Dorian Lockewood had spent his entire life in service to numbers.

  Numbers never lied.

  A ledger told you more about a noble than any speech ever could.

  A budget revealed whether a city was growing or dying.

  And balance sheets exposed corruption in ways that spies never could.

  Numbers, Dorian believed, were the foundation of order.

  And order?

  Order was what separated civilization from chaos.

  Dorian was born into a dynasty of imperial administrators.

  The Lockewood family had served the empire for three generations.

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  They weren’t warriors or nobles. They weren’t landed aristocrats with estates and titles.

  But they were trusted.

  Because they knew how to make things work.

  His father was a magistrate.

  His mother was an imperial scribe.

  His uncle was a tax auditor.

  Dinner table conversations were about economic policy, trade laws, and treasury reforms.

  By the age of six, Dorian could recite basic tax structures from memory.

  By ten, he had memorized the imperial budgeting system.

  By fifteen, he could calculate tariffs faster than most merchants.

  Where other children were taught swordplay, Dorian was taught how to balance budgets.

  Where other boys were trained to inherit estates, he was trained to govern them.

  His life was set in stone.

  He would become a great administrator.

  And he was fine with that.

  Because order was everything.

  Dorian thrived in academic settings.

  His tutors praised his discipline.

  His father, ever the stern perfectionist, once told him:

  "Governance is about control, Dorian. If you control the flow of money, you control the province."

  Dorian nodded.

  It made perfect sense.

  Until the day he saw his first real noble in power.

  And realized that most rulers had no idea what they were doing.