Before the Seven Kingdoms

Holiana [HOH-LEE-AH-NAH] was born into wealth and privilege. Her family treated those beneath their station with kindness, but her peers did not always follow their example. Many of them believed deeply in social order and made certain that everyone knew where he or she belonged. Holiana refused to see the world in those terms. She saw goodness in every person she met, from a child begging in the streets to a condemned criminal walking toward the gallows. She believed that, given the right opportunity and motive, anyone could choose to sacrifice his or her life to save another.

Her optimism shaped her. Even the smallpox scars that marked her face seemed to brighten rather than dim her presence. Her smile carried the warmth of someone who had chosen hope with intention rather than naivety.

Holiana’s family was forced to evacuate their mountain summer home after a rebel assault. When she heard the call to flee Orudara entirely, she recognized it as the only path she could live with. Her parents refused to join her. They believed the uprising would fade as others had before it. When she persisted, they dismissed her choice and sent her away with nothing. She left them behind and walked into the wild in search of the gathering refugees.

She reached Carimpluni Bay exhausted, hungry, and penniless. Messo noticed her kindness before he noticed anything else. Her quiet courage and her unwavering belief in humanity drew him in. They married months before the ships were completed, and she boarded with him while expecting their first child.

Holiana entered the exodus with hope. Messo entered it with warning. Together, they carried a vision of a world that might yet be better than the one they had fled.

Catenum [KAH-TIN-UHM] fled his home at ten years old. He slipped away from a drunkard father and a mother trapped in prostitution. Survival demanded boldness, and he understood early that a child alone would last only as long as someone found him useful. He sought work aboard the first ship that would take him. By chance, that ship flew no legal colors. It was a pirate vessel.

What might have ruined another child became, for Catenum, the making of him. The ship granted him discipline, danger, and a kind of family that he had never known on land. He learned quickly: knots, sails, tide charts, the arc of a blade, and the weight of command. By sixteen, he captained his own ship. By thirty, he had risen to Master of the Pirate Guild, a position few survived long enough to claim.

Catenum was a man of decisive action. Once he formed a plan, he moved with a clarity that unsettled allies and terrified enemies. His efficiency was legendary. His ruthlessness was measured. The military fleets of Orudara avoided any ship rumored to carry him, not out of superstition but out of hard-learned respect.

Catenum never forgot the boy he had been. He carried a quiet loyalty to the forgotten and the afflicted, especially those caught in plagues, famines, and wars. When such suffering reached Orudara’s coasts, he intervened when others would not. For all his reputation as a pirate, Catenum lived by a simple principle: no one undeserving should suffer for the failures of the powerful.

That principle shaped his decision to aid Messo. It also shaped the future of two continents.

Messo [MAY-SOH] entered the Information Guild long before he understood what the Guild was. At six years old, he was taken from a cash-strapped orphanage in Setreed and apprenticed into the Guild’s lowest ranks. For most children, such an arrangement meant a lifetime of clerical drudgery. For Messo, it became the only home he would remember.

By twenty-two, he had become one of the brightest analytic minds in Orudara. He solved puzzles that had lingered in Guild archives for generations, seeing structure where others saw chaos. Trade patterns, weather cycles, political tremors, dialect changes—to Messo, they all spoke with the same quiet logic. His predictions earned a reputation for precision that bordered on uncanny.

But brilliance was not the only thing that set him apart. Messo possessed a dangerous kindness, a trait the Information Guild regarded as a liability. Where the Guild prized detachment, he felt responsibility. Where they insulated themselves from consequence, he considered the cost to ordinary people. Mission came second to mercy, and the Guild never entirely trusted him for it.

When the first signs of an unprecedented uprising flickered across Orudara, Messo recognized the pattern faster than anyone else—and understood, with a weight the Guild refused to shoulder, exactly how many lives the prediction would claim.

Telimicas [TEH-LIHM-IH-KUS] was born a servant to a family having great political influence. The family he served knew their place in society to be near the top. Throughout his life, he was surrounded by excess: jeweled silks, large palaces, parties, feasts, and waste beyond description. Mostly, he was reminded of his place at the bottom of society. When the family he served was feeling particularly generous, he received the scraps from the feast after the dogs had been fed. Most of the time, however, he would be whipped if he ate any of the leftovers. His allowance was a pittance, barely enough to buy a roll or two to eat throughout the day, so he was compelled to steal enough to keep himself from starving. The servants all looked the other way because they were in the same state he was.

One day, however, the mistress of the house caught him with his illicit food. He struck her over the head with a heavy gold candlestick before she could raise the alarm. Telimicas fled the mansion and the city, but word of his rebellious act spread. Those in the upper echelons of society condemned him and demanded justice. He became a folk hero amongst the servants and even some of the military. Servants, at first just a handful, began disappearing. Some soldiers deserted. What started at first as a trickle was quickly becoming a flood.

And Telimicas was prepared to use that flood to cleanse Orudara, punishing the wealthy and distributing their assets to all. His message was particularly well received by the idle and indolent who had lived a life of relative ease working for homes of families who cared about their servants. An uprising of epic proportions was brewing, and Telimicas would not be able to control it.