The Black Peak Dunes, Great Desert – Dawn, Year 8002 A.A.
There are silences that comfort, and there are silences that terrify. The silence of the Black Peak Dunes this dawn was neither. It was the silence of judgment—the desert waiting to see whether it would be drenched in blood again, or whether the sands would be allowed to rest for another century.
The stars still clung stubbornly to their dominion above, as if reluctant to yield their kingdom to the rising sun. Yet the east had already begun its slow bleeding, a crimson line spilling across the edge of the world like the first cut of a knife. That blood-red horizon seemed a warning, a wound across the sky itself.
Every grain of sand whispered in the restless wind, scraping against stone in thin, biting sighs. The sound was sharp and merciless, like blades being honed in the shadows. The desert had seen this before. It knew the pattern of blood and ambition too well. It was sharpening itself for what was to come.
Kon Kaplan stood alone on the jagged ridge, a figure cut out of both shadow and fire. To an untrained eye, he might have looked like a statue—a piece of the rock itself, fixed and unyielding. But his stillness was no statue's stillness. It was the stillness of a predator before the strike, every muscle coiled, every breath deliberate, every nerve listening.
His cloak—once crimson, now dulled with the dust of long marches and the black grit of battles fought—hung heavy on his shoulders. His striped fur burned bronze in the shy, reluctant light, but there was no warmth in him. He was a man forged in deserts like this: vast, untamable, merciless.
One golden eye swept across the valley below. The other had been lost years ago, its absence marked forever by he black eye patch and the cruel scar that slashed his face. Yet he did not mourn it. In some way, the scar had sharpened him. What one eye no longer saw, the other had learned to perceive with terrifying precision. He could feel the world through the ground beneath his clawed hand, hear its tremors through the dry air. The desert spoke to him not with words, but with its vibrations.
And what it said was simple: Danger. Immense. Unstoppable.
The basin yawned before him like the bowl of some ancient sacrificial altar. Into it had been poured a tide of metal and flesh so vast it defied imagination. The first glance alone was enough to chill the marrow: spears rising in endless waves, banners unfurling like the wings of carrion birds, the stink of iron and oil and men too long camped together.
The banners of House Ferez cut through the murk like black gashes against the dawn. Serpents devouring themselves. 'A cruel symbol,' Kon thought. Fitting, in a way, that such a house would lead men into consuming themselves in the fires of ambition.
The drums—those deep, monstrous drums—beat like the heart of something older than men. He felt them in his chest, in his scarred ribs, in his teeth. They did not simply keep time; they commanded it. Every beat declared: You will march. You will kill. You will not think.
Four hundred thousand. Kon did not need to tally each line of spears or measure the blocks of infantry. His instincts carried the number to him like a whisper through the sand. A number too large to defy reason. A number so large it stopped being a number at all and became instead a living thing—vast, mindless, inevitable.
Kon had faced many odds. He had been outnumbered before—three to one, ten to one, even a hundred to one. He had learned how to turn terrain into an ally, how to make courage worth ten soldiers, how to make cunning worth a thousand.
But this… this was something different.
This was not a contest of tactics. This was not a skirmish to be outmaneuvered. This was the weight of nations pressing itself into the desert, intent on crushing whatever dared to stand in its way.
He could almost feel it pressing down on his shoulders, a crushing mantle not just of steel but of destiny. He thought of cities swallowed whole by floods, their towers and temples reduced to silt in the space of days. He thought of maps redrawn not by kings or treaties but by the sheer avalanche of men willing to die in obedience to a banner.
His gaze cut deeper, scanning through the faceless tide. He was not looking for soldiers; soldiers were smoke, easily scattered, easily burned. No—the true fire lay elsewhere.
Somewhere within that massive tide were the minds. The architects. The men whose ambition had called forth this leviathan from its slumber. The whisperers, the schemers, the generals who believed that the desert could be bent, that men could be driven like cattle into its heart and still come out whole.
And somewhere above them all, pulling at strings unseen, was the one name Kon's heart had already written in blood: Prince Erezhan.
He could not yet see him. But he did not need to. A general did not look for the shadow itself, but for the way the sand bent around it. He searched for gravity—the point of convergence, the silent center around which the chaos swirled.
His claws dug slightly into the stone beneath his hand. 'You brought this storm to my door,' he thought. And storms, once born, do not ask permission whom they destroy.
