The decision to march was a stone dropped into the still pool of the kingdom's fragile peace. The ripples were immediate and violent. Duke Daerlon, with a politician's instinct for survival, publically backed the king's call to arms, pledging his household knights—a calculated display of loyalty that cost him little and positioned him as a pillar of the realm in crisis. Privately, William knew Daerlon was hedging, waiting to see which way the wind blew from Greyport.
The army that assembled in the shadow of Blackcliff was a testament to the new, patchwork kingdom. At its core were the disciplined, weary royal guards and garrison troops. Alongside them marched companies funded by the Merchant Consortium—professional soldiers in standardized, functional armor, their banners bearing the sigils of trading houses alongside the royal stag. Contingents from loyalist lords, some grudging, some eager for plunder, formed a chaotic wing. And on the fringes, like shadows given substance, were Morwen's clansmen. They had come not at a king's command, but in fulfillment of their alliance, a pack of wolves joining a hunt for their own reasons. They brought no supply train; they lived off the land they intended to ravage.
William reviewed them from a low hill, the wind snapping the countless banners. He felt no surge of pride, only the heavy weight of the ledger. Each man represented a column of numbers: rations consumed, arrows loosed, silver paid, and the unquantifiable but paramount column—lives spent. The covenant-stone, wrapped and secured in a lead-lined chest on a sturdy wagon, felt like a cold counterweight to the heat of the gathering host. It was the soul of his promise; this army was the fist that would have to defend it.
Their strategy was one of brutal simplicity, born of Anya's clandestine work. They would not besiege Ferdinand's mountain keeps. They would invade the Vale itself, the fertile bowl of land that was his true source of power. The rivers were low, the springs faltering. Panic was already simmering. William's army would be the spark that turned simmer into revolt, presenting itself not as conquerors, but as the bearers of order and, crucially, the restoration of water.
The march east was tense, a drawn blade held at the ready. They crossed into the Vale not at Stonebridge, still held by Ferdinand's rearguard, but through a series of high, treacherous passes the clans knew. It was a hard, punishing trek that cost them wagons and a few dozen men to falls and cold. But it achieved surprise.
They descended into the eastern Vale like a grey tide flowing down the mountainsides. The first village they came to, a hamlet called Oakcross huddled around a near-dry creek bed, watched them approach with terror. William ordered his men to halt outside the settlement. He rode forward with only a small guard and a cask of water drawn from a still-flowing high spring.
The village elder, a man with deep lines of worry etched around his eyes, approached, kneeling in the dust.
"Stand," William said, dismounting. "We are not here to harm you. We are here to restore the King's Peace." He gestured, and a soldier broached the cask, filling a dipper. William drank first, then offered it to the elder. "The Duke Ferdinand has broken covenant with the realm. He has brought strife and drought upon you. The Crown's justice comes with water. Those who swear fealty will have aid. Those who bear arms for the usurper will face the law."
It was a performance, but a vital one. The men of Oakcross, their fields withering, their children thirsty, looked from the clear water to the grim, endless ranks of soldiers on their hillside. They swore. William left a small detachment and a royal engineer with instructions to find and clear the nearest blocked spring. The news, he knew, would fly ahead of them on wings of desperation and hope.
This was the war he waged: a battle of perception, of administration as a weapon. Village by village, they advanced, a combination of threat and succor. Some loyalist holdouts, manor houses garrisoned by Ferdinand's men, resisted. They were surrounded, stormed, or bypassed. William showed little mercy to the garrison commanders, hanging them as traitors. But the common folk, the tenants, were given the same choice: the Covenant and water, or the sword.
It was brutal, effective, and deeply corrosive to William's spirit. He was trading on suffering he had helped engineer through Anya's sabotage. The justice he dispensed felt thin, a veneer over raw necessity. At night, in his campaign tent, he would unwrap the covenant-stone. Its light seemed to flicker in the smoky air, sometimes flaring when he dwelled on an act of genuine clemency, sometimes dimming when he recalled the cold order of an execution. It was a mirror to his conscience, and the reflection was often troubling.
