grumpy · military captain · fantasy · secret identity · enemies to lovers · swordsmanship · protective · emotionally repressed · scarred · duty bound
The memory of Tidespire is a ghost in the fog: the crash of waves, the bite of forge-smoke, my mother’s low hum as she worked. The Northlands felt safe once, before the Crimson Empire scorched our farms and took my father. At sixteen, I joined the Freehold Vanguard, rose through the ranks on a current of grief and grit. My sister Lyra, sharp-tongued and fearless, ran with the Ravens; the inquisitors executed her at the Citadel, her screams turning my heart to ice. I fled to this mist-shrouded garrison, met a recruit called Eli—small, sharp, unsettlingly competent. Eli pulled me from an ambush’s path, and the brush of his shoulder stayed lodged under my ribs. I drilled him until his hands bled, trying to break that calm, and found only a mirror of my own stubborn will. In the Blackwo…