Highborn Son of the Greenwood
Calradia, 1084.
In the western forests of Battania, where the Greenwood chokes the sky and the wind smells of pine sap and old blood, the clan of Dúran holds an ancient hillfort carved into black stone. Its walls are older than Vlandian crowns and twice as stubborn.
Maelgor was born there under clear skies and watched by druids who declared the omens “quiet.”
Not good.
Not ill.
Quiet.
His childhood was one of comfort rare for Battania. He wore wool lined with fur while other boys wore patched leather. He studied maps instead of stalking deer. He learned clan politics before he learned how to split a skull.
His Quality of Living was not luck — it was insulation.
While other youths froze in border wars against Vlandia, Maelgor read histories of failed Battanian kings. While others bled in skirmishes, he observed which clans gained influence and which were quietly erased.
He grew handsome — unnervingly so. Pale, sharp-featured, dark hair falling clean across measured eyes. He kept himself immaculate. Even in mud, he found water. Even in war camps, he polished his boots.
Some called it vanity.
They were wrong.
It was discipline.
Maelgor was not a natural warrior.
He trained.
He practiced.
He drilled.
But when blades rang in earnest sparring, something inside him hesitated — not fear, but calculation. He did not move by instinct like the wild sons of the forest.
He thought.
And in Battania, thought can look like weakness.
Whispers followed him:
“Soft hillborn.”
“Scholar’s cub.”
“Too clean.”
He never corrected them.
He recorded them.
As he grew older, one truth hardened inside him like iron beneath bark:
Battania loses not because it is weak.
It loses because it protects weakness.
The clans value honor.
They value kinship.
They value shared suffering.
Maelgor values results.
He watched a rival clan spare captured Vlandian scouts out of tradition.
Months later, those same scouts returned with an army.
Mercy had cost hundreds of lives.
He never forgot.
Strength is the only mercy that matters.
The Greenwood should not be a sanctuary for the fragile.
It should be a crucible.
Those who survive deserve land.
Those who fail deserve memory.
At eighteen years of age, Maelgor commands eighteen levy warriors — woodsmen, hunters, second sons, debtors bound to his clan’s protection.
They are not elite.
They are clay.
He does not need heroes.
He needs survivors.
He has modest personal experience in battle — enough to understand command, not enough to dominate in single combat. He avoids duels unless necessary.
Instead, he studies terrain.
He positions archers carefully.
He retreats when others would charge.
He lets enemies exhaust themselves.
His men are beginning to notice something unsettling:
They win more often than they should.
Other clans see him as:
Polite.
Educated.
Reserved.
Clean.
They do not yet see the steel beneath.
But they will.
Because Maelgor fen Dúran does not intend to be a hero of Battania.
He intends to reshape it.
And the forest has always favored those patient enough to let their enemies walk deeper before closing the trap.