They cast the quiet ones out into the cold,
Not knowing fire does not die—it hides.
In the hush of forgotten halls,
A new rhythm begins to breathe.
---
The North Barracks was a place of exile.
Not official, not documented. But every soldier knew it. It was where the unwanted were sent—the boys who moved too oddly, who spoke too rarely, who laughed in battle drills or failed to keep the Crown's rhythm in their bones. The Unmarchable, they whispered, as if failure were contagious.
Ren approached the moss-eaten shed at dusk. No guards patrolled its perimeter. No torches lit its door. Its wood groaned when he pushed it open, as though protesting the presence of yet another exile.
Inside, the air smelled of rust, pine sap, and long-forgotten metal. War-worn cots lined the walls, each one occupied by a shadow. Three watched him step through the threshold.
The first—a wiry boy with coal-black hair and too-clean boots—sat upright, a bark-stitched book open on his knee. He glanced up, eyes sharp beneath thick brows.
> "Another ghost?" he hissed. "They're sending them younger every year."
The second squatted on a splintered plank, a half-carved wooden bird in her hand. Copper hair fell in tangled waves around eyes the color of tarnished bronze.
> "He hums," she observed, voice low.
The third was a mountain of a youth, broad-shouldered, scarred, silent. He sharpened a broken axe-blade with methodical strokes, steel singing beneath the whetstone.
Ren took a breath.
> "I'm Ren," he said. "This is where I belong."
The book-reader closed his tome and studied Ren as though weighing his worth.
> "No surname?"
Ren shook his head. The girl smiled, her knife-sharp lip glinting.
> "Good. Names weigh you down. Better to be carried by song."
The mountain of a boy grunted once—a greeting or a warning, Ren could not tell.
The book-reader rose. "I'm Kael. Strategist—until the Crown deemed me too… unpredictable." He tapped his book. "These are my notes on their rhythms. They hated every page."
The girl lifted her half-carved bird. "I'm Sira. I carve lies into wood that fly away." She let the bird drop; it shattered on the floor, wood splinters drifting like falling ash.
Kael nodded at the silent giant. "And that's Brann. He speaks with steel—no wasted words."
Ren sank onto the last empty cot. He laid his broken blade across his lap.
> "Why are we here?" he asked.
Kael let out a bitter laugh. "Because we don't move to their drum. We hear other songs."
Sira tapped her chest. "And this barracks? It's the beginning of flame."
---
Kael: Ink and Ash
> "They call it exile. I call it clarity."
His mind raced back to war-room tables strewn with maps and counter-maps. He had dared to ask a general, "What if we stagger our tempo?" The answer had been a cold glare and the command: "The Crown does not improvise." Here, in the hush of North Barracks, Kael found those who did improvise—where every misstep was a note, and every mistake a new melody.
When he first saw Ren on the makeshift mat, the boy's broken blade moved not with fear, but with an instinctive grace. It was variation—a whispered revolution against the Crown's iron beat.
---
That night, the three exiles taught Ren to train in silence.
Brann's sparrings were brutal questions: Will you break here? Will you yield now? Ren dodged and countered, learning to find rhythm not in lines and commands, but in the space between strikes.
Kael drilled him in half-stances and pivot-turns borrowed from foreign scrolls, each sequence ending with, "What does your blade want?" Ren answered only with movement, weaving through the silent assaults.
Sira watched them all, humming faintly as she carved new shapes into driftwood. When Ren finally paused, she whispered:
> "You don't hear it yet, do you?
Your blade hums with survival,
But its song…
Its song will make you choose."
---
One week later, on a moonless night, the warhorns sounded.
They were not the Crown's clean calls—but hoarse wails that split the air. The earth trembled with unnatural wind. Ren and his companions raced outside to find the forest edge ablaze with streaks of shadow-iron.
Corrupted Riders: men once adorned with Syr'khan crests, now clad in jagged black armor, banners of bone trailing behind them. They charged like devouring storms.
Ren's blood sang. He raised his broken blade; it sang back, a resonance deep and sure.
---
Corrupted Rider's: Rhythm of Rot
"We do not march. We consume."
He had once been a captain—a lion in shining armor. Then the void found him, bending his blood to a darker beat. Now he remembered nothing of his name or crown. His arms moved on their own, black steel howling as it feasted on bone and fear. He smelled something new among the exiles—a hum not of war, but of life. It drew him forward, thirsty for that last spark.
---
Ren met the first rider at the treeline. The man swung a cruel glaive; Ren sidestepped, blade humming to warn him. He danced between shadow and steel, his broken edge sparking against void-metal, singing a defiant note.
Brann and Kael joined the fray. Brann broke a rider's guard with a savage cleaver-chop; Kael guided Ren's movements with whispered counters. Sira, clutching her new wooden bird, sang a single clarion note that sent a ripple through the corrupted ranks—flickering their armor as though afraid.
Within the chaos, Ren heard it clearly: the blade's song—no longer a hum, but a promise. Each step he took carved space between them; each swing he made struck with the precision of thunder.
When the last corrupted rider fell, silence reclaimed the forest. Only the embers and echoes of gone screams remained.
---
They returned to the barracks at dawn.
Exhausted, blood-spattered, hearts still pounding a new rhythm.
Kael closed his book. "You didn't just survive. You conducted them."
Brann racked his broken axe. "Your song is louder now."
Sira pressed her carved bird into Ren's palm. "Keep this. To remind you that even lies can take flight."
Ren looked at his blade—broken, humming, and alive.
---
From exile grows the flame.
From flame, the blade.
And from blade—
A rhythm even shadows fear to mimic.
---