Chapter 273 — Warden's First Walk
They set the meeting for dawn, though sleep had been small and thin for most of the council that night. Word of Zerathis's appointment had rippled through the Hollow like a stone into glass: some fractured and fell away with eager acceptance, others cracked open with fresh fissures of fear. This morning's council was meant to be a pressure valve — to put deadlines, to lay out boundaries, to ask for a timeline that would make their new daemon's duties feel official and safe.
Kael arrived and stood at the head of the table with the same quiet calm that had become his shield. Lyria arrived with warpaint still flecking her cheek from a night of target practice. Rogan's bulk filled a chair as if the wood itself had been carved to fit him. Varik sat like a coiled thing, fingers absently tracing a scar on his wrist. Azhara lingered near the map table, the morning light catching in her white eyes. Saekaros, the Voice of the People, watched them all with a face that tried to look stern and only half-succeeded.
Zerathis did not sit. He loafed against the far wall — a black silhouette of a man too large for his skin, molten veins faintly glowing beneath the surface. The torches painted his scars in bronze and red; when he moved to look around the table the room felt smaller by degrees.
"We've intelligence," Kael began, cutting through the tension. He set a hand flat on the map spread before them. "To the east, a week's ride — the village of Harthgrove. Small, backwards, but connected. The traders there have been seen buying and selling slaves. Bandits use the road that bends past the old mill as a staging ground. If the Iron Brand were to find a hole in our supply chain, they'd use Harthgrove as a wedge."
Saekaros made a face. "You expect a daemon to go into a human village and come back bruised but full of facts?" He glanced at Zerathis. "Do you understand how this reads to our people?"
Kael didn't flinch. "Do you want facts? Not rumors? Then we accept that facts will sometimes come harsh. Zerathis will go. He will move like shadow through their lanes. He will test the whispers and return with proof — names, numbers, evidence. He will not raze the village unless it is a threat we cannot mitigate."
Varik's fingers stilled. "Why not send mortal scouts? Spies?"
"Because the Iron Brand moves like worms in rot. They burrow and hide and bribe. They strike fast and cut the throat clean before the rumor is old enough to alarm scouts. We need someone who can walk the underbelly and not be detected. Zerathis offered to prove himself. This is the test."
Rogan's voice was low. "And if he doesn't come back?"
Kael's jaw tightened. The question hung like a blade. "Then we burn the dungeon and salt the ground."
Silence. It was the kind of answer that had consequences. Fear, respect, duty — mixed and raw.
Zerathis stepped forward, the molten lines in his skin pulsing. "Give me a name or two to find," he said. "A name I can chew through like a bone in a mouth. Point me to the weakest line and I will follow it to the heart of their nest."
Kael spoke a name and a detail he had gleaned from Varik's rumors and from a trader who'd whispered in a tavern. "A man named Brusen. He controls lodgings and keeps a ledger of newcomers. He's been moving men and women on night caravans. Find him. Find his ledgers. Bring names. Bring proof."
Zerathis smiled, only half-predatory in its cruelty. "A ledger will sing for me."
They outfitted him with nothing more than a cloak to hide his bulk and a satchel with a scrap of food. Kael hesitated only to give him one more instruction, the one that galvanized the room down the line: "You will not take what you want for yourself. We are not your quarry. You will bring the evidence back. You will not harvest slaves for your amusement. This is about the Hollow."
The daemon inclined his head, that slow motion like a tide. "Understood."
Zerathis left at dusk.
He walked like a shadow but moved like a storm. Word left by whispered riders; the Hollow watched torches die down and counted heartbeats until dawn. In town the air felt taut. Lyria led patrols along the roads; Varik and Rogan checked supply caches and sent out careful scouts who moved with the kind of caution a man develops when he suspects something in the dark is watching him watch. Azhara kept the gate herself at midday, hands ready to staunch the first bleeding if it came.
Two days passed. On the third, a rider came back: Varik, bent double and gray, eyes wide.
He announced it before the council could ask. "He came into Harthgrove, watched the tavern for an hour, then walked the back alleys. Brusen is real. Brusen uses the old mill path. He keeps ledgers wrapped in oilcloth beneath a loose floorboard in the 'Rusty Ferret.' Zerathis took a ledger. He did not kill Brusen in the street — he used the ledger to speak true names to him. Brusen's mouth fights with a fever now."
The council swivelled. A murmur scattered like birds.
Kael stared at Varik. "Details."
Varik swallowed. "He cut through guards like the wind through reeds. Brusen's men are missing — either dead or scattered. Zerathis didn't raze the village, but he did something worse for smugglers: he destroyed their secrecy."
