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BEHIND THE EAST TOWER

Author: UNDAUNTED

2026-10-30 17:06:01

The east tower cast a long, cold shadow over the training ground, and in that shadow, at an hour when even the crows were still asleep, Sergeant Vell tried to teach Kael how not to die.

“Again.”

Kael thrust. Vell turned the spear aside with a flick of her wrist and rapped the flat of her own weapon against his ribs, hard enough to bruise.

“Again.”

He thrust. She stepped around it. Another rap, this time on the thigh.

“You are thinking,” she said. “Stop thinking. On the Wall, the man who thinks is the man who is dead before he finishes the thought.”

“I was taught that thinking is the only thing that separates a soldier from a corpse.”

“By whom?”

“Every strategist I ever read.”

“Strategists die in beds,” said Vell. “Again.”

By the time the sun cleared the eastern ridge, Kael’s arms were shaking, his lungs burned and he had been struck so many times that he had lost count. But something was happening beneath the bruises. His feet had begun to find the ground on their own. His grip had settled. He could feel, faintly, the shape of a rhythm he had not known existed: the weight shifting, the breath, the line of the spear.

“Better,” Vell said grudgingly. “You are still terrible. But better.”

He wiped sweat from his eyes, and a thought struck him.

Borrowed Memory.

He had not dared to use it yet. Ten minutes, once per day, a skill from any harvested creature. He had been saving it like a coin he was afraid to spend. But the Inspector was two days away, and he could not afford to wait.

“Sergeant,” he said. “May I try something?”

She raised an eyebrow. “If it gets you killed, I will be annoyed.”

He closed his eyes. He reached inward, toward the ring, toward the cold, humming presence of the nine creatures he had harvested. He felt them like doors in a dark hallway. One of them, he sensed, was warmer than the others. A memory with an edge to it, sharp as a drawn blade.

Yes, he thought. That one.

[ BORROWED MEMORY: ACTIVE ]

[ Source: Nightmarish #4 (formerly: Dareth Ilmar, Spearmaster of the Ninth Tower). ]

[ Skill borrowed: Ilmarin Spear Forms (Rank D). Duration: 10:00. ]

The world did not slow this time. It aligned.

Kael opened his eyes, and his hands knew things his mind did not. His stance shifted. The spear in his grip no longer felt like a stick of wood but like a living part of him. Somewhere inside his head, a man who had died six hundred years ago exhaled quietly, as though glad to be useful again.

“Ready?” he asked.

Vell’s eyes narrowed. She did not answer. She simply struck.

He turned her spear aside with a motion so small that she did not see it, and the butt of his own weapon stopped a finger’s width from her throat.

Silence.

“That form,” she said, very quietly. “Where did you learn it?”

“I did not.”

“That is not Drakmoor style. That is not any style I know. But I have seen it. In the old stone carvings in the lower armoury. Faded, worn, thousands of years old.” She stared at him. “Varyn. What are you?”

The ten minutes ran out, and the skill drained away like water through a cracked cup. Kael staggered, suddenly clumsy again, and Vell caught his arm.

“I do not know yet,” he said honestly.

She looked at him for a long, long time.

“Good answer,” she said at last. “Do it again tomorrow.”

They were not alone.

Kael did not notice at first. It was Dax who spotted the figure, as he came running across the yard with a heel of bread in each fist and a look of enormous self-satisfaction.

“I stole breakfast for you,” he announced, then stopped. “Who is that?”

Kael turned.

On the far side of the yard, half hidden in the shadow of the armoury, stood Garrick. His left arm hung in a sling. His face was a mask of dull, quiet fury.

He was not looking at Kael. He was looking at the thin man standing beside him, a clerk in a clean grey coat who held a wax tablet and a stylus. The clerk was nodding, writing, listening with great attention as Garrick spoke.

“That is the quartermaster’s scribe,” Dax whispered. “He writes the reports for the Inspector.”

Kael watched them for a long moment. Garrick looked up, caught his eye and smiled, slow and cold and satisfied.

He saw, Kael thought. He saw the form. He heard the Sergeant. And now he is telling it to someone who will carry it south.

“Trouble?” Dax asked.

“Yes,” said Kael. “A great deal of it.”

He pocketed the bread. His appetite had gone.

