The wind howled in pitiful sighs, and the world narrowed until it was nothing but a blur of iron and meat.

Mers did not know how long he had been standing there, his arm a leaden weight that swung and swung with the same grace of a butcher that was drunk.

The faces surrounding him shifted a dozen times, some lost to the red-slicked stones, others simply unable to keep pace with the knight’s desperate rhythm.

He was a silver ghost in a burning house, his blade rising and falling until the hilt was sticky with a warmth that was not his own.

A great many men were thrown his way, sent by the defenders to plug the leak in their stone hull. But superior steel and a lifetime of training proved the decisive factors. Initially, a rain of arrows had sought the gaps in his plate, clattering off his breastplate like hail on a tin roof. Eventually, the bowmen perched upon the stone pillars realized they were merely blunting their shafts against his vanity; they turned their spite toward the unarmored "Graceless" instead. This forced the levies to huddle beneath their shields, trapped in a nightmare where steel was thrust at them from the front and death whistled down from above.

Most of the struggle was a fever dream.

The suffocating closeness of the ramparts rendered tactics a vanity; there was no room for elegant maneuvers , only the raw, guttural inspiration of leading from the fore. Mers lost all sense of time, his world reduced to a singular, pulsing mandate: thrust the pointy end of the sword into the man ahead, and ensure the same was not done to him.

It was in a rare moment of stillness, as he stepped over a pile of the fallen to find his next mark, that he turned to look back.

He did not know why he did, he just fell the need for it.

What he saw made a smile bloom on his face.

The progress was staggering. The defenders were no longer just yielding; they were melting away, the enemy lines buckling under the sheer, frantic pressure of the assault. They had carved a red peninsula into the heart of the Eastern Stronghold, and through that gap, the true mettle of the League was finally making landfall.

A great, ragged roar went up from the exhausted peasants as the bridge of the siege tower groaned under a new, heavier weight. The "Graceless" stepped aside more than willingly , their blood-streaked faces splitting into delirious grins as the sun finally caught the untarnished steel of the reserve.

The dismounted knights had arrived.

They poured from the tower’s maw like a silver rive,men in full harness, their surcoats bright with the heraldry of the South, making them appear like a rainbow in a field of red, their longswords, maces, and axes catching the morning light. They didn’t stumble as the peasants had; they marched with the heavy, rhythmic thunder of iron-shod boots.

"The knights!" a dying levy gasped, reaching out a muddy hand as if to touch the passing splendor. "The knights have come!We won!"

The cheering of the commoners rose to a deafening pitch, a frantic, hopeful sound that drowned out the wind. Mers stood in the center of the breach, his chest heaving, his right arm throbbing with the arrow still embedded in his meat. He watched the Oizenian , Ezvanian , Kakunian and Habadian nobility stride onto the ramparts he had bled to take, their fresh strength opposite to his own ruined state.

Through the cheering of the peasants, a sound that finally allowed Mers a moment to draw a breath that didn’t taste of his own terror, He leaned against a crenellation, his heart slowing. They had done it. The bridge was thick with the silver-clad reserve, and the stronghold’s heart was laid bare. For a fleeting, honeyed second, relief washed over him, a warm tide that promised him he might actually live to see the sunset.

Then, the scream rose as if to wake him from that dream.

It was not the high-pitched shriek of a dying boy or the panicked wail of a fleeing levy. it was a raw,roar that seemed to vibrate through the very stones beneath Mers’s boots.

Mers turned, his relief melting away like wax in a furnace.

There, cutting a red swath through the cheering Oizenian peasants, was a nightmare in battered steel. He was a titan of a man, leading a splinter of survivors, barely two dozen men-at-arms, their armor so stained with gore they looked like they had been forged in a slaughterhouse.

At the head of this grim company stood the source of the roar. He appeared to be a dead man in plate, his breastplate so dented and scarred it looked like it had been hammered by a giant’s fist, first in and then out.

There could have been decorations or signs of honors on the man’s armor, but he was so red that they were lost.

A visible crack ran through his visor, shearing away a piece of the steel to reveal a face etched deep with the cruel fingers of time, grey-bearded, scarred, and burning with a lethal, concentrated hate.

Only half of his face was visible, but through that half seeped a hate enough to drown the whole castle.

The man didn’t hesitate even with countless man charging on him. He swung a heavy, notched axe in a horizontal arc, cleaving a levy’s skull halfway through , like a burnt branch broke in two. Without breaking stride, he then slammed his shield edge-first into another man’s face, claiming the poor bastard’s jaw.

He took two other lives before he freed himself, cocked his head back and let out a scream that made Mers’ blood go ice-cold.

Beneath the filth and the dents and the deads, Mers saw the heraldry of the beast: the Silver Wolf.

