The Cataclysm archive: The Assassin

As the first age of the Empire trembles and the Crysais Jewel shatters, the world begins to change. Cities once lit by faith and trade now burn under the weight of famine and fear. From the broken dungeons rise the first horrors of the dark, and the Emperor’s will grows mad in his effort to control what cannot be contained. Among the first years of the shattering, a child named Julia is born, son to a prostitute and a daughter of a copper elf unremembered to Julia. Sold at the age of eight for opium, she is taken far from the streets she knew, into the depths beneath the capital of Miralith. There, beneath the earth, her name and her past are stripped away. She is remade by the Silent Assassins, the Dark Hands, trained to kill for coin, and to forget what it means to be human. Follow her life as the years pass, as her training deepens and her understanding of the world begins to turn. In the annals of the first age she learns of her lineage, her order, and the early birth of the guilds that would one day shape the fate of all men. As rebellion brews and whispers of the Crysais Shards spread through the land, Julia becomes a killer of men, her blade guided by the words of others. Yet fate shifts when the Empire itself gives her their next task: to hunt and kill a small band of Wayfarers who seek to end the Emperor’s rule. What begins as a contract will become a choice, and in that choice, the course of an age may change forever.