Far beneath the surface of the world, where light had not walked for a century, the Throne of Ash and Bone lay still.

The great chamber was carved from blackened stone. It pulsed faintly with a slow, blood-warm rhythm — like the heartbeat of something ancient, dreaming beneath the earth. No torches burned. The walls glowed on their own, dim veins of cursed light tracing patterns long forgotten by living men.

At the center of the hall sat Vortannis.

He was so still he might’ve been taken for a statue. His body was wrapped in shadows and scorched flesh, twisted by the death that once claimed him and the magic that had pulled him back. Pale skin clung tightly to muscle and bone, marked with jagged scars like molten glass across his throat and chest — the price of his death at the hands of King Finduir so many years ago.

And yet … he was indeed living, and breathed. One eye glowed a sickly emerald. The other, pure gold. They did not blink.

Before him, suspended in the air, hovered a phantom image: a projection of a leaf of the Triune Sigil, shimmering faintly with false light. It wasn’t real. The leaves had been broken from the Sigil long ago, and hoarded by the sundered races.

And yet … it shimmered. Vortannis extended a long, thin, white hand. His fingers passed through the illusion. “It stirs …” he whispered, the sound dry as dust on stone. “The shell remembers.”

The vision flickered. Only for a single breath, the emerald at the Sigil’s center burned brightly. Somewhere far away, in the forgotten village of Forlon-a-Midden, its real counterpart echoed the same glow.

From the shadows stepped a figure: tall, cloaked in a smoke-grey cape and silver-edged armor, crowned with a thin silver circlet and a gaze that burned like coals. He knelt on one knee before the throne.

“Maeroth.” First of the Abyss. Lord of the Fourth Breach. Demon-lieutenant to the undying king. Vortannis didn’t look at him, still fixated on the illusion of the Sigil. “The shell lives. Hidden in time, shaded in sorrow, broken. Hidden among pastures, sheep, cattle, and commoners, who know nothing of power.”

Maeroth’s voice was a blade drawn in a cathedral. “Do you sense the one who stirs it?”

“Only dimly now,” Vortannis said, finally rising from his throne. “But that’s only a matter of time. Something wakes that should not. Not yet.” He turned slowly, his movements smooth and dreadful, like something dead pretending to be alive.

“I forged the Sigil to bind the races to my will. It broke and unmade their unity. And now …,” he reached toward the illusion again. It rippled. “Now it dares remember its shape.”

From behind the throne, three figures emerged in silence — cloaked in black with blood red trim, their faces hidden behind cold iron masks etched with dead language. Handlers: sorcerers ever-bound not by loyalty, but by his domination. Their wills had long since been hollowed out and replaced with his.

Behind them, in chained alcoves, the Fallen shifted: thirty undead forms, once men and women of every race, now stripped of thought and driven only by the compulsion of their Handlers, and his own will. Each Handler would command ten.

Vortannis gestured. “You will go to the west. The place nearly forgotten by all: Forlon-a-Midden. Find and take the shell. Kill anyone who opposes you. Pass undetected across the lands as much as you are able.” His eyes narrowed. “The world need not see the blade until it has already struck.”

He turned to Maeroth. “You will not go. Not yet. Watch the other leaves. Their time will come.”

Maeroth bowed lower. “As you command, Lord of the Breaking.”

Vortannis turned back to the image of the Sigil, his voice quiet and cold: “Let the peasant boy dream of stars … while the darkness closes around him.”

Maeroth departed to his long-awaited watch, while the Handlers marched their Fallen.

Two weeks passed at Wardencamp like a slow-turning wheel: each day shaped by muscle and sweat, stillness and strain, lore and learning, laughter and struggle. The recruits had settled into their routine, no longer strangers in training, but something beginning to resemble a fellowship.

