The banners of the rebellion fluttered against the roaring wind, soaked in mist and ash. Arthur stood before his legion — his armor blackened by soot, his cloak torn by countless campaigns. The moon was a silver wound in the sky.
"Forward!" he roared, voice like iron striking flame. "We march for freedom, for the fallen, for every child starved under their crown!"
The forest echoed with the roar of thousands — the rebels surged forward through the clearing, torches blazing, steel glinting. Otto Hightower rode beside him, tightening his grip on the reins."Commander," he said, eyes narrowed toward the horizon, "once we reach the fort, we strike fast. But… what about the Vault?"
Arthur's eyes glimmered with fire. "The Vault will be ours before dawn. Inside lies what the Empire fears most — truth and power."
The army advanced — boots crushing frost, drums beating like thunder. Then, a sound split the rhythm.
A scream.
A lone scout came stumbling from the treeline — face pale as death, blood frozen around his lips. "The north side! They're coming from the ridge!" he gasped.
Otto turned sharply. "What is it? Imperial cavalry?"
The man's mouth trembled. "No… no horses… no men."
Before he could finish, the torches dimmed. The temperature dropped. A breath of ice swept through the forest like a ghost's sigh.
Arthur's instincts flared. "Shields up!" he barked. "Form ranks!"
Then came the shapes — half-seen through the mist — pale figures walking with a calmness that defied death itself. Their eyes burned blue, skin stretched like frostbitten leather.
Otto muttered, trembling, "By the gods… Walkers."
The rebels hesitated, some stepping back. Arthur drew his blade — the crimson edge glowing faintly against the darkness."I've killed worse than ghosts," he said coldly. "Archers! Fire!"
Arrows flew — hissing like a storm — but when they struck the pale forms, they only shattered into splinters. One Walker lifted its hand, and the ground cracked open beneath the front line — frozen corpses crawling out, the long-dead soldiers of ages past.
Chaos erupted.
Men screamed. Fire spilled. The air filled with the shriek of breaking steel and the crunch of bone under frozen claws. Arthur cut through the first of them, his blade cleaving its skull — but it didn't fall. It only looked at him with those endless eyes and smiled.
"Commander!" Otto shouted. "We must fall back! These aren't men!"
Arthur snarled, driving his sword deeper until the blue light faded. "No retreat! If they want death — give it to them!"
The rebels rallied around him, their torches lighting the night like a storm of suns. For a moment, the Walkers slowed. Then, a howl echoed through the forest.
Every torch went out.
Arthur felt something ancient stir within the darkness — a presence. He turned, cold wind tearing through his armor.
Atop the ridge stood a figure — taller than any man, crowned with shards of ice, watching him—the Hollow King.
Arthur's breath froze in his throat."Impossible…" he whispered. "I killed you. I saw you burn."
The figure smiled faintly, voice echoing in his mind — in the tongue of the Children."ᚱᚨᚾ ᚺᛖᛚᛚ, ᚨᚱᛏᚺᚢᚱ. ᛁ ᚨᛗ ᚾᛟᛏ ᛞᛖᚨᛞ. ᛁ ᚨᛗ ᚣᛟᚢ."(Run, hellborn Arthur. I am not dead. I am you.)
Arthur's knuckles whitened on the hilt."Then I'll kill you again."
He raised his sword high, its crimson light clashing with the blue glow of the undead. "All units!" he roared. "Form the dragon line! Push them back! If this night ends, it ends in fire!"
The rebels screamed their defiance, surging forward as flames and frost collided — a storm of blood and light swallowing the Black Forest whole.
Otto shouted, "We can't fight them, Commander!"
Arthur roared back, "We can fight gods if we must! Push them back!"
The forest erupted into chaos — fire and frost clashing, blood steaming on the ice. Then, above the screams, came a low, distant horn.
Otto froze. "That sound… that's not theirs."
Arthur turned — and his blood went cold.
From the southern ridge, fires bloomed anew — not from the rebels' torches, but from dragons. Golden cloaks glinted beneath the flames. War horns roared.
Daemon Targaryen had arrived.
