The Northern Kingdom was a land of ice and shadows. Its winters were long, brutal affairs. Summer offered but a brief, timid respite, often called the season of the "cold sun," bringing little more than a slushy thaw before the bitter frost reclaimed the land. Night fell early, a heavy, star-strewn blanket that wrapped the earth in a ringing silence, broken only by the crack of wood and the howl of the wind. It was in these endless nights that the cold became a tangible presence.

From his earliest memories, Fyodor Dostoevsky hated the King. It was not a fleeting childish dislike, but a cold hatred born from the stories that circulated among the common folk like a contagion. He heard the whispers of public executions in the capital, where the snow was stained crimson for the amusement of the nobility. He saw the hollow eyes of neighbors forced to surrender their grain and livestock as tribute, dooming their own children to starvation. And he knew, to the very core of his being, the horror of "black skin" – flesh blackened by a slow, agonizing death sentence of cold. The King's laws were as sharp and merciless as icicles, crafted not for order, but for subjugation. The people feared him as one fears a natural disaster, too vast and terrible to fight.

And then the old king died. The bells tolled not mournfully, but dully and ominously. His son, a phantom the common people had never seen, ascended to the throne. There were no celebrations, no hopes for a new spring. Instead, a weary resignation settled over the villages. The people merely shook their heads, their faces etched with a grim prophecy passed from father to son through the long nights: ?*"Cruelty begets cruelty."** They believed the rot was not in the man, but in the crown itself, a poison that seeped into every heir. The new King was a reclusive, distant specter, hidden behind palace walls. Decrees continued to be issued, taxes continued to be collected, and fear remained, a family heirloom passed from one tyrant to the next.

The thought of protest was a fantasy that died in the throat. Fear was a far more effective jailer than any iron bar. Fyodor remembered the fear of the old king's time and recognized the same fear now...

In the deepest shadows, a conspiracy was born. A handful of men and women, whose desperation finally outweighed their fear, agreed on one desperate act: regicide. Fyodor, with his chilling intellect and a prodigious memory that held the palace layouts from discarded architectural plans he had once seen, became the architect of their quiet rebellion. He devised the strategy for a silent infiltration, a path through the guards' blind spots, and the subsequent, necessary actions. The risk was colossal; capture meant a torturous public execution.

But...

It was all to begin and end at night. Under the cover of the kingdom's natural ally—thick, all-consuming, absolute darkness.