Chapter 1: Death and Rebirth
Corvin Blackmoor had never believed in the bright colors of flags, or the honeyed lies of politicians. He believed in cold mornings, in the crack of a rifle bolt, in the wet pull of blood soaked sand between his fingers. Raised in the shadowed streets of London, his will has been steeled before he ever touched a battlefield.
He was only eighteen when he joined the military, a thin edge of desperation driving him forward. Patriotism wasn’t in his heart. Necessity was. It was not long before his talents were noticed and he was taken into the Special Air Service. The SAS, Britain’s quiet, lethal answer to a violent world.
From the humid jungles of South Sudan to the ruined streets of Mogadishu, from Baghdad’s infernal nights to the brutal cliffs of Helmand, Corvin waded through the worst humanity had to offer. He slit throats in back alleys and kicked down doors in ghost towns where even the dogs had fled. He survived mortar storms, ambushes in poppy fields, betrayals sold for scraps of gold.
In 2016, during a black operation in southern Afghanistan, a shrapnel blast shattered his side while tearing apart the Taliban fighters he had cornered. He killed three more men before collapsing. When he awoke in a hospital bed in London, he was no longer fit for the field.
Rather than throw him away, they reassigned him to Defense Intelligence, where he sifted through human filth in the form of intercepted communications, data leaks, and coded messages. At first, he thought it would be boring. Instead, it poisoned him.
He watched governments sell children into wars they would never fight themselves. He watched agents swap loyalties with the ease of changing coats. He watched entire countries crumble under signatures of crooked politicians. In the neat fluorescent corridors of intelligence analysis, Corvin’s last illusions burned to ash.
He trusted no one. He loved no one. An orphan of the streets he started to his life, only his status changed at least streets were safer when compared to snake pit of intelligence and government offices. He served only because survival was a habit he hadn’t broken yet.
In those cold nights, when he could not stomach another briefing on how many innocents would be classified as collateral, Corvin found a different kind of peace in the pages of fantasy novels, in grim worlds where power was earned and loyalty was simple. He despised the garish drivel of cultivation novels, the idiocy of young master tropes. If he was to believe in any kind of world, it would be one where blood paid for blood, and no apologies were made.
He died in an alley not far from where he was born. It was late 2024, and he had stumbled onto something ugly. Political disinformation plot carefully stitched together by an Iranian Quds Force cell, aimed at destabilizing half of Europe’s fragile alliances.
They silenced him with three neat shots to the chest. No grand firefight. nor a final stand. The Crown called it a "random mugging" before the blood dried.
Corvin Blackmoor died at thirty seven. Cold, bitter, alone.