The walls of the Bastion loomed through the autumn mist, as vast and imposing as the fortifications of Lencum, capital of Habadia, or the high redoubts of Oizen.

But where the stones of a capital might stand with a defiant, grayish-white luster, these walls were the color of sun-bleached bone. They were choked with moss that had been watered by three months of human blood, a run-down expanse of masonry that looked as though it were being slowly ground into powder by the sheer weight of the conflict.

The Prince stood in his pavilion, staring at that stubborn grey line. He had assaulted it until his siege towers were splinters. He had starved it. He had bombarded it with stones until the earth shook. And yet, battered as it was, the Bastion still stood.

They had defied him.

Had any man told him at the onset of the spring thaw that he would be standing in the exact same muddy footprint months later, he would have had the man’s tongue for the insult.

Now, the whispers were louder than the wind. People called him incompetent. The lords called this campaign lost.

"It makes no sense," he muttered to the empty air, his knuckles white as he gripped the hilt of his sword, with the desperate need to swing it at something , anything really.

They had twelve thousand swords. Twelve thousand! The vermin inside that wall could have numbered four thousand at most. And the forces Alpheo kept outside? The shadows that lived in the treeline? They were a handful of ghosts, and yet fighting them was as grueling as facing an army of equal size.

They struck like vipers in the night, bleeding any force he sent out to forage. For the first two months, he had been patient, his belly full of grain from Kakunia. Then, that supply had been severed.

May the Weaver snip the thread of that madman! To rise in rebellion and put the torch to the very granaries that should have sustained this campaign through winter was a lunacy no sane tactician could have predicted.

With the Kakunian stores gone, he was left with the resources of only three thrones. He had been forced to rely on Oizen’s meager granaries, sending party after party into the surrounding woods to scavenge. But the forest belonged to the Yarzat wolves. Of every five men he sent out, only three returned. The other two would reappear days later, delivered in the dead of night as a pile of scalps and severed limbs left at the edge of the torchlight of the camp.

’’Works of barbarians that one.’’ Had commented Ser Gerwaise Gallow.

’’May the Gods strike them down and those heretics they brought to the lands of the Five’’ Lord Cregan muttered, making the holy star with his hands.

But what he needed was steel to strike them down, for the Gods would not bear to give them the slighted of attention.

He had even considered putting the entire forest to the torch, to burn the bastards out of their holes, but this accursed land conspired against him. It rained rivers even in the height of summer, and now in autumn, the wood was too sodden to take a spark.

"Even the gods have turned their faces," he hissed.

He couldn’t spare the men to hunt the raiders; every sword pulled from the siege lines was a sword he desperately needed for the next assault. His lords were growing unsteady, their loyalty fraying like an old rope, and the common troops were beginning to look at the Bastion not as a fortress, but as a tomb.

It was an avalanche of failure, moving with silence down, with him standing directly in its path.

"The recruits from Pardum will arrive in two days. We can attempt a fresh assault with the towers in three," reported the Prince of Oizen, his armor as polished and pristine as the day the campaign began.

Not a fleck of dust on it...

Nibadur looked into Sorza’s eyes and saw a reflection of his own gnawing anxiety,along with the confused awe at how thoroughly they were failing.

Gods curse the Yarzats for their latest.

They had somehow managed to put to the fire and sword the thousand-man rearguard left to protect their vital supply lines. The enemy was a phantom, everywhere and nowhere at once, yet possessed of the sheer raw strength to annihilate a host of a thousand.

Where did they even get the strength for that?

Were he not their target, Nibadur might have been impressed. Such a strategy required more than just hiding; it required a decentralized ferocity, a host of men who could forgo the "fair fight" and cooperate with lethal precision the moment the trap was sprung.

How did they feed themselves without a baggage train? How did they maintain communication across the fractured wilderness? How did they know exactly where to wheel their horses? The logistics made Nibadur’s head throb, yet the Fox had done it all the same.

Fuck him.

With the rearguard butchered, there was nothing to stop the Yarzat raiders from putting the torch to everything in their path. And indeed report after report trickled in, villages reduced to ash, refugees clogging the roads of Oizen.

Lords received words of their villages put to their swords, who in tow came complaining to them.What were they to do about it?Forgo the siege and go all the way back to give some bandits a good pounding?

Even that opium-induced fool of a brother-in-law, hiding in his tent with whores and pipes, seemed a lesser headache than this.