Across the table, Saekaros's hand trembled. "You sent them a walking nightmare and told him not to take the spoils. You could have saved lives with measured intervention, Kael — not unleashed that— that thing."
Rogan bristled: "What did he do?"
Varik's voice was flat. "Zerathis found the caravans in the marsh on the mill road. He killed five of the iron bandits there and returned with their leader's map. Where the map pointed, he took the ledgers. He left a warning — he cleaned the ledger of lies and carved it into a post outside the Rusty Ferret for all to see. He bound a mark there." Varik closed his eyes. "People will speak of it for years."
A silence followed so thick it pressed against their ears.
The proof lay in the satchel Zerathis had returned with: names, dates, wax seals, lists of goods and sums, and a ledger with ink smeared from fingers that had typed it in haste. It was brutal, precise work. The names were names — not rumors, not half-whispers — clear evidence of trade in flesh. The map showed trails and hidden depots: exactly the places Kael's scouts had feared but could not prove.
Azhara's hands found the ledger, fingertips trembling as she read: names of women moved to a slaver outpost two days' ride south; a caravan scheduled for the next market.
"We can act," she said, voice quiet. "We can stop them."
Kael let that settle, and then he said, as if answering some other question: "He did not steal. He did not enrich the Hollow with their blood." He looked across the council. "He broke their secrecy, exposed them. That will save lives."
The council argued — you could feel the push and pull — some called for immediate strike teams to root out every trace of the Iron Brand, others demanded restraint and diplomacy. Rogan wanted blood and an immediate march. Saekaros fretted for the market and for how neighboring trading towns might react. Varik and Lyria argued about the timing and the best routes.
Zerathis watched them all with the same patient amusement a wolf might give to quarrelsome sparrows. He did not intercede. He had done what he had been asked: the underbelly had been stripped of its skin. He'd proven the utility of having a daemon who could walk where others could not.
When the meeting fractured into plans and counterplans, Kael took a step back. He let the council take themselves to the edge and coax them back, arranging targeted strikes against specific depots, orchestrated moves that would maximize rescues and minimize collateral. The ledger provided the targets; Zerathis had provided the key.
Later, when the crowd thinned and private business called off the rest of the day's heat, Kael walked out into the low sun to meet the daemon who had returned to the Hollow with such a gift.
Zerathis stood upon the low ridge overlooking the fields, molten cracks dim in the daylight. He tended to a shallow wound at his forearm with a strange, smoking ichor — not healing so much as sealing. He offered no excuses.
"You left bodies," Kael said simply.
"Bandits, slavers, men willing to sell children," Zerathis replied. The words were simple, not licentious. "I left none who would serve a market for human misery."
"And the ledger?"
"In your hands. Names on paper are bullets with direction. You pull the cord."
Kael looked at him — at the broad of shoulder, the horned silhouette, the monstrous hands. The Hollow's future swam in the sharp blade of this chooser's decision. He reached out and touched the daemon's arm, feeling heat, feeling the tremor of a power that could as easily consume as protect.
"You did what I asked," Kael said. "Not because you loved us — I do not ask that — but because you honored a bargain. You fought with restraint."
Zerathis turned his molten eyes to him and, for the first time since he'd been made Warden, there was something almost— human — in his expression. "I proved my worth. Consider the underbelly cleansed for now. The Iron Brand will move. They always move. If you wish their throats cut, I will find them. But know this: the shadow breeds other shadows. I will not stop being a storm."
Kael let smoke from the distant forges curl into his lungs and taste of iron in the air. "Then continue to give us names. Continue to break the nets they weave. And for every person you return, for every ledger you bring, this Hollow will remember you for what you are: a terrible guardian."
Zerathis's smile was bare teeth and something close to approval. "A guardian with teeth is more useful than one with kind words."
They walked back together toward the Hollow — two very different figures moving side by side: one a young king who had bled to build a home, the other an ancient storm newly tamed and appointed to watch in the dark.
Behind them the council argued, planned and debated. The ledger burned as a bright problem to solve — answers wrapped in a brutal fabric of truth. The Hollow had a new edge now: a Warden who could walk the underworld and bring back the names that hid in its belly.
But as Kael watched children play in a nearby yard, as he watched Lyria drill new scouts beneath the trees, he felt the weight again — not only of a victory, but of a responsibility sharpened into a promise. He had gambled and the gamble paid. For now.
The Warden had walked his first road. The shadows had yielded their teeth.
The Hollow would sleep that night with more eyes unclouded — and more reasons to fear the dark.