Chapter 11: The Sound of Chains
The forest held its breath. After the horn's call, even the wind seemed to wither, leaving only the faint rattle of chains drifting through the trees. It was not near, yet it was not far enough. The sound crept beneath the skin, gnawing at the nerves like teeth.
Lord Carrow rose slowly from the corpse at his feet, the cracked mask still dangling from his gauntleted hand. Snow swirled around him, sticking to his cloak, his face hard and unflinching. Yet even he could not disguise the tension in his shoulders.
"Mount up," he said. The words were low, but they carried like iron. "We ride."
The men obeyed, though not swiftly. Fear made their hands clumsy on reins and straps, made their breath catch in the frigid air. The battle had already cut us deep; the promise of what lingered ahead bled us further.
Joran rode close, his jaw tight, voice hushed. "Scouts," he whispered, echoing Carrow's grim claim. "If those things were only scouts… what walks in their shadow?"
I had no answer. None of us did.
We pressed on, hooves crunching softly in the deepening snow. The forest closed around us, a tunnel of black branches heavy with frost. Clouds smothered the sky, dimming the world to ash and iron.
The trail of footprints continued—small, stumbling, so many that they blurred into one another. Children. A village worth of them. Herded north, as Kael's warning had said, "like herds to slaughter."
Every so often, the snow betrayed a story. A scrap of cloth snagged on a branch. A cracked toy soldier, half-buried by drifting frost. A streak of frozen blood trailing into nothing. Each sign dug its claws deeper into me, filling the silence with ghosts.
By the time the sun slid behind the peaks, the forest thinned. Ahead stretched a clearing rimmed by ancient pines, their trunks black against the pale sky. At its center stood a ring of stones—weathered giants, carved with runes that time itself seemed to have forgotten.
And there, at the circle's heart, burned a fire the color of ash. It gave no warmth, only smoke that rose in twisting fingers, clawing upward as if to drag the heavens down.
The tracks ended there.
So too did the children.
They huddled within the stone circle—dozens of them, perhaps more. Thin as reeds, faces hollowed by hunger, eyes wide with a terror too deep for tears. Chains bound their wrists, the links fastened to the ancient stones. When they saw us, a few stirred, but none cried out. As if their voices had already been stolen.
My stomach clenched. Joran muttered a prayer under his breath. Carrow's grip tightened on his reins, but he did not speak.
The silence shattered.
The chains stirred first, quivering like serpents tasting the air. Then the sound returned—louder now, heavier, rolling across the clearing like thunder beneath the snow.
From the treeline opposite us, the shadows broke.
They came in a tide. Not the jerking, half-living scouts we had faced before, but a host. Their movements were more deliberate, their ranks unbroken, each step echoing the clink of their iron masks. The sight of them was enough to drain the warmth from my veins.
Their weapons gleamed cruel in the dying light: hooks, chains, barbed spears, axes hammered from black iron. Masks of bone and metal hid their faces, though I thought I glimpsed pale lips writhing beneath the cracks, whispering words that froze the tongue.
And at their head walked a figure taller than the rest.
He wore a cloak of furs blackened with age and filth. His mask was wrought not of bone, but of iron, forged in the shape of a cracked sun—the same sigil painted on every raider's chest. In his hand he carried a staff wound with chains, each link etched with runes that burned faintly red, as if feeding on the fire's smoke.
At his presence, the children bowed their heads. Not in defiance. Not in hope. In resignation, as though their fate was already sealed, as though he had owned them long before the chains.
A ripple of unease passed through our company. One man whispered, "What devil walks among us?" Another made the sign of the gods over his chest.
Lord Carrow's blade rasped free, the steel catching the pale glow of the ash-fire. His voice rang clear across the clearing:
"Break their lines. Free the children. Or die trying."
The host did not falter. The leader raised his staff, and the runes along its chains flared brighter, casting red light across the stones. The fire swelled, roaring though no wood fed it, and the chains binding the children began to tighten, dragging them closer to the center of the circle.
The horn blew again, deeper than before, shaking the very stones. Snow toppled from the trees, and the ground trembled with the sound.
And then the chains moved.
Not only those around the children, but the very links that adorned the staff. They writhed like serpents alive, slithering across the stones, lashing outward toward us.
A shiver crawled up my spine.
The true storm had come.
"— To Be Continued —"
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