There is a world somewhere between near and far where things grow from nothing.

Sturdy trees with suits of armor sprout from inhospitable soil, while mighty beasts hatch from delicate stones and molten rock yields swords of gold. Fierce warriors are carved from the most fragile of hearts, and things like courage and love ignite like flames in the dark.

This world is a forge. Brutal and scorching and full of finely crafted things.

A warrior sprang from this world as improbably as the flowers that bloom in its arid wilderness. She was not a warrior at first, but something else she does not care to remember. (A sword does not recall the lump of metal it came from; it knows only the hand that wields it and the sun that kisses its blade and the life that bleeds at its fateful end.)

Now the warrior takes lives and defends lives and binds them too, weaving a ballad of life and death, flame and steel. Metal sings in her hands as it does in a smith’s; the battlefield is her forge. She crafts victories out of impossible odds and wins her people’s love with every beast slayed. Around her, empires rise and burn just as the sun dies and reawakens, and through it all the warrior remains unchanged because she is the heart of her world, the bright burning core of it.

And here come the blood and the bones like moths to a flame, eager to rally her to their cause. To answer the call that she, too, has heard between the stars.

This is her story now as much as it is theirs, and here it begins.