The air outside Skaggad was clean and fresh; perverse in its sunshine.

  Gulls cawed as if nothing had happened, picking at the wash of green bodies littering the concourse like overworked dredges at a slop hall.

  Sludge stepped closer to the ridge—boots still freshly wet with ice melt.

  Thud, thud.

  [Halbrecht69 whispers: bro you can reply]

  The ledger skittered back and forth amongst limbic crevices. The cold pang in its lumberjack folds couldn't find the same purchase that it had in the throne room—couldn’t find the same seething control. If it could understand what self was, Sludge felt itself once more. For a while, at least. The same, frigid rage it had felt had thawed—if only slightly.

  On the approach, along the ridgeline, stout men in thick breastplates clattered into formation. Their spears clicked down in ceremonious sequence, the red, spear-blazened banners of their polearms flickering in the wind.

  Sludge stood before them, its grip bone white on the axe.

  The ferret-faced man stepped forward. No weapons hung in his pale, soft hands—just a book, splayed open.

  “Our hero,” he started. “Or so it appears. Dunden thanks you kindly, as does our Lord Commander Halbrecht.” His voice sounded damp and muted in the half-baked bog.

  “Goblins… dead,” drawled the lumberjack. “Friends… dead too.”

  The ferret-faced man dipped his head—not a bow, not quite, but something more rehearsed. His eyes flicked past Sludge, over the ridge, toward the faint steam still rising from the frozen carcass of Skaggad.

  “Yes,” he said. “A regrettable cost, but a necessary one. War is… arithmetic, after all.”

  The word landed wrong.

  Behind him, the spear-line held. No one lowered their weapons. No one advanced. The men stood rigid, eyes darting, hands tight on hafts as if the air itself might still bite. They looked dead ahead like each of them was trying their damnedest to stifle a laugh, yet no one laughed.

  Sludge took another step forward.

  Thud.

  The men flinched as one. A few spears wavered before snapping back into place. The red robed man huffed a smile.

  “I believe my lord commander would like to extend an invitation. Just say the word, and you will have safe passage. Our agreement has been honoured in kind—reward awaits.’

  [Halbrecht69 whispers: lol just accept inv]

  Sludge did not know what a lord commander was. It knew meat. It knew weight. It knew the difference between those who came to fight and those who came to count.

  The ferret-faced man cleared his throat and continued, undeterred.

  “Dunden will, of course, honour that deed. Skaggad’s eradication secures the mire-road, restores trade, and—” he smiled thinly “—provides us with an excellent line to the South.”

  He closed the book with a soft clap.

  “You will be escorted to the city. Fed. Healed. Presented. Rewarded, of course.”

  Behind Sludge, the gulls screamed and fought over goblin scraps. One hopped closer, pecked at a severed green hand still rimed in black peat, then took off again with a startled cry as the fingers cracked.

  Sludge looked down at its axe.

  The steel still hummed faintly. Cold slept along its edge, restless but sated. Somewhere deeper—beneath rage, beneath borrowed sinew—the Cold Prince shifted, attentive… wanting to speak.

  Sludge looked back up.

  “Friends… not numbers,” it said, lumberjack beard spotted in moisture.

  The ferret-faced man smiled again, wider this time. Patient, if not a little irked. “Of course, brave souls each of them. Though here you stand.”

  [Halbrecht69 whispers: zzzzz dude just start quest]

  Light dwindled in cloud cover, peeling back to bright, and the man stood idle as if waiting for an answer. He was, indeed, waiting for an answer, though one that Sludge had little comprehension of.

  He coughed. Smiled, then coughed again.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  “Go,” wheezed Sludge, a cold fold on its breath.

  “Excellent!” He closed the book—sharply and with finality, with the practised ease of someone used to being obeyed without resistance. He turned on his heel.

  “Onwards,” he said, and the word carried.

  Spears lifted. Shifted in form. Not aimed at Sludge—never that—but angled just enough to suggest direction. A corridor assembled itself out of bodies and red cloth. Not a threat, just a suggestion, made very carefully—like a polite marker pointing on a compass.

  Sludge looked down the line.

  Beyond them, the mire-road stretched thin and brown, a scar through reeds and black water that steamed faintly where Barston folk and greenskin alike still bled into the soil. Wagons waited there. Heavy ones. Iron-bound, drawn by squat marsh-horses with wrapped hooves and blinders sewn thick. The same kind that had trudged and rattled at the crossroads camp.

  Sludge stepped forward, unsure in itself or its own footing.

  Thud.

  The men flinched again, though less this time. Practice was already setting in.

  [Escort initiated… syncing with player seed]

  The road out of the mire was slow and narrow, raised only by packed peat and old bone. Each step sank a little, the ground giving reluctantly beneath Sludge’s weight, then sealing again with a wet sigh. Frost clung to the edges of the path where Sludge passed, stiffening reeds, glazing puddles, leaving behind a faint, crawling rime that cracked and receded once distance was gained.

  The men kept pace. Not close but never too far.

