The departure of Silas Marwood did not bring relief to Sunstone. It left a vacuum filled with a tense, ominous quiet. The villagers knew, with the primal certainty of a people who lived on the edge of a dangerous world, that they had not vanquished a threat, but merely insulted a far greater one. They had looked into the eyes of the Iron Hegemony and spat in them. There would be consequences.
Elias felt it too, a building pressure on his Sense Life/Death map. The world outside the Blackwood was no longer a neutral grey space; it was a vast, hostile entity, its attention now turned in his direction. The challenge had been issued and accepted.
From his spire, he watched Sunstone prepare. Jorn, his authority reaffirmed, directed the villagers with a grim purpose. They sharpened spears, fletched arrows, and reinforced the palisade. They were a hardy, courageous people, but Elias knew their preparations were a child's sandcastle against the coming tide. A few dozen hunters with flint-tipped arrows against disciplined ranks of steel-clad soldiers was not a battle; it was a slaughter.
His Primary Objective: Ensure the survival of the anomaly designated 'Elara'—and by extension, her entire village—had now escalated into a full-blown military crisis.
He spent the first week after Marwood's departure in his forge. The Hegemony swords he had claimed were of excellent quality. He melted them down, the fine steel glowing white-hot in his furnace, and began to craft. He was not making weapons for the villagers. Gifting them superior arms would only give them a false sense of hope and encourage them to fight a battle they could not win. It would be sending lambs to the slaughter in better armor.
No, the weapons he forged were for himself, and for his true army.
He worked with the singular focus of a master craftsman possessed. He fashioned wickedly curved blades, designed to shear through plate armor. He forged heavy, spiked heads for maces that could shatter shields and bone with equal ease. He created gruesome, articulated claws of sharpened steel. Each piece was an instrument of terrifying efficiency, quenched not just in oil, but imbued with a trace of his own necrotic energy, making them cold to the touch and unnaturally resilient.
Then, he summoned the core of his fighting force. Over the years, he had collected the skeletons of the most formidable beasts he had slain or found in the forest: the six-legged bear-creature, a massive stag with a rack like a thicket of spears, and a pair of the lithe, deadly Shadow-Prowlers. These were not just piles of bones; they were the frameworks of apex predators.
He began the arduous process of Animating Dead on a scale he had never attempted. He did not just reanimate them; he rebuilt them. He spent days weaving the new steel weapons and armor plates into their very structures, replacing bone with blade, reinforcing joints with iron. The stag's antlers were tipped with spearheads. The bear-golem's fists were replaced with the spiked mace-heads. The prowlers had their claws shod in the viciously curved steel blades.
The process was a grotesque fusion of necromancy and blacksmithing, a dark art all his own. He was creating a new breed of undead: Necro-Steel golems, each a unique and horrifying engine of war. They were his personal Four Horsemen.
During this time, the Soul Anchor was a source of constant, grounding information. Elara was afraid. All of Sunstone was. But her fear was different. It was tempered by a deep, quiet faith. He felt her touch the small, Warden-doll she still kept, a silent prayer to the dark god of the woods. Her belief in him was a tangible pressure, a weight of expectation he was determined not to fail.
One evening, using Wraith Walk, he drifted to the edge of the village. The elders, Jorn among them, were gathered around the central fire, their faces grim.
"...the scouts from the southern ridge saw dust on the horizon for two days straight," a hunter reported. "Like a great serpent of dirt crawling towards us. An army."
"How many?" Jorn asked, his voice heavy.
"Too many to count. Hundreds, at least."
A silence fell over the elders. Hundreds. It was an unimaginable number.
"What of the Warden?" another elder asked, his voice trembling slightly. "Will he... help us?"
Jorn looked towards the dark silhouette of the forest. "He has always acted in ways we cannot predict. He saved Elara. He drove off the first soldiers. He purified the Blight. But he has never fought our battles for us. He is a spirit of the wood, a force of balance. To fight an army of men... that may not be his purpose."
Jorn was wise. He understood Elias was not a genie to be summoned. He was trying to manage his people's expectations, to prepare them for the possibility that they would face this threat alone.
Elias listened, an unseen ghost. They were right to be afraid. And Jorn was right to be uncertain. He couldn't just march his four necro-steel monstrosities into their village and announce, "I am your general." The fragile balance of fear and reverence would shatter, replaced by sheer terror. They would be as afraid of their saviors as of the enemy.
He had to protect them. But he had to do it his way. He had to be the monster. His aid could not be a comforting hand; it had to be a terrifying, incomprehensible event, an act of the wild, angry forest itself. He wouldn't fight for them. He would fight in front of them.
He retreated to his spire, the plan solidifying in his mind. The Iron Hegemony was coming. They expected to fight frightened villagers armed with sticks and stones.
They would not find them.
Instead, they would find the Blackwood. They would find the Grave Warden's domain. And they would face an army born of their worst nightmares, forged in the heart of a necromancer's forge. The echoes of Silas Marwood's challenge were about to be answered, not with a whisper, but with the roar of unholy war machines and the silent, terrifying judgment of the Ashen King.