The castle's breath evened into a predator's calm—draw, hold, release. Lucas stood at the Blood Gate while dawn tried and failed to happen over the wasteland, a thinner gray laid over older gray, like paint over scar. The ribs of ancient beasts threw their long hooks across the plain. Wind scraped bone. Silence felt sharpened.
"Begin," he said.
The command moved through stone and chain. Ghouls poured from the Night Barracks in disciplined filth: Mirk and Var at their head, the newer ones trotting like obedient knives. Bone Dogs flowed out from the kennels—four, then eight, then twelve—tails of vertebrae whispering, skulls tilted to taste the air. Above, the Crimson Spires woke: narrow slots inhaling cold, preparing hands that did not yet belong to living archers but soon would. The Darkblood Sentinels took their stations on the gate and the eastern spur, crimson eyes fixed, a hush spreading from their armor like frost.
Lucas stepped onto the rampart and let Crypt Sense unroll the map in his spine. He painted on it.
The first brushstroke was a field of jaws.
Shallow pits appeared where the domain's skin thinned—clean circles disguised with gray shale and bone flakes, their rims laced with thin ribs angled inward. At the bottom, he had Mirk spear short stakes at knee height, then smear them with Grave Mold until the air above tasted like a sick room. A weight would collapse, legs would fold, and the stakes would teach anatomy. The Bone Dogs paced the edges, committing the new smell to their dictionary of permission.
The second brushstroke was wire.
Rusted chain drawn taut between ribs—knee-high where a running man wouldn't look, hip-high where a mounted one would trust speed. Lucas had Var anchor the lines to buried iron, then weave them behind low rock lips so they didn't announce themselves. Here and there he threaded the chain through bone bells—little cages of vertebrae strung with teeth. They made no sound now; Stillness held. But once released, one misstep would ring a quickly learned language.
The third brushstroke was hunger learned into geometry.
He placed Ghoul Galleries—narrow trenches cut into the shale, roofed with bone slats and dust, mouths angled toward predicted routes. Two ghouls to a gallery, breathing quietly, their orders simple: knees first; hands if they beg. Between galleries he left kill alleys—straight channels lined with rocks the size of kneecaps, in which a dog pack could move like water and a man could trip like history. The galleries connected to buried runnels leading back to the Slave Grave; even the dragging would be efficient.
The fourth brushstroke was the air.
Above the gate, he traced arcs in his mind for archers not yet introduced to the world—Lunar Volley cones crossing and doubling, a lattice of falling red. He made angles for Pierce the Heart, slender lanes that cut through the broad, a surgeon's answer to a crowd's question. He set the Dread Banner to hang only when he chose, not when it wanted to admire itself.
Selena watched him from the parapet, barefoot on stone newly taught to be a wall. She said nothing until his hands stilled.
"A hallway," she judged at last, amused. "A very long one that ends in a mouth."
"Slaughter zone," Lucas corrected, mild.
Her smile bared teeth. "I'll take the right wall."
He gave her the right wall with a thought. She leaned into it as if into a lover.
"Vicarius," Lucas called.
The Death Knight stepped from beneath a shadow that hadn't been there a heartbeat ago, plate drinking the gray until it found nothing left to take. The Sentinels looked like long memories behind him.
"You will not chase," Lucas said. "You will receive. If they stop at the teeth, let the dogs teach. If they cross the teeth, stand them up and remove the head that thinks it commands."
"Understood," the knight said. His voice left a rim of cold on the air that made the wind mind itself.
Ghouls dragged in the last of the needed bones. Dogs finished threading chain through teeth-bells. Selena drifted along the line, tapping stakes that displeased her, tilting a jaw here, a rib there, her chaos a finer order. When she passed Mirk, she paused, re-tying the knot at his throat with two fingers. It was almost tender.
"Don't chew too fast," she told him.
"Chew… right," Mirk echoed reverently.
The domain stilled. Lucas drew Stillness over the front like a veil; sound thinned and the wind forgot to gossip. Somewhere beyond the new boundary, men would be deciding whether bravery was different from hunger and whether either was a good breakfast. Ramius's name hung in the sky like a patient hazard.
He waited.
Time passed in a useful shape. Bone Dogs rotated, one pack crouching in shade while another roved. The ghoul galleries learned the temperature of their roofs. The Sentinels' auras sank another degree. Selena hummed once; the spires liked the note.
A ripple at the edge of Crypt Sense brushed his skin—curious, quick, withdrawn—then returned with friends. One heartbeat, two, ten. He saw their shape before he heard their gear—a loose line, too loose for fear to keep it neat, the center heavy with arrogance. Scouts first. Men with the easy misbelief that the ground becomes polite when you need it to.
Lucas released Stillness enough to let their mistakes make noise.
They came in over the low ridge, halting where the ribs knitted into a shallow fence. Helmets low, mouths open. Leather cracked. Hooves scuffed. One of them turned to speak and nearly stepped into a pit. He found his balance and sneered at the dirt, as if it had apologized.
"Empty," another judged, voice pitching up the ladder—the kind of man who thinks his echo is a friend.
