The road to the Frontier does not march. It crawls.
Nine days in the levy wagon, nine days of chains and rain and the stink of our own dying, and still the war feels farther away than the moon. The Empire is a mouth that never stops chewing, and we are the scraps thrown to the back teeth.
We are six living souls now (one deserter bled out on the fifth night, and the guards left his corpse for the crows). The wagon lurches over ruts deep enough to swallow a horse. Every jolt grinds my flayed back against the splintered sideboards. The horse blanket they wrapped me in has long since fused with the scabs; when it tears free, it takes strips of skin with it.
The guards ride ahead or behind, never beside us. They fear contagion. Not of fever—of guilt.
The landscape changes slowly, the way a corpse changes colour.
First the coastal cliffs give way to rolling farmland. Fields lie fallow, black with last year's stubble. Scarecrows wear real helmets now, rusted and empty. Here and there a village still stands, but the doors are barred and the church bells hang silent. When we pass, faces peer from cracks in shutters—old men, women clutching babies, children with eyes too large. No one waves. No one offers water.
On the fourth day we reach the royal highway—the great paved road built by the third Aurelian Emperor to carry legions to glory. The stones are cracked. Weeds grow between them like green veins. Mile markers lean drunkenly, carved faces worn smooth by centuries of rain and despair.
Here the war begins to bleed into the land.
We pass our first gibbet.
Six bodies swing gently in the wind, feet bound, necks stretched long. Ravens have taken the eyes and most of the faces. One still wears the scarlet cloak of an officer. A placard around his neck reads: COWARDICE BEFORE THE ENEMY.
The guards do not slow.
On the fifth day the burned villages begin.
Roofs collapsed into black lace. Wells choked with ash and small bones. A child's wooden horse lies in the road, one wheel missing, painted smile still bright. The wagon rolls over it. The crack echoes like a bone breaking.
That night we camp beside a river the colour of old blood. The guards drink plum brandy and sing marching songs with the words wrong. One of the poachers tries to crawl away. They catch him by the ankle chain and drag him back through the fire. His screams last until the brandy runs out.
On the sixth day we enter the Blighted Plain.
This is where the war truly lives.
The ground is scarred with trenches old and new, some filled in with quicklime and the dead, others still open like wounds. The air smells of sulphur and rotting meat. Crows wheel overhead in black clouds that blot out the sun. The horizon flickers with distant cannon fire—red flashes like dragon eyes opening and closing.
We pass the remnants of battles no one bothered to name.
A forest of pikes driven into the earth, each bearing a helmet or a skull. A wagon train overturned and burning still, though the fire must be years old—some say the war itself keeps certain fires alive. A child's shoe nailed to a tree, sole worn through, ribbon still pink.
The guards grow quiet. Even they feel it now—the sense that something is watching from beneath the earth.
On the seventh day we reach the supply road—the last road the Empire still pretends to control.
Here the traffic is constant.
Columns of fresh levies march east, faces gray with fear. They stare at us in the wagon as though we are ghosts. Some cross themselves. Some spit.
Wagons of wounded roll west—men missing limbs, jaws, faces. Some scream. Some simply stare at the sky and wait to die. The smell of gangrene follows them like a banner.
We pass a company of engineers building a gallows large enough for fifty men at once. The carpenters whistle while they work.
On the eighth day the rain begins.
Not clean rain. This rain is yellow and stings the skin. It falls from clouds the colour of old bruises. Where it touches iron, the metal weeps rust. Where it touches flesh, it burns.
The guards wrap their cloaks tighter and curse the warlocks of the Obsidian Dominion. They say the enemy has poisoned the sky itself.
We, the meat, have no cloaks.
The rain finds every lash on my back, every crack in the brand, every fold of the rotting stump. It is acid and mercy at once.
That night the madman begins to scream about dragons. No one silences him. The guards are too busy vomiting from the yellow rain.
On the ninth day we smell the Frontier before we see it.
The stench rolls over us like a living thing—shit, rotting flesh, burnt powder, and something sweeter underneath, like overripe fruit left to burst.
The wagon crests a low ridge.
And there it is.
The war.
Not a battle. Not a siege.
The war itself, stretched across the earth like a flayed beast.
Trenches stretch to the horizon in both directions, a black lattice of scars. Smoke rises in pillars. The ground between is cratered and black, littered with the iron bones of siege engines and the pale shapes of the unburied. Crows and worse things feast in plain sight.
In the distance, the enemy lines mirror ours—another black scar across the earth. Between the two armies lies the true no-man's-land: a strip of ground so poisoned by cannon and sorcery that nothing grows, not even grass. Men say if you fall there, the earth itself digests you.
