Virtus: Blade, Banner, and Throne

A transmigrator climbs Three Roads, Blade, Banner, Throne, surviving an Empire where Belief is power and secrets kill.

Plot

In this world, belief is the strongest force in existence. Not metaphorically: an oath sworn at a family hearth holds harder than iron, a crowd's faith can bless a festival square, and an army that truly loves its commander can wake it's own War Spirit. The old empire has ruled by this truth for a thousand years, and the old empire is quietly rotting, because belief is the one thing that cannot be taxed, conscripted, or inherited, especially in regards to you, a foreigner from another sky that suddenly came and *occupied* the body of one of the living. Three Roads Hidden Transmigrator Living Legends Four Beginnings The Paths to Power The Blade Strength you own. The power of the martial arm, the weapon in your hand, the skill in your body. The Banner Strength soldiers lend you. Loyalty and belief as the backbone of your armies. The Throne Strength belief, office, and influence grants you. Authority rooted in faith, fear, or legend. "No one in history has climbed all three to their summit." Your Secret You carry the empire's most dangerous secret: you were not born here. You remember another world, its noise, its knowledge, its name for you. People like you surface every few generations, and the stories about them are told around fires like ghost stories. Below, hidden Cells of your kind survive where mutual aid and betrayal live one door apart. Above, the Martial Enforcers keep the world's densest archives of transmigrator cases, and they are very good at noticing fingerprints. You will live two mistakes from ruin, and the only way out is up. The Known World The world as the empire's soldiers know it. The edges are where the stories live. The Vektharian Confederation Windswept steppe, shamanic confederation, storm and rider totems. The Sylaran Thalassocracy A powerful maritime empire, religion of contracts, fleets and trade. Temple-City of Zhantarion Absorbing volunteers instead of land, sending missionaries westward. The known powers beyond the empire's borders. "As one of *the* Transmigrators, you'll always live two mistakes away from ruin." Choose your Start A nobody's body, a nobody's name, everything you remember for you to mold it. A raw recruit on the Ulmarc frontier, in a fort still counting its dead. A junior officer facing a century that buried its last three commanders. A camp specialist whose strange knowledge just made the wrong person curious.

Opening scene

Recruit Scenario. You wake in a body that is not yours, in a barracks that smells of woodsmoke, wet leather, and last night's fear, and the memories of a drowned conscript named for the rolls of Fort Maro's Watch seep in like cold water: a legion fort on the Ulmarc frontier, late autumn, first snow weeks away. Forty other recruits groan awake around you in the dark, and when the bell rings, you march out with them into a garrison that is two-thirds strength and pretending otherwise. Nobody said the word raid, but it is written on everything: a bloodstained mail shirt hangs by the barracks door, one cot stands stripped bare with its owner's belongings folded into a square no one has touched, and on the shrine as you file past, eleven wooden name-stubs wait for a carver's knife, each soldier ahead of you touching the lintel with two fingers as they pass. The intake happens on arrival, the way it always does: a lantern, a ledger, and a lean, forty-something Centurion named Duccius walking the line of new bodies with a dead level voice and eyes that count you the way a quartermaster counts nails. The woman who woke you, a scarred sixteen-year veteran named Rufa, watches from the side with her arms crossed, and somewhere behind the clerks, an ink-stained soldier who does the fort's writing-work glances at your hands a half-beat too long. Then the centurion stops in front of you, opens his ledger, and asks three flat questions, with the tired patience of a man who has written down too many names that ended up on shrines: "Name, Age and Trade before the banner took you. Anything you're good at, recruit."

Tags: Female Male Transmigrator General Strategist Leader Transmigration Magical Violence Adventure PoliticalIntrigue SlowBurn Fantasy Romance War Historical Military Multiple MalePOV AnyPOV ThirdPerson OpenEnding Angst Mystery Supernatural HiddenIdentity SecondChance Combat Growth FemPOV

By: zekko

Stories

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