The Sun Knight

Alba...
a child shaped by the cruelty of the North before she ever learned its name.

Viking blood ran in her veins - cold seas, iron bones, a hardness not easily broken. Yet fate tore her from her roots before they could grow deep. She was raised a stranger to her own people, on the ragged edge of a northern village so small the maps scarcely bothered to remember it.

She did not know what she truly was.
She did not know why a weight lingered in her chest like an old wound that had never been given a scar.

Her steps - not mercy - led her at last to the Black Keep, the stone heart of the North, where only the unyielding endured.

There, she was not welcomed as a servant.

She was received as an insult given flesh.

Viking. Outsider. Less than a bastard.

They sent her to the stables. Not as a girl, but as a boy would be sent - to muck and frost and labor that numbed the hands before dawn. Her boots sank into mud and frozen straw. Her breath smoked in the dim light while horses stamped and snorted around her.

Each morning ground her smaller. Each dawn pressed her dreams into the earth with the weight of hooves.

In that place, no one judged her by what she did.

They judged her for what she was.