The wagon stops.
The guards cut us loose from the wheels but leave the manacles.
Ahead, a wooden arch marks the entrance to the Meat Pit—the worst trench in the entire Frontier, reserved for the condemned, the mad, and the noble who must be taught humility.
The arch is made of human bones lashed together with wire. Skulls grin down from the crossbeam. Someone has painted words across them in blood that never quite dries:
""" ABANDON MERCY, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE"""
The sergeant waits beneath it, the same burned-face creature who will one day drag me from my grave.
He counts us like sheep.
Six.
He smiles with what is left of his lips.
"Welcome to the end of the world, gentlemen," he says. "The Empire thanks you for your service."
He grabs my chain first.
The others follow.
We shuffle forward beneath the arch of bones.
Behind us, the wagon master cracks his whip and turns back toward the living world.
Ahead, the trench yawns open like a mouth.
I take my first step into the Meat Pit.
The ground is soft with the dead.
And somewhere far beneath my bare, bleeding feet, something older than grief opens its eye for the first time in fifty years.
It sees me.
It knows me.
It has been waiting.
The wagon stops beneath the bone arch at full dark.
Torches flare alive in a perfect circle. Eight hundred condemned souls are already packed shoulder-to-shoulder along the fire-steps and trench walls, silent as the grave they all share. The air is thick with the stink of open sores, shit, and the sweet-sour rot of the latrine trench. No one speaks. They simply watch.
I am dragged out last.
The guards cut my ankle chain from the wagon but leave the manacles.
The horse blanket now more scab than wool is ripped away in one brutal yank. The night wind kisses every flayed stripe on my back. The scabs tear open like wet parchment. I fall to my knees in the ankle-deep sludge and make a sound that is not human.
Commander Moloch waits in the centre of the trench.
He is a mountain poured into black iron plate. The left side of his face is melted wax; the right side is carved from old scars. A necklace of dried human ears clacks softly when he moves.
He holds the levy parchment in one gauntleted fist.
"Silence for the reading!" he roars.
Eight hundred throats fall dead quiet.
Moloch unrolls the parchment slowly, letting the torchlight crawl across the broken wax seals of House Veal and the Emperor himself.
"By order of Count Aldric Veal, Lord of Whitecliff," he begins, voice carrying to the farthest rat-hole, "this man, once called Kaelen Veal, second son, is stripped of name, title, blood, and honour for the crime of attempted rape upon the Lady Elyra of House Avelaine, his betrothed."
A low animal growl rolls through the trench.
Moloch lets it swell, then raises the parchment higher.
"Sentence delivered: hand forfeit, eye forfeit, branded as beast, one hundred lashes, and delivered to the Meat Pit to serve until death without hope of ransom, mercy, or memory."
He pauses, savours the moment.
"Welcome, little lord," he says softly.
"The Pit has been hungry for fresh nobility."
The growl becomes a roar.
The first thing that hits me is spit: thick, yellow, accurate. It spatters my branded cheek, my empty socket, my open mouth. Then comes the piss: hot streams from the upper fire-step, soaking my hair, running into the open lashes like molten glass. Someone hurls a fist-sized lump of shit that bursts across my chest and slides down my belly in slow, stinking rivers.
I gag and retch, but there is nothing left in me.
Moloch laughs, a sound like millstones grinding bone.
"On your feet, Lord Cripple. The welcome is just beginning."
They haul me upright by the hair. My legs will not hold. Two sergeants twist my arms behind my back until the shoulders scream louder than my flayed skin.
Moloch circles me slowly, boots squelching.
"Look well, lads," he calls. "This is what happens when silk touches the mud. The mud always wins."
He stops behind me.
"Turn him."
They spin me so torchlight falls full on my back.
Eight hundred men see the masterpiece: skin hanging in ribbons, white spine visible in places, pus and blood mixing into pink rivers that drip from my waist.
A collective hiss of savage approval.
"Pretty work," Moloch says. "House Veal always did have good whips."
He steps close enough that I smell the rot on his breath.
"Listen carefully, little lord," he whispers for my ears alone. "Tonight you learn the only the first lesson. There will be eight hundred more."
He steps back and raises his voice again.
"Bring the salt!"
A wooden bucket is passed hand-to-hand over the crowd. Coarse gray sea-salt, the kind used to cure meat.
Moloch scoops a double handful and rubs it into my flayed back himself.
The pain is instant, absolute, biblical. I scream until my voice tears. My knees buckle. They hold me upright so the salt can keep working. Grain by grain it burrows into raw muscle, into nerve endings that never knew they could burn like this.
When the bucket is empty they throw the dregs in my face. Salt finds the empty eye socket, the split lips, the brand. The world becomes white fire.
