THE ASHEN HEIR AND THE HOLLOW CROWN

THE GATE OF ASH

The Ashfront did not look like a fortress. It looked like a wound in the mountain.

Kael saw it properly at dawn, when the wagon crested the last ridge and the fog thinned. A wall of black stone rose out of the glacier, four hundred feet high and so wide that its ends vanished into the snow. Watchtowers jutted from it like broken teeth. Along the battlements, banners hung in rags, scorched at the edges. Beyond the wall, where the land should have continued, there was only a dim crimson haze, as if the sky itself had been cut and was slowly bleeding.

“Home sweet home,” one of the guards muttered, and the other did not laugh.

The pale blue words had not returned since the bridge. Kael had spent the night staring at the dark, waiting for them, and had finally understood that the ring on his finger would not explain itself. It had spoken once, like a door opening a crack. Now it waited, patient and cold, to see what he would do.

The gate was a slab of iron, scarred with claw marks deeper than a man’s arm. It groaned open just wide enough for the wagon. Inside, the courtyard was a churn of mud, ash and bodies. Soldiers in patched armour hauled stretchers toward a long, low building where someone was screaming. Others sharpened blades with the blank, mechanical patience of men who had stopped counting how many times they had done it.

No one looked up as the wagon rolled in. A new prisoner was nothing. A new prisoner was weather.

The warden’s office smelled of lamp oil and old blood.

Warden Hask was a slab of a man with a face like a boot that had been through a war. One of his ears was missing. His left hand was a hook of black iron. He read the emperor’s writ without a flicker of expression, then set it on the desk and looked Kael over the way a butcher looks over a thin calf.

“Kael Varyn,” he said. “Formerly a prince.”

“Formerly,” Kael agreed.

“Sealed core. No cultivation. Nineteen years old.” Hask tilted his head. “The emperor’s writ says you tried to poison him. Did you?”

Kael blinked. In five days, no one had asked.

“No.”

“Hm.” Hask did not seem to care either way. “Here is the truth, boy. I do not care what you did, who you were or who your father is. Out there is the Wall. On the Wall are monsters. The monsters do not care about your title, either. You will be assigned to the Eighth Cohort, which is a polite name for the men we expect to lose first. You will eat what you are given. You will stand where you are told. If you are very lucky, you will die quickly.”

“And if I am not lucky?”

For the first time, something moved in the warden’s face. It was not quite a smile. It was a man seeing something familiar and not enjoying it.

“Then you will learn what the rest of us already know,” Hask said. “And you will wish you had been.”

He slammed a stamp onto the writ. The sound echoed like a gunshot.

“Sergeant Vell! Take the new meat to the barracks.”

Sergeant Vell turned out to be a woman.

She was perhaps thirty, lean as a whip, with a scar running from her left temple to the corner of her jaw and short dark hair cut with what looked like a knife. She walked fast and did not wait for Kael to keep up. When he stumbled in the mud, she said, without turning, “If you fall behind on the Wall, I will not come back for you.”

“Understood.”

“Good. You may be the first to say it and mean it.”

The barracks were a long stone hall lined with bunks three high, each one narrower than a coffin. Men watched from the shadows as Kael entered. A few of them were hard-eyed killers, and he could tell at a glance which ones. The rest were worse: young, gaunt, their faces hollowed out by something that had nothing to do with hunger.

One bunk near the door was empty. The blanket on it was stained dark.

“The last man who slept there?” Kael asked.

“Died three nights ago,” said Vell. “Take his boots, if they fit. Yours are useless.”

Kael looked at the dead man’s boots, which sat neatly beneath the bunk. He thought of the palace, the silk, the warm halls of Drakmoor. Then he sat down and began unlacing them.

Vell watched him. Something in her expression shifted, just slightly.

“You are not what I expected,” she said.

“What did you expect?”

“A crier.”

“I cried for two days in the wagon,” Kael said honestly. “I am finished now.”

She snorted, and the sound had a crack of reluctant humour in it. “Sleep. The horn sounds at dusk. You will see the Wall for the first time tonight, and I would rather you were rested for it.”

The horn sounded long before dusk.

Kael had barely closed his eyes when the whole fortress changed. Boots thundered. Men shouted. Somewhere above them, a bell began to toll, a deep, flat, ugly sound, and the entire barracks emptied in seconds as soldiers grabbed spears and ran for the stairs.

“Breach on the north rampart!” someone bellowed. “Nightmarish, three of them! Every cohort to the walls!”

Vell appeared at his bunk, already armoured, a short spear in her hand. She threw a second one at him. He caught it clumsily against his chest.

“Stay behind me,” she said. “Do not engage. Do not look at their eyes. If one gets past me, run.”

“Run where?”

She did not answer.

The stairs were a roaring tunnel of bodies. They burst out onto the rampart into freezing wind and the stink of burning meat. And Kael saw, for the first time, what the empire had been lying about.

The creature on the wall was the size of a horse. It had too many joints in its legs, a body of wet, glistening black, and a face that was almost a human face, stretched wrong, with a mouth that opened sideways. Where its eyes should have been, two pits of crimson light pulsed in time with the glow on the horizon.

It had already killed. Three soldiers lay in pieces near its feet. A fourth hung impaled on one clawed limb, still twitching.

Nightmarish, Kael thought numbly. He had read the word in his tutor’s books, in the sections about folk tales. Bogeymen. Nursery stories. Things made up to frighten children and tax the credulous.

“Formation!” Vell roared. “Spears out, brace on three! One, two…”

The creature moved.

It was impossibly fast. A blur of black. Four soldiers went down in a single sweep, and then it was among them, and Kael felt the air hot against his face and heard Vell shout his name.

He did not decide to move. His body simply did. He threw himself sideways as a claw tore through the space where his head had been, rolled across frozen stone, and came up with his spear instinctively levelled.

The nightmarish turned its sideways mouth toward him.

And the ring on his finger went white-hot.

[ HOLLOW CROWN SYSTEM: THREAT DETECTED ]

[ Target: Nightmarish (Tier 1). HP: 340 / 340. ]

[ Host strength: Insufficient. Survival probability: 4%. ]

[ Tutorial unlocked: THE FIRST HARVEST. ]

The words burned in his vision, and Kael had half a heartbeat to read the last line.

[ Objective: Land the killing blow. The fallen will pay what they owe. ]

The fallen.

He looked at the dead soldiers on the stones. At the blood. At the creature rearing up to strike.

And for the first time in his life, Kael Varyn felt something move inside the sealed, silent place where his spirit core should have been. It was small, a single thread of heat, like a candle lit in a house that had been dark for nineteen years.

The nightmarish lunged.

Kael raised the spear.