The ridge held its breath.
Gray light lay flat over the ribs of the wasteland, bleaching edges until distance and shape were the same lie. The Dark Castle watched without blinking. The Blood Gate did not creak. Wind worried the flags and failed to make them confess. Lucas stood on the rampart, a hand on cold stone, the other hand empty by choice. Beneath his palm, the castle's pulse kept time—slow, unhurried, murderous.
They were coming.
Crypt Sense traced the tide before eyes could. Pressure at the new border. Weight in the gullies. A crease of bodies moving in a line that could not decide whether to be a spear or a rope. The enemy had chosen to believe speed became safety if you said it louder.
Selena arrived at his shoulder the way a sharpened thought arrives—without footsteps, without apology. The light did not own her; it borrowed her outline and kept its distance. Her eyes were a deeper red this morning, as if the night had sobered and left its good wine behind.
"Your hallways," she murmured, gaze slanting over the field of pits, wires, galleries, and teeth. "Shall we show them where they end?"
Lucas did not answer. He breathed once, and the castle heard his decision.
Stillness.
Sound folded. The plain's little noises—grit, leather, habit—tucked themselves away. The approaching column entered a silence that smelled like the last second before a match flares. Men do not keep their balance in such quiet; they fill it with the weight of their nervous feet.
The first rank stepped into the slaughter zone.
It wasn't a rush. It was worse—a confident walk, armor soot-stained, spears angled, the black fang stitched to every breast. Officers in iron caps rode the flanks, heads turning, eyes stuck on the Dark Castle as if it were a storybook they'd been warned about at home. One lifted a hand. The line paused, then resumed. Orders try to be louder than dread. Dread usually wins.
They did not see the dust lids over the pits. They saw ground.
The ground opened its mouth.
A boot sank. An ankle inverted. A stake found its brother bone and spoke to it in a language that breaks. The man's breath left him in a wordless plea. On his right, two soldiers lunged to help—good instincts spent in the wrong room—and a chain caught both at the knees. They pitched forward together, forearms catching and skidding on shale. Blood touched Grave Mold and learned heat belonged to someone else now.
"Keep moving," an officer said, too careful. "It's just—"
His horse rang a bell with its belly. Teeth chattered in the little cage, and far down the line a dozen heads turned to look for a sound they couldn't find. Panic is a kind of music. It doesn't need ears.
Selena tilted her face to the wind and smiled as if it had told her a joke. "One step."
Lucas raised two fingers.
Ghouls rose in pairs from the galleries, quiet as weeds. Loops of braided bone-string leaped from their hands and tightened around throats. A harsh chorus started and stopped—men grabbed wires, fingers skidding, the loop digging deeper with gratitude. Knees hit dust. Dogs flowed in low, elegant, tails tapping vertebrae against stone. They didn't tear yet. They held—forepaws pinning wrists, jaws on calves, weight applied like a teacher's hand on a page.
The line compressed. That is what lines do when they are well-trained and badly placed. Those in the rear pushed; those in the front had nowhere to go but down. Chains kissed more shins. Trip bells tried to speak under Stillness and made only the name of fear in men's throats.
"Release," Lucas said.
Stillness lifted its palm. Noise came back all at once. The bells clamored like a wedding you were not invited to. The wires sang their high lesson. The dogs snarled in polite agreement. Somewhere, a horn decided to be brave and found its mouth full of dust.
Arrows fell.
There were eight bow-slots open in the nearest Crimson Spire now. Eight Blood Moon Archers lifted bone bows strung with sinew that had memorized screaming and drew as one. Lunar Volley did not sound like rain; it sounded like dozens of decisions being revised midair. Red-lit shafts arced in shallow curtains and hammered into shoulders and backs, pushed men forward when they wanted to go back and down when they wanted to be brave. A Pierce the Heart threaded the little space between a visor's edge and pride, and a captain folded around absence.
The first rank broke and bled into the second, and for a heartbeat, the second forgot whether they had come to help or to inherit. Officers shouted. Shouting is a flimsy rope. The castle cut it a hundred ways.
"Now," Lucas said, and pulled a different thread.
Ghouls let go of one set of throats and threw pitch.
It wasn't tar—not truly. The Resonant Forge had cooked Bone Pitch from rendered marrow, Grave Mold oil, and the dark residue of the altar. It came up out of buckets thick and black with the promise of a new kind of weather. Ghouls splashed it onto cloaks, onto ropes, onto the little pile of broken shields that men build without thinking when edges happen.
Selena raised her hand delicately, the way one might ask a quartet to begin their second movement. "A touch?"
Lucas nodded once.
She snapped her fingers.
The spark didn't leap from her skin; it grew out of the pitch itself, as if the substance had been practicing burning in secret. Fire rolled into being with a soft whuff, like a curtain taking a bow and discovering it had always been flame. Grave Mold in the mix breathed, learned a hotter word, and taught it to its friends. Cloaks crawled with orange. Ropes hissed. A tangle of three men became a shape without language.
"Hold the wind," Lucas said.
The domain obliged. The fire lay low and wide, obedient, a red carpet rolled out under boots that didn't want it. Smoke rose—heavy, oily, sour with mold—and wrapped throats that were still remembering the feel of wire. Men clutched at their collars and dragged air full of ash into chests already bargaining with fear. Eyes watered, blurred, blinked too late.
The Darkblood Sentinels stepped forward two paces, shields up, making calm black shapes against the heat. The Crimson Aegis pulled flames toward itself and refused them politely. Behind those shields, dogs darted in and out, nipping tendon, then back into shadow. One Sentinel's blade lifted, fell, and a screaming knot shed the part that had been organizing it.
