And still Aerion was restless.
Every night ended the same: him sprawled on his bed, Clyde’s letter pressed to his chest, whispering into the dark as if the knight might hear across the distance, across the silence.
“Come home,” he murmured. “Come home to me.”
The road west wound like an old scar through the land—muddy, uneven, littered with broken wagons and graves dug shallow where the earth was too frozen to yield.
The war was over.
That was what they’d been told. What the king’s herald had shouted from a blood-stained dais. What Clyde himself had ordered his men to believe.
But war never ended so cleanly.
The march home was slower than the march to battle. Horses stumbled from exhaustion. Men limped, leaning on one another, arm or hanging loose on thinner frames. The air was raw with spring thaw—wet earth and rot and smoke from villages burned months ago.
Clyde rode at the head. His shield was gone, his horse a ragged bay that had already carried him too far, but he held himself tall. He had to. The men followed his back now, not the banners.
Renn should have been at his side. So should Merrick. So should fifty others whose names Clyde would never stop carrying. Instead, he had a hundred hollow-eyed survivors, boys too young and men too old, looking to him as if he could conjure safety from mud.
He didn’t speak much. But when the youngest faltered, Clyde was there to steady him. When the food dwindled, he gave up his share. At night, he walked the lines of the campfires, speaking a quiet word here, a hand on a shoulder there. It wasn’t much. But it kept them moving.
What kept him moving was smaller still.
A ribbon, worn soft with years, tied around his wrist beneath his gauntlet. Aerion’s colours, faded to brown, but his all the same. Clyde touched it when no one was looking, thumb brushing the frayed knot, and thought of the letter folded close to his chest.
He read it in his head more often than he breathed.
Come home. Live long enough to be punished for it.
The words made him smile, faint and private. They made his step surer when the mud clung too heavy. They made the nights less cold.
Aerion was waiting. Aerion and the girl. A hearth, a home, a future that felt almost possible.
Almost.
Because on the twelfth day of the march, when the road narrowed through a stretch of black pine, Clyde’s instincts caught fire.
The silence was wrong. No birds. No wind. Only the creak of leather, the squelch of mud, the uneven rhythm of too many tired boots.
He raised a hand. The column slowed.
And then the arrows came.
Screaming from the trees.
Men fell before they could cry out. Horses shrieked. Steel rang.
Clyde’s sword was in his hand before the first shaft struck. He bellowed for the men to form ranks, though his voice was nearly drowned in chaos. Blood spattered his cheek, hot and fresh.
The war was not over.
Not yet.
The arrows were only the beginning.
The trees themselves seemed to split apart, bark shredding into splinters as something bigger moved behind them. The air reeked of sulfur, of rot and burning metal. Then came the sound—low, guttural, more beast than man.
The first creature leapt from the shadows.