Ferdinand, trapped in his central fortress of Silverhold, reacted with the fury of a cornered beast. He sent his still-formidable cavalry to raid William's supply lines and harass his flanks. Skirmishes flared in the wooded valleys, sharp, bloody affairs where the mountain clans excelled. William lost men, supplies, time. The campaign slowed, mired in the gritty arithmetic of attrition.
It was during one of these grinding weeks that Alaric found the camp. The lore-warden looked more spectral than ever, his robes stained with travel, his silver eyes reflecting the campfires like distant stars.
"The stone is troubled," Alaric said without preamble, standing in William's tent. "It feels the conflict. It is meant to be a center, a still point. You have brought it into the storm. It drinks the chaos."
"I need its strength," William said, exhaustion fraying his voice. "The men… they fight for pay, for duty, for fear. They need to believe in something more. The stone is a symbol."
"It is becoming more than a symbol here,"Alaric warned. "In this place of violence and broken oaths, its energy is twisting. It seeks to impose order, but the only order it finds is the order of the camp, the order of the march, the order of the battle line. It is learning the wrong lessons."
William remembered the stone's warmth during the court session in Millford, a response to peaceful law. Here, it felt cold, passive, a observer of martial law. "What do you suggest? Should I send it back to Blackcliff?"
"It is bound to you, and you are here. Its absence would be a different kind of wound. You must balance it. For every act of war, you must perform an act of restoration. The stone must see the making as well as the breaking."
The next day, they came upon a scene of horror. One of Ferdinand's cavalry bands, frustrated and enraged, had sacked a loyalist village that had sworn to William. They had not just taken food; they had massacred, a message of terror. The place was called Willowbrook, and it was now a charnel house, the air thick with flies and the sickly-sweet stench of death.
William's army, seeing the smoke, arrived too late. His soldiers, particularly the mercenaries and some of the lords' men, saw this as justification for a matching fury. Calls went up to burn the next Vale village they found.
William stood amidst the ruins, the horror a cold stone in his gut. He saw the ledger entry: Willowbrook. Civilian casualties: approx. 200. Strategic impact: increased troop rage, risk of atrocity, propaganda victory for Ferdinand. The arithmetic suggested retaliation.
Then he thought of Alaric's words. He thought of the cold stone in its chest.
He called his commanders together, his face a mask of grim stone. "We will bury the dead," he declared. "Every one of them. Our men will do it. No looting. We will send riders to every village within a day's march. We will tell them what happened here, and we will tell them Ferdinand's men did it. And we will tell them that the King's justice will find those responsible, but it will not punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty."
It was a monumental task. It cost them a full day of march. It was militarily stupid. Men grumbled as they dug graves in the hard soil. But as they worked, a strange quiet fell over the camp. The vengeful fury bled away into somber, weary duty. William himself took a shovel and worked alongside them for an hour, his back aching, his hands blistering.
That night, when he checked the covenant-stone, its light was steadier, warmer. It had not flared, but the sickly flicker was gone. It had witnessed an act of reverence, of order imposed on chaos not through violence, but through grim, humane duty.
The act had another, unintended consequence. The next village they approached did not flee. The elders came out, their faces fearful but resolute. They had heard of Willowbrook, and they had heard of the king who buried the dead. They surrendered without condition. And they offered information: the cavalry band that had committed the atrocity was using an old hill fort a half-day's ride north as a base.
William dispatched Morwen's clansmen and two companies of his fastest light horse. They found the fort, took it in a night assault, and captured the captain and his lieutenants. William had them tried before a makeshift court of his officers and a representative from the Willowbrook survivors. They were found guilty and hanged from the walls of the very fort they had used. The rest of the men were disarmed and released, told to carry the tale of the king's justice back to Silverhold.
The campaign became a dual rhythm: the hard, sharp beat of military advance, and the slower, deeper counter-beat of consolidation and law. It was exhausting, stretching William's forces and his will to the limit. But it worked. The Vale was splitting. The western half, where William's army moved, was becoming a occupied territory under the Crown's new laws. The east remained Ferdinand's, but his grip was weakening as stories of William's harsh but fair justice spread, contrasted with the depredations of Ferdinand's own desperate troops.