The mornings belonged to discipline. They woke before the sun, shaking off the chill as dew silvered the grass. Their days were filled with the thump of wooden weapons, the crack of slingstones and bolts, the thrum of arrows released into bark and straw. Hands blistered, bruises darkened, muscles strained — and yet none of them faltered. They had begun to learn what it meant to endure.

But the change that mattered most wasn’t in their strength and abilities. It was in the relationships between them.

The recruits truly began to trust one another. Jokes surfaced around the fire. Meals were shared without prompting. During sparring drills, they moved as though pieces of the same puzzle, fitting tighter with each day.

And always at their sides were their familiars.

Kestel, watchful and sharp-eyed, circling high whenever Jaxson took his stance. Mika, fearless and brash, wrestling with Lyra in the grass when drills were done. Eira, silent and still, her presence anchoring Kiera through moments of hesitation. Tink, endlessly curious, nosing through Theo’s tool satchel and occasionally reassembling his snares in the wrong order. And Thorne, always silent, always watching, moving beside Boaz with the certainty of shadow.

Their presence became natural. Necessary. Then came the moments no one could explain.

The first happened during a routine range drill. Jaxson fired late, his timing off, but the arrow curved sidewards mid-flight, catching the target’s edge anyway. He didn’t speak of it, and no one called it out. But afterward, Kestel landed on his shoulder and leaned her head against his cheek.

Days later, during a sparring match, Lyra ducked a blow that should have caught her square across the shoulder. Kiera swore she saw the blade pass through her. Lyra blinked, confused, then looked down as a shimmer rippled across her skin and faded. Mika stood nearby, ears pinned back, low growl rumbling in her chest. No one laughed. No one spoke.

When Theo checked his snare trap, he found the broken gears and snapped branches had somehow twisted together into a lurching, clumsy creature — a crude golem with a spring for a spine and a trap jaw for a head. It stumbled a few steps, fell on its face, then tried to bite a nearby bush. Tink stood over it proudly, paws on her hips, her tail flicking with satisfaction, as if she had personally engineered the ridiculous thing. Theo stared in disbelief, muttered to himself for an hour about “structural integrity,” and finally gave up, sketching frantic new blueprints by firelight while Tink smirked at his efforts.

Kiera, tending Boaz’s wrist he had hyperextended on a too-brash attack, felt warmth pulse through her hands, and when she pulled away, his injury was healed. She and Boaz had been too startled to speak, as Boaz rubbed his wrist appraisingly. Eira merely blinked, as if this was how healing always worked.

Boaz often sat alone at twilight, blades across his knees, the campfire’s light playing along their edges. One evening, after another brutal day of training, frustration welled up inside him — a fierce, helpless anger at his own failures. He gripped his sword tighter, and without warning, a thin ribbon of flame sparked to life along the blade, racing toward his hand.

Startled, he dropped the weapon, the fire vanishing with a sharp snap of air. Thorne stirred from the shadows and moved silently between Boaz and the dying embers, his great body low and tense, as if shielding him from something unseen. Boaz stared at his hands, chest heaving, unsure if he had summoned the fire — or if it had summoned him.

None of them understood what was happening.

Their instructors didn’t speak of it, but they noticed. They watched the familiars closely. They held their questions behind stern eyes and quiet glances.

And something else lingered, just beyond the reach of words.

The birds were slower to sing in the morning. The air held a stillness that felt like breath drawn in but never released. Even the trees creaked more than they should. When the wind stirred the canopy, it came not like a song, but like a warning.

And in those quiet, unguarded moments, when no one was sparring or laughing or patching bruises, Boaz would sometimes look westward toward Forlon, then north, where the forest grew dense and dark.

He felt watched.

These changes didn’t happen all at once, of course. The forest changed in the way a dream unravels: slowly, softly, until you wake and realize something isn’t where it should be.

By the end of the second week at camp, the trees near the training fields stood straighter, their autumn leaves hardly rustling. The wind came less often. The birds hesitated before they sang. The recruits noticed it, though none of them said so directly.

