The sky over Jermand was always like this.
At least in Rockefeller's memory, it had never changed.
It was an eternal, low-hanging vault of lead gray, heavy and stagnant, filtering the scant daylight into a dim, lifeless color that spread evenly over scorched earth, ruined walls, and muddy roads.
Jermand lay in western Ancient Terra, deep in the interior of the old continent, in what had theoretically once been the heartland of a glorious civilization.
But by the time Rockefeller was born, war and barbarity had long since rewritten the meaning of geography.
Rockefeller von Hohenstein.
He acquired that name later. Before then, he was merely the second son of Hohenstein, an insignificant minor noble house in the Kingdom of Jermand.
His childhood was confined within the family's cold, damp stone castle, its walls covered in mildew and the scars of battle.
The air always reeked of cheap fuel, moldy tapestries, and a subtler smell: the odor of slow decay.
Table manners, heraldic scholarship, and noble traditions drawn from an obscure past that no one followed anymore formed his earliest world.
But on a Terra torn apart by warring warlords, that fragile veneer of civilization carried no weight.
The Kingdom of Jermand itself was merely one of the weaker factions among the many Tech Warlords and Mutant Warlords.
So-called noble titles offered no immunity against bullets, Power Klaws, and energy weapons.
They brought not comfort, but heavier burdens and a harsher process of selection.
Rockefeller's adolescence held no poetry or riding lessons. All that awaited him was deafening live-fire practice in the cellar shooting range, near-death combat drills against the family guards in the courtyard, and the pressure of his father's cold eyes watching him for long stretches, as though appraising merchandise.
Killing was the only lesson.
Survival was the