The fourth Maiden

Prologue

Long before the Walls stood against the horizon, before the names of Marley and Eldia were ever written into history, and before mankind came to know the terror of the Titans, there lived a girl named Ymir Fritz, a child born into a world where one's worth was measured not by who they were, but by what they could offer to those who stood above them.

She was a slave, taken beneath the rule of King Fritz and raised without the freedom to question the life that had been given to her, and though the years passed beneath the shadow of the king's authority, Ymir remained little more than a quiet figure within his kingdom, unnoticed except when she was needed and remembered only when there was work to be done.

It was on an ordinary day, when a single pig escaped from the village and the king demanded that someone be held responsible, that Ymir was accused and sent into the forest as punishment, where she wandered beneath the ancient trees until she came upon a great hollow within the earth.

And within that ancient darkness, where nothing had stirred for countless years, something awakened.

Something that remembered a world before mankind had given it a name, something that had existed beyond the understanding of those who would eventually inherit its power, and something that had been waiting for a living vessel to carry it into the future.

Ymir fell into its depths, and when she emerged from beneath the tree, she was no longer the helpless girl who had been hunted into the forest.

She had become the first Titan.

The Founding Titan.

With a power that could alter the course of nations, Ymir was no longer regarded as a mere slave, but neither was she truly set free, for King Fritz saw in her newfound strength only another means to expand his kingdom, and so the girl who had once been powerless became the weapon upon which the Eldian Empire would rise.

She fought the wars commanded of her, conquered the lands placed before her, and built a kingdom greater than anything that had existed before her time, while the man who possessed her loyalty continued to mistake obedience for devotion and submission for love.

In time, Ymir bore King Fritz three daughters, Maria, Rose, and Sina, whose names would one day be remembered throughout the world and whose blood would continue the Titan lineage long after their mother's death.

Yet there was another child.

One whose name would never be carved beside theirs, whose existence would eventually disappear from the records of Eldia and Marley alike, and whose bloodline would end before it could become another branch of the power Ymir had brought into the world.

She was Ymir's fourth daughter.

And unlike her sisters, she was the one who remained closest to her mother, watching quietly from the side whenever Ymir was summoned by the king, learning from the smallest movements of her face and the pauses between her words that there was a sorrow within her mother that no one else seemed willing to acknowledge.

She did not understand the world beyond the palace, nor did she understand the power that lived within her mother's blood, but she understood one thing even as a child: Ymir was not happy.

And when Ymir eventually died protecting the very man who had spent her entire life using her, her daughters were given the same command that would determine the fate of every generation that followed.

They were to consume their mother so that her power would not disappear.

Maria did as she was told.

Rose did as she was told.

Sina did as she was told.

And the fourth daughter did as well, though she carried the weight of what she had done differently from her sisters, because she had not eaten her mother for the sake of the king, nor for the sake of Eldia, nor because she believed the power should continue.

She did it because she had been given no other choice.

But when the king later demanded that she bear children so that the power within her would continue through another generation, she refused.

She had watched her mother spend her entire existence as a vessel for someone else's will, and she would not allow the same fate to be written into her own life.

So her bloodline ended with her.

The Titan she carried was never inherited by another.

Its power remained lost to history, swallowed by the same passage of time that erased the name of the girl who had once carried it.

And while Maria, Rose, and Sina became the ancestors of the royal bloodlines that would shape the world for the next two thousand years, the fourth daughter became nothing more than a forgotten piece of history, remembered in only the oldest and most incomplete records as the daughter who had refused to continue what her mother had begun.

Her Titan was thought to have gone extinct, her name was forgotten, her bloodline was believed to have vanished.

Yet within the Paths, where time had never truly moved as it did in the world of men, the power she had once inherited from Ymir remained.

She's waiting.

Not for a king.

Not for an heir.

But for the day when its blood would find its way back into the world.