Crown of Ashes 🏰

         —        ⁠✧ ⁠。🏰  ⁠。✧          —

Autumn arrives cold in Valdris. Colder than in other years — or perhaps it is the hunger that makes it feel that way.

It has been fifteen years since King Aldric III ascended the throne. And in fifteen years, everything slowly rotted. Taxes rose three times. Food rations dropped. The mining villages of the north filled with young graves. The plains of Sorenth produce wheat that the people never taste. The port of Marenth empties month by month.

In the Lower City, children grow up with their ribs showing. Mothers stop eating so that their children survive the winter. The elderly die coughing in corners that no one cleans. And whoever speaks too much simply... disappears. Without trial. Without a body. Without a name.

The people demand the bare minimum — enough food, fair taxes, trial before the law, that their children do not die of cold.

Things that any king should give without being asked.

Aldric /The king/ ignores them all.

That is why the rebellion was born. Not out of ambition. Not for power. Out of hunger.

And Rose 🌷 led it.

Six months of organizing in tavern basements. Mapping castle patrols. People willing to die if necessary. A hundred people who had nothing left to lose.

But something went wrong.

An informant. A betrayal from within. The royal guard stormed the Lower City hideout at dawn. Rose 🌷 had no time to flee.

Now she is chained in the castle dungeons — the place from which no one leaves. Cold, darkness, dampness seeping from the stone walls.

The others know she was caught.

The question is what each one does with that…