"Form the dragon ranks!" a voice bellowed from behind the inferno. Thousands of Dragon Knights advanced, blades drawn, eyes gleaming with bloodlust.
Arthur realized in that instant — they were surrounded.Walkers in the north. Daemon's army in the south.The forest — now their tomb.
Otto whispered, "We're trapped."
Arthur's face hardened. "Then we fight trapped."
In the distance, atop his warhorse, Daemon drew his sword and pointed toward the flames."Forward!" he roared, voice booming like thunder. "Flush them out — every rat, every rebel! Burn the forest if you must — let the gods themselves choke on their ashes!"
The Dragon Knights surged forward, torches igniting the trees. The rebels screamed as the forest itself burst into flames. Between frost and flame, the world cracked open — the dead pushing from one side, Daemon's men from the other.
Arthur's cloak burned at the edges, his blade gleaming red against the frost."So be it," he muttered. "A war on two fronts."
He looked toward the flames — where Daemon's figure emerged on horseback, sword blazing with dragonfire — and then toward the mist — where the Hollow King watched, smiling.
Arthur raised his sword and screamed,"Then come for me, all of you!"
The rebels surged forward — trapped between gods and monsters — as the forest of the north burned brighter than the sun.
Arthur's breath came in white puffs that vanished into the choking smoke. He vaulted down from his mount as if the earth itself called him closer, boots sinking in frost and ash. Around him, the fighting had become a grinding, senseless machine — steel biting bone, torches pitch-hissing as they licked at frozen branches, men screaming as pale hands dragged them beneath the roots.
He glanced at Otto, who was bracing his horse against a tangle of felled pines. Blood darkened Otto's sleeve where a splinter had cut him; his jaw was set like an iron hinge. "Otto — is there any way out? Any route that isn't a trap?" Arthur barked. The words cut through the clamor.
Otto spat, scanning the dark outline of the forest with a soldier's eye. "There's the old hunter's ravine — narrow, steep sides, only a dozen men could pass abreast. It will slow any cavalry, maybe even foul the undead if we collapse the west lip. There's a hidden ford beyond the mill — shallow, fast water; the Walkers will struggle. If we can reach either, we can make the Walkers fight Daemon's men, not ours."
Arthur's lips pressed together. "Good. Then we lead them. We make the pale things fight the southern column. Otto, Maya — create a corridor of flame to drive them south. Force them into the valley. Make the forest run at them."
Maya saluted and vanished, a streak of black among torches, barking orders. Pikes reoriented, archers flanked, men lit sacrificial fires and flung them into deadfall — controlled hell to herd the dead. For a heartbeat, it seemed the plan might hold: the Walkers, a slow tide of unnatural frost, turned like a blade fed the right way, drawn toward the roaring light as if pain itself were a beacon.
Arthur stepped forward into the first line. A Walker loomed out of the haze — taller than the rest, its face a pale mask stretched over impossible bone. It moved without haste; it regarded him with blue coals for eyes. Arthur hefted his blade and closed the distance in a single, brutal arc. Steel met frozen flesh with a scream like shattering glass — the Walker's head snapped free and flew in a trailing arc of ice and hair, landing in the snow with a cracked, echoing thud. Men cheered, a thin note of victory hacking out of their chests.
But the triumph died as suddenly as it had flared. The severed head shuddered. The blue light at its sockets flared, and the neck knitted back as if winter mended what fire could not. The head staggered upright, fell to its knees, and then, with the same dead smile, rejoined its body. It rose and turned its unblinking face toward Arthur.
"Kill one, ten rise," Otto growled beside him. "They don't bleed like men."
Before Arthur could sharpen his next command, the world answered with a new, sickening sound — the twin whistles of Daemon's longbows. Arrows cut the night, black as thunder, and they fell in a storm; quivers emptied like rain drums. They came from the south — a lethal rain that found shields and flesh alike.
"Arrows!" someone screamed. "From Daemon!"