The desert was still whispering to Kon Kaplan when another voice intruded upon its silence—an easy drawl, smooth as worn leather, carrying the cadence of plains and sunburnt roads. It was a voice that meandered at its own pace, unconcerned with the crushing weight of armies or the drumbeat of war below.
"How many are we starin' down, Lord Kaplan?"
Kon did not turn fully. His discipline, his instinct, kept his gaze fixed on the seething valley of spears. Yet he allowed a fractional shift of his head, enough to register the approach of the man whose tone was as unmistakable as the desert wind itself.
Climbing the ridge toward him was Lord Jeth Fare. The figure was wiry, built like the taut string of a bow, yet carried with the relaxed nonchalance of one who had walked the desert roads longer than memory itself. His fur was the muted brown of wheat left too long beneath a pitiless sun, his desert robes bleached pale by years of exposure. Nothing about him looked like ornament; every fold, every loose layer was practical, born of function before fashion.
And yet, there were marks of distinction. The curling brand seared into his forearm—Hazël #5—glowed faintly when the rising sun caught it. The pair of chakrams at his hips were not the plain tools of a sellsword but works of deadly artistry, their golden filigree catching what little light there was, whispering promises of ruin. Even the bent straw stalk that dangled from the corner of his mouth seemed an affectation of deliberate carelessness, one that refused to be stolen by the restless desert wind.
But Kon knew better. He had known Jeth long enough to see through the veil of indolence. That tail, swaying in a lazy, metronomic rhythm—sometimes amusement, sometimes calculation—was never meaningless. It was a rhythm of his mind. And Jeth Fare's mind was as dangerous a weapon as his blades.
The Saboteur. The Country Rat. The 5th Narn Lord.
"Approximately four hundred thousand," Kon said at last. His voice carried the weight of stone. The number lodged in his chest like grit, sharp and immovable. "Carlon's core force. Legionnaires. Cavalry. Heavy infantry." His golden eye tightened. "And others. Mismatched armor, scattered formations. Not Carlon-born. Mercenaries. Sell-swords. They've bought steel from every hand that could carry it."
Jeth loosed a low whistle. In the emptiness of the desert, the sound was consumed almost instantly, a small, frail thing before the immensity below. Yet its meaning lingered. Impossible. Suicidal. Terrifying.
"Guess they ain't treatin' this like some neighbourly chat over sweet tea and biscuits."
For a heartbeat, Kon allowed the ghost of a smile. Grim. Bitter. A momentary crack in the granite of his bearing. "Guess not."
"And our folks?" Jeth asked. His gaze, until now fixed on the endless tide of Carlon's war machine, shifted westward with deliberate patience.
Kon followed his line of sight. Across the basin, the opposing ridge stirred with motion. There, pouring down the slope like a living river, came Kürdiala's forces. Twenty thousand only, dwarfed by the ocean of enemies before them, yet the sight did not inspire despair. If Carlon's army was a flood, then this was a blade: narrow, disciplined, impossibly sharp.
They did not march. They flowed, each step aligned with the next in silent, precise unity. No horns heralded their advance. No generals shouted orders. The desert itself seemed to bend its ear to the quiet rhythm of their movement—the steady crunch of sand beneath boots, the muted sigh of linen war-garb shifting against armor.
Their armor was not the gleaming vanity of empire but the hard pragmatism of survival: steel where it mattered most, sand-colored cloth where the sun's weight needed breaking. They carried no excess. They bore only what they must, and that made them all the more dangerous.
The sun caught their banners as they unfurled in the wind. Black Panther of Kürdiala, sleek and terrible on royal purple. Gray Mountain of ArchenLand, rooted and unyielding on green. Crimson Lion of Narn, forever caught mid-pounce, promising swiftness and blood. Together, they were a tapestry of heritage, strength, and vengeance stitched across the dawn.
And at their head—
A raccoon Tracient strode before them, compact in frame yet immense in bearing. His cape billowed as if impatient to leap from his shoulders, its pin marked by the polished acorn of the Fare Clan. Across the fur of his other shoulder burned a brand that needed no heraldry to explain it: Özel #1.
Johan Fare. Nephew to Jeth. And the iron fist of Kürdiala's ground might.
Kon's eye narrowed with recognition. His mouth twitched—not humor, but acknowledgment of inevitability. "Your nephews's got that look again."
