Then—
a sound.
Soft. Distant. But not the horn, not the sea-wind, not the restless cry of an owl.
A howl.
Long, low, and unearthly. It rolled across the hills, threading through stone and silence alike until it touched even the highest tower. Not loud enough to rouse the guards. But Aerion heard it.
He felt it.
Something primal stirred beneath his ribs, the faint, irrational sense that he was being watched. He stepped back from the window, heartbeat quickening despite the walls around him.
Another sound followed—fainter, like claws against stone. Then nothing.
Only the wind.
Aerion stood still for a long moment, gaze fixed on the darkness beyond the glass. His reflection looked back—goldenhair, sharp eyes, the faintest tremor of breath. He lifted his chin, forcing calm, forcing arrogance, forcinghimself.
“Wolves,” he said aloud, voice cutting the quiet. “Only wolves.”
But when he turned away, he lit another candle before leaving the room.
The barracks were never silent for long. Even at midnight, the air carried the low murmur of men’s voices, the rasp of whetstones, the faint clink of chainmail being mended. Smoke from the torches drifted toward the rafters, mingling with the sharp scent of oil and iron.
Clyde sat at the long table nearest the hearth, armour stripped down to a padded tunic, forearms bare. The firelight turned the scars there to pale ropes, the kind that only years of battle could carve. Marreck, a broad-shouldered knight with a nose long since broken and eyes quick with mischief, leaned across from him, nursing a cup of watered wine.
“They’re saying the eastern ridge is crawling with them,” Marreck muttered, voice low enough not to carry. “Whole patrol gone missing two nights past. Found the horses, though. Half-eaten. No sign of the men.”
Clyde grunted. “If they found the horses, they weren’t taken by bandits.”
“Nor wolves,” said another knight from farther down the table, his voice rough with age. “No beast leaves tracks that deep and none at all after. My brother saw it once, years back on the border near Harren’s Fen. Said it moved like smoke—four-legged, but wrong somehow. Eyes like cinders.”
A few of the younger soldiers crossed themselves instinctively.
Clyde didn’t. He had seen worse.
He’d seen the creatures they spoke of.
Fifteen years old, sword too big for his hands, and already knee-deep in mud and blood. The first time he’d seen one, it had burst from the fog during a dawn raid—its hide like bark, its mouth filled with teeth that gleamed like glass. He had killed it, or thought he had, until it kept moving long after the blade should have stilled it. They were fast, silent, hard to wound, and impossible to understand.
He’d never feared them. You didn’t fear what you couldn’t afford to.
But that was before his duty had a face.
Now, the thought of those creatures crossing into Valemont lands, moving unseen beneath the same sky his lord slept under… it twisted something deep inside him, something sharper than fear.
He leaned forward, voice low. “Folk tales. What do you know of them?”
Marreck blinked. “Folk tales, sir?”
“About the demons,” Clyde said. “You all grew up on stories. Tell them.”
A younger knight, one of the new recruits from the northern valleys, shifted uneasily. “My mother said they come from the oldest forests. Places men weren’t meant to walk. She said they’re what’s left when the gods turn their faces away.”
“That’s priest talk,” Marreck scoffed. “Old women trying to scare children out of the woods.”
“Still,” the recruit murmured, “they’ve always been here. My grandfather said they were seen before the first war. Before kings, even. No one knows where they come from. They just… appear. When the land’s sick. When men start killing each other again.”