The volley tore through the rebel ranks. Torches spun out. Men who had been rushing toward the ravine dropped in the snow, faces white, mouths open in surprise and pain. Where arrows struck timber, fire spat and flared, seeding the sky with sparks that drifted like tiny stars. Arthur felt one graze his shoulder beneath his cloak; the sting was white-hot, but the old, slower pain of the Walkers held his focus. He turned his blade, deflected a shaft, and kicked a fallen man clear as a second volley thudded into the earth.
Otto cursed and swung his mount into a wheel, trying to form a protective line. "He's pushing from behind!" Otto shouted — scarce breath left him, voice split with anger. "Daemon's cutting us off! He means to trap us in this valley!"
Arthur looked to the south and saw it then: banners shining, ranks tightening into wedge formations, torches lining a flank like a second sunrise. Daemon's men were not simply advancing — they were closing the noose. Archers reloaded with demonic speed; crossbow bolts thunked into frozen trunks; a line of steel advanced with the cold deliberation of a huntsman.
"We're boxed," Arthur muttered. He spat on the ground, snow hissing. "Fine. We change the rules."
He pointed — hard, precise — toward the ravine. "Otto! You and twenty men — take the west lip. Collapse it if you can. Maya! Signal the men on the ford. Lure them! Make the pale bastards think the valley is open. I will take the hunters and cut a path. If we break through to the ford, water will hold them — it'll slow their feet."
Otto didn't hesitate. He slammed his heels into his horse and rode off, a dark spear backed by a dozen desperate men. Maya blew a sharp whistle and ran to the flank, her hand flashing banners for those who had ears — the rebels who understood rhythm and ruin. The rest surged forward like a tide of bodies, some to die at the teeth of frost, some to die by arrows.
Arthur hacked through the first rank of pale soldiers — steel singing, blue light showering him. The Walkers were not monstrous in strength so much as in unnatural endurance: swords sank uselessly and tore away with only brief discomfort. Arthur's blows had to be precise, to points where bone met thread, to the hinge of a jaw, the base of the skull. He learned each time it mattered. He killed, and for every head he toppled three more rose.
Bolts thudded around him; one found a young ensign at his side. He felt the man go rigid, a cry muffled against snow. Arthur wrenched the ensign's body free with an ugly grunt and shoved it beneath a bristling pike to hold a small gap open. "Move!" he snarled. "Cover and move!"
A pale hand closed on his gauntlet in a cold that burned. He pivoted, blade flashing, and the hand was severed — but the arm kept clawing at his cloak. He hacked again until the limb fell away and bled nothing. The sight hardened something bright and terrible inside him. "Enough!" he roared. "Forward! To the ford!"
They ran. The ravine yawned ahead like the throat of some sleeping wolf; Otto's men were already hammering at the west lip with pick and petard. Behind them, the Walkers closed, their slow, inexorable march swallowing the distance. Above the din, a procession of Daemon's archers reloaded, and their commander's shout was a blood-drip in the night. "Not yet! Wait for the gorge!"
An arrow sailed — not toward the Walkers but toward the miners at the ravine lip. It struck a packed line of sacks and powder-impregnated brush. Fire leapt up in a bright, greedy tongue. The lip did not need much: crackling wood and a lucky ember, and the western face started to slump. Rocks tumbled, men shouted, and Otto's project became a rush to save themselves from both collapse and flame.
"Gods!" Otto howled, slamming his shoulder into a block of earth to try and hold it, to stop the fall. "They've cut the exit!"
Arthur spun, eyes wide, breath cutting white. The last clear route to the ford closed in seconds as webs of flame and stone threw up a wall. Daemon's men moved with grim precision, pushing the rebels into a narrowing gauntlet — frost from the north, fire from the south — the Black Forest itself turning traitor.
Maya's whistle shrieked again and, with it, a low chorus rose: the rearguard had taken a side path — a narrow hunter's track almost grown over — they were trying to flank east, hope to reopen a sliver of escape. But every step eastward smoked; arrows from hidden nests speared the flank, and men fell with thudded impacts.