Jeth's tail flicked once, sharp and fond. "Aye. The 'I-woke-up-today-hopin'-some-poor-bastard-would-test-me' look. Means he's in a fine mood. Best not to get in his way."
There was pride beneath the lazy cadence, pride only family could carry without fear of arrogance. Both men watched as Johan's sharp gaze swept the Carlonian tide below, and instead of dread, anticipation bloomed across his features.
Anticipation, not of survival, but of the test itself.
For a time, silence wrapped the two lords like a cloak. Not an uneasy quiet, but one born of weathered companionship, the kind forged in long marches, night watches, and campaigns where men leaned on one another more than on their swords. The wind whispered its endless riddles around them, filling the space between Kon Kaplan and Jeth Fare as each kept his eyes fixed on a different horizon.
Kon's gaze clung to the abyss of the basin below, where Carlon's host writhed like a single iron organism, while Jeth's lingered on the disciplined, unbending tide of Kürdiala flowing down the western ridge. The stillness between them was not void—it was full. Full of trust, full of memories, full of the unspoken knowledge that both would bleed for the other without hesitation.
At last Jeth broke the silence, his voice shifting like steel drawn from a scabbard. Gone was the lazy drawl, gone the careless plainsman's air. When he spoke now, it was sharp, deliberate, carrying the weight of calculation.
"What do you make of Erezhan's side?"
The question cut through the air. He was not asking about the four hundred thousand swords glinting below. He was asking about the needle in the haystack—the small cluster of vipers coiled at the very heart of this leviathan.
Kon's good eye narrowed to a sliver, the golden iris glinting like a blade in the dawn light. His thoughts were not quick—they were measured, deliberate, the kind that remembered every scar and every face.
"The prince himself," Kon began, his tone low, heavy, as if each word was carved from stone. "Erezhan. Hazël #16. Skilled, yes. Arrogant. Cruel. That trinity alone makes him more perilous than many seasoned generals. A man who does not doubt himself is dangerous. A man who delights in cruelty is worse. He will not simply fight to win—he will fight to wound, to unmake."
Kon's cloak shifted as his claws flexed beneath its folds, the gesture unconscious, the body remembering battles long past. "But it is not he alone who troubles me. It is those who cling to his shadow. His right hand, Baraz—the Rhino. Hazël #20. I have crossed him before, in the Midlands."
His voice hardened, becoming flint. "His body was unnatural even then. Durable beyond reason. Blades bit but did not break him. Mana struck and found no purchase. He was like a mountain given flesh. And now, with the Shadow's mark festering in his blood…" Kon's eye narrowed to a dangerous slit. "He will be stronger. Faster. Perhaps unbreakable."
He drew a slow breath, steadying the weight of memory before continuing. "And the snake. Sahira. The whisperer. More venomous than any blade. If she has healed from what was done to her… if the darkness has sharpened her craft…" His jaw clenched, his voice dropping lower. "She is the most dangerous of them all. She does not strike the body—she strikes the mind. She coils around your fears, turns them into chains. She makes you your own jailer. A foe undone without ever raising a hand."
For the briefest moment, his golden gaze flickered, recalling a battle past. "Adam did her no mercy last time. He hollowed her out. She was left a husk, scarcely able to breathe on her own. Yet if she walks again… then the Shadow has raised something far worse than she was."
Jeth's brow furrowed. His keen eyes roved across the endless press of banners and bodies below as if sheer will might pierce the cloak of anonymity. "Strange thing, though," he murmured, the cadence still flat, focused. "For all that talk, I can't sense 'em. Not a flicker. Not Baraz's brute mana, not Sahira's slithery poison. Nothin'."
His tail stilled, the playful rhythm gone. "It's like they ain't here at all. Just… a hole where they should be."
Kon's reply came like iron ground against stone. "I noticed." His gaze did not leave the mass below, but his tone confirmed the unease building in his chest. "They are here. Make no mistake of that. They are the heart of this host. But they are cloaking themselves. Deliberately."
He shifted his head, turning to look Jeth square in the eye, the scar that bisected his brow catching the light. "Which leaves the greater question: why? Why hide, when they have the numbers? Why conceal their strength, unless…" His claws flexed again, the tension audible in the grit of his voice. "Unless they are waiting. Unless this is a game of patience. And we have not yet seen the board."