"What of the food?" Nibadur asked, his voice tight. He knew the coming assaults were as useful as throwing pearls at swine, but the stomach was the only clock that mattered now.

"What of Kakunia?" the Prince of Oizen countered, pointedly diverting his gaze.

So bad you won’t even deign to answer? Nibadur thought bitterly. Are we to starve in this mud?

When the Yarzats had scorched the rear, they hadn’t spared the grain. It had taken a month of delicate maneuvering by the Prince of Shaaza to contract any meaningful numbers of merchants into bringing supplies. It was humiliating enough to beg that prince for bread, and now even that pipeline was failing.

"We would sooner expect the Fox to surrender than see a single grain from Kakunia," Nibadur snapped. "Do you truly think that lunatic bastard didn’t put the stores to the torch the first chance he got?He is probably back in his lands , wine in hand laughing at us starving. I ask you again: what of the food?"

Sorza sighed, the sound not making Nibadur’s mood any better. "I can perhaps requisition two more weeks’ worth, but I would need to strip the few villages that still have a winter hoard." He left the obvious unsaid: his own people would face a famine that would kill thousands. But Sorza clearly preferred a starving peasantry to the retaliation of Alpheo. "Perhaps we could appeal to Shaaza again?"

"I’ll send an envoy," Nibadur muttered, though hope was a dry well. "For now, we wait—"

The heavy silk of the pavilion entrance was torn aside.

"Your Grace!" a voice cried, choked with a panicked urgency. The man who stumbled in looked as tired and grey as the stone walls they were besieging. His most prominent feature being rope-scar circling his neck, a souvenir from a gallows that had failed to claim him.

"Ser Gervaise?" Nibadur asked, rising slowly.

The man wheezed, clutching his chest as he delivered the latest catastrophe. "A mutiny, Your Grace! It has broken out in the lower camp!"

Fuck. Fucking fuck.The fox again?

"Who has risen?"

"Mostly the peasant levies brought for the assault, Your Grace. We are trying to contain it, but we fear the rot is spreading to the other ranks. We need steel, and we need it now!"

It was the final crack in the dam. A mutiny.Their fault for bringing so many peasants and sending them to their deaths. That night attack had been a failure and now even a rot.

"I’ll call my retinue," Sorza said, already pushing past Gervaise to reach the crisp air outside.

"Send word to the Ezvanian lords!" Nibadur barked, his voice regained its edge of iron. "Enlist their help. Put the peasants down, then hang every tenth man before the rest of the army. I will not have our own steel pointed at our throats while the Fox watches. Move!"

He was alone in the sudden, ringing silence of the pavilion. Outside, the muffled screams of the mutiny and the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of horses galloping toward the lower camps felt distant, like a storm breaking over a neighbor’s valley.

Away from your attention and care.

He didn’t move to join them. His fingers, stained with ink trembled slightly as he reached for a flagon of wine that had long since gone flat.

He looked at his hands, the hands of a Prince who had envisioned a swift, glorious unification.He would made a strong kingdom, what achievments could they have made if they had only united?

Instead, they were the hands of a jailer that was imprisoning himself in a campaign doomed to fail.

He could not starve the Yarzat wolves; they would feast on their own defiance while his own host withered into skeletons.

He could not storm the grey walls; to do so was merely to provide the Mountain with more corpses to water his moss.

And now, the very peasants he had brought to carry his ladders were turning their rusted tools against his knights.

He leaned his head back, closing his eyes. The flickering candlelight played over a face that had aged a decade in a single season.

He took the rings off his fingers and put them back on. Sometimes stopping only to bite lightly at his chuckles.

Every strategy was a dead end. Every ally was a beggar and a debtor.

What was left? To retreat in disgrace? To watch his coalition dissolve into the very mud that held his boots?

He slumped forward, resting his forehead against the cold, hard surface of his map table.

The sounds of screams and steel rose ever higher. Outside there was yet another battle, one that even winning would make them weaker than they had been before.

But the night was not finished with him. As the fires of the mutiny began to die down into a low, bloody glow, life decided to answer his silent plea.

A way out indeed existed, the only question being if he were of sound mind to take it.

For that night, deep into the darkness, such an answer would be delivered by the one man he least wanted to see.

The one man whose presence had made the price of victory far too high to ever attain.