On the star of Velekam, the small eye of the world god known as the continent Vinstraga, the outskirts of the capital of the Archduchy, Strosstadt in Strossvald, a young woman from nowhere tries her best to sail the sea of fates in a place most unfamiliar to her.

Challenged to fight when wreathed in weakness, battle refuses to wait for her strength to return. There is no path but to seek victory- and insist to herself of the inevitability of that war’s conclusion. The stakes are everything- if she cannot fight and win for what she wishes, then how else can she take her dreams?

An unspoken curse of judgment upon humanity from its God, if true freedom can only be found in conquest.

Or is living so simply dressing oneself in chains?

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You are Anya Nowicki. That name was all you were given from the one who had brought you into this world- and you would have discarded it in a moment if those most precious to you did not find a hundred times more value in it than you ever had. You were demanded, commanded, even if by none but yourself, to take that name and make it worthy of having been saved by the man who in a righteous world should have been the greatest legend in history.

That sort of lofty aspiration was easy to latch onto when you were young, and easy to let slip away over the years as you grew no closer to that aspiration. Yet it had still been in your heart when the days came that the ruler of this land and others had no choice but to recognize your deeds.

Should you be proud, you had to wonder, or was that not nearly enough?

That line of thinking was grandiose for where you were. Not a smoldering battlefield…well, perhaps one of sorts. Your cooking had produced an awful lot of smoke.

You were in the midst of the first of three…duels? Ostensibly for the hand of your boyfriend, Magnus Edelschwert, but as far as you were concerned, this wasn’t actually going to factor into any decision by a man like him. This series of duels was for you- and your opponent, one Yuliana Sanmorza. You remembered her name for a flash before correcting your recollection of her name back to <span class="mu-i">Mouthy Cunt</span>.

The first match had been one of cookery. The other’s choice, of course, but it was in an art you knew nothing of. You refused to forfeit whatsoever, even if you already knew your chances of winning weren’t fantastic, and the silver haired bitch had meandered by you to mouth off again.

She knew nothing of what you were, what you’d done, what you would become, so her insults were meaningless…but you still entertained yourself with the image of giving her the good old Dustlands medicine for the terrible sickness of wagging the mouth freely without knowing whether you had a glass jaw. It was clearly an ailment that had festered long without treatment.

Not yet, though. Her time would come. Nobody could dodge it forever- you knew that well enough.