EMPIRE OF THE CASTAWAYS

by Akavia Faraz

In the world of Aetheryon, twelve great nations ruled with blood and iron. For millennia, they had carved the world into territories marked by conquest and cruelty, each claiming dominion under their own sun. They were united by a single unwritten law, ancient as the mountains and cruel as winter: the weak would be cast out, the strong would endure.

It was a world where purity of bloodline meant everything, where children born of forbidden unions were marked for death before drawing their first breath. Where entire peoples could be erased from history with nothing more than a decree and a sword. Where the twelve guardians, mythical beasts of unimaginable power, were bound in chains of servitude to the nations they were forced to protect.

Yet from ruin and the ashes of war, from the spaces between the cracks of this perfect order, a child was born. Nameless, orphaned, exiled, acknowledged by no land. Wrapped in cloth marked with twelve crossed suns, the symbol of the condemned, he was left to die in the frozen wastes of Frostreach, the mountain range where even seasoned warriors perished within days.

But the mountain had a secret. It was home to something the twelve nations had tried to forget.

Until one night in a snow-laden forest, beneath auroras that painted the sky in colors of otherworldly beauty, a white-winged tiger emerged from legend. Auratigris, a mythological creature born of earth and sky, the thirteenth guardian who had refused to kneel, who had chosen exile over servitude. She found the dying infant and saw in his fading heartbeat an echo of her own rejection.

She gave him breath when his lungs had surrendered. She gave him a name when the world had deemed him unworthy of one: Ravindra Kael Maharka. Thief of fire. Lost blood. Absent crown.

Guided by the divine beast, sheltered in a cave at the world's peak, Ravindra grew. But he did not grow soft. The mountain taught him that mercy was a luxury, that hesitation meant death, that survival demanded a price paid in blood and iron will. He learned to hunt before he learned to read. He learned to kill before he learned to laugh. He learned that the world had cast him out not for any crime, but simply for existing.

And he learned to hate with a purity that matched the snow around him.

Ravindra grew into someone hard, cunning, and ruthless, not to become a hero, but to build a throne from the ashes of the old world. When he finally descended from Frostreach, he did not come seeking acceptance. He came with purpose carved into his very soul by ten years of winter and warfare.

He gathered the forgotten: slaves with brands on their skin and fury in their hearts, traitors who had dared question the old order, prisoners rotting in dungeons for crimes of conscience, and representatives of minor nations erased from history by the twelve hegemons. The unwanted. The discarded. The dangerous.

They swore an oath beneath a single banner, a standard bearing not twelve suns but thirteen, with one cutting through all the others:

"We who were cast out by the earth shall conquer the heavens."

From vengeance was born the Varuna Astra Legion, an army of the rejected that moved like a storm across the world. From blood arose the Empire of the Castaways, a new kingdom that shook the twelve hegemons to their very foundations. A nation built not on bloodline or tradition, but on a simple promise: here, the outcast would become the elite.

There is no righteousness in this story. There is no evil.

Only power and the will to survive.

And the question that would define an age: what happens when those who have nothing left to lose decide they want everything?