By the time the sun rose again, the forge had come alive.
It hadn't seen fire in a hundred years. Moss had claimed its stone belly. Rats had made homes in the ash pit. But with labor and sweat, the forge of Highrest was reborn—not as a place of war, but of remembrance.
Caedren stood at its edge, watching the flames rise.
Beside him, a thick-armed woman with soot-blackened skin hammered out a blade that gleamed like the winter moon.
"I thought we weren't raising an army," Neris said, arms crossed, eyes on the glowing metal.
"We aren't," Caedren replied. "But we must give the past a voice."
The smith, Marra, looked up briefly. "And this blade will speak it?"
"No," Caedren said. "It will remember it."
That afternoon, the courtyard echoed with the ring of metal. Not of soldiers drilling, but of old weapons being reforged—broken swords melted and reborn, rusted spears recast with new tips. Yet not one weapon bore the mark of a noble house. No sigils. No lions or wolves or burning suns.
Instead, they bore only one symbol: a circle split by a single line—open, unfinished.
"What is it?" a young girl asked, watching Marra etch it onto a shield.
"The mark of a vow never ended," Marra said. "Of a kingdom still being written."
Meanwhile, Neris led her own work.
She had taken a dozen volunteers beyond the gates—scouts, messengers, traders-turned-watchers. They moved through the wilds, mapping old roads and whispering to the scattered villages that the fires of Highrest had been lit.
Some slammed their doors.
Others wept.
In a hamlet called Venn's Hollow, they found something worse than silence—a tree hung with the bodies of five men. Around their necks were signs: "For speaking the Kingless Lie."
Neris returned with fire in her eyes and blood on her blade.
Caedren said nothing as she threw the signs at his feet.
"They're hunting your name."
He knelt, touching the rough boards. The wood was fresh. The blood was not.
"This is no longer resistance," Neris growled. "This is war."
Caedren rose slowly.
"Not yet," he said. "War is what they want. What they understand. But we'll strike only when the echo is loud enough to be heard in every crumbling hall and blood-drenched market."
"And what echo is that?" Neris asked bitterly.
Caedren turned toward the forge.
"The sound of a kingdom being born from nothing but its own shadow."
That night, in the old chapel of Highrest, Voren lit a single candle before the shrine of no god.
"It has begun," he whispered. "The world does not know it yet, but a new pillar has been set."
He turned to the old statue at the chapel's center—its features long worn down by time. But beneath the moss and cracks, a sword still rested across its lap.
Kael's statue. No crown. No armor. Just a cloak and that sword—unraised, unswung.
"Your fire lives on," Voren said. "And it walks with Caedren now."
Outside, the first snow of the season began to fall.
It touched stone, steel, and the shoulders of those building a kingdom without kings.
The next morning, the forge blazed brighter.
More had come.
Blacksmiths, potters, weavers, and scribes from villages along the hills had heard whispers carried on ash-winds. That the Kingless Fire had taken root. That Highrest had awoken.
A woman from Drel's Ford brought a book half-burned but still legible, filled with old laws rewritten in the margins. She handed it to Voren and said, "This is what we used when our lords abandoned us. Maybe it can be better now."
A former guard captain brought not blades, but seed. "Food's the first weapon," he said. "I'll teach them how to grow in stone."
Even a bard arrived—old, drunk, half-mad. But his song, cracked and rasping, echoed in the hall:
"Stone remembers, steel forgets, But fire bears the names unmet. Raise no crown, but raise the light, And guard the lost in endless night."
Caedren listened to the song and found tears in the silence.
He sat alone afterward, by the fire, map in hand. The Broken March spread before him. So many ruins. So many names lost beneath the moss.
Neris entered and tossed him a cloak.
"Snow's thickening," she said. "Winter's come early."
He nodded. "And with it, the next choice."
She sat beside him. "What choice?"
"Do we let the world come to us..." He tapped the map. "Or do we go to them?"
She stared at the roads. At the dead places marked in black. At the old citadel of Myr, now fallen to warlords. At the river cities where coin still ruled like kings.
"If we go," she said, "we risk everything."
"And if we wait?"
"They burn everything we might become."
Caedren folded the map.
"Then we walk. Not as conquerors. Not to demand fealty. But to remind them..."
He stood, eyes on the fire.
"That the world is not yet finished."