CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I do not come to you lightly. I am no revolutionary. I am not strong. But I am not blind. Enclosed is a ledger. It contains names. Records. Rotting secrets. It is the only thing I have managed to smuggle out piece by piece over the past five years. I do not ask for justice. Only for light. For someone to see. If nothing else—let my name be cursed, let it be forgotten—but please, let the screams stop.”
Witness name redacted. Sealed court proceeding on Lord Eramus Steeples. 985 NE.
The boy tugged weakly at the ropes biting into his wrists. Every inch of him throbbed from the beating, but it was the ribs that screamed the loudest. Sharp pain flared with each shallow breath. He slumped in the corner of the barred wagon, staring through the wooden slats with sullen eyes.
Abruptly, the wagon creaked to a halt. There was an exchange of distant words ahead from his captors.
Boots approached with a crisp thud. The reason for their stop wore a cloak so white it seemed to glow in the gloom. Steel polished to mirror brightness gleamed on his shoulders and chest. It must take him an hour each day just to keep it that spotless. The boy squinted. That face... Exodio? Yes—Child Captain Exodio. How did he know his name and face?
“You stand accused of grave crimes, boy,” Exodio intoned, voice as cold and precise as his armor. “They tell me you assaulted a Child of the Light. A crime punishable by death. And yet... you are young. And already bloodied.” His gaze lingered on the bruises. “Repent, and the Light will surely forgive.”
“I repent nothing, my Lord,” the boy said, chin lifting despite the pain. His voice was brittle, but his eyes flared with defiance. That gave Exodio pause.
“There is mercy in the Light for those who seek it,” the Captain said, his tone sharpening. “I offer you a path to redemption. Will you not take it?”
“I understand, my Lord,” the boy said. “But I have no regrets. I struck no man without cause. Your Child was threatening a younger boy—barely ten. It was a child’s game, nothing more. But your soldier took a naked blade to it. I stepped in. I stand for the weak. Do the precepts not say ‘The shepherd must tend to even the runt of the flock.’”
Exodio’s brow arched at the audacity of this boy quoting scripture to him. His jaw flexed. “You may not know the full story, child.”
“What more do I need to know? I was there.” the boy snapped. “The Child drew steel over a game of make-believe. He didn’t ask a question, didn’t give a warning. Just swung. Who else would stop him?”
Exodio was silent for a moment, parsing what had not made it into the reports. Convenient omissions, no doubt.
“You overstepped,” he said at last. “A civilian intervening against an officer—it’s reckless. And dangerous.” He gestured at the boy’s battered frame. “You could have been killed.”
“These bruises aren’t from him. I gave him better than he did.” the boy muttered, forcing himself to stand despite the pain. “They’re from the others. His friends.”
Exodio’s lips thinned. “Some among us are... overly zealous,” he said, almost grudgingly. “Sometimes, innocents are caught in the blaze we call justice. That is not the Light’s will. I’ll speak with the Child in question.”
The boy bowed his head, just slightly. “As the Lord wills. Am I free to go, then?”
Exodio studied him. “You’re not from this town. What brings you here?”
“I came to join the Children of the Light.”
That caught the captain off guard. His brows rose, lips parting slightly. “You came to join us—and your first act was to brawl with one of our officers?”
“Yes, sir.”
Exodio folded his arms, his tone suddenly more curious than cold. “Why?”
The boy didn’t hesitate. “Because it was the right thing to do.”
For a long breath, Exodio was still. Then—unexpectedly—he laughed. A dry, rasping sound like iron scraping leather.
“Well,” he said, eyes narrowing. “Perhaps we do have a place for you after all.”
Halfhand awoke to silence.
For a fleeting second, he believed he was dead—drifting in that liminal stillness between worlds as his life flickered before his eyes. But then the pain came, dragging him back like hooks in his flesh. Burning ribs, a twisted knee, the raw ache of muscles torn and bruised. He gasped.
The memory struck like a hammer.
The battle. The witch. Jena’s dead eyes. The flames. The void.
He tried to rise, but agony surged through him. His arms shook with the effort. He pressed a hand to his side and stifled a groan, bracing against the sharp stab of broken ribs. With a ragged breath, he forced himself upright.
And then he saw her.
Jena.
Alive.
Sitting just feet away.
His breath caught in his throat. No. No, that couldn’t be right.
He remembered her body on the ground.. He had felt her life flicker and vanish like a candle in the wind.
But here she was. Breathing. Pale, yes—gray-lipped and sunken-eyed—but undeniably alive.
He stared at her, uncertain if his own blood loss had finally cracked his mind.
She met his gaze. Her expression was blank for a moment, then curled faintly at the edges. “You look awful, Lord Knight.”
His throat worked. He swallowed the lump. “You should see yourself.”
Her laugh was thin. Hollow. Her voice was distant and strained.
Halfhand looked down. His armor was gone, stripped away and left in a twisted heap beside her. His body was a mess of cuts—long, clean lines where the shattered steel had carved through flesh. Jena must have peeled the armor off him while he was unconscious. They looked like metal scrap now.
How long had they been lying here?
He searched and saw Viellain sitting slumped near the horses. He didn’t look up, but his head inclined slightly to acknowledge Halfhand’s awakening.
“The House is gone,” the Inquisitor said quietly, nodding to the smoldering ruins on the hill. “Burned through the night. Even the pine bones. Nothing left.”
A black scar now marked where the Sleepless House had once stood, coals still glowing in the daylight like the last embers of a funeral pyre. Smoke clung to the landscape, sour and greasy, as if the place itself had resisted being unmade.
“I’m out of weapons,” Viellain muttered. “Out of tricks. We lived. All of us….somehow.”
There was no victory in his tone. Just exhaustion.
Viellain stood slowly, revealing the eschar of burns on his body. He looked down and then commanded Halfhand. “You need to check my Cage.”
Halfhand approached. The familiar haze of burnt flesh and scorched fibers lingered heavily around the Hand of LIght. Halfhand brushed away the soot caking the man’s back. The hard black ink was still there—twisted runes and iron-black lines, etched into flesh like chains. Despite the battle, the flames, and the force that had nearly killed them all, the Cage remained whole.
Halfhand’s finger traced the pattern over the angry red flesh. No interruptions.
“It’s unbroken.”
“The Light blesses and curses me,” Viellain said, moving stiffly towards the horses.
Jena watched from where she sat. Her voice came soft, uncertain. “What was that?”
Viellain didn’t answer.
Halfhand did. “A soul-cage. Inked deeply with founder’s iron. It's meant to keep things out. The Power, possession, corruption. For those willing to pay the cost.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Does every Hand of Light have one?”
“No. Only the ones who’ve seen too much. The ones willing to give up their place in the Wheel for a sliver of control. It works just as well as keeping things in.”
She looked disturbed at the implication. “If he dies, his soul is trapped?”
Halfhand nodded. “Bound. Rotting alone in eternity. No hope of rebirth. It’s... a permanent end to their thread in the Pattern.”
Jena turned away, visibly shaken.
But the mention of souls twisted something in Halfhand’s gut.
Because he remembered.
He remembered the moment Jena died. The clarity of it. Her breath failing. Her chest still. Her soul departing like a thread severed. He had felt it—known it.
And yet... he’d done something.
Instinctively. Desperately..
He had placed his hand on her and called—not with words, but with will, with the silent scream of his conduit. Something passed through him—his life, his flame, his essence.
And something had answered.
She had drawn breath again.
Now she sat here, quiet and pale, like a reflection in still water.
Alive.
But how?
He didn’t know. No one in the Children of Light could be trained for that. The soul was sacred. Resurrection was heresy—blasphemy. The Light gave and took in its time.
