My name is Gunnar Milkhause Schröeder, and if you’re wondering about the umlaut over the ö, yes, it’s real. So is the head full of voices. When I was a child, I didn’t just daydream—I conducted symphonies of imagination. Entire civilizations rose and fell behind my eyelids. Mars wasn’t just a red dot in a textbook; it was a desert kingdom ruled by librarians who rode sand-foxes. The moon? A quiet retreat for retired astronauts who’d grown tired of breathing and just wanted to float in peace. I climbed Everest in my socks, scaled Machu Picchu between math problems, and once walked the Amazon rainforest during a particularly long lunch…

The wind howled through the high cliffs of Hrafnnes, rattling the stone walls of the palace and carrying with it the bitter scent of frozen pine. Inside the great hall, King Akbar paced before the great fire, its orange tongues doing little to chase away the cold that had settled deep in his bones. Beside him, Queen Egrida stood, her silken robes a muted gray that mirrored the sky outside. For years they had stood together on the throne, their rule marked by prosperity and peace, but their joy was incomplete, hollowed by a single, aching absence. He was fifteen winters old when the iron clad scent of salt first…

The forest had always been a place of secret murmurs, a living tapestry of scent and sound that most in the kingdom chose to ignore. To Prince Erik, however, the Whispering Woods had become a second home—a realm where the ordinary rules of the palace dissolved into the rhythm of wind, bark, and bone. It had begun when he was twelve, the year his father, King Aric, sent him down a winding path to meet the old seer and healer known as Elsinka. Elsinka was not a woman of great stature, nor was she cloaked in the usual trappings of power. She was a head full of silver hair, a…

The first winter in the mountains was a bitter teacher. Prince Erik of Hrafnnes, aged ten, stood knee-deep in a drift of snow so pure it hurt his eyes, his small fingers too numb to properly work the knots in the rabbit snares Sigurd had shown him. The old forester’s voice, when it came, was not unkind, but it was as immutable as the granite peaks around them. “The cold does not care that you are a prince, boy. It only cares that you are slow.” Erik’s lips were chapped, his stomach a hollow, aching thing. He had missed the evening’s catch. Supper had been a husk of tough bark-bread…