He woke to metal being cleaned.
Not the clatter and clink of old-world mess, but a soft, careful rasp: whetstone along edge, cloth over plate, the faint click of buckles seated to the same hole every time. Dawn was a thin ash-grey at the basin's rim; the camp below it was order made visible.
Caleb's back ached where stone had been a bed. His wrists were raw beneath the black iron cuffs, the short linking chain looped through a ring set into the rock. When he shifted, the chain gave a measured inch, no more, as if whoever had installed it had spent a lifetime calculating the length a man needed to sit up and not much else.
Around him, the army did not bustle. It arranged itself. Blades were inspected, halberds stacked and unstacked in neat pyramids, straps pulled snug with the same tug. There was no smoke, no fire, no smell of porridge or meat. No one spoke beyond quiet syllables that sounded as if a scholar had tidied a language until it could be filed.
A figure broke from the closest line and approached. Armour black as wet slate; cloak dark enough to be a hole in the morning. The helm was smooth, visor a narrow slit. In their hands, a small black bowl steamed faintly.
"Water?" Caleb rasped.
The figure crouched and held the bowl to his mouth. He took a cautious sip. Warm. Thick. Metal-sweet.
It slid down like heat and iron and something that made his teeth ache. He recoiled, too late, and swallowed because the body does what it must. The figure tipped the bowl again, patient as a nurse. He took another mouthful and set his jaw against the wrongness of it.
"Fortified," he told himself under his breath. "Some kind of… broth."
The figure's head tilted, as if they'd heard the thought. Fingers—gloved in a pale material that wasn't leather—adjusted his bandage with clinical care. The glove brushed his skin. Cold leached through like winter through stone.
"Who are you lot?" he managed, trying for wry and landing nearer to hoarse.
No answer. The figure's hand went to the helm. The visor unlatched with a neat internal click. Metal lifted.
The face beneath was beautiful the way frost is beautiful—too smooth, too pale, the mouth a clean stroke of ink. The eyes were a clear, unnatural violet, irises like polished amethyst. When the mouth curved—almost kindly—the lips parted just enough for him to see the edges of teeth that were a shade too sharp.
Every instinct in Caleb howled with a child's simple clarity: don't.
His stomach turned slowly, like a millstone starting to grind. He thought of the bowl and almost spat, and didn't, because he was not going to be sick in front of whatever this was.
The officer—because that was what the posture and the precision said—let the visor fall back into place. The slit re-shadowed the eyes. A moment later they were simply a soldier again, impersonal as a statue.
Across the basin, another helm rose, slowly, and then another. A handful of officers bared their faces to the weak light: that same perfect pallor, the same violet gaze, a few mouths too full of quiet. He remembered, with the painful snap of cold water over a fire, the figure on the village wall, low and alone and watching—the violet glint in a shadowed face that only he and Luke had noticed. He heard himself say Elara's name aloud, soft enough to be private and not private enough at all.
The officer's head tipped, considering. They said nothing.
The camp changed its shape without needing to be told. Lines flowed into files, files into columns. Standards went up as if drawn from the ground by string. There was a pause—delicate, balanced—like a breath held between notes.
A taller figure stepped onto the low rise that served as a dais. Their armour was etched on every plate with narrow sigils that made the eye itch. Their cloak hung correctly. The helm was smooth as an egg, visor a neat brutal smile.
They did not speak—not in the ordinary way. They lifted a gauntleted hand, and the whole camp seemed to lean closer to the gesture.
The captain descended, pace without waste, and stopped two paces from Caleb. The helm angled, a hunter scenting wind. Beneath the metal the nostrils flared once.
"This one's blood stinks of Lunara," the voice said. Not loud. Clean. Educated. It carried like cold water poured in a quiet room.
A second officer, visor already up, violet eyes bright and almost reverent, inclined their head. "So it's true, then," they murmured. "She has returned."
Caleb's mouth dried. The word slid into him and settled in the place where hope had been: Lunara. He'd heard it as a title on Riven's tongue and as a whisper at the edges of circles. Hearing it here, through a helm, made something in the world tilt.
"She has a name," he said, harsher than he intended. "Elara."
The captain considered him for a heartbeat longer. "Names are masks," they said, almost pleasantly. "We speak of the thing itself."
"You don't know her," Caleb said, which was both a plea and an accusation.
"We know enough," the captain replied, as if confirming a ledger. "You will not be killed."