"Empty territory?" a third laughed, showing too much gum. "Free?"
The line rolled forward.
A foot found the dust lid over a jaw. The jaw swallowed. A man went down to the knee and was reborn into the stake that waited to be named. He made a sound that men make when a god steps on their throat. Five others stopped; two laughed. The man's laughter broke when blood crossed into mold and started writing a new language in his veins.
"Watch your step," someone muttered with the wrong kind of humor.
They picked around the first pit like drunks stepping over their own shame. It improved their care for six paces. Then a chain kissed a shin. it didn't ring only because Lucas held sound's mouth shut. But he let the man's curse travel. Curses attract friends.
"Tripwire."
"Cute."
"Spread—"
The ghoul galleries opened like eyes.
Two ghouls flowed up, not out; their arms looped at shin height, their teeth taking the dinners first—tendons, hamstrings. The line's right side imploded into crawling. Bone Dogs poured into the alley with admiration for knees. The air filled with the sound of contracts being rewritten: bones realizing they had promised too much. Four men tried to ring the bells that had been decorative. Their hands found teeth instead.
Lucas did not smile. He only adjusted.
Rally. The ghoul line tightened where it had been clever and loosened where it had been hungry. Sunder Step. Selena moved without leaving a path, arriving where stubbornness had started to organize. She stepped into a man's decision and removed it for him, then set it at his feet as a reminder.
Arrows hissed. Not many; not yet. Two Bloody Moon bows had finished their growing in the spires and found hands. Their strings were veins taught to hum at one note. The first Lunar Volley fell at a shallow angle across a pocket where five had thought kneeling was geography. Red-lit shafts hammered shoulders, collarbones, hands that begged. A Pierce the Heart threaded a gap between two helmets and instructed a man to stop hoping.
"Pretty," Selena said, not looking up, her wrist already writing another correction.
The enemy did not break; they had not learned enough yet. A rider shoved forward from the center, all black coat and certainty, hooves throwing chips. He saw pits and leapt over them with a contempt that had trained him to be killed. A chain took his second stride. His horse screamed, reared, tore skin, and went down in a folding of legs. The rider rolled well. He came up with a horn in one hand and an oath in the other.
Vicarius walked into his frame and filled it.
The Death Knight did not hurry. He raised one palm. Vigilant Terror washed out slow and heavy. The rider's oath broke into bits too small to say. He tried to blow the horn. His fingers forgot which end made music. Vicarius turned his hand and the horn left the man's grip, clattering into a shallow bowl of blood and dust. A Bone Dog took it and trotted off, pleased to have learned a new game.
"Back!" someone barked. "Back—pull back—"
They tried. The slaughter zone did not agree. Retreat lines ran into the places advance lines had left. Men stumbled into men. Dogs found those tangles delicious. The ghouls continued their uncomplicated theology: knees, then hands. A Sentinel's Blood Cleave sang once and a wedge learned that a triangle can be cut into less interesting shapes.
On the ridge beyond, a second line formed—the ones with discipline and the fear to use it. They watched arrows fall like punished rain and hesitated. Good. Witnesses are useful.
Lucas measured casualties the way a careful thief counts footsteps. At thirty-two fallen, he eased the dogs back with a thought. At forty, he let the bells ring. Stillness lifted its palm and sound crashed back into the world: screaming, iron, the panicked clamor of bells hitting teeth, that bell-murdered horn trying to be a voice from a dog's mouth. Men who had been brave because the world had been quiet now had to be brave in noise.
Selena pivoted through the racket like a ballerina who had just found out she preferred knives to applause. Her laughter drew terror forward and then cut it into ribbons. She spared one, as instructed, and pushed him with a palm against the forehead; he fell backward into a pit he would live to describe.
"Run," she told him sweetly. "Tell your lord that the empty place ate your name."
The spires finished their second breath. Four archers now. Lunar Volley widened, a red net cast and drawn. A man tried to crawl out under the mesh and learned that hope and arrow weight the same when the night decides.
"Enough," Lucas said at last, as he might tell rain to stop at the even edge of a roof.
The dogs fell back, reluctantly, bleeding silence. The ghouls licked bone-dust from their teeth and retreated into galleries like secrets returning to a mouth. The Sentinels remained, red gaze flat. The field held its lesson: pits full, chains slack with trophies, bells silent again because noise had run out of things to live in.
On the far ridge, figures clustered tighter, counting their missing with the fast arithmetic of grief disguised as command. A coat too straight lifted a glass to the light and found blood as the only answer. The line's mouth opened to deliver something brave and closed because there was no one left at the right distance to hear it.
Selena joined Lucas on the rampart. Blood dried on her glove in a neat pattern. Her eyes were bright enough to set moths on fire.
"Hallways are lovely," she said, pleased. "Especially when they lead nowhere but down."
"Next we move the walls," Lucas answered. He was already drawing an updated map against the inside of his skull. Ridges shift. Fear pools differently. The dogs will need new language.
From beyond the ridge came a voice, carried by wind and error. Thin with distance, thick with disbelief.
"Empty territory?" It laughed, the wrong color. "Free?"