The Fourth Crusade

<p><em><strong>The Fourth Crusade</strong></em></p><p>As armies gather and banners rise the great city of Constantinople shimmers like a crown between worlds. But beneath its golden domes and crumbling saints something older than empires begins to stir.</p><p>The year is 1202. The West marches East under the banner of the cross-but faith is fractured and loyalty is a currency too easily spent. Among the crusaders are the broken the haunted and the ambitious:</p><ul><li><strong>Sir Alaric of Rouen</strong> a disgraced knight fleeing the ash of Béziers.</li><li><strong>Anna Komnene the Younger</strong> scholar and relic-binder sworn to guard secrets the Church has tried to forget.</li><li><strong>Iñigo</strong> a Castilian youth with a gift for sensing relics-and for hearing things no one else dares name.</li><li><strong>Lady Alix of Flanders</strong> noble and dangerous whose ambitions reach beyond the throne to the Flame itself.</li><li>And <strong>The Keeper</strong> a veiled figure marked by a vault that should never have been opened.</li></ul><p>Relics begin to bleed. Statues weep flame. The vaults beneath Hagia Sophia hum with memory. Whispers echo through the marble: the Flame is waking.</p><p>But this is not a god. Not quite.<br>It is something older-buried beneath faith and empire-long sealed in relic and rite. A force not divine but remembering.</p><p>As siege looms and betrayal coils through the ranks a forgotten power prepares to speak again.<br>And when it does it will not ask for worship.</p><p>It will ask for return.</p>