Jaxson began sleeping with his bow beside him, even when not on rotation, for they had started taking turns on night watch. Lyra checked her blades twice each morning. Kiera’s hands, once steady when dressing wounds, now lingered a little longer on each bandage, as though expecting worse to come. Theo started waking in the night, claiming Tink had been pacing in circles beside him, but each time he looked, she was curled up, still as stone.

And Boaz … Boaz could feel it through Thorne. The lynx no longer slept near the others. He paced before dawn, silent and watchful, eyes fixed always west. Sometimes he stopped and stared into the trees for so long that Boaz forgot he was there.

Once, Boaz stirred before the sun and caught Thorne crouched low on a rise just outside camp, body taut, ears pinned back. The lynx didn’t move for nearly an hour.

Later that morning, Boaz found Master Julian at the edge of the eastern grove, kneeling beneath a cedar older than the camp itself. The Earthreader’s hands were pressed against the bark, his eyes closed, his long frame folded like prayer.

Boaz hesitated and almost turned away, but Master Julian spoke first, without opening his eyes: “There is movement in the roots.”

Boaz approached quietly, careful not to disturb the needles underfoot. “What kind of movement?”

Julian tilted his head. His voice was low, even, and so calm it made the words feel colder. “Not of water. Not of growth. Not of animals digging or storms pulling limbs down. Something older. Something the trees do not understand.”

He opened his eyes at last. They were pale and sharp, like stone washed smooth in river water. “The ground remembers what passed here long ago. And now … now it feels something like that again.”

Boaz swallowed. “Do you think something’s coming?”

Julian looked west, not at the horizon, but beneath it. As if trying to see into the bedrock. “I don’t think. I listen. What I hear is … hesitation. The land is holding its breath.”

Thorne appeared behind Boaz without a sound. He stood still as ever, tail low, ears alert, but his eyes didn’t scan the trees. They watched the ground. Boaz looked between them: Julian, unmoving, and Thorne, tense as if waiting for a storm to break.

He felt it too now. A tightness. A pressure just beyond sense. Not danger yet. Not violence. But the shape of something approaching.

Like a whisper rising through the roots.

By the time the midday bell echoed through the trees, the sun had pushed most of the morning chill back into the shadows. The wind still bit around the edges, but the cookfire crackled merrily, sending up the scent of smoked turnip stew and warm bread.

The recruits had gathered in their usual half-circle around the fire, huddled in cloaks and wool-lined gloves, bowls in hand.

“It’s definitely saltier than yesterday,” Theo muttered, poking at the stew with his spoon. “You trying to kill us, Jax?”

“I didn’t cook it!” Jaxson protested. “Kiera stirred the pot. Blame her.”

Kiera gave a serene smile. “I added thyme. Not salt.”

Lyra took another bite and made a face. “I think Tink added the salt.”

There was a moment of silence as everyone turned to look at the raccoon, who sat perched on Theo’s knee, holding a corked spice vial and looking deeply unrepentant.

Theo narrowed his eyes. “That’s my emergency salt. That was for winter.”

Tink casually tipped the vial upside down, as if to prove her point.

“Well,” Lyra said, grinning, “guess we’re surviving winter on thyme and regrets.”

Mika let out a huff beside her, then rolled onto her back, paws in the air, clearly done with this conversation.

Boaz chuckled, taking a sip of stew. “I don’t know. I kind of like it.”

“Of course you do,” Jaxson said. “You’d eat tree bark if Thorne didn’t glare you out of it.”

Boaz glanced at the lynx sitting beside him, utterly unmoved by the noise or the teasing. “He’s judging all of you right now.” Thorne blinked once, slow and unimpressed.

Above them, Kestel let out a shriek and swooped down, nearly skimming the top of Jaxson’s bowl. The archer ducked instinctively and spilled half his stew across his cloak. “Kestel!” he shouted. “What was that for?”

Theo was laughing at this, almost choking on a mouthful of stew. Tink took the opportunity to climb into his pack again, possibly in search of cinnamon this time.