But Halfhand had... broken that.
And he didn’t know how.
He studied Jena’s movements, each blink, each breath. She looked like herself. Sounded like herself. But still, something within him crawled. As if she cast two shadows when no one else did.
And deeper still—beneath bone, beneath thought—he knew something in him was gone.
He reached down, touched the earth, and reached with his will through his conduit.
Pain exploded through his chest. Blinding. Raw. He gasped, staggered.
The conduit of his soul was severed. Dead. His link to his inner Light’s flow had been burned away.
The cost of what he had done was starting to manifest.
He had given her a second life.
But at what price?
The Hunt: The Illian Desecration --- &RPaward
Re: The Hunt: The Illian Desecration --- &RPaward
Chapter Sixteen
“I tried to speak to Loria again. My old maid. She just shook her head and wept. Later that night, she was gone. I hear her sometimes beneath the floorboards. Scraping. I think I’m forgetting how to talk to people who aren’t afraid of me. Or who don’t look at me like I’m already a ghost.”
-Illian journal. Author unlisted.
Doubt. It has been time since Halhand felt true doubt. Faith has always provided him clarity and purpose. Since joining the Order, he has not felt his faith shaken thus.
He had acted with Jena with impulse and emotion and now the voice of Light had abandoned him. This was on him. A failure as a Knight and Acolyte.
He flexed his hand of sacrifice and felt it as it truly was. A physical deformity of a cripple. His price for his abilities, but just a reminder of weakness.
But when he looked upon Jena, he could not say he regretted it. Even in the pain of his doubt, he still felt in his core that it was the right thing to do.
But no, he must move on. His soul was just wounded, he decided. Torn. It will heal. There was nothing else that would make sense to him. To drag his heavy beaten body forward into his quest again with or without his abilities.
It was a day’s meager reprise before they were packed up for the journey again. Packing was not hard. Their belongings were significantly lighter than when they started their journey.
Viellain had lost all of his hard ordinances in the battle with the Levianthan, but he still had a apothecary’s worth of medicines, which he emptied out on their extensive wounds. Both Children were slathered in pungent unguments and balms, and almost every surface wrapped in bandages. Jena seemed to have escaped with the least of the visible wounds. Viellain had stitched her lacerations with catgut, bandaged her wrist tightly and prescribed her two weeks of iron pills. Her clothes were still most intact and just required a rinse in the river. Meanwhile, Halfhand and Viellain were now dressed in a hodgepodge of piecemeal clothes barely covered by their ragged traveling dusters. They looked and smelled like a troupe of vagabonds.
Viellain released their last messenger pigeon. It flew off north in the direction of Murandy, where it will hopefully find the Child of Light reporting station. It carried their last potential message from this forsaken land, a cry for help into the void.
“Where’s the houndslayer? ” Viellain asked as he watched the pigeon disappear into the gray. “We too should leave soon.”
“I saw her by the Sleepless carcass. I will fetch her.” Halfhand went.
Jena was kneeling by the charred foundation of the Sleepless House, arranging the last stones of a simple cairn. The wreath she laid on top was woven from stalks of purple lion’s mane—wild, delicate blooms that seemed almost too gentle for this scorched ruin.
“Her favorite flowers,” She explained quietly.
Halfhand approached, frowning. “Whose?”
“The Lady. Her name was Meria.”
He stiffened, instantly alert. “You know her name. And why build a grave for her? She killed you. Almost.”
“She was sick,” Jena murmured, eyes still fixed on the flowers. “Sick in the mind. Poisoned by the land itself and its people. She too is a victim of Him.”
Halfhand’s voice turned hard. “Her poison killed countless men and women. Don’t romanticize madness, Jena.”
“She didn’t mean for me to see it,” Jena said, softer now. “But when she drank my blood, she took my memories. And... I took some of hers.”
“That’s dangerous,” Halfhand snapped. “Mind-hazards aren’t truth. Whatever you saw, it was bait for corruption.”
“No,” she said, eyes haunted. “There was honest purity in her pain. Raw and unvarnished.”
She stood slowly, voice steady, but laced with sorrow.
“She was married off young. Too young. Barely older than I am. They called her strange, fey-touched, but she was beautiful—beautiful enough to catch a lord’s eye. Lord Steeples.”
Halfhand wanted to interrupt her but her words flowed with a relentless cadence that could not be stopped. There was something compelling in her voice.
“He was a monster. But clever. Handsome. Charming. He never laid a hand on her—not directly. She wasn’t his toy. She was his trophy. A rare bird in a gilded cage, watched, displayed, and never allowed to fly. Anyone who got too close to her—maid, guard, servant—they vanished. Into his dungeons. Into his cruel games.”
“Isolation,” Halfhand said. “A torture of its own.”
“Worse than that. The people began to fear her as much as him. She was the monster’s pet, the only one untouched by his wrath. A curse in human form. She was blamed for things she never chose. Her only true companion was the weaver spiders in her empty opulent room, the ones who seemed to spin for her.”
Jena’s fists clenched.
“But she wasn’t blind. She wasn’t broken yet. Over the years, she gathered evidence. Names. Schedules. The truth. And she smuggled it out, piece by piece. Eventually, it reached the capital. The army came like the stories said.”
“And the Lord?”
“Dead before they broke the gates. Poisoned himself in his study. The coward’s way.”
“And so she was free.”
Jena shook her head. “The army left the estate to her. Her freedom. But the servants didn’t see her as their savior. Only as the wife of their tormentor. His curse. And they turned on her.”
Halfhand knew what happened next. He knew enough of the base psychology of the masses.
“She had delivered them from evil. And they made her pay for it.”
“Everything the Lord did to them, they did to her. Fivefold. For months. And she endured it. Silent, alone, believing she deserved it.”
Her voice cracked.
“She repressed those memories. Tried to forget. But they’re still there. Gnawed and mangled, but alive. You can’t imagine the things I saw.”
Halfhand looked away, not able to meet the pain in Jena’s eyes.
“She was... shredded. Not just in body, but in soul. Torn down until there was nothing left but instinct. And then—at her lowest—she reached out. And that Power reached back.”
“She channeled?” Halfhand asked, quietly. “Better she had died there.”
“She awakened. Not from training, not with guidance. Not through joy or need. Through agony. Her first weave was a scream of her sundered soul.. And when it was done... the manor was painted in the blood of tormentors and innocent alike.”
Jena’s voice grew quieter.
“She didn’t run. She stayed. With her spiders. The only ones who understood her. She lived with the broken silence. For years.”
“But she wasn’t alone forever,” Halfhand guessed the rest of the tragedy.
Jena nodded. “She never called him by name. But he came like a whisper through the rotting halls. He came like Death. His skin was thin as paper. His voice—like dry leaves. Eyes glowing like starlight. He traveled in the company of another who was masked in leathers.”
“She tried to kill him the moment she saw him by reflex or by recognition. Her weaves lashed out—but he didn’t even flinch. He snuffed her strongest attempts like candlelight."
Jena’s gaze turned hollow.
“Even in her broken state, she tried to refuse him. But he was persuasive. His will was indomitable. He filled the broken cracks of her psyche with his poison. He told her the world had stolen from her. That she had bled for it. That it owed her. And he taught her how to take back.”
Halfhand whispered, “Blood curse.”
She nodded. “He taught her to drink the memory of blood to quench her emptiness. To draw strength from others' pain and take their humanity. He called it justice. But it wasn’t. He twisted her, stitch by stitch, until she wasn’t Meria anymore. Just hunger in silk. He took the last pieces of her and made them useful to him. The same as her prior Master.”
