Mira Thornvale

Lia was once the healer of the White Rose Clan. At seventeen, she watched her people slaughtered by the Bloodclaw Legion. She survived only because she treated an injured enemy soldier—an act that branded her a traitor. To protect that boy, she willingly endured three years of imprisonment in the Bloodclaw camp, never uttering a word.

She believed he had long forgotten her. Yet she never knew that boy was now the Bloodclaw's ruthless warlord—Karl Thorne, codenamed "The Bone General," who swore an oath to "sever all ties to the past with his own hands."


The Wolfbone Promise

The empire no longer bore its old name. It fractured—quietly—into federated provinces governed not by generals, but by healers, farmers, and teachers.


The toxin factories had been razed. The Wolfbone fields burned.


But in the Northwest, far from any capital or council hall, a figure remained.


Every day, he built altars of snow and bone-white petals.


Every dawn, he stood at the water’s edge, humming a lullaby to no one.


The man with storm-gray eyes and a silver cloak that no longer bore insignias.


They said he carried seeds in pouches stitched from old uniform patches.


They said he never spoke unless it was to correct a grafting angle or name a flower’s Latin root.


They said his hands were calloused not from war, but from planting.


But etched into the bone pendant around his neck, barely visible beneath frost:


Chapter 16 – Bloom of the Poisoned Rose