For a little while, the tension that had hung over them the last few days faded. There was laughter. Elbows in ribs. Bread tossed across the fire. Familiar tails swishing in the leaves. Even Eira, ever still and solemn, gave a soft hoot and blinked slowly, as though briefly amused by it all. It didn’t last long. The clouds were gathering behind the treetops, and the wind had a sharper edge now.

But for a brief stretch of midday in the forest, the wardens weren’t recruits, or soldiers-in-training, or pieces of someone else’s war. They were just friends. And that would have to be enough.

The sun had shifted lower by the time Master Julian called for them.

The shadows stretching from the trees had grown long and lean, pulling autumn’s quiet stillness behind them. The air had cooled again, and the warmth of the midday fire faded fast once they left its reach. Wind rustled through the thinning canopy, lifting dead leaves into soft spirals that danced around their boots as they made their way down the winding trail.

They said little. There was something about Julian’s expression: composed as always, but tighter now, sharpened by some quiet strain, that told them this would not be a routine exercise.

He led them to a grove they had been to before, the ring of ancient stones half-swallowed by moss and time. But the space felt different now. Not just colder, and not just because of the air. Heavier. As though the ground remembered more than it wanted to share.

Julian stood at the edge of the circle and turned slowly to face them. “You know the form,” he said. “Hands to the earth. Familiars near. No words. Just listening.”

He waited, not for them to nod, but for the silence to settle. When it had, he stepped back and said nothing more. The recruits entered the ring, one by one.

Kiera knelt at the eastern edge, palms pressed gently to the soil, her cloak pooling behind her, hood pulled over her head against the chill. Eira perched behind her on a low branch, perfectly still.

At first, all she felt was the cold.

But slowly, as she let her breath slow and her heartbeat quiet, something began to rise beneath her hands. Not a sensation exactly, but a presence. A sadness that pulsed up from the roots below, as if the land were mourning something it could no longer name.

It didn’t come all at once. It seeped in like mist, curling into her ribs, wrapping around her lungs. It felt like loss. Not of life, but of hope. And then it faded, leaving her eyes damp and her hands trembling.

Eira didn’t move.

Theo crouched low to the ground, hands flat on the soil, head bent forward. Tink climbed up onto his back and lay flat across his shoulders, not playful for once, just waiting.

He expected the pulse of roots, of tunnels, of the deep things that usually murmured beneath the forest floor.

But there was nothing. Not quiet. Not stillness. Just absence. The land beneath him was empty, like a drum with no skin. Something had passed through — not recently, but recently enough — and had left more than footfalls. He pressed his fingers deeper into the earth, as though trying to make it speak again. But it remained hollow.

Tink tightened her grip on his collar.

Lyra dropped into a crouch with her usual ease, one hand touching the moss, the other resting on Mika’s back. The hyena was tense, her tail flat, eyes fixed on a nearby tree as if expecting it to move.

Lyra closed her eyes. She reached, gently, for the quiet that had always met her here: the tangle of growth, the language of underbrush. But today, the land didn’t welcome her. It felt guarded. Distant. No, it watched.

Something buried deeper than roots had turned its attention toward her. Not with curiosity, but with cold calculation.

It didn’t hate her. It didn’t fear her. It simply noticed. Lyra pulled her hand back and stood too quickly, swaying. Mika didn’t follow. She stayed low, teeth bared, but silent.

Jaxson sat cross-legged, bow laid across his knees. His fingers brushed the dirt lightly, as if uncertain whether he wanted to connect at all. Kestel glided in low above him, then settled in a branch not far from Eira.

He had never found the stillness of Earthreading easy. His instincts were built for motion, for wind and line of sight. But this time, something reached out to him. He felt a pull, subtle and persistent, dragging his attention not downward, but west.

A pressure beneath the surface. A current running against the natural grain of the land. Like a path trying to open. But it didn’t want to guide him. It wanted to mislead him.

