The Price of Power Chapter 0 - The Story So Far...
- John Drake
- 2 hours ago
- 8 min read
The Ironbound Empire's shadow stretched across continents, its foundations built upon chains and suffering. In a world of institutionalized slavery and oppression, six souls would find their paths converging toward a shared purpose: The Ironbound Empire's destruction.
Rashon Stonebreaker's tragedy began in the Cloudspire Peaks, where his Goliath tribe had lived for generations. The empire's forces arrived without warning, their slave legions pouring through mountain passes like a tide of iron. As the youngest warrior of his clan, Rashon fought desperately alongside his kin, but their stone-like flesh and ancestral strength proved insufficient against the empire's overwhelming numbers and blood sorcery. When defeat became inevitable, the village elders performed their most desperate ritual—binding the souls of the entire tribe to Rashon's body, granting him their combined strength at the cost of their lives. The ritual left him standing alone among corpses, his crimson eyes burning with newfound power and unbearable grief. Imperial soldiers fitted him with an obedience collar, its blood magic ensuring his compliance through precisely calibrated pain and pleasure responses. His first act as a slave was to burn the bodies of everyone he had ever loved, the smoke carrying their ashes toward peaks he would never see again.
While Rashon lost his freedom in the mountains, in the empire's iron heart of Ferronatus, Acalia Swiftwing had never known freedom in the first place. Born into slavery, she was sold as an infant to House Nightweave, the city's premier blood sorcery dynasty. The dark elves raised her alongside dozens of other slave children, training them for various forms of service. When Acalia reached sexual maturity, she caught the eye of one of the noble family’s son, Sylvus Nightweave. The blood mage claimed her as his personal property, and he used her body nightly, forcing his cock into every hole while she lay bound to his bed. Her repeated escape attempts only earned her more creative punishments—whippings that left her back a map of scars, days spent hanging by her wrists in his chambers, forced to service him and his guests at elaborate parties where she crawled naked between nobles who treated her as furniture.
Her defiance finally crossed a line when she drew his eldest sister’s Carmilla’s attention. Acalia never knew what she did to annoy the other woman, but the beautiful blood mage decided to make an example of her. In House Nightweave's courtyard, before an audience of slaves forced to watch, Carmilla used her blood magic and blades to slowly sever Acalia's wings at the base. The procedure took hours, Carmilla's magic keeping Acalia conscious as muscle and bone separated, her blue tiefling blood pooling beneath her. The massive scars across her shoulder blades would never fully heal, permanent reminders of what her slavers had taken from her. Sylvus, finding his damaged toy less appealing without her wings, sold her to the gladiatorial pits, assuming she would die.
The arena became Acalia's brutal education in violence. She learned to channel her rage into deadly skill, her natural agility compensating for her missing wings. She killed her first opponent within a month—a desperate woman who begged for mercy before Acalia drove a blade through her throat. The crowd's roar taught her that their entertainment mattered more than any slave's life. She learned to fight with sword and dagger simultaneously, her style growing more vicious with each match. Within two years, she had become one of the pit's most successful fighters, her blue skin and horns making her instantly recognizable to the bloodthirsty crowds.
Across the empire's vast territories, other stories of resistance were taking shape. Vashara Smokesong had been raised in an elven forest that was one of very few places within the Empire’s nominal borders still free of Imperial control. For nearly two centuries, her family had trained her in their ancestral arts—archery, spirit magic, and the patient resistance that had kept their people free. In the last decades since the newest rulers of the Iron Empire rose to power, imperial incursions into her forest have intensified, and are threatening to overwhelm their borders. Desperate and with little choice left, the elders of her clan selected several elves—including Vashara—for a critical mission. They would spread out and infiltrate the empire's territory, working to destabilize it from within before it could mount a full invasion of her homeland. Armed with her ancestral knowledge and her bow, she crossed into enemy territory disguised as a caravan guard… and it was in that caravan that she met Daerreth Emberborn.
The fire genasi had fled Ferronatus years earlier, carrying guilt that would never leave him. He had been an unwanted child abandoned by his parents to the street, leaving him to survive among thieves and orphans. Eventually he fell in with a crew of other young criminals who became the only family he knew… until they were all slaughtered by the civic legion of Ferronatus. He fled the city, knowing execution awaited him if he was discovered.
The fire genasi and the elf found common cause in their hatred of the empire. Their partnership quickly evolved into romance, their bodies intertwining in rented rooms and hidden camps as they planned acts of sabotage. Vashara's deadly precision with her bow complemented Daerreth's skills in stealth and deceptive combat. Together, they travelled around following the trade caravans, using their positions to gather intelligence and occasionally redirect shipments away from imperial forces.
Years earlier, a half-elf named Milaena Dawnbringer faced years of rejection among the elven society she was born into. She finally found her purpose when she joined the temple of the Order of the Sacred Shield, dedicated herself to the goddess Saphyria. Rising quickly through the priesthood’s ranks, she took her final vows, swearing the Oath of Purity that forbade her from ever knowing a man's touch, and she received the crescent moon tattoo on her sword arm marking her as one of Saphyria's sworn defenders.
