Chapter 1
Chapter 1
"Before I knew it was you, who had been saved. I could never imagine to finally meet you. Till then, it was difficult for me to share this with you. Before you've become what you are, a Grenadier fighting for the right cause. I admire your strength and your soul. It reminds me of them. The ones who saved me, despite being trapped for many decades or more. From the death of a Saint. From a war after another. Erased from the waters. Remains you a saved one."
Would you like to hear the story of Maynen and Maeve?"
I THY KINGDOM COME
I THY KINGDOM COME
The Kingdom of Bohemia sixteen fifty-seven
When the wounds of the Thirty Years' War had only just begun to scar over, the land of Silesia remained restless, its soil rich with coal, its people burdened with whispers.
There resided the Palefer family.
They were spoken of in lowered voices, never in daylight, and never without crossing oneself. The Palefers were the wealthiest family in all of Silesia, their fortune said to be carved from the earth itself. Sons of miners, the elders would say, yet no mine had ever yielded such unnatural prosperity. Gold came too easily to them. Silver clung to their name like frost.
And so, as all unexplained wealth demands, rumors took root.
The villagers spoke of a hidden order within the castle walls, the Kult des Reichtums, a secretive circle said to commune with forces forbidden by both Church and Crown. Some claimed the Palefers were devotees of "Dämonische Zauberei", or the Darkened-Vow Sorcery which practices condemned not only by priests, but by imperial law. Others whispered of something older than sin, older even than Rome.
They feared the Strzyga.
In Silesian folklore, the Strzyga was no mere phantom. She was a devourer of souls, a creature born of those said to possess two souls, one human, one damned. It was believed such children were marked from birth, destined either for death or for transformation into something unholy. The elders warned that these beings did not always remain buried.
And worse still, they could be summoned.
It was said the Palefer castle had become a place of such summoning.
These fears, once scattered like ash, were given dreadful shape on a winter's morning when a body was discovered within the Grand Szigis Temple. A common man of Cosel, known to be neither wealthy nor wicked, lay upon the cold stone floor. His skin was pale beyond death, drained not only of blood but of all warmth, and his eyes, once brown had faded into a lifeless white.
No wound marked him.
No struggle had been heard.
The priests called it divine judgment. The townsfolk called it something else.
From that day forward, no one walked alone beyond the outskirts of Cosel after dusk. Mothers kept their children indoors. Travelers refused the road. And every misfortune, every sickness, every disappearance was traced, inevitably, back to the castle on the hill.
Yet within those walls, life told a different story.
There, under vaulted ceilings and candlelit corridors, knowledge, not fear, was pursued.
A man named Maynen Anselm had arrived in Cosel under noble invitation. A scholar of considerable promise, he had studied at the esteemed University of Königsberg. His reputation in the fields of history and antiquities had reached even the ears of Duke Aurel Palefer, lord of the castle and master of Cosel's lands.
The Duke had summoned him for a singular purpose: to document the history of Cosel and its surrounding territories, a task both honorable and perilous in a land where truth was often buried deeper than coal.
Maynen arrived under escort, greeted not with warmth, but with a formality that bordered on coldness. The castle itself seemed reluctant to house him, its stone halls echoing too loudly, its servants speaking too softly.
Still, he accepted his chamber. He followed the rules. He bowed where expected.
And he observed.
By day, he worked diligently, transcribing records, studying relics, and submitting his findings to his superiors. His dedication did not go unnoticed. Within months, several of his works earned commendation, even praise from the Duke himself.
But by night, Maynen pursued a different inquiry.
One not written in ink.
One whispered in fear.
He listened to the servants. He studied the patterns of movement within the castle. He noted which doors remained locked, which corridors fell silent, and which names were never spoken. Beyond the duties assigned to him, he began to piece together a second history, one that did not belong in official records.
A history of deaths without cause.
Of villagers taken in the night.
Of something that fed not on flesh, but on the soul itself. And as winter deepened, Maynen Anselm came to understand a truth far more dangerous than rumor:
The people of Cosel were not wrong to fear the castle.
They were wrong about why.
Decades passed.
What had once been whispers in the border town of Cosel had not vanished with time, it had spread, adapted, and taken root in a new world. The Palefer name, once feared in the shadowed hills of Silesia, had risen beyond provincial power and reshaped itself into something far greater.
At the heart of this transformation stood the city of Paleferus, a state whose origins were as obscure as the wealth that sustained it. Marble towers replaced stone keeps, and law replaced rumor, yet beneath its polished grandeur lay the same unease that once haunted Cosel.
The Palefer family still ruled.
To the public, they were statesmen, patrons of learning, architects of prosperity. To the citizens, who called themselves Pacificans, they were the silent foundation of everything: trade, governance, even faith. And as before, there was one question no one could answer:
Was the Palefer fortune built upon power ...
or sacrifice?