Jaxson opened his eyes and stared west through the trees. He didn’t know what waited there, but he knew it was calling.

Boaz stepped into the circle last, the wind tugging at the edges of his cloak. He knelt beside one of the larger stones, Thorne pacing once behind him before settling in close.

The moment Boaz touched the ground, a jolt surged through him: not painful, but deep.

The forest had always felt old. But now it felt “aware”. Not just of him, but of something inside him. The pressure he’d felt in his dreams: the vision of fire, of the bone-crowned king, of the lake beside the city, all of it stirred again, not in his mind, but in the soil. The land recognized him. It didn’t reject him. It didn’t welcome him. It remembered him. And that terrified him more than anything else.

Thorne pressed against his side. Boaz realized he’d been holding his breath. He let it out slowly and withdrew his hands. He realized for the first time that the ground was cold. Of course it should be, it was Autumn.

When they had all stepped back from the circle, Master Julian stood in silence for a long while, eyes sweeping across their faces.

No one asked what he had felt. They already knew the answer. At last, he spoke, his voice low and distant. “The land carries memory. And what it remembers now … is fear.”

A wind swept through the grove, rustling the leaves high above them. None of them moved. None of them spoke. But every one of them knew: Something was coming.

Supper also was subdued.

Even the fire crackled less eagerly that night, its flames shifting more blue than gold as the wind picked up out of the west. The stew had gone cold faster than usual, and though the recruits ate, they did so in silence. Their earlier laughter had not returned. Whatever warmth the afternoon had offered was gone now, replaced by the growing weight of something unnamed.

The firelight flickered low beneath the canopy of the Lore and History station. Smoke curled upward into the crisp autumn sky, where stars had begun to prick the heavens one by one. The benches, carved from stone and softened by time, were arranged in a circle around the flame. The recruits sat with cloaks drawn tight, bowls emptied, steam long faded from their hands.

Tonight, the lesson did not begin with a story, it began with a question: “Why do you think,” Master Syrna said, her voice calm and even, “you and your familiars are sensing things that we have not taught you to expect?”

Silence met her words. Not resistance, just uncertainty.

Boaz looked at Thorne, whose eyes reflected the fire like molten gold. Kiera’s hand rested gently on Eira’s wingtip. Jaxson stared into the flame, jaw set.

Master Elira, pale and ageless in the firelight, stood slowly and stepped forward. She held a weathered scroll in one hand, though she didn’t unroll it. Her eyes scanned the circle. “There are stories,” she said softly, “written in the time before the Battle of Beltin Fords. Not many. Most were lost, or hidden, or … deliberately forgotten.”

She paused. The fire snapped once. A few leaves blew through the stone pillars and scattered at her feet. “Some of those stories speak of echoes: residual currents of magic that would stir in the land whenever great change approached. In the years before the Sundering and the battle, animals grew restless. Entire groves of trees withered overnight. Dreams turned violent. Familiars, the few that were in that age, were said to wake before their wardens understood why.”

Theo shifted on the bench. “But that was more than a century ago.”

“Yes,” Elira said. “Which is why we study history, not for what has passed, but for what might return.”

Master Richard stood next. He was smaller than the others, sharp-eyed and thoughtful, a quiet keeper of old truths. “Tradition tells us the border is more than land. It’s a threshold,” he said. “Not just between nations, but between what is and what was — between memory and myth. That’s why you’ve been taught not only to read the earth, but also lore and history. To sense when the land itself begins to remember.”

He looked around the circle. His gaze lingered on each of them, as if trying to measure what they already knew but hadn’t admitted. “So I ask you again,” he said gently, “what do you think the land is remembering?”

Still, no one answered. Not at first.

Then Lyra said quietly, “It doesn’t feel like memory.” All eyes turned to her. “It feels like warning.”