For decades, she led dawn prayers and protected women who sought sanctuary within the temple's walls… until the Empire came for them. Imperial forces, viewing the sanctuary as a threat to their control, stormed the walls during evening prayers. An elder priestess hid Milaena in the crypts beneath the temple, sealing her inside with ancient wards while the slaughter commenced above. Milaena listened to her sisters' screams as soldiers raped them on the temple's altars before cutting their throats. When she finally emerged hours later, she found the temple transformed into a charnel house. Blood covered every sacred surface, and her sisters' bodies lay twisted in positions of violation and death. The massacre shattered her belief that offering sanctuary alone was enough to combat evil, and Milaena swore she would actively oppose it at any turn from then on.
The half-elf wandered for months before settling in a lawless border town where her healing abilities and protective magic began attracting those in need. There she met Valdis Moonshadow, a young human mage who had fled her own tragedy. Valdis had spent ten years at an Imperial Academy, her farming village having pooled its meager resources to send its most gifted child to study magic. She had excelled in theoretical studies, mastering the manipulation of Aetheric Currents with remarkable skill. But when she returned home to share news of her prestigious posting with the 143rd Iron Legion, she found her village reduced to ash and bones. Some of Iron Lady Seraphina Ashfire's alchemical experiments had been tested there, leaving twisted corpses that barely looked human.
The devastated mage found solace in Milaena's compassion. Over several months, their relationship deepened from comfort to love. Valdis would spend hours with her head in Milaena's lap while the priestess stroked her hair, both women finding peace in each other's presence. Their lovemaking grew passionate and hungry, Valdis's shy inexperience balanced by Milaena's confidence. Together, they began planning ways to undermine the empire that had taken so much from them.
Back in Ferronatus, Acalia's fame in the arena had grown to the point where she was awarded as a prize. After a particularly spectacular victory where she killed three opponents simultaneously, she started being given to slave legionnaires posted in the city… and one night, she was given to Rashon for a night's entertainment. When guards let him into Acalia’s cell, they expected him to use her as countless others had. Instead, Rashon simply sat in the corner, his massive frame threatening but harmless. They spent that first night in silence, but he was sent to her time and time again, and over successive nights, they began to talk. Rashon spoke haltingly about his tribe, while Acalia shared fragments of her life in House Nightweave's compound.
After a week of these encounters, Acalia faced a brutal match against two seasoned gladiators. Though she emerged victorious, she sustained severe injuries, including deep gashes across her abdomen. As she lay bleeding in her quarters that night, blood seeping from dozens of injuries, she asked Rashon to come closer. Acting on instinct she couldn't explain, she did something to the collar, and the metal fell away. For the first time in a decade, Rashon was free. The unstoppable goliath tore through unprepared guards that very night, carrying Acalia’s injured body from the city and fleeing into the wilderness where he slowly nursed her back to health.
Weeks later, starving and desperate, Acalia and Rashon attempted to rob a merchant caravan in the borderlands. They chose poorly—Vashara and Daerreth were among the guards. The confrontation could have ended in bloodshed, but Vashara recognized the desperation in their eyes, the same hollow look she'd seen in so many victims of imperial cruelty. Instead of fighting, the four formed an alliance. They shared their stories around a campfire, each recognizing kindred spirits who had suffered under the empire's iron fist.
When the group eventually reached the caravan’s destination, they soon encountered Milaena and Valdis where the priestess was healing injured travelers. The six recognized something in each other—a shared purpose that transcended their individual vendettas. Milaena's wisdom and healing abilities, Valdis's magical knowledge, Vashara's strategic mind and deadly aim, Daerreth's cunning and connections, Rashon's incredible strength, and Acalia's fierce combat skills combined to form something greater than the sum of their parts. They swore an oath together that they would bring down the Ironbound Empire. Not just for personal vengeance, though each carried plenty of motivation for that, but to ensure no others would ever again be made to suffer as they had. They would free the slaves, topple the Iron Overlords, and tear down the entire structure of oppression that had destroyed so many lives. It was an impossible goal, but for six people who had already survived the impossible, it seemed the only path worth walking.
Working together, the six heroes enjoyed modest success. They raided legion supply caravans and slaver crews, swindled noble Citizens, and destroyed stockpiles of grain and meat that were being sent to the frontlines of the empire’s never-ending conquests. Each time they succeeded, they grew bolder… together, they were capable of anything, it seemed. The empire had created its own enemies through its cruelty, forging them in the fires of suffering until they became weapons sharp enough to cut the chains that bound a continent. Each carried scars both visible and hidden, trauma that would never fully heal, but they had found something worth fighting for in each other—a makeshift family bound not by blood but by shared purpose and mutual protection. The empire's greatest weakness had always been its inability to conceive that the broken could rebuild themselves into something stronger.
Then they found an opportunity. A large number of slaves that were being sent back to Ferronatus had been gathered at the provincial garrison. There would be too many troops there to fight, but they wouldn’t be expecting a raid. Losing so many valuable slaves could be a major blow to Imperial control of a region on the outskirts, and Daerreth had found them a way they could sneak in, so the heroes vowed that they would free those slaves from the garrison and escape with them…
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