Prologue

Some where in the vast expanse of shimmering white snow, a boy gasped as his head jerked up with a start. He was half buried in the snow. Lack of food and water had taken their toll on him. With great effort, he turned his head to look at his surroundings.

Foul-smelling corpses of more than six people and one beast encircled him. He tried standing up, but the bloody bruises on his entire body inflicted by those dead mages around stopped him.

He slowly rolled over, a feeble attempt to reach the water skin bottle on the dead beast, but it only made the wounds on his back to scream in protest.

"Aaaah!" the pained sound came from his dry throat. He drew in a ragged breath, the cold in the air only drying his throat further.

'How long have I been unconscious?' he wondered, "An hour? A day? More? '. From the smell of the corpses, it seemed to have been a long time.

Steeling himself, he tried standing again amid the painful protest, but only to fall to his knees. Staring up ahead, his golden eyes burned with rage as they forced his body to stand again and again.

Exiled by his own people, hunted by every hunger driven mages for the huge bounty on his head, the closest thing he had to family was himself.

His name is Soren, but they like to call him bastard, filth, unwanted - and that was only when they were being polite.

Anyone who didn't know what had happened on that forsaken place would have said that the battle was over.

But no, the battle was far from over.

In fact, it had just begun.