"Back!" an officer bellowed, voice breaking into three pieces on the way out. "Back—back—"
They tried. The slaughter zone had a back only for those who had not yet stepped forward. Men turned and met a pit, a chain, a friend who'd become an obstacle. A bone bell swung and found a helmet with the thin fury of a pendulum. Another Lunar Volley walked across their retreat like a jailer. Some threw shields. Some threw prayers. Neither weighed enough.
Selena did not hurry. She moved along the edge of the fire with the perversely exact grace of someone reading an old favorite. A sergeant lunged at her through the heat, eyes red, beard singed, spear coming low, good angle. She swayed aside, just enough to make the spear think it had been wrong all along. Her blade wrote a single autograph under his ribs. He tried to tell her a secret. She put a finger to his lips and let him be quiet.
"Two steps," she said to no one, delighted.
Lucas flicked Rally into the galleries. Ghouls advanced one body-length, no more. Knees first; hands if they beg. Dogs widened, taking the new room. The archers in the spires shifted their aim a handspan left, and three men who had thought they were outside the pattern learned the pattern had better math.
The heat mounted until breath was work. Smoke crawled. Lucas could feel Dread of the Threshing Gate press down on spines like an honest hatred. Somewhere behind the main crush, a rider tried intelligence: sweeping wide around the fire line to find the gate's blind angle. Lucas had left that angle on purpose. It existed to be believed in.
"Vicarius," he said.
The Death Knight stepped into the rider's future.
Steel rang once and lost confidence. The horse reared and froze, flame mirrored in its eye, not understanding anything except the cold that had suddenly happened to its bones. Vicarius turned his wrist and cut for less width than customary. The rider came apart in two thoughts that did not agree.
On the ridge beyond, the observers—Ramius's heavy knot—stirred at last. Standards jerked. A horn blew and didn't carry right, sound tripping over heat. A unit of shield-men began to jog, shields up to clever their way through the rain.
Lucas exhaled. Stillness dropped over the spires only. The archers' fingers released in silence; the volley arrived without warning's hiss. Shields thudded, staggered. A second volley came with sound—snap snap snap—and the men learned that silence can be louder if it chooses the right heartbeat.
"Push smoke," Lucas said.
The domain obliged with a conspirator's breeze. The black rolled outward, a low tide crawling toward the fresh relief. The new men coughed what their comrades had already learned to cough. Eyes squinted. Lines bent. Somewhere behind the smoke, Bone Pitch found new friends and re-lit where confidence had thought it was safe.
Selena's laughter slid through the heat, bright, merciless. She moved in and out of glare so that to some of them she was the thing inside the fire. A man reached for her through the orange and touched nothing but a cooler night. His hand made a sound when it realized it had grabbed the wrong future.
A handful broke free. There are always a handful. They fled laterally, crawling the fence of ribs, hoping a seam had been left for accidents. A bone dog pack paced them, heads tilted, as if listening to a familiar song. At a nod from Lucas, the pack surged, not to drag under, but to turn—herding the handful gently back into the place that had decided to keep everyone's names.
"Enough," Lucas said again, when the field had learned what it needed to know.
Command threads tightened and released. Ghouls withdrew into their slats without reluctance, satisfied. Dogs fell back, panting smoke. The spires loosed one last Pierce the Heart into a silhouette that had started to gather authority where none should stand, and the silhouette became a memory of posture. The Sentinels stepped back into their wall and were wall again.
Silence did not return. It arrived.
What moved on the ground moved for good reasons: the roll of a body finding its last position, the drip of melted pitch to stone, the small noises pain makes when it tries to sign a treaty. A few living crawled. Selena allowed three of those to pass her—on hands, coughing, eyes wild—as gifts for fear to deliver. She bent once and whispered a word into a man's ear that made him stop crawling and remember his childhood for too long.
On the ridge, the second line stopped moving. Standards leaned inward toward the black coat that held them together. Someone spoke vehemently, a hand cutting the air, pointing, refusing. Another hand shook, maybe from rage, maybe from a different honest message traveling up the bones.
Selena came to stand beside Lucas again, smoke making her hair a darker river. Blood had freckled her glove. Her smile was not wide; wide is for people who need to be seen. "Your step was cruel," she said, content. "One step into death, and then the world did the rest."
Lucas let his hand leave the stone. The castle's pulse did not quicken for praise. "They walked," he said. "We let the ground do what it remembers."
He looked beyond the field to where the ridge watched itself in the heat. He could not see Ramius, only the idea of him: a straight back deciding whether pride tastes better before or after smoke.
A scout who had been allowed to live stumbled past a pit and discovered he had forgotten how to judge distances. He clutched his throat—raw from wire, ash, and screaming he had saved up too long. He turned once to look back at the gate. It did not look back. He ran. His voice, torn and thin, scraped toward the ridge and carried the wrong kind of hope with it.
"Empty territory?" someone had laughed earlier.
The laugh did not come back.
Lucas turned from the parapet. "Reset the traps," he said. "Refresh pitch. Salvage arrows. Bring in any who can still produce Vile Spark."
"Gladly," Selena said, eyes flicking to the spires, calculating how many archers were ready to learn a better song. "And after?"
"After," he said, "we take their horn."
The wind shifted, bringing the taste of iron and endings. The castle breathed, slow and deep, as if pleased with its lungs. Far away on the ridge, a banner trembled not from wind but from hands.
The second line shuffled a single pace forward.
One step.