Leon never really believed his grandfather's stories about where his family had come from. To hear the old man tell it, they were royalty, exiled long ago. The last remnants of the line sent away to save them from the civil war that was tearing apart the kingdom. The king had died, leaving only a teenage bride and an infant son. The nobles squabbled for who would act as Steward, taking in the young queen and the heir, each knowing the future of their house would be made if they could entrench the royal bloodline in their debt.
It was the king's general who arranged to have the queen and her son smuggled out of the kingdom when the nobles began their war. A group of hand-picked guards and ladies vanished to the outer lands, taking over an abandoned farmstead and posing as simple peasants. The war went on, the lands changed control, the kingdom dissolved and the exiled royal family continued on a simple farmers, their cover identities becoming actual as generations passed, their fake farmstead expanding to become the community of Montcalme on Keddenmark.
The lands that would become Nivmadas, once the kingdom of Avelone, became more and more troubled, monsters and bandits all carving out pieces of land, the old nobles squabbling over lost glory and old wounds. On the fringe a young man growing up as a simple farmer listened to his grandfather tell impossible stories. It all changed when the old man died. On his death bed he gave the young man a key that opened an old chest. It's contents changed everything. Many things were in it, and together they were irrefutable. The young man was a prince of a long dead kingdom.
Not that it mattered. He had responsibilities. A family. Work. Debts. Everything he'd had before he opened the damn chest he still had, and for years that was exactly the way he wanted it.
Then word of the Grail swept across the land like a storm, bringing the grail-hunters with it. They were little more than bandits armed with a writ from the king. They wanted money as "tribute", but there was none. They wanted food, and they gave it. It was when they wanted his wife that he drew the line. He killed three men that day. That night they came with twenty. He survived, but not much else did.
Months passed, recovering, rebuilding, crying, hating, drinking. It was the day he finally finished the roof that he realized that it didn't mean anything anymore. Not as long as they could simply ride in and do it again. Something had to be done. There were supposed to be people to protect the ones that could not protect themselves. There was supposed to be justice. That is what the grail was supposed to be about, but it had become another thing to fight over.
The man who rode from that farmstead was not the man who had grown up there. Leon Farmer was dead. This new man was armed and armored in the colors of a kingdom unheard of for centuries. The line of Lioncourt was raised from antiquity. The grail had returned to the land, and with it, the king.
