Blood and shields
"Stay back, Morello! The wind—get back!" Ewphen's voice tore through the storm, raw with panic.
The men stumbled over one another, boots sinking into shifting sand. Someone screamed as metal scraped stone. Another laughed—thin, broken, already lost.
"It's summoning them!" a soldier cried. "From the garden—east and south!"
"Hold the circle!" Ewphen shouted. "Don't break—don't—"
A heavy chain fell from above without warning, crashing down between them with a scream of iron. The circle shattered. Men were dragged screaming across the ground, pulled toward the edges of the castle grounds.
"This makes no sense…" Ewphen thought, even as the world lurched.
A thunderous crack split the air. Stone broke loose from the castle's crowned head and fell. Something struck him hard. White light flashed behind his eyes. Warm blood streamed down his face.
The dead came then.
They rose from the sand as if unearthed by the storm itself—skeletal figures with charred flesh stretched tight like burnt leather over glowing bone. Rusted swords dragged furrows in the ground. Bows creaked. They moved slowly, deliberately, and there were too many.
"No magic," Ewphen muttered, crawling backward. "No myths. Just move."
He dragged himself into the corner beneath a fallen statue at the castle's front, fingers trembling as he twisted his red scarf—silk and wool—tight around his bleeding head. Around him, his remaining men were being driven back, forced away from the castle gates they had fought so hard to reach.
Only then did the full weight of the place press down on him.
The Castle of Shewdon rose vast and imposing on the nameless, desolate island—its white-winged structure scarred by sand-colored mold, its walls carved by centuries of wind and war. The garden to the north churned with a living storm, a whirlpool of sand where a spirit had returned once more.
Ewphen was no mage, no bearer of legends. He was a loyal slave to the governor of the Maniac Empire, clad in silver-arrowed armor, an iron shield strapped to his arm. He had survived not by prophecy, but by inference, instinct, and an unyielding will to keep others alive—long enough to reach the mountains of Cabadon.
Hundreds had died before Shewdon. These few were all that remained.
Now even that hope was thinning, scattered across the sand as the wind howled and the dead obeyed an unseen master.