You were born into a noble house that had already begun to crumble long before your first breath. Whatever power your lineage once held had long since eroded into memory and faded stories told by aging retainers. By the time your name passed to you, it carried little more than a hollow echo of former prestige. The lands were gone, sold or seized to settle debts that were never yours. The banners of your family hung folded and forgotten, and the great halls of your ancestry stood empty.

When your father died, he left you nothing of comfort. No estate, no fortune, no allies waiting to guide your future. Only a suit of dark, weathered armor and a well-balanced sword remained—relics of a time when your house still mattered. He passed them to you not with promises of restoration, but with silent expectation. If your family’s name was ever to mean anything again, it would be by your own hand.

With nothing left to bind you to the ruins of your past, you chose the road. You became a wandering knight with no banner but your own, traveling from settlement to settlement in search of purpose, coin, and whatever fragments of glory might still be earned in a world that had largely forgotten your bloodline. The weight of your armor became familiar. The rhythm of travel, the uncertainty of each new horizon, and the constant presence of your blade at your side formed the only life you knew. Each small victory, each completed contract, each battle survived was another step away from obscurity.

On one such journey, beneath the warmth of a bright afternoon sun, you followed a quiet road that cut through open countryside. Wildflowers swayed in the breeze, and for a moment the world seemed unusually calm. That calm broke the instant you noticed movement ahead. A lone woman with vivid red hair stood surrounded by armed men—bandits, by the look of their mismatched weapons and predatory stances. There were eight of them, closing in with the confidence of those who believed their prey already cornered.

You did not hesitate. Whatever doubts or calculations might have stayed another traveler never found purchase in your mind. You stepped forward, drew your blade, and placed yourself between them and the woman. Steel met steel almost immediately. The fight was brutal and uneven, numbers pressing against you from every direction. Yet you held your ground. Training, instinct, and sheer refusal to fall carried you through the chaos of clashing weapons and shouted threats.

One by one, the bandits fell. Each victory came at a cost. Blows slipped past your guard, armor dented under repeated strikes, and blood began to soak into the seams of your worn equipment. Pain threatened to slow your movements, but you forced yourself forward regardless. You continued fighting long past the point where retreat would have been reasonable. The world narrowed to the arc of your blade, the weight of your armor, and the necessity of surviving each passing second.

A final strike ended the last of them, but not before a blade found its mark. The wound was deep enough to send a jolt through your entire body. Even so, you did not allow yourself to collapse until the final enemy lay motionless at your feet. Only then, with the immediate danger gone and your purpose fulfilled, did the strength leave your limbs. Your vision blurred. The ground rushed up to meet you. Darkness followed.

When consciousness finally returned, it came slowly and heavily. Instead of cold earth or the open sky, you felt the softness of a bed beneath you. The scent of clean linen and faint unfamiliar perfume filled the air. Your body was wrapped in careful bandages, each movement reminding you of injuries that had not been allowed to claim you. The ceiling above you was unfamiliar—high, ornate, belonging not to a roadside inn but to a place of wealth and deliberate design.

You lay within a spacious, well-appointed chamber somewhere inside a grand manor you did not recognize, alive when you had every reason not to be, and with no clear memory of how you had been brought here at all.