She looked back at the cairn.
“She wasn’t a monster until He came.”
Halfhand was silent for a long time.
Jena continued, voice low. “I think he’s why the darkhounds never came here. I think he’s the Wendigo. The one that feeds on the flesh of grief and ruin.”
She stepped back from the cairn, brushing dirt from her knees.
“She died long before we met her. But no one else will mourn her. So I will.”
Halfhand stood quiet next to her. He did not grieve or mourn for a dead witch, but he gave her the moment of silence. As the two turned away to the horses, Halfhand simply said “Do not tell Viellian” and Jena simply nodded.
Behind them, the ruins of the house still smoked, the ashes carrying the last remnants of a broken soul into the wind.
“I tried to speak to Loria again. My old maid. She just shook her head and wept. Later that night, she was gone. I hear her sometimes beneath the floorboards. Scraping. I think I’m forgetting how to talk to people who aren’t afraid of me. Or who don’t look at me like I’m already a ghost.”
-Illian journal. Author unlisted.
Doubt. It has been time since Halhand felt true doubt. Faith has always provided him clarity and purpose. Since joining the Order, he has not felt his faith shaken thus.
He had acted with Jena with impulse and emotion and now the voice of Light had abandoned him. This was on him. A failure as a Knight and Acolyte.
He flexed his hand of sacrifice and felt it as it truly was. A physical deformity of a cripple. His price for his abilities, but just a reminder of weakness.
But when he looked upon Jena, he could not say he regretted it. Even in the pain of his doubt, he still felt in his core that it was the right thing to do.
But no, he must move on. His soul was just wounded, he decided. Torn. It will heal. There was nothing else that would make sense to him. To drag his heavy beaten body forward into his quest again with or without his abilities.
It was a day’s meager reprise before they were packed up for the journey again. Packing was not hard. Their belongings were significantly lighter than when they started their journey.
Viellain had lost all of his hard ordinances in the battle with the Levianthan, but he still had a apothecary’s worth of medicines, which he emptied out on their extensive wounds. Both Children were slathered in pungent unguments and balms, and almost every surface wrapped in bandages. Jena seemed to have escaped with the least of the visible wounds. Viellain had stitched her lacerations with catgut, bandaged her wrist tightly and prescribed her two weeks of iron pills. Her clothes were still most intact and just required a rinse in the river. Meanwhile, Halfhand and Viellain were now dressed in a hodgepodge of piecemeal clothes barely covered by their ragged traveling dusters. They looked and smelled like a troupe of vagabonds.
Viellain released their last messenger pigeon. It flew off north in the direction of Murandy, where it will hopefully find the Child of Light reporting station. It carried their last potential message from this forsaken land, a cry for help into the void.
“Where’s the houndslayer? ” Viellain asked as he watched the pigeon disappear into the gray. “We too should leave soon.”
“I saw her by the Sleepless carcass. I will fetch her.” Halfhand went.
Jena was kneeling by the charred foundation of the Sleepless House, arranging the last stones of a simple cairn. The wreath she laid on top was woven from stalks of purple lion’s mane—wild, delicate blooms that seemed almost too gentle for this scorched ruin.
“Her favorite flowers,” She explained quietly.
Halfhand approached, frowning. “Whose?”
“The Lady. Her name was Meria.”
He stiffened, instantly alert. “You know her name. And why build a grave for her? She killed you. Almost.”
“She was sick,” Jena murmured, eyes still fixed on the flowers. “Sick in the mind. Poisoned by the land itself and its people. She too is a victim of Him.”
Halfhand’s voice turned hard. “Her poison killed countless men and women. Don’t romanticize madness, Jena.”
“She didn’t mean for me to see it,” Jena said, softer now. “But when she drank my blood, she took my memories. And... I took some of hers.”
“That’s dangerous,” Halfhand snapped. “Mind-hazards aren’t truth. Whatever you saw, it was bait for corruption.”
“No,” she said, eyes haunted. “There was honest purity in her pain. Raw and unvarnished.”
She stood slowly, voice steady, but laced with sorrow.
“She was married off young. Too young. Barely older than I am. They called her strange, fey-touched, but she was beautiful—beautiful enough to catch a lord’s eye. Lord Steeples.”
Halfhand wanted to interrupt her but her words flowed with a relentless cadence that could not be stopped. There was something compelling in her voice.
“He was a monster. But clever. Handsome. Charming. He never laid a hand on her—not directly. She wasn’t his toy. She was his trophy. A rare bird in a gilded cage, watched, displayed, and never allowed to fly. Anyone who got too close to her—maid, guard, servant—they vanished. Into his dungeons. Into his cruel games.”
“Isolation,” Halfhand said. “A torture of its own.”
“Worse than that. The people began to fear her as much as him. She was the monster’s pet, the only one untouched by his wrath. A curse in human form. She was blamed for things she never chose. Her only true companion was the weaver spiders in her empty opulent room, the ones who seemed to spin for her.”
Jena’s fists clenched.
“But she wasn’t blind. She wasn’t broken yet. Over the years, she gathered evidence. Names. Schedules. The truth. And she smuggled it out, piece by piece. Eventually, it reached the capital. The army came like the stories said.”
“And the Lord?”
“Dead before they broke the gates. Poisoned himself in his study. The coward’s way.”
“And so she was free.”
Jena shook her head. “The army left the estate to her. Her freedom. But the servants didn’t see her as their savior. Only as the wife of their tormentor. His curse. And they turned on her.”
Halfhand knew what happened next. He knew enough of the base psychology of the masses.
“She had delivered them from evil. And they made her pay for it.”
“Everything the Lord did to them, they did to her. Fivefold. For months. And she endured it. Silent, alone, believing she deserved it.”
Her voice cracked.
“She repressed those memories. Tried to forget. But they’re still there. Gnawed and mangled, but alive. You can’t imagine the things I saw.”
Halfhand looked away, not able to meet the pain in Jena’s eyes.
“She was... shredded. Not just in body, but in soul. Torn down until there was nothing left but instinct. And then—at her lowest—she reached out. And that Power reached back.”
“She channeled?” Halfhand asked, quietly. “Better she had died there.”
“She awakened. Not from training, not with guidance. Not through joy or need. Through agony. Her first weave was a scream of her sundered soul.. And when it was done... the manor was painted in the blood of tormentors and innocent alike.”
Jena’s voice grew quieter.
“She didn’t run. She stayed. With her spiders. The only ones who understood her. She lived with the broken silence. For years.”
“But she wasn’t alone forever,” Halfhand guessed the rest of the tragedy.
Jena nodded. “She never called him by name. But he came like a whisper through the rotting halls. He came like Death. His skin was thin as paper. His voice—like dry leaves. Eyes glowing like starlight. He traveled in the company of another who was masked in leathers.”
“She tried to kill him the moment she saw him by reflex or by recognition. Her weaves lashed out—but he didn’t even flinch. He snuffed her strongest attempts like candlelight."
Jena’s gaze turned hollow.
“Even in her broken state, she tried to refuse him. But he was persuasive. His will was indomitable. He filled the broken cracks of her psyche with his poison. He told her the world had stolen from her. That she had bled for it. That it owed her. And he taught her how to take back.”
Halfhand whispered, “Blood curse.”
She nodded. “He taught her to drink the memory of blood to quench her emptiness. To draw strength from others' pain and take their humanity. He called it justice. But it wasn’t. He twisted her, stitch by stitch, until she wasn’t Meria anymore. Just hunger in silk. He took the last pieces of her and made them useful to him. The same as her prior Master.”
She looked back at the cairn.
“She wasn’t a monster until He came.”
