For a while it looked winnable. Then the fourth year the tide shifted again. By the fifth it was a foregone conclusion. And now, in the sixth year, there are only a few holdouts, ragged pockets in the far north and the far south, and everyone knows it’s a matter of time.
Here’s the strange part: there never seemed to be more of them. Fifteen hundred came ashore in those first boats, and as near as anyone can tell, fifteen hundred is still all there are. Their armies are built out of the people they’ve conquered. Locals who swore loyalty, desperate men chasing land grants, soldiers who had no other choice. The invaders lead. Everyone else fights their war for them.
That ought to make you feel something. It should.
The occupation is — it’s like living under a boot. Worse than a boot. They’ve turned neighbors against each other. Big coin for turning in someone who broke their oath. Big coin for turning in someone who helped the resistance, sheltered the wrong person, said the wrong thing. And if they catch someone who swore loyalty and then broke it, they don’t just kill them. They make an example. Public. Slow. The kind of thing you don’t forget and they don’t want you to forget.
And it’s not just the occupation. Since the invaders came, the land itself has gone wrong. Beasts that used to keep to the deep woods are on the roads now. Bolder, meaner, like something’s calling them out. Travelers vanish between towns that are two days apart. Neighbors who swore the oath and kept their heads down are disappearing anyway, quietly, no explanation, no one asks. The people who gave in to survive are finding out that giving in doesn’t mean you’re safe. It just means you’re useful until you’re not.
There are rumors, too. Darker stuff. About what the Silent Legate actually wants from the people who swore loyalty. About the magic the invaders use. About the dead that don’t always stay dead on their battlefields. Nobody wants to say it plainly, but everyone’s thinking it.
This is where you come in.
You’re going to play people who fought against the invaders. Soldiers, sellswords, hedge knights, doesn’t matter. What matters is that someone gave your names to the occupation. Maybe a neighbor looking for bounty money. Maybe someone who broke under questioning. Doesn’t matter how. Your names are on a list now, and the occupation’s bounty hunters are good at their work. You’ve been sheltered by people who are risking everything to hide you. That debt has a limit.
Here’s the conceit you’re buying into: you’ve decided that running isn’t enough. Hiding isn’t enough. The only way to save the people you love, the people still alive, still wearing chains, still hoping someone is coming back for them, is to find out what you’re actually fighting. And that means going east.
You’ve been collecting what you can. Journals. Your own, and others’. Documenting the war, the invaders’ tactics, the things you’ve seen that don’t make sense. Pendants and tokens taken from dead invaders. Strange items no one can identify. Anything that might help someone smarter than you figure out what these people are and where they came from.
The destination is Ix. East over the mountains, across the plains beyond, through the deep forests, over yet more mountains, all the way to the far edge of the continent. The Grand Wizards of Ix are said to possess knowledge older than the Nine Kingdoms, older than anyone living remembers. If anyone can look at what you’re carrying and tell you what you’re fighting and how to kill it, it’s them.
That’s the plan. Get through the passes. Get to Ix. Get answers. Come back with something that can actually win this war.
Nobody sent you. There’s no king left to give the order, no general marshaling a secret resistance. You’re doing this because you looked at what’s happening and decided someone has to, and no one else is going to.
We pick up with you in a cellar beneath a sympathizer’s shop, waiting on dark. When the sun goes down you move. Out the back, through the alleys, past the patrols, and into the hills before dawn. The people hiding you have risked everything, and every hour you stay is another hour they might get caught. You don’t get to say goodbye properly. You don’t get to thank them enough. You just go.