Arthur's throat was tight. Blood warmed his lips; the world smelled of iron and burning pitch. He tore his gaze from the flames to the pale ridge — and there, as if the nightmare had a face, the Hollow King watched, pale-blue eyes gleaming beneath his bone crown. He raised one hand, a nd Arthur, for a moment, felt the roots of the forest strike toward his boots like searching fingers.
Something screamed — a man, a soldier Arthur recognized — then the sound was snuffed. The Walkers had breached the first of Otto's lines and pushed a wedge toward the trapped center. Daemon's cavalry slammed like a hammer, and the hunters fell back, grinding into the trapped masses.
"Hold until I carve a way through!" Arthur shouted. He dropped low, shoulder-charging into a walker's ribs, driving it backward, then launching himself between two Daemon knights who had cut into the flank. He twisted, blade arcing, and for a breath caught where a man in dragon-etched plate reeled back with a great gash. The knight's eyes went wide — not at the blade but at the sight of the Walkers in the periphery, at the dead moving like e tide.
"Lord?" the knight gasped. "We did not—"
"We do not retreat!" Arthur shouted, voice raw. "If we cannot break the ring, we die with swords in hand."
The knight's mouth opened and closed, torn between orders and instinct. He chose steel. He raised his own sword and met the rebel's blow, and for a heart-stopping second, two waves of humanity collided: wolves biting wolves.
Near the ravine, Otto's last petard detonated with a keening cry, tossing up a cloud of rock and snow. A ring of desperate men slipped through the dust and jagged stone — a ragged, bleeding wedge of survivors. Arthur saw them and pointed — "To them! Push! For the ford, or die trying!"
They surged. The forest thundered with the sound of bodies throwing themselves into the breach. Arthur led — arc after arc, slash after slash — until his arms burned, until someone took his boot and he nearly fell. He slammed down and kicked the man free, only to see the figure topple into the snow with an arrow through his throat. Men at his shoulder fell away, their faces slack.
Then a shriek tore across the battlefield — not human. A wing-slice of shadow and flame: a lancer from Daemon's wedge had set a torch in his iron gauntlet and stabbed it into a rebel pike stack. The flames leapt, and the corridor of escape narrowed to a single, smoke-choked line.
Smoke blinded. Frost crept sideways, a white hand smoothing over the edges of boots and mail. Arthur felt the world tilt between incineration and frozen suffocation. He looked at Otto, met his friend's eyes for a half-second, and the decision was carved: a small party would sprint for the ford; the rest would hold the line and gamble that the Walkers and Daemon's men would collide in their hunger for them instead of finishing the cutting work.
"Otto — you and the best of the riders go!" Arthur commanded. "Maya — you take ten with the banner into the smoke, find the hidden for, and hold it. The rest—" he slammed his blade into the frozen ground, letting the steel sing. "—stand and bleed. Hold until dawn, or until the world ends."
Otto shook his head, fury and grief and begrudging respect mixing. "You'll not throw us away, Arthur."
"You have no choice," Arthur snapped. "Do it now!"
Otto spurred away with a handful of men — a white comet through the falling ash. Maya answered with a thin, savage grin and vanished into smoke with her ten. The rest surged forward, a feral wall of living steel.
As the small party bolted for the ford, an arrow clipped Otto's shoulder, dropping him from the saddle. He went down hard, rolling, twisting to shield his wound, and two men dragged him up and shoved him toward the riverbank. Behind him, the forest screamed.
Arthur met Daemon's eye across the smoke — the prince's face was a pale god's mask of cruel satisfaction. For a moment, they were two kings separated by a sheet of flame and frost: one who would purge, one who would unmake. Then Arthur turned back to his men and charged, voice raw, "For the people!"
They answered with a roar that rose from throats stripped raw. The air was a living thing now, hammered by fire and frozen by ancient cold, and in that alchemy the first terrible truth of the night became clear: survival would be purchased in blood, cunning — and a faith in the impossible.
Daemon's black stallion crashed through the embers and smoke, hooves tearing up the ground. His armor was gleaming like liquid steel, his crimson cloak whipping in the wind. He drew Dark Sister in one smooth motion — its blade caught the moonlight, glinting like bloodied glass.