Halfhand was silent for a long time.
Jena continued, voice low. “I think he’s why the darkhounds never came here. I think he’s the Wendigo. The one that feeds on the flesh of grief and ruin.”
She stepped back from the cairn, brushing dirt from her knees.
“She died long before we met her. But no one else will mourn her. So I will.”
Halfhand stood quiet next to her. He did not grieve or mourn for a dead witch, but he gave her the moment of silence. As the two turned away to the horses, Halfhand simply said “Do not tell Viellian” and Jena simply nodded.
Behind them, the ruins of the house still smoked, the ashes carrying the last remnants of a broken soul into the wind.
Re: The Hunt: The Illian Desecration --- &RPaward
Chapter Sixteen
“Power is not ownership; it is stewardship. To wield it without responsibility is not freedom, but slavery to one’s own appetite.” Excerpt, Chapter 2, Philosophy of Natures and Power. Scholar Elan Morin Tedronai. Year unknown.
The next week on the road passed in uneasy quiet. Each of them carried their own ghosts from the Sleepless House, and every mile seemed to stretch the silence thinner. For Jena, her body slowly mended, but her mind still struggled to adapt to the events of the Sleepless House.
Each night, when they made camp, Lord Inquisitor summoned her for what he called a debrief. But for Jena it felt like a cross between a trial and an inquisition.
Lord Inquisitor questioned Jena carefully, making her repeat her tale in the Sleepless Mansion. His gaze was unreadable. His usual lazy amusement was gone, replaced by the cold gleam of a dissecting blade. This was her first experience with a true Questioning.
He did not move, except the constant clicking of his finger-armor, the noise hanging over Jena’s neck like a swinging guillotine.
“How can you not remember more?” Lord Inquisitor’s eyes were unblinking.
“It do be hard to put memories into words. They do blur together ” Yet he did not pause his impossible demand, and he continued to force her to recite over and over, drawing out the finest details that she did not even realize she remembered, peeling the memories back like old bandages.
While Lord Inquisitor crawled over her memory with a fine-tooth comb, it was regarding the end of the battle that he took the most interest.
“What happened after you stabbed the witch?” Lord Inquisitor asked again.
Jena swallowed. “All my strength do left me. I blacked out until I woke up here.”
His eyes didn’t leave her face. “No. Again. No summaries. Every detail. Don’t leave out the small things. Walk me through it.”
“I was on the table—it was knocked over, and the jolt… stirred me. Shrike do be in my hand, as if it wanted to be there. I could barely move, steering my arms like they were dangling on strings. The room was in flames. I couldn’t see you. But I saw the Lord Knight in the air—dying, crushed, bleeding. And… and she was there. Right in front of me. Her back to me. Vulnerable.”
“You were near death.” he asked, his voice quieter now. “What pulled you up when your body was finished?”
“I don’t know. Instinct. Shrike found my hand somehow. I stabbed her. I hoped but knew it wasn’t a killing blow. But it was all I had. And then I couldn’t see or move. But, I felt… peace.”
His eyes narrowed. “Peace. In that place?”
She faltered. “…Yes.”
“And then?”
There was a weight in the question, as though he was asking about more than just a sequence of events.
“I—” She frowned, pressing at the fog in her mind. “There do be … a feeling. Urgency. Heat. Light, maybe. Then nothing. I woke up outside.”
Lord Inquisitor leaned forward slightly. “Describe the light.”
She blinked. “I’m not sure it was light. Not the kind you see. There do be an almost painful heat. It was more like—” she broke off, unsettled. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters,” he said. “Again.”
And she did. Again and again, a dozen times over the next hour, he pulled the memory apart, made her circle back, made her scrape at the edges for anything she’d missed. His questions needled at her brain, making her itch to remember, to give him something. She didn’t know what he was looking for—only that he would not stop until he found it.
Eventually he leaned back, apparently satisfied. It felt like an eternity to Jena, she could feel her back soaked in cold sweat. But it seemed to be over. Lord Inquisitor had shifted again, returning to his mask of careless detachment. The transition itself was terrifying—how easily the predator became a jester again.
After the first interview, Jena thought that Lord Inquisitor was done but he made her sit again the next night. And the third night. And the questions seemed to be always the same. It almost seemed to become a routine to a point where Jena rattled off her answer as if memorized. She had gotten comfortable in the Lord Inquisitor's gaze. That is until the fourth night.
“And did you notice anything about Meria’s face before you struck her?” He asked, the first time diverting from his script.
Jena went to answer automatically, when something inside her seized her jaw and froze it for just a second. She had gotten too comfortable. A bead of cold sweat formed on her neck. She had never mentioned Meria’s name to him before– had she? It was possible Lord Inquisitor had learned it while Jena was unconscious, but in that case, wouldn’t Lord Knight know the name as well? Lord Knight had warned her to not let Lord Inquisitor know about the Lady’s memories, and his word held a dire truth. But then how would Lord Inquisitor know? Jena felt like she was caught in a badger trap.
Lord Inquisitor looked inscrutable, offering no clues about the nature of this deviation. But somehow Jena’s lips moved, hiding the rattling of her heart. “Meria do be the Lady’s name?”
The questioner simply nodded without a blink or a gesture. Jena felt an ominous aura settle around Lord Inquisitor, and yet the interview flowed forward again as if practiced. And that seemed to be the last night of questioning. She felt as if a balance had slipped. Either she had passed an unknown test, or she had fully stepped in the snare.
But such was the relationship that Jena had developed with the Lords. Though she had some experience with their presence, it was still like living on a dangerous edge. She could sense the darkness of their presence, and had seen personally the violence they were capable of. She had no doubt that to them, she was still ultimately a disposable tool. To be used and to be cast away at the earliest inconvenience.
After the darkhounds and the Sleepless House and her near death experience, she could feel the rational part of her telling her to just abandon this clearly suicidal quest. And yet she knew that her personal fate was tied up to this pair of men fundamentally as broken as her. There was never going to be a return to Troias. She was too changed.
Yet Jena could sense a shift in her relationship with the Lords since Sleepless. She could sense a tenseness with Lord Inquisitor despite the completion of the interviews and the keeping of her secret.
She wanted a return to before. She had considered giving her precious knife Shrike to Lord Inquisitor. His armament was depleted, and it would without a doubt be more useful in his hands, no matter her attachment to it. She did not want to give up Shrike dearly, but she felt perhaps the offering would serve her purpose. But to her relief, he gave her explicit permission to keep it.
“I cannot take your knife now, hound slayer.” He said. “It belongs to you and you to it. You are bound in promises of blood that I shall not break. In fact, it may even be considered a relic now by Children of Light tradition, almost a trifold blooded blade, blessed in the field and not the forge. First drink of three, blood of shadow. Second drink, blood of witch. Shrike is now twice blooded, something only a dozen Children of Light can claim and two of them are here. You should be proud, houndslayer, for one to have claimed to drink twice, that is a mark of a generational talent.” Though his voice was emotionless, the rare words of encouragement stirred a sense of pride in Jena.
“What is the third blood?” Jena asked. The Lords had dropped her daily questions limit.
“Perhaps one day you may find out.” Lord Inquisitor says, his voice seemed oddly sad. Jena did not push this further, but there was a pride now in holding her knife.
Her relationship with the Lord Knight was also different. One of Jena’s jobs was to help Lord Knight’s dressing, especially with his arms. As she unwrapped his dressing, she saw the lacerations covered with black scabs, but the wounds were starting to get weepy and angry with red streaks crawling up his skin.
“Does it hurt?” She asked, concerned.
