At midday, the stench of the fallen had taken root. The smell of matter coming undone. Life turning to dirt. Beings turning to dust.

  At least they had worked while I parleyed. Fires had come up. The marshes were never good for digging—most that is buried comes up sooner or later. Fires would have to carry the unfortunate to heaven.

  I studied the fort. I wondered when any Grenzlander commander last saw it from this position: from the east, from across the river, in the camp of the enemy.

  It seemed less impressive from here. All the proud angles and bastions that had once cast long shadows now looked crooked, softened, and spent. What from the west had seemed deliberate—from the east resembled a failing barn, held together by prayer and woodrot.

  And yet, Erden’s Edge had proven its worth. It held. It bled. And still it held.

  “Are we ready for this?” Riedel asked. A question by shape only—ritual, not doubt. His face had the pale stillness of a man who had already accepted the burden and was waiting only for the weight to settle.

  “No,” I said. “But we must be. Work will have to be done.”

  “We’ll find the means. The whip will find the way.”

  “Verily.” The word escaped me more as breath than answer.

  I turned my gaze to the river. The broken bridge stretched out like a snapped limb—half-submerged, half-burned, straining toward the other bank as if desperate to resume its old purpose. Beside it stood Gotthard, still as carved stone.

  The Blemmye lingered by the swampy bank, where the floodwaters had delivered their cargo. He had arranged them, the dead—neatly, respectfully. Old and young. Gustavian blue, Grenzland red. Mudded, waterlogged, some already faceless. He moved along the row without hurry, without pause, as though each form demanded full accounting. His face turned toward each in turn. His lips moved. Prayers? Reckonings? Names spoken aloud one final time?

  The sight unseated something inside me.

  “Should I get him?” Riedel asked, watching Gotthard’s massive frame in profile.

  “He has done his job,” I murmured. “He has laid the world bare.”

  A cold breeze rolled in from the east. It licked at the blackened grass, stirred the ashes of the night’s fire. Somewhere behind us, a hammer rang—metal striking metal in rhythm. The fort beginning again.

  I felt the chill return. Not wind. Memory.

  Gotthard’s words from the parley lingered like smoke that wouldn’t clear.

  “I hath worse tidings to offer still.”

  The sentence clung to the walls of my skull like soot. It had prooven all to true.

  I savored his absence now—strange as it felt. I needed one moment free from riddles and revelations. Just one stretch of silence to gather what little of the world still obeyed rules I understood.

  The dead had been counted. The enemy was no longer across the bridge. Wordly matters, then. Soil and stone. Orders and oaths. We would rebuild. Or we would pretend to.

  The Gustavian camp across the bank was stirring. Horns sounded in staggered bursts—long, nasal calls that echoed strangely through the wet air. Orders rang out in that clipped, foreign dialect of theirs, sharp as snapped twigs. Figures moved between tents. Muskets slung. Fires lit.

  Time to move. Time to work.

  The fort’s gate groaned open at its own leisure, chains grinding like old bones. A pair of village lads had been posted to crank it—poor choices, though likely the only ones left upright. They strained with every turn, red-faced, too slow. They’d learn. Or they’d be replaced.

  Kristoff stood waiting just inside the arch. His boots were dusted with mortar flake, his buff-coat misfastened, face flushed to the ears. A salute cut the air between us—sharp, sincere—but the frustration in his posture was louder than the gesture.

  “Captain Edelmer,” he said, straightening like a yard pole. “Did the parley bear fruit?”

  “It remains to be seen,” I replied. “Status?”

  “Villagers are being assigned to burial duty. Burn sites prepped on the outer ridge. Still waiting on a few ox-carts.” He paused, jaw tight, then added with a sigh—or a huff, hard to say—“We’ve begun interrogation of the anomaly hunters. It is… an ordeal.”

  “I can imagine.” My voice sharpened. “It can wait. New priority—rally the troops. Full arms, full kit. All officers to the war room.”

  “Sir, the war room—”

  “Now, Kristoff.” I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t need to. “Time is short. The Gustavians will enter.”

  He blinked. Just once. The color drained slightly from his ears.

  Then he turned on his heel and ran, barked orders already flying before his feet hit the yardstone.

  Behind me, the wind picked up again, carrying the scent of ash, iron, and wet rope. The smell of peace in the making, or a fresh war warming its limbs.

  “Riedel. Vollmer. Follow.”

  They moved in step without question, boots striking earth with the rhythm of men who had long since stopped needing to be told why.

  The yard was alive now. Drums thundered, not in cadence but in warning—get ready, they said. I stood at the rise of the stone steps, the war room above, the yard below, and took in the view before time could take it from me.