The Lord of Bracum didn’t look at the knights pouring from the tower. He didn’t look at the carnage around him. His eyes, wild and bloodshot, locked onto Mers’s silver plate. In that moment, the world narrowed to just the two of them, the veteran of a hundred wars and the one-armed knight who had dared to take his wall.

Xanthios let out another wild challenge, turning the peasants’ cheers into whimpers of fear. He began to move, ignoring the spears that poked at his flanks, ignoring his own men as they struggled to keep up, there was only one point where his attention belonged. He seemed a force of nature, a landslide of iron making a bloody road toward Mers.

"You!" Xanthios bellowed through the crack in his helm, the word sprayed between cracked lips. "By tonight’s dawn I shall give you wings and make you fly!"

Mers felt the weight of his sword grow tenfold.

But he still raised it and prepared himself to make his stance.

He held no fear as he did so, for he knew the gods were with him in this dance.

-----------------

Men broke themselves against Asag like waves against a cliff of black iron. A knighthood and a king’s ransom had been promised to any man who could bring down the Mountain of Aracina, and the ramparts were choked with those greedy enough to try.

"Die!" a voice shrieked, cutting through the wet slap of blades.

The attacker was tall and lean, clad in a fine, long hauberk that marked him as a man of birth. He had lost his helm in the fray, and a gash across his forehead sent a curtain of crimson masking his vision.

It was a youthfool face.

Another fool who had taken the bait of an early death.

Asag saw the opening and lashed out with a swipe, but the knight was fast. He slammed the blade aside with a snarl of bared teeth.

"Bastard!I will have you weight in silver" the man spat, his eyes wild. "Die!"

He began to circle , his heavy mace whistling through the air in a lethal blur. The man took heart seeing the legend himself reduced to a short sword and no shield. One solid connection would stagger the giant; a second would end the story of the Third Legion. Asag knew it, and every fiber of his being rebelled against the looming dark.

The tall man lunged, his blunt iron seeking skull and shoulder. Steel cut the biting wind, then bit deep into the wooden hoardings of the wall. It was a desperate dance. Asag was battered, his limbs leaden after an hour of ceaseless slaughter, and the weight of the failing Eastern front sat heavy on his soul, slowing his movements.

The tall man continued his mad assault.

"Die!’’He swung and missed.

’’Die! ’’ He swung again and hit the air once more..

’’Die!Die!Die!’’

Asag had always hated maces. He hated the way they ignored the grace of a parry, and he hated it especially more when the bastard finally found his mark.

The iron head of the weapon caught Asag across the side of his face.

The world fractured. White stars exploded behind his eyes, and the roar of the battle faded into a high, piercing whine like the roaring of marriage bells.

Asag hit the stone on one knee, his vision swimming in a sea of grey, as he thought of his wife.

The soon to be honored knight let out a triumphant crow, certain the Mountain was finally falling. He raised the mace high above his head with both hands, a butcher preparing the finishing stroke.

"DIE!"

But he did not die, he instead roared.

"YOU FUCKING CUNT!"

He didn’t use his good hand. He ignored the agony and closed his wounded, mangled fist, delivering a desperate, upward strike toward the man’s inner thigh. He felt the sickening give of soft meat and he swore that something pop.

The knight’s breath left him in a pathetic, high-pitched moan. He exhaled a long, shuddering breath of shock while Asag whimpered in the dark, white-hot heat searing through half his body from the strain on his ruined wrist.

Yet, through the veil of pain, he rose, standing over the man who, a heartbeat ago, had been looking down at him.

"Die," Asag growled, and this time, the man complied.

He drove the dagger he kept on his belt into the side of the knight’s neck, the steel shearing through the other side. He let the body slump, his sword lost somewhere in the red mud of the rampart.

Asag let out a rattling curse as he looked at his empty hand. His eyes fell on the dead man’s mace, and he scooped it up, the weight of the blunt iron feeling cold and honest,perhaps he should have chose a mace since the begginning. He was turning back to the fray when a heavy hand clamped onto his shoulder.

Asag spun, the mace already halfway through an arc, before his eyes caught the dark and white of the Legion. He pulled the blow, the iron head whistling away from the soldier’s face.

"Legate!" the man shouted not knowing how close he had come to death , his voice barely audible over the ringing in Asag’s ears. "News from the East! Lord Xanthios led a counter-charge with his retinue! He smashed the bastards to oblivion! The Wolf has cleared the wall!The enemy is in rout!"

Asag’s head swam, the world tilting dangerously. He felt the high, metallic whine in his ears begin to fade, replaced by the legionnaire’s frantic, joyful report.

"He’s consolidating the line!" the soldier cried. "He’s sending reinforcements our way! The Eastern wall holds!"

At that Asag leaned heavily against the cold stone, a battered, bloody smile splitting his grime-streaked face. The Mountain was broken, his body was a ruin, but they had survived.

They had held the Bastion for one more day.