“They don’t bother me, Jena.” He grunted, staring into the distance. She applied the dwindling poultice on the festering wounds. He didn’t flinch, didn’t even breathe differently when she touched him. The calm frightened her more than the blood ever could. She tried to avoid touching the wounds directly, because they made her skin crawl. But she continued on with her duties quietly, wrapping them carefully like she had been taught by the goodwife loris and praying to the Light they would heal and whispering the Litany of healing.
She paid more attention to Lord Knight’s tomes now. Once, she found them tedious and dense. She would read the same paragraph multiple times and still not make sense. But now she felt drawn towards them, especially the black bound book of Philosophy of Natures and Power.
When she read it now, it felt like a book was finally revealing its core secrets. Initially, it seemed to be a wandering diatribe about the abstract understanding of Power. But now, its words resonated with the new, burning hunger she felt since her near death. It spoke of strength as burden, of the world as something shaped by will alone.
And there was something more that she had held back from the interrogation besides Meria’s memories. She had resisted revealing it to anyone simply because it felt so personal. That when she had her near death experience in the Sleepless House, she had experienced something transcendental and indescribable. She had felt something vast and infinite. She knew in her heart it must be the Creator, a red light of almost painful heat and blistering intensity. And when she woke up, she knew she had changed. There was a purpose of spirit and hunger for life. Without it, she would have been a catatonic mess.
When the Knight noticed her reading, he only nodded. “I was hopeful you could make it further than me,” he said. “The one who taught me claimed that book would change the world.” And with her heart, she knew that to be the truth.
The mountains of the peninsula to the capital rose over the marshes, and they picked their way carefully through the rocky mountain passes. The ground here was more travelled. The mountain passes and the fort chain here would be the last barrier to Illian downcountry, where lies the capital city of canals.
Jena has never been this far. She made small trips with her family or with the Goodwife Lordis, but the shield wall was far from her experience. However, she picked the right paths, driven by memories of Lady Meria. It was unnatural, yes, and unsettling, but it allowed her to lead around most of the common patrol paths of the Illian army. It was hard for her sometimes to sort out what was her own memories. It would be ironic if the Lords of Light knew how much they were guided by the psychic ghost of a witch.
They made good time here, even with their meager supplies that they supplemented with foraging. Jena’s abilities to hunt served them well, but as they got up in the mountains, the game became scarce and their stomachs lean.
To get past the mountain passes, one would have to navigate through the network of Illian forts. One of them rose in the distance too, perched in the crevice of the past, chiseled into the mountain with battlements reigning over, ready to shower any invading army with oils and boulders.
Jena gazed at the fort as she felt the pit in her stomach drop. Even though she was guided here by instinct, she could feel a deep engrained terror yanking at her. Her memories from Meria were incomplete. There were no discrete details, but raw emotions and fear that her subconscious associated with that mountain fort. She knew what waited there was beyond death.
“This is the one. The home of the Winnika.” She said more to herself.
Jena could see Him in her mind’s eyes through the ghost. It was like the eyes of a predator. It was the same eyes of the creature wearing her father’s face on that winter cold. She had locked those memories behind a cage, but whatever the Sleepless Lady –- Meria had done to her had left her old memories drifting and mixing with a life she had never lived.
They were halfway up the mountain pass when a lone figure stepped into the trail. Jena had begun to notice the silence of the forest, the way the wind seemed to avoid the place. Then a figure stepped onto the trail ahead.
He wore armor that had once gleamed, now dulled and flaking like old lacquer. Six more men rose from the brush with crossbows raised, cutting off any escape path. The motion was too smooth, too practiced, even in their ragged state.
“Lovely,” Lord Inquisitor muttered, raising his hands with exaggerated slowness. “If you’re selling souvenirs, I fear we left our coin in a fire. Large fire. Very tragic.” His voice was light, but Jena saw how his eyes never left their weapons. Lord Knight’s hand had drifted to his sword hilt.
“If you’ve got no silver,” the leader drawled, there was a hint of a strange accent. “then leave your horses and your packs, and maybe we’ll spare your lives.”
Up close, they looked half-starved—beards grown wild, eyes too bright with hunger. Yet even broken, there was discipline in them, the sort that came from years under command.
“You’re Seanchan,” Lord Knight said, hand casually resting on his sword hilt. “What are you doing waylaying travelers on Illian soil?”
That got a reaction—muttering among the men, one of them spitting in the dirt.
Seanchan. Jena had heard of that term before. Tales of a savage army from across the sea, murdering and enslaving women. Jena had only heard of them in stories. But what she heard was that they were monsters, and rode beasts of nightmare. This ragged bunch of bandits did not look very legendary to Jena.
“Don’t draw, soldier,” the Seanchan leader warned. “You try anything and we’ll bury you here. You may look like beggars, but you ride those warhorses like you know them. You’re not fools. Don’t act like them.”
Before Lord Knight could reply, a distant sound rose from the valley. Heavy hoofbeats. A plume of dust crested the far hill.
“Illian patrol,” one of the Seanchan scouts hissed. “Big one.”
The leader clicked his tongue and gestured sharply. The crossbows vanished into the brush as quickly as they’d appeared, likely down a hidden path. Moments later, the trail was clear—save for faint footprints and broken branches.
The Inquisitor tilted his head, smirking. “So. Shall we vanish too?”
“Wait,” the Knight said. “We follow.”
Jena blinked. Follow them? The Seanchan?
Lord Knight turned his horse off the trail, into the undergrowth. The Inquisitor gave a long-suffering sigh but went after him.
“What are you doing?” Lord Inquisitor hissed. Jena echoed the same question in her own head.
“We need allies,” the Knight replied, his voice low and certain. “Weapons. And answers. Desperate times call for desperate allies.”
They found the deserters again in a hollow below the ridge. The Seanchan rose from their crouch, crossbows trained, expressions hard.
“Mad dogs,” the Seanchan captain spat. “You had your chance to walk away. Now you follow us? Why?”
“I wonder the same thing,” Lord Inquisitor murmured. Jena agreed as well silently, eying the sharp arrows aimed at them.
Lord Knight stepped forward slowly, hands open. “Because we have a common enemy. And perhaps a common past. Judging from your armor, you were stationed at the coastal outpost.”
That gave the deserters pause. One or two lowered their bows slightly. The captain hesitated, then nodded grimly.
“You’re not wrong,” he said. “What’s left of it.”
“Tell me what happened.”
A moment passed. Then the captain spoke.
“They came in the night. Armor like the Illian Companions—but wrong. Silver, but traced with red sigils that glowed like molten iron in the dark. They broke over the walls and tore through plate armor like parchment. Our damane lit the field with fire—but it didn’t stop them. Whatever they were, they were not humans.”
His voice turned hoarse.
“Nothing could stop them. I saw them tear the heads from sul’dam and deathwatch with their bare hands. No mercy. No quarter. Our supply ship tried to flee with the camp supporters. I couldn’t see what, but something formless rose up from the black sea, writhing and seething. Dragged the ship down below the waves. Screams carried all the way to the cliffs.”
Lord Inquisitor gave a slow whistle. “And you? You ran.”
The Seanchan’s eyes narrowed. Arrows rose again.
“Just saying, it’s a bold look for the Ever Victorious Army.”
Lord Knight raised a hand. “You lived. That matters now. The Light has given you a second chance. Your enemies are our enemies. Fight with us. It’s not too late to reclaim your honor.”
“Children of the Light.” The Seanchan Captain shook his head. “No. You don’t understand. Did you not hear what I just told you and saw with my own eyes? They weren’t men. They weren’t right. We live on their scraps here, but we still live. To fight them is walking to sure death.”