  The Blemmye walked among our own. No swords drawn, no chants of defiance. A man passed a pail to a creature with a face in its chest. A child carried a bolt of cloth past three soldiers arranging pyres. Smoke rose. So did cooperation. For now.

  Good. Let it hold.

  I entered the war room without knocking, without signal, without fanfare. The heavy door swung open and daylight spilled across the stone floor, dragging with it the noise of labor, of life beyond planning. Inside—less life, more stench.

  There they were. The anomaly hunters. Living, breathing, visibly sweating reminders of everything outside the fort’s walls. Crusted in mud, wrapped in coats too thin for war and too thick for truth. One rubbed his jaw like it still hurt. Another stared into the table wood as if it might offer salvation.

  Brandt was mid-hiss when I arrived—his voice sharp and venomous, hand planted firm on the table. The interruption struck him like shot. He wheeled, wide-eyed, mouth clenching shut on whatever bile he’d been ready to pour.

  Then the salute. Late. Stiff. Angled wrong.

  “Captain Edelmer,” he bit out. His face was redder than any wound I’d seen today.

  So. That was the warning Kristoff meant.

  No matter.

  "Officer Brandt, we are convening a war council."

  The man straightened further, some of the crimson draining from his face, though it clung stubbornly at the neck. "Aye. So the parley went sour?"

  "No. But it was sour nonetheless." I peeled off my gloves—damp with the chill—and set my hat aside, eyes fixed on the two anomaly hunters at the far end of the room. One sat rigid, drilling holes into the table with a stare that could strip varnish. The other—older, leaner—drilled straight into me, the disdain undisguised.

  "They can stay."

  Vollmer’s breath hissed through his teeth. His lips barely moved. "I would not permit such a rabble to fester while we prepare."

  "I would concur with Vollmer," Brandt muttered, trying for composure but already sinking back into his grievance. "They’ve been nothing but a barrel of quarrels since the gate opened. It’s taken all my restraint not to court-martial the pair of them for insubordination, pestilence, or sheer irritation."

  "Captain—" the hard-faced one barked, already rising from his seat like a soldier half-dismissed. His voice had the gall of gravel and the temper of rust. "Your lard-faced excuse of an officer has hardly improved matters!"

  Brandt’s face surged red again, this time past his ears.

  "While you’ve been dallying with Gustavians and playing diplomat, the situation here has turned to farce. No scouts sent out. No one probing the hills. Nothing but hands wringing and whispers in corners. We’re huddled together like piss-soaked kittens in a storm instead of taking stock and preparing for the next strike!"

  The room shifted with the weight of his outburst. Riedel’s brow twitched. Vollmer’s hand found his belt. Brandt clenched something invisible in his fist—patience, or his last thread of self-restraint.

  But I held my tongue. The man was crude, but not wrong. And we needed every damned ugly truth we could stomach.

  Kristoff came through the door in his usual hurried state, boots striking the stone like a man trying to outpace his own thoughts. “The troops are in a state of readiness,” he reported, “the Blemmyes I cannot account for. They go where they will.”

  He paused as his eyes caught the hunter—still half-risen, half-fuming—and then shifted back to me. “I had hoped to warn you properly.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  “None needed,” I said, brushing soot from my cuff with more ceremony than was necessary. I let my voice flatten. “All—take a seat. That includes you.”

  The finger I raised toward the sweat-stained firebrand might as well have been a sabre. He looked like a man more used to giving orders than being pointed at. But I didn’t blink. Rigid men break fastest. Better to let him believe the table was his stage. Some warmth, some looseness—perhaps then the truth would spill with the bile.

  He sat, even now calculating his every move towards his seat. Good. A man like that, if he talked, might say something useful between his insults.

  “I bear news from the Gustavian parley. I have met with the Gustavian Commander, and his subordinates. We have reviewed the situation we are in, and the situation we are closing in on.”

  The officers, and the unbidden guests, gave their attention in full. Riedel and Vollmer did not look at me. Their gazes drifted, locked somewhere inward. Still digesting. Still haunted by the weight of the meeting.

  “The situation is perilous. We face concrete threats, accounted for by both Jensson—the Gustavian Commander—and Gotthard.”

  I let the name land. A few eyes narrowed, others turned wary. No one interrupted.

  “Gotthard spoke of other dangers. Less concrete. Less measurable. But perhaps more troubling than all the rest.”

  “I will not yet trouble our minds with all dangers at once, when half of them might not even come to bear. But the threat of the shadowy nightmares that nearly undid the Gustavians on our borders is, most probably, still a real threat.”

