Chapter I: The Weight of Broken Oaths

  The morning mist clung to the moors of Hárthal like a guilty secret, swirling about the ankles of the weary men who stood waiting for death. Edryc son of Eradoc leaned against the splintered remains of a watchtower that had stood since his grandfather's time, his fingers absently tracing the notches carved into his sword's crossguard. Each groove told a story - the deep one near the pommel from the siege of Dr?m's Keep, the cluster of smaller marks from the skirmishes along the Blackwater, the fresh one still pale against the weathered steel from yesterday's ill-fated sortie. The weapon felt heavier in his hand than it had when his father first placed it there six summers past, though whether from weariness or the weight of what was to come, he could not say.

  Below him in the makeshift camp, the remnants of Lord Maldred's once-proud host moved like men already halfway to the grave. Where five hundred warriors had marched out from Brynwood's gates singing songs of victory, scarcely two hundred now remained. Their armor bore the scars of countless battles, the sigils of their noble houses obscured beneath layers of dirt and dried blood. The banner of House Bryn - a black field emblazoned with a silver gauntlet clutching a lightning bolt - hung limp in the still air, its edges frayed like the last tattered remnants of their honor.

  Edryc's breath caught in his throat as the first drumbeats rolled across the moor.

  *Thoom. Thoom. Thoom.*

  The sound resonated deep in his chest, a primal rhythm that set his teeth on edge. At his side, old Halvar the spear-thane spat into the mud, his milky left eye twitching in its socket. The veteran's breath reeked of sour ale and rotting teeth, but his grip on his weapon remained steady as the bedrock beneath their feet.

  "He comes with the mist, just as the old tales warned," Halvar muttered, his voice like gravel grinding beneath a bootheel. "Vargor Chainbreaker rides the black wind itself, they say, and his wolves follow close behind."

  Edryc made no reply. His gaze remained fixed on the horizon where the fog coiled and twisted like living things. Shapes emerged from the gloom - first the scouts, lean and wolfish in their patchwork armor, then the main host. A sea of iron and leather advanced in eerie silence, their spearpoints catching the pallid morning light. At their head rode a nightmare given flesh - a towering figure in blackened plate armor, his visor wrought in the likeness of a snarling wolf's maw. The Wolf-King himself.

  The drums fell silent.

  A hand like a smith's vise clamped down on Edryc's shoulder. He turned to face Lord Maldred, though the man who stood before him bore little resemblance to the stalwart commander of Edryc's youth. Ten years of ceaseless war had curved the lord's spine like an old oak bent by the wind; his beard - once black as a raven's wing - now showed more silver than dark. The scar along his jawline - a gift from the Dr?m raiders - pulled his mouth into a permanent grimace that might have been mistaken for a smile by those who didn't know better.

  "Listen well, lad," Maldred rasped, pressing a battered warhorn into Edryc's hands. The metal felt ice-cold against his skin. "When the line breaks - and break it will - you sound this. Once for the living. Twice for the dead." The old lord's rheumy eyes burned with desperate intensity as he pointed to the Banner of the Oath. "Whatever happens, you keep that damned rag flying. For when it touches earth..."

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  A single horn-blast shattered the morning stillness.

  The Wolf-King raised his greatsword, and five hundred throats roared as one.

  The world dissolved into chaos.

  Steel shrieked against steel as the first wave crashed upon their makeshift barricades. Edryc fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Halvar, their blades moving in grim synchronicity. The old warrior's spear darted like a striking adder, finding gaps in armor with lethal precision.

  "Left flank!" Halvar barked.

  Edryc pivoted just as a pike thrust toward his ribs. His sword sheared through the shaft, and his follow-through opened the wielder - a beardless boy with frightened eyes - from collar to breastbone. Hot blood sprayed across Edryc's face, the coppery taste flooding his mouth as the boy crumpled without a sound. He had no time to dwell on it as another foe took the boy's place, then another, and another.

  A thunder of hooves announced Maldred's desperate charge. The old lord rode like a man possessed, his greatsword carving crimson arcs through the enemy ranks. For one fleeting moment, the tide seemed to turn - then Edryc saw the archers cresting the rise behind the Wolf-King's lines.

  "Shields!" he screamed, but the warning came too late.

  A black cloud of arrows blotted out the sky. Maldred's warhorse went down screaming, its body pinning the lord beneath its bulk. The banner wavered - then began its inexorable descent toward the churned earth.

  Edryc's world narrowed to that single terrible sight: the embroidered fist unraveling as the banner kissed the mud.

  The earth trembled.

  A sound like a thousand rusted hinges screaming split the air. All fighting ceased as every man - Hárthal and Iron Legion alike - turned toward the barrow-mounds dotting the moor. The largest - the Grave-Mound of Hár the Old - yawned open like a festering wound.

  From the darkness within emerged a hand.

  Not bone. Not flesh. Something in between - the color of old parchment stretched too tight across knuckles too large, too wrong. The fingers flexed, each joint popping like green wood in a fire.

  Then the Black Wind came.

  It rolled across the battlefield like a living thing, a mist that clung and slithered into mouths and nostrils. Where it touched, men fell choking, their eyes turning black as pitch. The Wolf-King's horse reared, its screams cut short as the mist poured down its throat.

  "Run, you damned fool!" Halvar seized Edryc's arm, dragging him backward. "That's no natural fog!"

  They fled through the chaos, past men clawing at their own faces, past the gaping maw of the barrow from which something ancient and ravenous was pulling itself free. The last thing Edryc saw before the mist swallowed the world was the Banner of the Oath, its silver threads snapping one by one like the unraveling of fate itself.

  For hours they staggered through the peat bogs, the ground sucking at their boots like the grasp of drowning men. Halvar led them unerringly along paths only a native could know, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

  "The Hollows," he panted. "Líotha's folk will shelter us... or slit our throats. Depends on her mood."

  The village emerged from the mist like a dream - a cluster of stilted huts with roofs of living turf. A figure waited at the largest dwelling's threshold: a woman with hair like banked embers braided with fingerbones, her eyes sharp as broken glass.

  "You stink of death and broken oaths," Líotha said, her voice low as a blade being drawn.

  Halvar bowed his head. "The Wolf-King has taken the field. And worse... the barrows stir."

  The woman's gaze locked onto Edryc. Something unreadable flickered in her expression. Then she stepped aside.

  "Come then, last son of Bryn," she murmured. "Dawn is a long time dead in Hárthal."

  As Edryc crossed the threshold, a sound echoed across the moors - the grinding of stone on stone, and beneath it, a whisper like dry leaves scraping against a tomb:

  "We remember."