He pointed in the distance towards the mountain fort. He leaned forward slightly, eyes haunted.
“Don’t think we didn’t try. We did retreat to survive their initial attack.” His voice was harsh. “But I gathered what was left, and we followed them and their captives. We had no choice. That bloody fort is where we tracked them to.
“We prepared an infiltration. We thought just like you. But when he got close, what we saw.” There was a murmur in the ranks of the Seanchan. “They knew we were coming, because all the captives were lined up on the lowest parapet, nooses around their neck. And they were screaming, crying for help, obviously trying to bait us close.
“But as we drew close, hesitant, they were tossed over the parapet, to hang. But that was not the worst part. Even with their necks obviously broken, their screams never stopped, and their body jerked in an impossible way. One of my sharpshooters got close enough to fire an arrow to put a mercy arrow through the skull of a screamer. It did nothing. The screams continued through the night. Whatever was done to them kept them moving and screaming for a week. When the screams finally silenced a week ago, even the vultures left their bodies alone. Each of us can still hear those screams now. I lost two good men who tried to go in to silence them. Never again.”
“That place is a pit of pure evil. They bring prisoners. Mostly Illianers. Some even willingly. Once a week. Taken to that Fortress and beyond. But no one ever returns. The locals won’t go near it. The few that remain.”
“We’ve seen worse,” Lord Knight said quietly. “ You faced something you couldn’t understand—couldn’t defeat. I don’t blame you for surviving. But you have seen the evils of that tower.”
The Seanchan captain’s jaw tightened. He didn’t speak.
Lord Knight pressed. “Your armor may be broken, your ranks scattered—but your name is not gone. We have fought the evils of this land, we have won. We have paid for it, but we have won still. There is a reason you have stayed around here. You know in your heart that you cannot leave without justice uncorrected. I think the land has cursed you to stay here. The Light has connected us for a reason. Help us. We need to know the truth of that fortress.”
Silence. The crossbows didn’t lower—but they didn’t fire, either.
One of the younger deserters shifted. “We could—”
“No,” the captain snapped, silencing him. His voice cracked like frost underfoot. “You don’t understand until you have stood at its threshold. You will see. We will not go anywhere next to it again.”
Lord Knight’s jaw clenched. “Then you’ve already surrendered.”
The captain looked away, as if ashamed. “I’d rather be ashamed and alive than be turned into those things. Leave us. You’re madmen. You’ll wish we had just cut your throat here..”
He turned. The others followed with hesitation—vanishing into the forest like ghosts.
Lord Inquisitor stood silent a long moment before he spoke. “You almost had them.”
Jena had felt it too. The Seanchan wanted to agree, but Lord Knight’s words tugged at something fundamental. But visceral fear had won in the end. And she understood it too well.
Lord Knight nodded. “Almost isn’t enough.”
“I’ve seen their look before. They’re broken. Might as well be ghosts.”
“Then let’s make sure we don’t break the same way,” Lord Knight said, looking toward the mountain. “Our plan doesn’t change. We will investigate the Fortress.”
Those words drew cold terror in Jena from memories that were not of hers. But, she had sworn to Lord Knight that she could keep up. Her stomach quashed at stepping into that realm, to face the terrifying visage of their nightmares. She opened her mouth, fighting with the two halves of self, “Lord Knight, i do not…. I do not…”
Lord Knight cut her off, as if knowing her mind. “Jena, we do not expect you to step in there. There is clear danger and you physically have not healed. You have been involved in the terrible fighting, but that was never your purpose. In your physical state, you will only slow us down.” He says, despite the edges of his exposed bandages fluttering in the wind. He softened his edge, “And you will need to be witness to our deeds. If we do not return.”
It was a solution to her decision paralysis, and yet it still left her uneasy to be left alone on the hillside. But what other choice did she have? She wanted to protest, but yet the clenching of her heart lightened.
By dusk, she watched them climb the path toward the mountain’s heart. The wind tugged at the Knight’s bandages and set the Inquisitor’s cloak snapping like a black flame as they faded into the shadows of the path.
Jena found a hollow where the grass was soft and the horses could graze. She built a small fire, not for warmth but for the illusion of safety, and waited in the shadows of the mountains. And she would wait a long time.
“Power is not ownership; it is stewardship. To wield it without responsibility is not freedom, but slavery to one’s own appetite.” Excerpt, Chapter 2, Philosophy of Natures and Power. Scholar Elan Morin Tedronai. Year unknown.
The next week on the road passed in uneasy quiet. Each of them carried their own ghosts from the Sleepless House, and every mile seemed to stretch the silence thinner. For Jena, her body slowly mended, but her mind still struggled to adapt to the events of the Sleepless House.
Each night, when they made camp, Lord Inquisitor summoned her for what he called a debrief. But for Jena it felt like a cross between a trial and an inquisition.
Lord Inquisitor questioned Jena carefully, making her repeat her tale in the Sleepless Mansion. His gaze was unreadable. His usual lazy amusement was gone, replaced by the cold gleam of a dissecting blade. This was her first experience with a true Questioning.
He did not move, except the constant clicking of his finger-armor, the noise hanging over Jena’s neck like a swinging guillotine.
“How can you not remember more?” Lord Inquisitor’s eyes were unblinking.
“It do be hard to put memories into words. They do blur together ” Yet he did not pause his impossible demand, and he continued to force her to recite over and over, drawing out the finest details that she did not even realize she remembered, peeling the memories back like old bandages.
While Lord Inquisitor crawled over her memory with a fine-tooth comb, it was regarding the end of the battle that he took the most interest.
“What happened after you stabbed the witch?” Lord Inquisitor asked again.
Jena swallowed. “All my strength do left me. I blacked out until I woke up here.”
His eyes didn’t leave her face. “No. Again. No summaries. Every detail. Don’t leave out the small things. Walk me through it.”
“I was on the table—it was knocked over, and the jolt… stirred me. Shrike do be in my hand, as if it wanted to be there. I could barely move, steering my arms like they were dangling on strings. The room was in flames. I couldn’t see you. But I saw the Lord Knight in the air—dying, crushed, bleeding. And… and she was there. Right in front of me. Her back to me. Vulnerable.”
“You were near death.” he asked, his voice quieter now. “What pulled you up when your body was finished?”
“I don’t know. Instinct. Shrike found my hand somehow. I stabbed her. I hoped but knew it wasn’t a killing blow. But it was all I had. And then I couldn’t see or move. But, I felt… peace.”
His eyes narrowed. “Peace. In that place?”
She faltered. “…Yes.”
“And then?”
There was a weight in the question, as though he was asking about more than just a sequence of events.
“I—” She frowned, pressing at the fog in her mind. “There do be … a feeling. Urgency. Heat. Light, maybe. Then nothing. I woke up outside.”
Lord Inquisitor leaned forward slightly. “Describe the light.”
She blinked. “I’m not sure it was light. Not the kind you see. There do be an almost painful heat. It was more like—” she broke off, unsettled. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters,” he said. “Again.”
And she did. Again and again, a dozen times over the next hour, he pulled the memory apart, made her circle back, made her scrape at the edges for anything she’d missed. His questions needled at her brain, making her itch to remember, to give him something. She didn’t know what he was looking for—only that he would not stop until he found it.
Eventually he leaned back, apparently satisfied. It felt like an eternity to Jena, she could feel her back soaked in cold sweat. But it seemed to be over. Lord Inquisitor had shifted again, returning to his mask of careless detachment. The transition itself was terrifying—how easily the predator became a jester again.