Moloch is not finished.
"Bring the knife."
A sergeant hands him a short, wide blade kept glowing in the coals.
Moloch presses the flat against the boar brand on my cheek.
The skin hisses. New blisters rise. The old scab splits and curls like burning parchment.
He does it again. And again. Until the sigil stands out raw and wet and perfect.
Only then does he step away.
"Carve him a bed."
They drag me to the far end of the trench, beneath the latrine overflow where the mud is soft with liquid shit and piss. There, with the same glowing knife, Moloch carves four words into the clay wall above where my head will lie, deep enough that rain will never erase them:
NEVER AGAIN
He pats my ruined cheek like a proud father.
"Sleep well, little lord. Dawn comes early in the Pit."
They chain my ankle to a corpse's ribcage driven into the mud like a stake.
The torches are snuffed one by one.
Eight hundred men settle back into their misery.
I lie on my belly in the filth, back on fire, cheek cooking, salt eating me alive from the inside.
The carved words glow faintly in the dark, as though the trench itself wrote them.
I stare at them until blood loss drags me under.
And for the first time since the courtyard, I do not dream.
Because there is nothing left to dream with.
Dawn in the Meat Pit is not light. It is a slow gray rot that crawls over the trench lip and drips down the walls like pus.
I wake to the sound of my back has fused to the mud. When I try to move, the scabs tear open and fresh blood runs warm down my sides. The salt Moloch rubbed in has done its work; every breath feels like inhaling broken glass.
The carved words are the first thing I see.
NEVER AGAIN
They are already crusted with dew and someone's spit.
A boot nudges my ribs. Hard.
"Up, Lord Cripple. Work waits for no man."
It is the sergeant with the burned face the same one who will one day drag me from graves. His name is Voss. He smells of sour wine and old blood.
He unchained my ankle from the corpse-stake and hauls me upright by the hair. My legs will not hold. He lets me fall twice, laughing each time.
The trench is already alive.
Men cough black phlegm. Rats fight over a severed hand. Someone is screaming in the latrine trench because the flux has eaten his bowels out.
Voss drags me to the centre fire-pit where a cauldron of gray slop steams. He ladles one cup. One.
"This is yours when the day's work is done," he says, and sets the cup on a stump just out of reach. "Until then you starve. Nobles don't eat free here."
He shoves a rusted spade into my remaining hand.
"Your job today, little lord: clear the bone pile."
He points.
At the far end of the trench, a mound of corpses has been growing for weeks. Limbs stick out at wrong angles. Faces are black and swollen. Maggots work in white rivers.
"Stack them neat," Voss says.
"We need the space. New meat coming tomorrow."
I stare at the cup of slop.
My stomach cramps so hard I double over.
Voss kicks me toward the pile.
I work.
One-handed, I drag bodies across the mud. The first is a boy no older than Lysenne, throat torn by shrapnel. His eyes are still open, filmed white. I close them with trembling fingers. The second is an old campaigner with half his face shot away. His remaining eye fixes on me with perfect hatred even in death.
By the tenth body the stump is bleeding again. By the twentieth the maggots have found it. They crawl inside the raw end and nest. I feel them writhing.
No one helps. They watch and spit and laugh.
At noon the sun climbs high enough to turn the trench into a stew pot. The stink rises in waves. Flies settle on my open back in black clouds.
Voss returns with the hot knife.
"Time to freshen the brand, my lord."
He presses the glowing blade to the boar sigil on my cheek. The skin hisses. Blisters burst. I do not scream this time. There is no voice left.
He does it three times, until the sigil stands out raw and weeping.
"Pretty," he says, and walks away.
The day crawls.
I stack corpses until the pile is neat and the trench floor is clear. My remaining hand is shredded from dragging mail shirts. Blood and pus mix in the creases of my palm.
When the sun begins to die, Voss returns with the cup.
I reach for it.
He pours it into the mud.
"Tomorrow, maybe," he says. "If you're still breathing."
They chain me back to the corpse-stake beneath the carved words.
The trench settles into night.
Torches are lit only along the fire-steps. The rest is darkness and the wet sound of eight hundred dying men trying to sleep.
I lie on my belly in the filth, cheek against the cold mud, and wait for one heartbeat I almost drift.
Then I hear footsteps.
Soft. Deliberate.
Two silhouettes block the faint torch-glow.
The first is a giant with a shaved head and a broken nose. The second is smaller, wiry, with a rat-face and quick eyes. Both wear the striped tunics of long-term convicts. Both smell of sweat and lust.
The giant crouches.
"Commander says the new noble whore gets a private welcome," he whispers. "So he learns his place proper."