  “Most probably, my fucking god…”

  The firebrand muttered it like a man who didn’t know silence had a cost. It slipped out half-spoken, half-spat—an impulse unburdened by tact or fear. Very well.

  “I did not catch your name.”

  “You did. You were probably too busy shitting your britches last night to remember. I’m Johan.”

  The room turned. Heads turned. I did. My officers did. Even his companion—who had until now stared daggers into the table’s grain—lifted his gaze to regard him.

  “I assume you have some choice words, then. Share your wisdom with this council, and we will listen.” I leaned forward. Let him feel the weight of my voice. “I know your profession. I know the cost of it. On a sanctioned day, in a saner time, you’d be gallows-bound by noon.”

  I let the silence breathe. I watched the spark flicker in his eyes.

  “If your insights are of worth, Johan, then maybe—just maybe—I will pretend you are too.”

  Johan leaned in, disdain tainting his voice. “If you are not ready for what comes, I would hang myself—without your help.”

  He leaned back, slapped his companion on the shoulder hard enough to jolt him upright. “This is Erlik. We are Hunters. We have hunted together for seventeen years. I say we, but we have been several. Only we have endured.”

  His arms crossed. He leaned back again, gaze dragging across the room like a blade. “We have endured for a plain, simple reason: we take nothing out there for granted. Every anthill can kill. Every breeze can carry death. Every grain of sand might hold the key to salvation—from an emptied mind, or a hollowed-out corpse.”

  He stood. Brandt shifted, one boot angling toward his whip. Vollmer’s hand settled near the hilt of his pistol.

  Johan’s voice sharpened.

  “The creatures of last night match no pattern. No gangrenous boar. No cow twisted by storm. No sin-pestered human turned beast. Since when,” he said, scanning the table, “would any such force come in numbers?”

  His hand struck the tabletop once. Open palm. The sound echoed.

  “Coordinated?”

  “We met them by the border marches, south of here.”

  Erlik’s voice broke the air with the steady cadence of a man dragged from foul dreams. He rubbed his jaw, then gestured broadly with a hand cracked from weather and time.

  “We’ve seen the taint of the touched before. Many times. Some of our own have turned. No priest, no healer, no grand declaration. Just us. Just a knife. You do what must be done.”

  He shook his head slowly, wearied bone guiding flesh. “But these beings—these things—they don’t match the pattern.”

  He didn’t look at anyone as he spoke. He stared at the table’s edge, as though the grain might remember what his voice could not carry.

  “I don’t need to spell it for you. There are devils out there. We’ve all heard the stories. We’ve seen the signs. And they look like devils—don’t they? Like in the books. Like the priests taught us.”

  His eyes finally lifted.

  “These beings… are a different kind of mockery.”

  “Very well, so we have something new out there,” Riedel interjected, tone clipped. An attempt to reassert order, to wrest control from the outsiders who now dominated the room with dust-streaked coats and unwashed certainty.

  “We dealt with them handily. Cannon and musket seemed to do the trick—as with any foe. What more can you add?”

  Johan’s face twisted. Sour didn’t begin to cover it. His lips curled, his brow knotted, and the shift in his jaw was so sharp it seemed his teeth might crack from holding back the first thing that wanted to rise.

  “If you drop an apple, it will rot,” he said flatly. “A corpse will fester and stink. It is the law. Of nature—even of anomaly. All that is good will rot. All that is bad will turn worse.”

  He turned his full gaze on Riedel, voice rasping now with restrained venom. “Do you truly think nothing else is coming?”

  “No,” I answered. “We know more is coming. A whole world torn asunder—underfoot by forces we know, and those we don’t.”

  I rose, meeting Johan’s challenge without breaking my gaze.

  “Jensson has reports from the Gustavian civil war. There are stirrings. Movements of great proportions. A warlord is taking the lead. A new Gustav.”

  Johan shifted—clearly ready to speak—but I raised a hand.

  It worked.

  “Gotthard talks of foes no being has seen. They travel toward us even now. The shadow-creatures were only the beginning. Something else rears them. Leads them.”

  I let the silence press for a moment. Let it fill the cracks in certainty.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, “we are at the cusp of a siege.”

  I sighed.

  “That is why the Gustavians are moving in. They are preparing to move as we speak.”

  The room surged. Chairs scraped. Officers rose almost in unison—wide-eyed, mouths agape, voices tripping over each other.

  “They’re moving in? The Gustavian whores!?” Brandt roared, his cane cracking against the floor with enough force to startle the shadows.

  “With how many mouths to feed?” Kristoff asked, his voice high, cracked at the edges. “Babies and old fools? Are we to ration for the infirm now?”