After the first interview, Jena thought that Lord Inquisitor was done but he made her sit again the next night. And the third night. And the questions seemed to be always the same. It almost seemed to become a routine to a point where Jena rattled off her answer as if memorized. She had gotten comfortable in the Lord Inquisitor's gaze. That is until the fourth night.
“And did you notice anything about Meria’s face before you struck her?” He asked, the first time diverting from his script.
Jena went to answer automatically, when something inside her seized her jaw and froze it for just a second. She had gotten too comfortable. A bead of cold sweat formed on her neck. She had never mentioned Meria’s name to him before– had she? It was possible Lord Inquisitor had learned it while Jena was unconscious, but in that case, wouldn’t Lord Knight know the name as well? Lord Knight had warned her to not let Lord Inquisitor know about the Lady’s memories, and his word held a dire truth. But then how would Lord Inquisitor know? Jena felt like she was caught in a badger trap.
Lord Inquisitor looked inscrutable, offering no clues about the nature of this deviation. But somehow Jena’s lips moved, hiding the rattling of her heart. “Meria do be the Lady’s name?”
The questioner simply nodded without a blink or a gesture. Jena felt an ominous aura settle around Lord Inquisitor, and yet the interview flowed forward again as if practiced. And that seemed to be the last night of questioning. She felt as if a balance had slipped. Either she had passed an unknown test, or she had fully stepped in the snare.
But such was the relationship that Jena had developed with the Lords. Though she had some experience with their presence, it was still like living on a dangerous edge. She could sense the darkness of their presence, and had seen personally the violence they were capable of. She had no doubt that to them, she was still ultimately a disposable tool. To be used and to be cast away at the earliest inconvenience.
After the darkhounds and the Sleepless House and her near death experience, she could feel the rational part of her telling her to just abandon this clearly suicidal quest. And yet she knew that her personal fate was tied up to this pair of men fundamentally as broken as her. There was never going to be a return to Troias. She was too changed.
Yet Jena could sense a shift in her relationship with the Lords since Sleepless. She could sense a tenseness with Lord Inquisitor despite the completion of the interviews and the keeping of her secret.
She wanted a return to before. She had considered giving her precious knife Shrike to Lord Inquisitor. His armament was depleted, and it would without a doubt be more useful in his hands, no matter her attachment to it. She did not want to give up Shrike dearly, but she felt perhaps the offering would serve her purpose. But to her relief, he gave her explicit permission to keep it.
“I cannot take your knife now, hound slayer.” He said. “It belongs to you and you to it. You are bound in promises of blood that I shall not break. In fact, it may even be considered a relic now by Children of Light tradition, almost a trifold blooded blade, blessed in the field and not the forge. First drink of three, blood of shadow. Second drink, blood of witch. Shrike is now twice blooded, something only a dozen Children of Light can claim and two of them are here. You should be proud, houndslayer, for one to have claimed to drink twice, that is a mark of a generational talent.” Though his voice was emotionless, the rare words of encouragement stirred a sense of pride in Jena.
“What is the third blood?” Jena asked. The Lords had dropped her daily questions limit.
“Perhaps one day you may find out.” Lord Inquisitor says, his voice seemed oddly sad. Jena did not push this further, but there was a pride now in holding her knife.
Her relationship with the Lord Knight was also different. One of Jena’s jobs was to help Lord Knight’s dressing, especially with his arms. As she unwrapped his dressing, she saw the lacerations covered with black scabs, but the wounds were starting to get weepy and angry with red streaks crawling up his skin.
“Does it hurt?” She asked, concerned.
“They don’t bother me, Jena.” He grunted, staring into the distance. She applied the dwindling poultice on the festering wounds. He didn’t flinch, didn’t even breathe differently when she touched him. The calm frightened her more than the blood ever could. She tried to avoid touching the wounds directly, because they made her skin crawl. But she continued on with her duties quietly, wrapping them carefully like she had been taught by the goodwife loris and praying to the Light they would heal and whispering the Litany of healing.
She paid more attention to Lord Knight’s tomes now. Once, she found them tedious and dense. She would read the same paragraph multiple times and still not make sense. But now she felt drawn towards them, especially the black bound book of Philosophy of Natures and Power.
When she read it now, it felt like a book was finally revealing its core secrets. Initially, it seemed to be a wandering diatribe about the abstract understanding of Power. But now, its words resonated with the new, burning hunger she felt since her near death. It spoke of strength as burden, of the world as something shaped by will alone.
And there was something more that she had held back from the interrogation besides Meria’s memories. She had resisted revealing it to anyone simply because it felt so personal. That when she had her near death experience in the Sleepless House, she had experienced something transcendental and indescribable. She had felt something vast and infinite. She knew in her heart it must be the Creator, a red light of almost painful heat and blistering intensity. And when she woke up, she knew she had changed. There was a purpose of spirit and hunger for life. Without it, she would have been a catatonic mess.
When the Knight noticed her reading, he only nodded. “I was hopeful you could make it further than me,” he said. “The one who taught me claimed that book would change the world.” And with her heart, she knew that to be the truth.
The mountains of the peninsula to the capital rose over the marshes, and they picked their way carefully through the rocky mountain passes. The ground here was more travelled. The mountain passes and the fort chain here would be the last barrier to Illian downcountry, where lies the capital city of canals.
Jena has never been this far. She made small trips with her family or with the Goodwife Lordis, but the shield wall was far from her experience. However, she picked the right paths, driven by memories of Lady Meria. It was unnatural, yes, and unsettling, but it allowed her to lead around most of the common patrol paths of the Illian army. It was hard for her sometimes to sort out what was her own memories. It would be ironic if the Lords of Light knew how much they were guided by the psychic ghost of a witch.
They made good time here, even with their meager supplies that they supplemented with foraging. Jena’s abilities to hunt served them well, but as they got up in the mountains, the game became scarce and their stomachs lean.
To get past the mountain passes, one would have to navigate through the network of Illian forts. One of them rose in the distance too, perched in the crevice of the past, chiseled into the mountain with battlements reigning over, ready to shower any invading army with oils and boulders.
Jena gazed at the fort as she felt the pit in her stomach drop. Even though she was guided here by instinct, she could feel a deep engrained terror yanking at her. Her memories from Meria were incomplete. There were no discrete details, but raw emotions and fear that her subconscious associated with that mountain fort. She knew what waited there was beyond death.
“This is the one. The home of the Winnika.” She said more to herself.
Jena could see Him in her mind’s eyes through the ghost. It was like the eyes of a predator. It was the same eyes of the creature wearing her father’s face on that winter cold. She had locked those memories behind a cage, but whatever the Sleepless Lady –- Meria had done to her had left her old memories drifting and mixing with a life she had never lived.
They were halfway up the mountain pass when a lone figure stepped into the trail. Jena had begun to notice the silence of the forest, the way the wind seemed to avoid the place. Then a figure stepped onto the trail ahead.
He wore armor that had once gleamed, now dulled and flaking like old lacquer. Six more men rose from the brush with crossbows raised, cutting off any escape path. The motion was too smooth, too practiced, even in their ragged state.
“Lovely,” Lord Inquisitor muttered, raising his hands with exaggerated slowness. “If you’re selling souvenirs, I fear we left our coin in a fire. Large fire. Very tragic.” His voice was light, but Jena saw how his eyes never left their weapons. Lord Knight’s hand had drifted to his sword hilt.
“If you’ve got no silver,” the leader drawled, there was a hint of a strange accent. “then leave your horses and your packs, and maybe we’ll spare your lives.”
Up close, they looked half-starved—beards grown wild, eyes too bright with hunger. Yet even broken, there was discipline in them, the sort that came from years under command.