Finally, after six weeks of this grinding, two-front war, they stood before Silverhold itself. The fortress was formidable, built into a great stone shoulder of the eastern mountains, its walls high and thick. A siege would be long, and winter was whispering in the wind. Ferdinand had pulled all his remaining loyal troops and supplies inside. He was daring William to waste his army against the stone.
William made camp just out of ballista range. He had no intention of a direct assault. His plan was colder. He had the valley below Silverhold cleared of any remaining loyalists. Then, he summoned Anya.
"The final vein," he said. "The one that feeds the Silverhold spring itself."
Anya nodded,her expression unreadable. "It can be done. But it is a deep vein. The spirit of that place is strong and old. To choke it… the mountain will not forget."
"The mountain, or Ferdinand's god?" William asked, thinking of the strange, listening presence he now knew was part of the world.
"They are sometimes the same,"she replied. "I will need the stone."
William hesitated.The covenant-stone was the heart of his new order. To use it for an act of deliberate, elemental strangulation felt like a profound betrayal of its nature. But Alaric had said it was learning. Perhaps it needed to understand the full weight of sovereignty, which included the terrible power to deny.
"Take it," he said, his voice low. "Use it as a focus. Not to destroy, but to… persuade. To show the mountain that Ferdinand's rule is a sickness upon the land. That the Covenant offers a healthier order."
It was sophistry, and they both knew it. But it was a necessary fiction.
Anya took the stone in its chest, and with a dozen of her most skilled clansmen, vanished into the foothills below Silverhold. For three days, nothing happened. The siege camp waited, tense. Ferdinand's men jeered from the walls.
On the dawn of the fourth day, a deep, groaning rumble echoed through the valley, not a sound of collapse, but of profound constriction. A shout went up from Silverhold's walls. The great fountain in the central courtyard, fed by the mountain spring, coughed, sputtered a stream of muddy water, and fell silent.
The fortress had water reserves, but the message was as clear as a trumpet blast: the very land was rejecting Ferdinand. Panic, long simmering, broke open inside Silverhold. That night, under cover of darkness, a party of guardsmen lowered the eastern postern gate and fled. In the morning, a signal flag of parley rose over the main gate.
Ferdinand did not surrender himself. He sent his seneschal, a pale, trembling man who offered terms: the duke would abdicate and go into exile in Greyport. In return, his family's lives and personal wealth would be spared, and his son, a boy of twelve, would retain the title of Lord of Silver Vale under the Crown's regency.
William stood in his tent, the seneschal kneeling before him. He felt no triumph, only a deep, cold emptiness. This was the sum. A broken land, a dead spring, a duke in exile, a boy as a hostage for future peace. It was a viable result. It ended the war. It secured the east.
But it left Greyport with a prize: Ferdinand, a bitter, knowledgeable exile who would be a weapon in their hands. And it left the Vale with a wound in its mountain, a silent spring that might never flow again.
He thought of the covenant-stone, used to persuade the earth to betray its lords. He thought of the ledgers, now to be updated with the costs of reconstruction, of a regency, of a forever-watchful eastern border.
"Tell your duke," William said, his voice echoing in the quiet tent, "his terms are accepted. He has three days to leave. His son remains. The Vale is now under Crown administration, governed by the Blackcliff Covenant."
The seneschal scurried out. William walked to the chest where Anya had returned the stone. He opened it. The white crystal lay within, its light dim, almost grey. The black fissure seemed wider, deeper. When he touched it, it was cold. It had done its work, and something in it had closed off, or broken.
Alaric entered silently. He looked at the stone and sighed, a sound like dry leaves. "It has learned the price of order. Sometimes, order must be a cage. It has tasted the power of denial. It will not be the same."
William closed the chest. The campaign was over. The rebellion was crushed. A new, fragile peace was imposed. But as he looked east, towards the silent mountains and the waiting ports of Greyport, he knew the calculus was not complete. The numbers were still running. The debt for this victory was still being tallied, in a currency of loyalty, land, and the slowly fading light of a stone that had once promised a better way. The Forge King had won his war. Now he had to live in the scarred and thirsty kingdom he had saved.