The Steppeborn: The Art of War and the Broken Path
The Steppeborn: The Art of War and the Broken Path
The steppe was never conquered. It was unmade.
The Orontai rode like wind across the grasslands, their breath bound to sky and silence, not cities or thrones. But the Zhong Empire came with iron phalanxes and talismans of fire. They did not bring war. They brought extinction.
Altan was born to that vanishing. A child without elemental gift. Voiceless. Spirit-null. Unwanted. Yet when the Zhong burned the clans, he did not beg. He fought. And when his mother, the last Flamecaller, stood alone on the ridge and whispered “Run,” he obeyed.
Not to survive. But to remember.
Hunted and broken, he fled west to the edge of the world, a place left blank on every chart, not out of myth, but because no one who entered ever returned. There, in the forbidden abyss known only in old blood and older fear, he fell into something deeper than legend. A chasm where cultivation dies and pain speaks.
When he returned, the war had changed. But so had he.
As phalanx legions rise and empires tighten their grip, a different kind of war begins. Formations clash in passes narrow as memory. Shields lock. Spears break. Blood spills in the thousands. There are no gods here. No destiny. Only discipline, silence, and the will to endure.
And the storm no longer comes from the sky.
It rises from the chasm.
"This story is also being published on RoyalRoad.com under the same title and author."