Relief should have come. It did not. The officer with the bowl set it on the rock beside him with gentle precision, as one might place a cup by a bed. Around the basin, the army became a road: long, silent, directed.
"Where are you taking me?" Caleb demanded, some part of him waking up properly now that fear had a shape to wear. "I can lead you to our people. We've sealed the gorge. We have women, children. We can—"
"Your village is not our destination," the officer said, just as pleasant. "Eat, Caleb."
The use of his name made something in his spine stiffen. "How—"
The officer might have smiled. "You told us, last night."
He hadn't. He had tried. He shut his mouth.
Two soldiers unhooked the chain from the ring and replaced it with another—longer, threaded with dark metal that had been etched all along its length with small repeating angles. When it brushed his skin it burned, not like heat, but like stepping into cold so sharp it stole breath. He hissed. No one looked sorry.
They did not drag him. They didn't need to. He stood because dignity is stubborn and because refusing to stand would have given them the wrong story.
They set him walking between two files towards the basin's narrow mouth. As they passed the wagons, he caught a glimpse inside one before the flap dropped. Racks. Vials. Each stoppered and labelled with a hand that would have made a teacher proud. A pair of soldiers in darker cloaks worked methodically with syringes over a feral's carcass, drawing, decanting, recording. A small brazier burned with a smokeless, blue-white flame. Instruments lay on a cloth too clean for this world.
He swallowed against saliva. The officer noticed and followed his gaze, unbothered.
"Collectors," they said, as if answering a question. "All that is left of the world is in its blood. We preserve what matters."
"And what matters," Caleb said, because he couldn't help himself and because an anger had finally lit under the fear, "is… us?"
"Patterns," the officer said. "Resistances. Corruptions. Old covenants." A glance, almost idle, towards Caleb's bound wrists. "Bindings."
They moved through the army. Close to the captain, men and women—things, a frightened part of him said, and he shied from the word—stood straighter, as if the air persuaded them to. No one jostled. No one coughed. The boots had the same conversation with the earth that they'd had all night: step, step, step; now we are here.
The captain paused at the basin's lip and raised one hand. The entire front rank faced outward. The column pivoted in sections with the grace of a school of fish. Caleb had seen ballet once, on a school trip, long before the Blood Moon. The memory rose now, absurdly: bodies taught to make order into beauty. This was that, and it made his stomach lurch with a kind of blasphemy.
"Why me?" he asked the officer at his side, low enough that it could have been talking to himself and not risk a reprimand. "Why am I not dead?"
The officer's helm turned. In the slit, for a moment, the violet light was soft as wine. "Because you stink of her," they said, altogether too gently. "Because something in you remembers Lunara when the rest of you does not."
"I love her," Caleb said, before his sense could save him. "If that's what you mean."
"A crude word for a precise thing," the officer said. They put a gloved finger, almost lightly, under his chin and made him look up. "But—useful, sometimes."
Caleb jerked back. The chain bit. The officer's hand fell away at once, not offended, not pleased—merely obeying the logic of touch withdrawn.
At a curt motion from the captain, they set off. No drums, still no torches. The sun was a rumour behind cloud, and the light bled around edges of rock in a polite way. The line flowed out of the basin and along a bench cut into the mountain's side as if the track had been built for it and kept waiting ten years in the dark.
They did not head up towards the village. Caleb's heart thudded once, hard and disappointed, and then learnt a new rhythm: not hope dashed, exactly, but hope made to sit down and mind itself.
"Where?" he asked again, stubborn because that was the solid thing that had not been broken in him yet.
The officer's head turned. "To our Lord," they said. "To court."
Caleb huffed a laugh that wasn't funny. "You've got a lord? A court? Since when?" He didn't add since the end of the world. The officer didn't answer. There was a kind of mercy in their refusal to teach.
They made ground along the bench at a pace set for endurance. Twice, ferals—stragglers, stupid with hunger and daylight—found them and broke on them like foam on breakwater. At the second, one got close enough that Caleb smelled its carrion breath. A halberd swept; the head went one way, body another. The nearest file did not break stride. Blood steamed briefly on cold rock and then wasn't interesting.
Midday—if the smudge of light meant anything—brought a halt of exactly fifteen minutes. Caleb knew it was fifteen because the captain removed a small disc—black, etched—and turned it once. Men knelt. The vials-wagon drew up and two Collectors passed down a line handing each soldier a sealed flute of dark fluid. Stoppers popped with neat little sighs. The soldiers drank. No flinch, no relish. Work. The smell was copper and old stone. Caleb looked away and thought very hard about bread.