Syrna exhaled slowly through her nose, as if she’d been holding that breath all night. She walked toward the center of the circle, her shadow long behind her. “When we were called to this cohort,” she said, “we expected to shape Border Wardens: watchers, defenders, guides.”

She looked toward the west. Her eyes glinted in the firelight. “But things have changed, and the land is shifting in a way we cannot yet explain.” She turned back to the recruits; these young wardens-in-the-making, each with a familiar now curled at their side.

“We were meant to prepare you to defend the border,” she murmured. “I fear we’ve been preparing you to cross it. What I mean is that we think you were meant to be a bridge between what has gone before in ages past, and what is to come. None of us rightly know what that means, but what seems certain is that you five will bridge the ancient past with the future.”

No one spoke after that. The instructors dismissed the warden recruits to their cabins, while the fire in the lore station burned low. Above them, the wind carried no birdsong, only the slow hush of leaves falling from trees that had seen too many winters.

The cabins creaked softly in the cold.

The wind had risen during the night, slipping between the wooden slats and sighing against the shutters. It wasn’t enough to wake the recruits, not fully, but enough to pull them into that strange place between sleep and alertness, where dreams mix with instinct.

Boaz lay awake however, arms folded behind his head, listening to the forest. It was too quiet. No owl calls. No wind through dry leaves. Just the stillness; the kind that settles in before something breaks.

Thorne sat near the door, ears pricked, body still. He hadn’t moved for hours, his ears and their long tufts the only movement as they swiveled forward and back.

Boaz shifted under his blanket, watching the faint silver of pre-dawn creep along the floorboards. His heart was calm, but his chest was tight, and he didn’t know why.

The knock came just before first light. Three sharp raps — measured, not frantic. Boaz was already upright, and Thorne had moved to the door before he had fully registered what he was doing. Master Hawar was standing there, motioned with his hand, and said, “Come. Messenger from Forlon.”

Out in the cold morning, the forest hung gray with fog. Frost lined the grass and leaves, and a pale sliver of sun barely kissed the tops of the trees.

A man stood just outside the circle of cabins, wrapped in a travel-worn cloak, boots caked with mud from the valley path. He looked like he’d been running hard, but not fleeing. His breath came fast, but steady.

Other instructors had also called out the other recruits. Syrna emerged from the instructor’s cabin, fully dressed, as though she’d been expecting him. The man nodded to her, and to Julian, who stepped out a moment later.

“I just came from Forlon. Name’s Brann.” He said this without ceremony. “We were attacked yesterday. Just after sunset.”

The recruits were gathering now, cloaks thrown over their shoulders, sleep still on their faces but burning away fast.

Boaz stepped forward. “Attacked by who?”

“They weren’t bandits,” he said. “but not living men, neither. Dead things. Walking. With skin like paper and eyes like fogged glass.”

Kiera covered her mouth with one hand.

He continued. “They came fast. Had some dark sorcerers or something like that controlling them. They just tore people down.”

Lyra’s jaw was clenched. “How many?”

“Three groups. Maybe thirty in all. But they seemed like fifty.”

Julian’s expression darkened. “Fallen.”

“That’s what I’ve heard tell of them, yeah,” the messenger nodded grimly.

“We tried to hold them, or drive them off. Your man Cayden is alive — he sent me. But he didn’t seem to think they were there for a fight. Thought they were looking for something, or someone. There was purpose in the attacks. Didn’t stop them from taking captives though.”

Jaxson stepped forward, voice tight. “Captives?”

“They didn’t just kill,” the messenger said. “They dragged off a dozen. Maybe more. Mostly the younger ones.”

Boaz felt the air leave his lungs. Children. Teenagers. His neighbors. People he’d seen in the square, at the market.

“Yeah, Cayden figures they were looking for something,” the messenger added. “Not just to kill. They … searched. Like they knew it was there, but couldn’t find it.”

Syrna’s face was pale. Her voice was colder than the wind. “Prepare your gear,” she said to the recruits. “We march as soon as you’re ready.”

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