“You’re Seanchan,” Lord Knight said, hand casually resting on his sword hilt. “What are you doing waylaying travelers on Illian soil?”
That got a reaction—muttering among the men, one of them spitting in the dirt.
Seanchan. Jena had heard of that term before. Tales of a savage army from across the sea, murdering and enslaving women. Jena had only heard of them in stories. But what she heard was that they were monsters, and rode beasts of nightmare. This ragged bunch of bandits did not look very legendary to Jena.
“Don’t draw, soldier,” the Seanchan leader warned. “You try anything and we’ll bury you here. You may look like beggars, but you ride those warhorses like you know them. You’re not fools. Don’t act like them.”
Before Lord Knight could reply, a distant sound rose from the valley. Heavy hoofbeats. A plume of dust crested the far hill.
“Illian patrol,” one of the Seanchan scouts hissed. “Big one.”
The leader clicked his tongue and gestured sharply. The crossbows vanished into the brush as quickly as they’d appeared, likely down a hidden path. Moments later, the trail was clear—save for faint footprints and broken branches.
The Inquisitor tilted his head, smirking. “So. Shall we vanish too?”
“Wait,” the Knight said. “We follow.”
Jena blinked. Follow them? The Seanchan?
Lord Knight turned his horse off the trail, into the undergrowth. The Inquisitor gave a long-suffering sigh but went after him.
“What are you doing?” Lord Inquisitor hissed. Jena echoed the same question in her own head.
“We need allies,” the Knight replied, his voice low and certain. “Weapons. And answers. Desperate times call for desperate allies.”
They found the deserters again in a hollow below the ridge. The Seanchan rose from their crouch, crossbows trained, expressions hard.
“Mad dogs,” the Seanchan captain spat. “You had your chance to walk away. Now you follow us? Why?”
“I wonder the same thing,” Lord Inquisitor murmured. Jena agreed as well silently, eying the sharp arrows aimed at them.
Lord Knight stepped forward slowly, hands open. “Because we have a common enemy. And perhaps a common past. Judging from your armor, you were stationed at the coastal outpost.”
That gave the deserters pause. One or two lowered their bows slightly. The captain hesitated, then nodded grimly.
“You’re not wrong,” he said. “What’s left of it.”
“Tell me what happened.”
A moment passed. Then the captain spoke.
“They came in the night. Armor like the Illian Companions—but wrong. Silver, but traced with red sigils that glowed like molten iron in the dark. They broke over the walls and tore through plate armor like parchment. Our damane lit the field with fire—but it didn’t stop them. Whatever they were, they were not humans.”
His voice turned hoarse.
“Nothing could stop them. I saw them tear the heads from sul’dam and deathwatch with their bare hands. No mercy. No quarter. Our supply ship tried to flee with the camp supporters. I couldn’t see what, but something formless rose up from the black sea, writhing and seething. Dragged the ship down below the waves. Screams carried all the way to the cliffs.”
Lord Inquisitor gave a slow whistle. “And you? You ran.”
The Seanchan’s eyes narrowed. Arrows rose again.
“Just saying, it’s a bold look for the Ever Victorious Army.”
Lord Knight raised a hand. “You lived. That matters now. The Light has given you a second chance. Your enemies are our enemies. Fight with us. It’s not too late to reclaim your honor.”
“Children of the Light.” The Seanchan Captain shook his head. “No. You don’t understand. Did you not hear what I just told you and saw with my own eyes? They weren’t men. They weren’t right. We live on their scraps here, but we still live. To fight them is walking to sure death.”
He pointed in the distance towards the mountain fort. He leaned forward slightly, eyes haunted.
“Don’t think we didn’t try. We did retreat to survive their initial attack.” His voice was harsh. “But I gathered what was left, and we followed them and their captives. We had no choice. That bloody fort is where we tracked them to.
“We prepared an infiltration. We thought just like you. But when he got close, what we saw.” There was a murmur in the ranks of the Seanchan. “They knew we were coming, because all the captives were lined up on the lowest parapet, nooses around their neck. And they were screaming, crying for help, obviously trying to bait us close.
“But as we drew close, hesitant, they were tossed over the parapet, to hang. But that was not the worst part. Even with their necks obviously broken, their screams never stopped, and their body jerked in an impossible way. One of my sharpshooters got close enough to fire an arrow to put a mercy arrow through the skull of a screamer. It did nothing. The screams continued through the night. Whatever was done to them kept them moving and screaming for a week. When the screams finally silenced a week ago, even the vultures left their bodies alone. Each of us can still hear those screams now. I lost two good men who tried to go in to silence them. Never again.”
“That place is a pit of pure evil. They bring prisoners. Mostly Illianers. Some even willingly. Once a week. Taken to that Fortress and beyond. But no one ever returns. The locals won’t go near it. The few that remain.”
“We’ve seen worse,” Lord Knight said quietly. “ You faced something you couldn’t understand—couldn’t defeat. I don’t blame you for surviving. But you have seen the evils of that tower.”
The Seanchan captain’s jaw tightened. He didn’t speak.
Lord Knight pressed. “Your armor may be broken, your ranks scattered—but your name is not gone. We have fought the evils of this land, we have won. We have paid for it, but we have won still. There is a reason you have stayed around here. You know in your heart that you cannot leave without justice uncorrected. I think the land has cursed you to stay here. The Light has connected us for a reason. Help us. We need to know the truth of that fortress.”
Silence. The crossbows didn’t lower—but they didn’t fire, either.
One of the younger deserters shifted. “We could—”
“No,” the captain snapped, silencing him. His voice cracked like frost underfoot. “You don’t understand until you have stood at its threshold. You will see. We will not go anywhere next to it again.”
Lord Knight’s jaw clenched. “Then you’ve already surrendered.”
The captain looked away, as if ashamed. “I’d rather be ashamed and alive than be turned into those things. Leave us. You’re madmen. You’ll wish we had just cut your throat here..”
He turned. The others followed with hesitation—vanishing into the forest like ghosts.
Lord Inquisitor stood silent a long moment before he spoke. “You almost had them.”
Jena had felt it too. The Seanchan wanted to agree, but Lord Knight’s words tugged at something fundamental. But visceral fear had won in the end. And she understood it too well.
Lord Knight nodded. “Almost isn’t enough.”
“I’ve seen their look before. They’re broken. Might as well be ghosts.”
“Then let’s make sure we don’t break the same way,” Lord Knight said, looking toward the mountain. “Our plan doesn’t change. We will investigate the Fortress.”
Those words drew cold terror in Jena from memories that were not of hers. But, she had sworn to Lord Knight that she could keep up. Her stomach quashed at stepping into that realm, to face the terrifying visage of their nightmares. She opened her mouth, fighting with the two halves of self, “Lord Knight, i do not…. I do not…”
Lord Knight cut her off, as if knowing her mind. “Jena, we do not expect you to step in there. There is clear danger and you physically have not healed. You have been involved in the terrible fighting, but that was never your purpose. In your physical state, you will only slow us down.” He says, despite the edges of his exposed bandages fluttering in the wind. He softened his edge, “And you will need to be witness to our deeds. If we do not return.”
It was a solution to her decision paralysis, and yet it still left her uneasy to be left alone on the hillside. But what other choice did she have? She wanted to protest, but yet the clenching of her heart lightened.
By dusk, she watched them climb the path toward the mountain’s heart. The wind tugged at the Knight’s bandages and set the Inquisitor’s cloak snapping like a black flame as they faded into the shadows of the path.
Jena found a hollow where the grass was soft and the horses could graze. She built a small fire, not for warmth but for the illusion of safety, and waited in the shadows of the mountains. And she would wait a long time.