Someone brought him a second bowl. He didn't touch it. The officer who had first fed him set it beside him and did not press, which made the bowl worse.
"Back," the captain said—one word, quiet—and the army stood in a single motion that didn't raise dust.
Afternoon leaned into evening. The track bent east; the light went thin and silver. They descended into a gully whose walls had been bitten smooth by old water. Frost traced ferns in the shade that did not melt. At the gully's mouth, set back among firs, was a low stone arch that looked like a thing the mountain had grown on purpose. A sigil had been cut into the keystone: crescent and fang.
Caleb's skin crawled as they passed beneath.
On the other side the world was quieter, like a church. Trees crowded close and then stood back as if they had been told to. The air tasted like old coins.
The column fanned into a new pattern without being told how. A ring. The captain stepped inside it with three officers and a figure in a cloak so dark it cancelled light. The helm of that figure was bare of any etching at all; it was simply black. They spoke together in low voices that did not travel. Caleb couldn't catch words—only the sense of them having more of whatever the captain had. In the ring's pause, the silence of the army had weight.
He shivered and hated that anyone could see it.
When the discussion ended, the cloak-figure turned their helmeted head and looked directly at Caleb. It was not a look you can misinterpret. It was possession previewed. The captain raised a hand. Two soldiers stepped from the line.
"Stand," one said, the first plain word he'd heard from any of them.
He stood. The runed chain tugged him forward a pace and then another. He tried to make the movement his, and succeeded in the way a man can own the placing of his foot on a trap he cannot avoid.
They brought him to a wagon he hadn't noticed before. Its boards had been stained so black they reflected nothing. The ironwork around the doors had been carved all over with those narrow angular sigils. When he got close enough the marks made a taste like electricity behind his teeth. He clenched his jaw and felt his molars hum.
The door opened. The interior was padded in the same dark. Two short chains hung from rings in the floor. The air inside was a few degrees colder than the air outside and carried a faint smell of salt and something medicinal. He thought of doctor's surgeries, white tiles and gloss paint, and of the ruin of the hospital at the edge of the old city, vines through broken windows.
He set his foot on the step and his knee didn't lock. He thought that was brave, which was pathetic and honest.
The captain came to the threshold and looked in at him for a long, quiet moment. The helm turned a fraction, as if acknowledging the shape of the man he was, not just the use he might be.
"Do you know what you are, Caleb?" the captain asked, almost gentle.
"A man having a very bad day," he said, because he could not give them Elara in a sentence.
"A witness," the captain said, as if correcting a student. "And a measure. We are very interested in measures."
He stared at the slit where the eyes would be and felt his temper finally gather itself in his chest like a fist. "I'm not a thing."
"No," the captain agreed. "You are not." A pause that could have been kindness. "We are not tracking her through you, if that is your fear. We do not need to. We have time."
It took him a second to realise that was meant as comfort. It wasn't.
The captain spoke then in that other tongue—a single, elegant word that tasted of winter. The runes along the chain warmed against Caleb's skin without heat. His knees went weak. His pulse skipped, then slowed, then found a new, unfamiliar tempo that seemed to listen for something outside him. The world tilted a degree. He ground his teeth, because that was his to do, and stayed upright by force of will and pettiness.
"Inside," one of the soldiers said.
He climbed in. The chains on the floor clipped to the cuffs with exact clicks. The door swung to and latched with the finality of a mouth closing.
Through the small, barred window high on the door, the forest looked like a painting done in bruises. The army moved in the corner of the frame—so precise, so tireless, so wrong. Somewhere beyond the trees, at a distance he could only measure in the ache behind his eyes, the mountain where he had left Elara went on being itself. He put his head back against the padded wall and shut his eyes.
"Lunara," someone said outside, low—he couldn't tell if it was prayer or calculation.
He curled his hands around the short length of chain and pretended it was a bowstring, and that the pressure in his chest was the good weight of a drawn shot instead of a rhythm imposed by a word he didn't know.
"El," he whispered into the dark. He made it a promise because he couldn't make it a plan. "Don't come."
The wheels took up a motion. The wagon moved. The Feast of Silence—if that was what this ordered hunger was—rolled with him into the trees.