The silence that fell as the vast horde retreated to a distance of half a mile was more unnerving than the noise of battle. It was a watchful, predatory silence, broken only by the moans of the dying on the field and the ragged breathing of the exhausted men on the walls. The air stank of charred flesh, wet ash, and the coppery tang of blood.Victory. They had won a victory. By any sane measure, it was a miracle. They had shattered the elite Draugur vanguard, captured one of the monsters, and repelled the first assault without the loss of the fortress. And yet, as Kaelan stood on the battlements, watching the enemy establish a vast, orderly encampment that encircled Northpass like a noose, it tasted like ashes in his mouth.The cost was visible. While the Legion had suffered no deaths in the shield wall, Roderick's impulsive charge had consequences. Two men who had followed him lay dead on the field, pulled down by Draugur in the chaotic melee. Three more had serious wounds. And Tavis

The silence that followed the unnatural execution was different from before. It was a stunned, sickened quiet that hung over both the Keep and the enemy camp for the rest of the day. The smoldering, blackened scaffold and its gruesome occupant stood as a stark, obscene monument in the middle of the field, a line in the sand written in ash and agony.Kaelan did not gloat. He did not give a speech. He simply ordered the watch doubled and retreated to the library, his mind a whirlwind of post-operation analysis. The psychological gambit had been played. Now he had to measure its effect.His Legion Morale Interface showed a complex, churning spectrum. The villagers’ auras, which had been a dim, fearful grey, now pulsed with a strange, agitated energy—a mix of horror and a dark, vengeful satisfaction. The soldiers’ morale had solidified, the gritty grey hardening into something sharper, more brittle. They were no longer just defending; they had become participants in a terrible, shared act

The horn that echoed through the night was not one of alarm, but of ordered, bitter retreat. It was a sound that went against every defender's instinct. To men fighting for their lives on the walls, it felt like a betrayal. But discipline, forged in weeks of brutal drills, held. They disengaged, fighting in tight, retreating knots down the wall-walks and stairways, flowing back into the inner keep and the central courtyard.From the shattered gateway, the barbarian tide roared into the outer bailey, believing they had broken the spine of Northpass. They saw the retreating defenders and smelled victory. They surged forward, a chaotic, jubilant mass, flooding the space between the outer wall and the inner keep.Kaelan stood on the inner gatehouse, the last of his men streaming through the archway beneath him. His Environmental Awareness was a screaming map of heat signatures and violent motion. He counted. He waited. He needed the density to reach a critical point."Now, Eldric!" he bar

The cart was a cage on wheels, a thing of nightmares cobbled together from the charred remains of the outer bailey. Heavy timbers were lashed with iron bands into a crude box, its only opening a small, barred window at the front and a bolted hatch on top. Inside, the surviving Draugur lay in a coma, kept sedated by a foul-smelling mixture of poppy and belladonna brewed by Yorin. Its breathing was a slow, wet rattle that seemed to make the very air feel heavier.The procession that left Northpass at the grey crack of dawn was a far cry from the desperate, hopeful mission of weeks prior. There were no scouts riding ahead. Just Kaelan and Roderick on tired horses, a cart driven by the ever-reliable, grim-faced Alaric, and four of the least-wounded legionaries as an escort. They moved slowly, the cart’s wheels groaning in the frozen ruts. Behind them, the keep stood like a blackened, broken tooth against the sky, its people watching them go with the hollow eyes of those who had seen the a

Winter in the Northpass was not a season; it was a siege conducted by nature itself. Biting winds howled down from the Dragon's Teeth, scouring the charred stones and forcing the builders to erect canvas windbreaks. The cold was a constant, gnawing enemy that stole feeling from fingers and made every movement an act of will. But Kaelan had turned that enemy into a reluctant ally.The concept of "icecrete" became a religion. Teams, working in rotating shifts to avoid frostbite, would pack clean snow into wooden forms, layer it with gravel and crushed stone salvaged from the ruins, and douse it with near-freezing water. In the sub-zero temperatures, it fused into a substance harder than soft stone, translucent and eerily beautiful. The first sections of the new inner killing wall rose not as grim grey stone, but as gleaming, pale blue ramparts that glittered in the weak sun.Eldric oversaw the construction with a fanatic's attention to detail. "The key is the channels," he explained to