Jeth spat out the stalk of straw. The desert wind caught it, whisking it away into the abyss of sand. His tail gave one sharp, final flick. "Don't know," he muttered, the drawl bleeding back into his tone though it carried no trace of ease. "Don't like it. But we'll find out soon enough."
He nodded toward the Carlonian lines. Below, the rhythm of the war drums shifted, deepened, like a pulse racing before the plunge into violence. Their beat grew hungrier, faster, pressing against the air like an unseen hand. The sound rolled up the dune and through their bones, drowning even the wind's whisper.
"Trumpets'll scream any moment," Jeth said, his gaze steady. "Then the waitin's over."
Kon Kaplan and Jeth Fare stood at the ridge, watching, listening, bracing. The storm had not yet broken—but its hidden heart was already beating.
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The eastern ridge was still shrouded in shadow, a jagged silhouette against the slow bleeding of dawn. Yet from its highest point, a figure gleamed—not by the grace of the hidden sun, but as if lit from within.
Prince Erezhan.
He stood alone, or appeared to, though behind him loomed giants. His boar frame was massive, a fortress of muscle bound in segmented plates of Carlon's darkest steel. The armor itself was an artwork of cruelty, every surface etched with serpent motifs that twisted and devoured their own tails, each rune along its length glowing with a sullen violet burn, like embers smoldering in an endless night. It was not the armor of one who sought to survive battle, but of one who sought to own it. Dominion cast into metal.
His eyes burned red—not the fleeting red of passion or fury, but the fixed, unnatural crimson of possession. They were eyes that did not simply see, but claimed. Eyes that reduced thousands of soldiers to coins in his treasury, lives already spent before they had even drawn breath for the charge.
Behind him was a shadow that breathed.
Baraz.
The rhino's form was colossal, a slab of living stone wrapped in jagged, blackened armor that hissed with sickly violet fire. Each plate looked less forged than tortured into shape, as if the metal itself had screamed under the hammer. The faint flames crawled across the ridges and edges, consuming nothing, feeding on nothing, yet they lingered, like whispers from another world.
His great horn bore the cracks of his duel with Adam Kurt—a memory etched into him by defeat. Yet instead of shame, they had been filled with burning metal, inlaid with violet like trophies. The scars had not been hidden. They had been exalted.
Baraz's breath was a furnace. Each exhale came like a bellows, deep and steady, the rhythm of a predator who had long since accepted patience as part of its strength. The air itself bent around him, shimmering with heat though the desert morning was still cool. He was a living reminder that some mountains do not crumble—they are reforged.
To the prince's left, lifted above the earth by a dais of blackened steel, coils wrapped and unwrapped in a slow, ceaseless rhythm. Sahira.
Her lower body, a tower of pale gold scales, coiled the dais like a constricting throne, a slow serpent's dance without end. Her upper body was upright but limp, posture too straight to be natural, as though held there by sheer, stubborn malice.
Her amber eyes were slits of fire, twin blades fixed unblinking upon the distant Kürdialan ridge. Her third eye—once opened in the Midlands to horrifying effect—remained sealed, a trembling ridge of skin on her brow. Yet even bound, it pulsed faintly, as though something unspeakable pressed against the thin veil of flesh, yearning to claw its way free.
The sight of her stillness was worse than motion. A body that weak seemed wrong paired with eyes that sharp. She did not need to move. Her watching was enough.
Erezhan did not glance at her. His red eyes clung to the opposing ridge, to the tiny figures outlined against the dawn. His voice was flat, almost bored. A sovereign demanding a tally, not a conversation.
"How strong are they?"
Baraz's answer came in a voice that rumbled like stone sliding down a mountainside.
"Twenty thousand. No more. Two Lords on the ridge—the Tiger, Kon Kaplan, Hazël #3, and the Rodent, Jeth Fare, Hazël #5. They will not descend yet. They will measure, test, bide their time. Below, the Özel General leads—the raccoon, Johan Fare. Özel #1."
The title was spoken with reluctant weight. Baraz respected rank even as he dismissed the man.
The silence that followed was heavy. It pressed like sand into a wound.
"If he pushes through our front lines, I'll meet him myself," Baraz continued at last, the vow more solid than iron. "But the Tiger and the Rodent—" his voice dipped lower, harsher, "—if they move… if they commit their full strength… we face more than a battle. We face a reckoning."
Erezhan's silence was long. He did not move, did not blink. His red eyes seemed to measure the desert itself, as though the dunes were but lines on his game-board.