He roared across the valley. His voice tore through the thunder of battle. "You red-eyed gutter-born bastard! I'll carve that smug look off your cursed face tonight!"
Dozens of Walkers stood on the ridge above, their breath misting like smoke, their skeletal hands gripping axes and spears. One stepped forward, its hollow jaw opening in a rasping hiss that sounded almost like laughter.
Daemon snarled, "I didn't account for this damn variable…" He ripped his sword free, pointing it toward the frozen horde. "Form up! Shields! NOW!"
Behind him, his men scrambled into ranks, but the forest had already come alive with death — the sound of bone scraping against steel, the thunder of hooves, and the inhuman shrieks of the risen.
Then from the opposite ridge came another horn — Arthur's banner appearing through the fog, crimson and gold.
Daemon's eyes widened. "No… no, no, no…"
Arthur's forces were there too — and between them, the Walkers.
"Damn it," Daemon growled, "we're all trapped in this hell."
He turned to his men. "Push from the rear! Don't let them flank us! If we die here, it won't be as prey!"
He slammed his sword into the ground, the shockwave tearing frost and corpses alike into the air as the first Walker lunged forward — and the battle between man and monster erupted beneath the blood-red sky.
Daemon spat blood onto the snow, his breath ragged, eyes burning beneath the storm. The battlefield was chaos — shrieks, clashing steel, frost breaking under galloping hooves. Walkers were ripping through both armies, tearing flesh with inhuman strength.
One of his lieutenants rode up beside him, helm cracked, eyes wild."Commander! They're surrounding us! We can't hold the flanks—"
Daemon seized him by the collar, yanking him close. "Then die buying me time!" he roared. He shoved the man back toward the ranks, slashing a Walker that lunged from the left. The blade of Dark Sister split its frozen skull in one clean stroke, the corpse collapsing like shattered glass.
"Roder!" Daemon bellowed over the din. His oldest knight — an iron-bearded man clad in dented black plate — turned at once."Take command of the host! Rally what's left of the cavalry, form a defensive wedge, and push east! I don't care if half of you die — buy me the path!"
Roder's eyes widened. "My lord, where are you—"
Daemon's grin was sharp, mad. "To finish the war I started."
Before the knight could protest, Daemon kicked his steed into motion. The horse reared, shrieking, and then surged forward into the storm. Snow exploded beneath its hooves as Daemon cut through the lines, cleaving Walkers and men alike. His blade sang — black lightning splitting through pale flesh.
Arrows whistled past him — some from Walkers, some from Arthur's men — one grazed his shoulder, another lodged into his pauldron. He tore it out, snarling, and kept riding. Every stroke of his sword left trails of violet flame. The heat melted the snow under his horse's path.
Behind him, Roder's cavalry clashed with the advancing undead — the sound of steel on bone echoed through the forest. Daemon didn't look back.
Through the fog, he finally saw him.
A crimson banner rose amid the carnage, torn by arrows, fluttering above the black armor of Arthur von Hurellious. He stood motionless atop a mound of corpses, golden-red eyes glinting like dying embers, his own sword resting against his shoulder.
Arthur looked up as Daemon approached — calm, unshaken."So," Arthur called out, voice carrying through the wind, "the hound finally comes crawling."
Daemon's lips twisted into a savage grin."Crawling? No. Charging."
He dug his heels into his horse, lowering his blade. The wind screamed as he thundered forward.
Arthur raised his sword slowly, unhurried — a black blade wreathed in pale light.
"Come then," Arthur said, his voice like iron and ash. "Let's see if you can finish what you began."
Their horses collided in a storm of snow and sparks — the two blades meeting with a sound like thunder, shockwaves ripping through the air, sending bodies and ash flying.
The ground beneath them cracked. The heavens themselves seemed to tremble.
Daemon's eyes locked on Arthur's. "I'll make you bleed for everything you've done."
Arthur pushed back, his smirk cruel. "Then bleed first."
The second clash was louder, deadlier — two powers colliding beneath a storm of ice and blood, as the undead howled around them and the armies of men fell like dust between gods at war.