  They rotated watch without command—pairs peeling off, others folding in. Efficient. Quiet. No merry songs nor quiet mutterings. Just the sound of mail shifting, leather creaking, breath misting in the cool air.

  Sludge noticed none of it, it just watched the sky instead. This wasn't sweet, sweet, goblin meat. No, Sludge's diet had shifted since Skaggad. This was metal and manflesh, and neither Sludge nor the cold pang had much appetite for it.

  Clouds dragged low and grey, but the sun pushed through in pale shards, warming the mire in places it hadn’t touched in weeks. Steam rose where damp melt met rot. The smell was thick—mud, iron, green death, and something sweeter underneath. A fragrance that reminded Sludge of before—whatever that meant.

  They walked for what felt like miles, hours, days. Gulls followed for a time, and then they didn’t. The mire folded into grassland, then beaten forest, then cobbled road.

  [Halbrecht69 whispers: ok so just walk with them

  [Halbrecht69 whispers: trust me this is the intended route]

  [Halbrecht69 whispers: its long]

  [Halbrecht69 whispers: you can reply bro]

  [Halbrecht69 whispers: /whisper on neural. iys not on command menu]

  Sludge paused mid-step. Thinking? Was it thinking? Somewhere not quite within it. Somewhere that it couldn't quite feel, not on the folds of its lumberjack flesh, at least. Nor in the twisted offal of its sludgey mass. Somewhere different.

  The men halted instantly. Too instantly.

  The ferret-faced man turned, eyebrows raised—not alarmed, just attentive.

  “Something amiss?” he asked.

  Sludge stood still, axe hanging loose in its grip. The cold inside it shifted, uncertain. The pressure behind the eyes nudged, then settled again.

  “…Road,” Sludge said, after a moment.

  “Yes,” the man replied smoothly. “It does tend to go on.”

  They waited.

  Sludge belched and stepped forward again. The escort resumed.

  They made camp before nightfall, just beyond the crest of the mire’s edge where the land rose firmer and intersected with a broad stone bridge; where trees grew thin and bent, their bark pale and flaking like old scabs. Fires were lit—but small, carefully fed, built to warm without calling. Meat was cooked on the coals. Bread broken, even a few rolls of dice on an upturned barrel slat.

  No one offered Sludge food, though no one denied it either. It simply did not eat. It had sustenance enough.

  Instead, it stood at the perimeter, watching frost creep and retreat at its feet, watching men pretend not to watch it back. Some stared openly when they thought it wasn’t looking. Others refused to look at all.

  The ferret-faced man approached once more, later, in the crackle of low burned embers, stopping well short of the frost line.

  “Dunden by mid-morning,” he said conversationally. “Road’s clear. The lord commander is… eager.”

  Sludge did not know what eager meant. It knew the sound of the word, though it did not like it.

  “City… big?” it asked.

  The man smiled, a touch more genuine this time.

  “Big enough to need you,” he said. “Our lord commander has fallen on… difficult times. The greenskins have been somewhat of an unpliable knot for some time, and our lord’s armies are needed elsewhere. The North. A difficult campaign.”

  That answer seemed to satisfy something. The Cold Prince smiled.

  The night passed without incident. No trauma crackled like electricity; no waves of nightmares sizzled out like blankets of fireflies.

  They marched on through the morning with little small-talk—just the steady stomp of leather boots and the rustle of chainmail.

  Dunden rose from the fog at dawn. Stone walls first—old, patched, mismatched, bearing scars from wars like scratched names in timbers. Towers followed, then banners, then the layered sprawl of roofs and smoke and motion. The city sat on higher ground, commanding the cobbled mire-road of the Southern March like a clenched fist.

  The portcullis rose with little ceremony. As Sludge trudged through, it realised people had gathered. Not soldiers—at least, not only soldiers. Traders, labourers, children dragged forward by curious hands. They lined the inner road as Sludge approached, murmuring swelling into something like awe, like fear, like whispered hope.

  It seemed that word travelled faster than boots.

  The escort tightened formation without being told, the ferret-faced man leading the retinue like a priest without a censer.

  Further inside, the streets widened, straightened. Stone replaced mud. Sludge’s boots rang dully now, its lumberjack steps dud-thudding across cobbles worn smooth by centuries of feet.

  The air smelled different in this place, like it wasn't quite right in the lumberjacks throat and nostrils. Smoke and oil. Bread. Ale. Humans. Still the same sweet stench of pig piss, though.

  Sludge slowed a little.

  The men did not.

  At the far end of the thoroughfare, beyond a rising set of steps, a banner hung heavier than the rest—deep red, sigiled in gold thread; a crowned sunburst. Three spears, again, thrusting west. Authority made visible. Made simple, so folk that walked by it always knew which way the pointy end went.

  The ferret-faced man turned and gestured ahead.

  “Dunden,” he said, unnecessarily. “The city welcomes you as an ally.”

  “And your reward,” he continued, smiling as he spread open the ledger.

  [Halbrecht69 whispers: ok good

  [Halbrecht69 whispers: get loot and i come.meet you]