I try to crawl away. The ankle chain stops me after one foot.
Rat-face giggles.
They fall on me like wolves.
The giant pins my shoulders. Rat-face wrenches my hips up. There is no ceremony, no warning. Only pain: sudden, ripping, absolute.
I bite through my own tongue to keep from screaming. Blood fills my mouth.
They take turns.
The trench sleeps around us. A few men watch from the shadows, silent, approving. No one interferes. This is the Meat Pit. This is how order is kept.
When they finish they spit on my back and walk away laughing.
I lie in the mud, bleeding from a new place, feeling something inside me tear loose and drift away forever.
The carved words above me glow faintly in the dark.
NEVER AGAIN
This time I understand them completely.
Not a threat. A promise.
The last gentle thing the world will ever say to me.
I close my one eye and let the rats come.
They are kinder than men.
The second dawn is worse than the first.
I wake to the taste of blood and shit in my mouth. The rats have been busy. My stump is a throbbing hive; white maggots writhe inside the raw meat like rice in a pot. When I try to move, the crust over last night's violation tears open and fresh blood runs warm down my thighs.
The ankle chain rattles. Voss is already there, boot on my neck.
"Up, Lord Whore. Different job today."
He drags me upright. My legs fold like wet parchment. He lets me fall once, twice, then hauls me by the hair to the centre of the trench.
Today the cauldron holds something that might once have been horse. The smell is sweet-rot and sulphur. Voss ladles one cup, same as yesterday, and sets it on the same stump.
"Earn it," he says, and points.
The latrine trench.
Forty feet long, six feet deep, open to the sky. Eight hundred men shit, piss, vomit, and die into it every day. The surface is a thick brown crust floating on liquid horror. Bubbles rise and pop with wet sighs.
Voss hands me a fifteen-foot pole with a broken spade blade lashed to the end.
"Your job, little lord: stir the soup. Keep it from crusting over. When I can see my face in it, you eat."
He shoves me to the edge.
The stench hits like a fist. My stomach heaves, but nothing comes up.
I step down into the trench.
The filth closes over my ankles, my knees, my thighs. It is warm, alive, hungry. Things move beneath the surface—rats, eels, worse. My feet find something soft that sighs when I stand on it.
I begin to stir.
One-handed, the pole is heavier than sin. Each push sends waves of liquid shit slopping against the walls. Flies rise in black clouds. The crust breaks and releases pockets of gas that burn my lungs.
An hour passes. Two.
The sun climbs and turns the trench into a cauldron. The filth cooks around my waist. My skin blisters. The maggots in my stump drown and are replaced by new ones.
Men line the edge to watch.
They piss down on me for sport. They throw their night-soil buckets when they're done. Some spit. Some simply stare with the dead eyes of men who have already forgotten what pity feels like.
At noon Voss returns with the hot knife.
He hops down into the trench beside me, boots sinking to the ankle.
"Brand's healing ugly," he says.
"Let's fix that."
He presses the glowing blade to my cheek again. The sizzle is drowned by the bubbling filth. I do not scream. Screaming is for people who still believe someone might come.
He carves a fresh boar sigil over the old one, deeper this time, until the bone shows white.
When he climbs out he kicks the cup of slop into the trench.
It floats for a moment, then sinks.
"Tomorrow," he says.
I keep stirring.
The day crawls.
By late afternoon the trench is mirror-smooth. I can see Voss's burned reflection grinning back at me.
He nods, satisfied, and walks away.
I am left in the soup until dusk.
When they finally haul me out, my skin is raw and weeping. The maggots in my stump have multiplied; I can feel them burrowing deeper.
They chain me back to the corpse-stake beneath NEVER AGAIN.
Night falls.
The trench settles into its usual chorus: coughing, crying, the wet sound of someone dying slowly.
I lie on my side, trying not to press my flayed back or ruined hips against anything.
A shadow falls across me.
An old convict with half a face the left side eaten away by something that left only bone and gristle crouches nearby.
He watches me for a long time.
Then he speaks, voice like dry leaves.
"You still got hope in there, boy?"
I do not answer.
He leans closer.
"Let it go," he whispers.
"Happiness is a country the war erased from every map. We're what's left after the fire. There's no road home. There never was."
He reaches out with a skeletal hand and touches the carved words above my head.
"NEVER AGAIN," he reads aloud, soft as a lullaby.
"That's the only truth they'll ever tell you here. The kindest truth."
He pats my shoulder once, gentle, the way a father might.
Then he is gone.
I stare at the words until they burn brighter than the torches.
For the first time since Whitecliff, something inside me stops fighting.
Hope dies quietly.
It makes no sound at all.