It is whispered among the merchants and the weary travelers who gather in the great square of the capital, that if one seeks the darkest truths of the wasteland, they must look to the steps of the Broken Helm tavern. There, cloaked in the shadows of the overhanging eaves, sits a beggar. He is a man of no known lineage and no recorded past, yet he holds stories in his mind that chill the blood – tales of the deep cold, of breaking minds, and of things only the gods should witness, recounted with a terrifying, impossible precision.
No one knows from whence he came. He did not travel the trade roads, nor was he cast out from the slave pens. One morning, as the pale sun crested the horizon, he simply appeared. He took his place upon the cold stone, setting before him a battered wooden bowl containing nothing but a few worthless coppers and a single, rusted fragment of an old chain.
Yet, the day of his arrival was not chosen by the wind. It was the exact day the sky spat out a stranger from another world. The day Amanda Chen awoke in the deserts of Urtagh. Has any scholar of the city connected the beggar’s sudden presence with the fall of the New Blood? That remains unknown. But those who survive long enough in this brutal land know one unyielding truth: in the world of Urtagh, the loom of fate weaves no blind threads. There are no coincidences.