Note/Disclaimer:  I like sharing my stories, so posting this here. Don't expect it to have an ending. I won't often be reading comments, but I enjoy knowing I'm not only writing for the enjoyment of my harddrive. As always, I'd love to dive into city building at some point, as I feel like that sub-genra is far too uncommon in lit-rpg but also holds the most promise. And yet I like to think I learned my lesson with my Elfin Queen chapters about raising the stakes too high too early. While my earlier writings were mostly for my own enjoyment, attempting to see what these worlds I dream of would actually look like, feel like, if they were real, with this serial my hope is, instead, to resolve some of the problems I have seen in my previous writings. The child of a hero shares in his final moments. The world is often a cold, unforgiving place and yet... for some few chosen souls, the souls of heroes and the souls of the innocent, there are those who are willing to stand against the whims of the fates. Waking up on the cobblestones in a strange land, our hero takes their first breath in a world of adventure. We open on the streets of Illmouth, in the far reaches of The Empire: a moderately large town in a moderately dense mountain range. Monsters troll the hills and serpents crawl through the lakes and streams, but those are not our first concern. Not at all. It's the monsters who live within the city walls, in fact, that will be our earliest and our greatest adversary.