The inn was a warm place of light and smell, all things averted from the wind-slashed fields beyond the city wall. Dahlia's stove hissed cheerfully, and the low murmur of regulars argued, proudly and loudly, over the morning's bread. Lanterns swung gently in the rafters; a dog slept at the hearth's edge. For a while, the world outside the inn's doors behaved like a thing that could be trusted.
That trust broke with the bangs of a stranger at the door.
He stumbled in covered in sweat and a thin smear of blood, clothes torn where he'd wrestled with something hard. The inn fell quiet like a stage whose actors had suddenly forgotten their lines. Dahlia pushed aside a towel and ushered him to the nearest bench.
"What happened?" Ada asked before anyone else could. She'd been sitting at the counter with Solis between bites of stew. Even dressed casually — a simple tunic and leather trousers rather than armor; her eyes were already on the man, cataloguing.
The stranger's voice was small and ridden with the tired lilt of someone who had seen the impossible and then accepted it. "Out at the outer ring," he panted. "We — my barn — we were taking grain in for the storm. Thought the night looked clear. And then they came: like black iron walking. No warnings they just barged in. In armour that drank the light."
Solis involuntarily tightened his hands around the spoon.
"They rode in on horses that looked like stitched shadow," the man continued. "They smashed the barn door and burned the first stall with some kind of—" he scrabbled at his sleeve to make the sign of an ember "—a light that smelled of sour metal. They took the grain and the crates. My fellows, I fought, but they were… odd. They didn't speak. They did not shout for coin. They took what they wanted — then left — vanished into the fields like ghosts."
Ada's jaw had gone tight. "How many?" she demanded.
"Four. Then a bigger band on the hill — five, then three. They moved like one thing. They left no tracks. I swear to Eloin."
Dahlia's hands were already busy, producing bandages and hot water. The inn returned to the rhythm of a small emergency, but the shadow of that word — "black" — hung over their chatter. Solis and Ada stood and led the man to a corner by the fire, listening as he explained how he'd hidden beneath the loft and watched those dark riders move off toward the middle ring.
"You should talk to someone in the guard," Solis said. "Report it. They'll need to know."
The man smacked his hand on the bench. "I told the outer watchers. They shrugged. Said... "maybe they were bandits". But these were not bandits. Bandits loot out money, not destroy the barn. These things — it felt like something else."
Ada's fingers curled into a fist under the table. "We'll report it up. I'll put up word and patrol the outer roads tonight." She looked at Solis. "You coming?"
Solis felt the sword at his back, so near and yet he still thought of the battered axe strapped to his pack. "Yes," he said simply.
That evening, at Dahlia's inn, the ordinary calm had an edge to it like thin ice. The news the stranger brought thread into other fragments they'd heard in the last weeks: a courier's wagon robbed on a quiet lane by shadow-figures two towns away; a small hamlet's granary found scorched; a trader's chest vanishing with no tracks to show where thieves had gone.
It has all started after the temporary suspension of Postknight unit. The pattern was ragged at first but formed a kind of meaning when laid across the map: the outer ring, then the middle ring, then closer — as if someone was probing the kingdom like a hand testing locks.
---
"We've been keeping low," Ada said to Solis later as they cleared plates, "and that has worked. But if these — whatever they are — are no good news. They have already caused a lot of trouble in outer ring, if this continues the whole 'low profile' plan of ours will collapses."
Solis didn't answer immediately. He tucked a strand of hair behind his ear and watched Dahlia sweep crumbs. "I don't like ghosts on real horses like in those fairytales." he said at last. "They leave wounds."
"You're poetic when you're stressed," Ada muttered. Then softer: "We have to tell Captain Colins. And Commander Cassandra."
They did. Word spread by the kind of hum a city runs on: a runner, a clutch of messages, a call from the outer watch to the tower. Within a day the reports accumulated into a troubling ledger — the dark riders had been sighted multiple times, and always at night. The farmers in outlying districts spoke of armor that swallowed moonlight. Traders reported glimpses of helmets that gleamed with no face beneath them, just a void.
By the third day, the attacks had crept inward. The middle ring, the part of Caldemount where markets, inns, and the early stalls of craft met the richer neighborhoods, had been breached. A small market had been harried; a merchant's cart overturned and the driver left with his pockets cut out and his horse found wandering, calm as a lamb. More frightening perhaps to the city's nerves than the thefts was the style of violence — clinical, precise, unfitted with bravado. Whoever rode the dark knights seemed uninterested in making a spectacle. They wanted loss and no trace.
The crown, of course, called a meeting.