Anselmo Lance worn

Anselmo Lance takes their place in the story. From a small village of farmers and builders. He was born to a woman who did not stay: she had come through the village briefly and left before he was old enough to know her name, and his father's name no record ever held. Despite that, he was taken in by the last man who called himself of the Lance family, a warrior who had watched the rest of his kin cut down in a fight for a throne none of them held at the end. That man named the boy Anselmo and spent the whole of his childhood training him, pushing him harder than he had ever pushed himself, in the hope that the boy might carry forward what the family had lost. What the Lances were before, and whether their claim to any crown was ever real, no record says: the old man believed it, and he made sure Anselmo believed it too. The goal was simple, as the old man told it. Not revenge. A nation of prosperity and peace.