Slowly, inevitably, his gaze slid toward Sahira. She had not stirred. Her coils shifted only with the inevitability of tides, her body limp but her stare unbearable. He knew the truth of her: if that sealed eye opened, it would not matter how many soldiers the Kürdiala brought. The desert itself would scream.
Then light broke.
The sun crested the eastern dunes, its first golden fingers stretching across the valley. And Erezhan moved.
In one imperious sweep, he raised his spear aloft. The weapon's barbed head caught the dawn and blazed like fire on water. The gesture was enough. It was command. It was prophecy.
Below, the lines of Carlon erupted. Trumpets blared, their brazen shriek tearing the fragile morning apart. Serpent banners dipped once, then surged.
"FOR CARLON! FOR FEREZ!"
The roar shook the earth. It rolled up from fifty thousand throats, not a shout, but a tide. A tide of rage. A tide of iron.
The first regiment advanced, a wall of shields and spears that gleamed like the teeth of a beast. Fifty thousand strong, they moved as one. Shields locked, spears leveled, swords drawn. Not men. Not soldiers. A tide.
From the ridge, they did not look like an army. They looked like inevitability. A flood of steel and intent, rushing forward to erase whatever dared to stand against them.
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Jeth gave a long, low whistle, the sound dry as the desert air. "Well, guess that answers that." His tone was almost casual, but the flick of his tail betrayed the truth—every nerve in him was singing. All speculation, all wary circling, all attempts to guess at Erezhan's intent—finished. The floodgate had opened, and the tide had declared itself.
Beside him, Kon Kaplan moved with the terrible grace of inevitability. The Tiger Lord drew his heavy red cloak aside with one sweeping motion, revealing the brand burned into his striped shoulder. Hazël #3. The mark blazed against his fur like a second sun, its stark lines a symbol that all who watched—friend or foe—would recognize. It was no boast. It was a declaration. A promise to his allies, and a warning to his enemies.
"If Johan's line falters," Kon said, his voice a rumble like shifting mountains, "if their center breaks, we join."
There was no bravado in it. No raised voice, no theatrics. Only the steady calm of an avalanche not yet loosed, the weight of inevitability waiting for its trigger. The tiger's golden eye stayed fixed on the valley, but his clawed hand flexed once at his side, hungry for the moment.
Jeth's response was quieter, but no less sharp. His hands closed around the grips of his chakrams, the golden discs whispering as they spun once, twice, before stilling again. The edges caught the dawn light, flashing like fangs. The sound of their spin was soft, but in that silence, it was a promise—the promise of a whirlwind that would carve its path through flesh and steel alike.
Down below, twenty thousand Kürdiala soldiers stood poised on the lip of history. At their head was Johan Fare.
He did not shout. He did not strike a pose. He simply stood, his spear angled forward, its point a clean, unyielding arrow toward the oncoming flood. The raccoon's compact frame radiated an energy taut as a bowstring. His acorn crest glinted briefly in the sun, not as decoration, but as recognition—a symbol of a house and a duty carried without hesitation.
For a breath, time itself seemed to hold. The desert, the sky, even the very wind stilled, all creation straining toward this singular point of release.
Then Johan spoke.
"Advance."
The word cut the silence like a blade through silk.
The effect was immediate.
Twenty thousand boots struck sand as one. The ground shuddered beneath them. There was no battle cry, no chest-beating roar. Only the immense, synchronized crunch of sand beneath disciplined feet—a sound so deep, so steady, it seemed the desert itself had found a heartbeat.
The sound of resolve.
Banners unfurled above the host, snapping taut in the sudden wind of their advance.
The regiments moved as though woven into a single cloth. No man broke rank. No line wavered. Their silence was their roar, their order their defiance. Against the rolling thunder of Carlon's fifty thousand, they answered not with noise, but with resolve—an unyielding wall of flesh, steel, and spirit.
High above, Jeth and Kon watched, the one with a smirk that barely concealed his pride, the other with the grim patience of a hunter. Both knew what this meant. Once loosed, this dance would not pause.
And deep in the hearts of all who stood upon that sand—whether soldier of Carlon or warrior of Kürdiala—settled the same ancient certainty. The desert would drink today. The Black Peak Dunes, so silent and patient, would not let the sun set without its fill of blood.
The banners streamed. The ground trembled.
The dance had begun.