  “We will find food,” Vollmer replied. “We will hunt. Gotthard has volunteered his kin. The Gustavians have supplies to bear.”

  But Vollmer, spewing the facts, did so with the tone of a man not yet convinced by his own argument. Each word was less spoken than pushed out, as if trying to outrun his doubts.

  “They are an imposing force,” Riedel cut in, his voice calm for once. “Well-trained. Plentiful. So is the enemy. Would you rather coordinate efforts—or fight them too?”

  At last, something agreeable from him.

  “And stay here?!” Johan thundered. “A siege is only won when the enemy gives up—or help comes. What help will come?!”

  The horn sounded then.

  Arrival. A new order.

  Just as well. It stopped me from uttering the truth.

  “All hands ready. Officers, to your stations. Make sure the men look as ready and capable as possible. Parade formations!”

  “For the Gustavians?” Kristoff called out, his voice sharp with disbelief.

  “For our allies,” I said.

  The fortress grounds burst into motion.

  I had scarcely seen my men so sharp—not even in battle. This was different. They felt it, same as I did. A shift not just in command, but in order.

  Villagers stepped aside. Some did more—straightening sashes, brushing dust from cuffs, tying ribbons where fabric had frayed. A flower here. A stitch there. It was ceremonial, yes. But also real. Helpful in the way only shared uncertainty can be.

  The 1st Swords. The 2nd Suns. The 3rd Believers. Each lined up with backs straight and colors crisp. The Golden Riders sat tall in their saddles, sabers polished and held across their shoulders like saints bearing relics.

  But I saw the nerves.

  You couldn’t miss them. Twitches at the corner of mouths. Hands adjusting the same belt loop twice. Eyes scanning the gate.

  They had always been enemies.

  The others. The ones over the line, beyond the oath.

  And now, they were about to cross into the place they were never meant to tread.

  From the vantage point of the stairs, I could see my men.

  As always, their eyes found mine—glancing, then holding, searching for something unspoken. Looking to me for permission. For sanction. For a sign that it was right to let the sacred foe step within our walls.

  I met their gaze.

  And I gave them the right.

  And so, we would meet them.

  But the moment lingered.

  The drums beat their low cadence—the rhythm of readiness, not quite a welcome, but welcome enough. A beat to brace the spine.

  But nothing came. No dust cloud. No hoofbeat. No line of blue-coated men emerging through the gate.

  “Do our guests find us wanting?” Brandt asked. The scorn was not hidden. It bled through his voice like bile.

  “Not from what Jensson told me,” I replied.

  I moved. Down the stairs, through the rows of my men. Each step a statement.

  Their eyes on me bore weight. These were not the same men I had dragged into ranks weeks and months prior. Then, their eyes had been hollow. Uncertain. Empty of oath.

  Now they watched me with fire behind their gaze. Purpose had rooted in them. A frontier discipline. A justified fear. They had made a choice, even if they didn’t yet know the name of it.

  Now, if only the Gustavians would see it.

  I turned, leapt up the stairs to the parapet, the high northern wall, to see what had stalled the moment.

  And lo—

  There it was.

  The Gustavian formation. Hundreds of them, arrayed in rows, halted along the far ridge. None moved. Not even the civilians in tow—the ragged farmers, the burdened women, the old men who had marched for weeks behind sabres they did not trust.

  They stood. Silent.

  Jensson was there—beside the river, at the threshold. And beside him, Gotthard.

  I saw them clearly. Jensson stood with his arms behind his back, tall and lank beneath his plain officer’s coat, his sharp features drawn tight with age and thought. The black tricorn hat cast a long shadow across his brow, but I could still see the lines—creased deep, carved by years of command. He must have been near sixty, yet his posture held firm, rigid not just from pride, but from duty long-worn. Beside him, Gotthard loomed—an ancient bulk of unmoving earth.

  Then: movement.

  Gotthard raised an arm. A sweep across the ground where the dead lay still.

  Jensson stood beside the corpses—not just soldiers, but kin. Unmarked. Unnamed. He removed his tricorn hat. Held it at his side. And lowered his gaze.

  These are the ones who kill. Those who do not believe. Who call our saints liars and our rites superstition.

  Who kill those like Gotthard.

  And yet it was Gotthard who halted an army.

  Gotthard who gestured toward the fallen.

  Gotthard who placed one vast, earthen hand upon Jensson’s shoulder—

  —and made a man grieve, before he dared to march.

  “I loathe the words Gotthard spoke,” Vollmer said, laying his thoughts bare. He stared at the marsh-side remembrance, his burgonet casting a deep shadow over his face. “A terrible burden.”

  “Someone has to bear it,” I replied. “Let us make sure the burden is shared.”