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THE LONG WHITE MARCH
They left the Ashfront on the sixth morning, in a column of forty men and eleven masked riders, under a sky the colour of dirty wool.The Deep Watch lay forty leagues north, beyond the last of the garrison towers, in a country no map had ever properly drawn. There was no road. There was only the glacier, an endless white sheet fractured by blue crevasses and wind-carved ridges. The sun never fully rose. The cold bit through leather and wool and flesh alike.Kael walked near the middle of the column with his spear across his shoulders and his breath streaming in front of him. His ribs were healing faster than they should. Orin walked beside him, bundled in a grey healer’s cloak, a small pack of herbs on his back. The warden had signed the transfer papers with the face of a man signing his own death warrant, but he had signed them. A healer is a healer, Hask had said stiffly. Take him. You will need him more than we do.It was the closest thing to a blessing that any
THE CORE IN THE DARK
The Gravemaw’s core was the size of a man’s head, and it was still warm.Sergeant Vell had stolen it from the corpse-cutters’ yard at midnight, wrapped in a bloody tarpaulin, and carried it across the fortress on her shoulder like a sack of turnips. Now it sat on the floor of the infirmary cellar, pulsing dully in the lantern light, and the three people standing around it were trying very hard not to look at it.“I want it understood,” Vell said, “that if we are caught, I will say I have never seen any of you before.”“Noted,” said Orin dryly.“It is worth four thousand gold crowns to a Council alchemist. The cutters were arguing over it with knives.”“I am sure they will be devastated,” said Kael.He knelt beside the thing. His ribs had been bound tight by Orin that afternoon, and he could still feel every breath. The ring on his finger was warm. It had been warm since the moment Vell carried the core through the door.“Are you certain?” Orin asked quietly. “A Tier-two harvest could
THE GRAVEMAW
The north rampart was a different world.The southern walls of the Ashfront were stone and mortar, scarred but solid. The north rampart was something older. Its blocks were black glass, fused by some terrible heat, and the ground beneath them was veined with threads of dull red light that pulsed in time with the glow on the horizon. The air tasted of copper. The wind carried whispers.Kael stood in the front rank of the Eighth Cohort, spear in hand, and tried not to listen to them.“Do not,” Vell murmured beside him. “They get inside your head if you let them.”“What do they say?”“Names. Mostly names.”He understood, then, why the veterans stood so rigidly and stared at nothing. Every soldier on the north rampart was listening to a dead city call out the names of its children.At the far end of the wall, on a raised platform with a view of the whole line, Inspector Corvin sat in a carved chair with a goblet of wine. Warden Hask stood stiffly behind him. Eleven masked riders ringed th
THE INSPECTOR IN BLACK
The Inspector arrived on the third day, in a storm.He came on a grey horse, flanked by twelve riders in black coats with silver clasps, their faces hidden behind plain iron masks. Snow whipped sideways across the gate. The portcullis rose with a shriek of chains, and the column rode into the courtyard without slowing, as though the whole fortress were a road laid down for their convenience.Warden Hask stood waiting in the mud, hook-hand clasped behind his back. He did not look afraid. He looked like a man who had decided long ago exactly how much fear he could afford.“Inspector Corvin,” he said.“Warden.”The man swung down from the saddle with unhurried grace. He was perhaps forty, slim, with pale eyes, close-cropped dark hair and a face so smooth it might have been carved from soap. He wore no mask. His coat was black wool, finely cut, and on his left breast a silver seal gleamed with the twelve-pointed star of the Council of Ash.He glanced around the courtyard, at the bodies st
BEHIND THE EAST TOWER
The east tower cast a long, cold shadow over the training ground, and in that shadow, at an hour when even the crows were still asleep, Sergeant Vell tried to teach Kael how not to die.“Again.”Kael thrust. Vell turned the spear aside with a flick of her wrist and rapped the flat of her own weapon against his ribs, hard enough to bruise.“Again.”He thrust. She stepped around it. Another rap, this time on the thigh.“You are thinking,” she said. “Stop thinking. On the Wall, the man who thinks is the man who is dead before he finishes the thought.”“I was taught that thinking is the only thing that separates a soldier from a corpse.”“By whom?”“Every strategist I ever read.”“Strategists die in beds,” said Vell. “Again.”By the time the sun cleared the eastern ridge, Kael’s arms were shaking, his lungs burned and he had been struck so many times that he had lost count. But something was happening beneath the bruises. His feet had begun to find the ground on their own. His grip had se
THE COUNCIL STIRS
In the highest tower of the palace of Drakmoor, a bell rang once.It was not an ordinary bell. It hung in a room with no windows, in a chamber that appeared on no map, and it had not sounded in forty-one years. When it spoke, every candle in the room bent toward it as though listening.Chancellor Maren, who had been dozing over a ledger, sat bolt upright.He was a gaunt man in his sixties, with a long neck and the soft, careful hands of a clerk. He had served three emperors without once raising his voice. He was, at that moment, the most frightened person in the palace.“It cannot be,” he whispered.“It is.”The voice came from the shadows beside the door. Crown Prince Dorian stepped into the light, still in the white court robes he had worn to the exile, an untroubled expression fixed to his handsome face.“The Crown has woken, Chancellor. Three days after my brother crossed the Weeping Bridge.”“You assured me the seal was absolute,” Maren said. “You assured the Council. Nineteen ye

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