We rode hard to Greywood and arrived before noon.
I had expected damage. I had not expected the specific quality of what was there. The houses were not burned, they were broken, walls pushed inward or pulled outward with a force that did not match any weapon I knew. Doors were off their frames. Furniture was scattered into yards. A water trough had been split cleanly down its length. Whatever moved through Greywood the night before had not been in a hurry, it had simply been strong enough that the village's structures meant nothing to it.
There were no bodies anywhere.
"They took everyone?" Thorne said beside me, looking down the main path between the houses.
"Everyone who did not run fast enough," I said.
I dismounted and walked through the main path. The damage got worse the deeper into the village I went. Near the southern entrance, the houses were mostly intact, just doors broken open or windows shattered. Farther in, closer to the central square, the walls themselves had been torn apart. I stopped in front of one house where the entire front wall had been removed in a single piece, like someone had pulled it free with their hands. The stones were stacked neatly beside the house. That detail bothered me more than the destruction. Someone had taken the time to stack the wall carefully after tearing it down.
"This was not random," I said, crouching to look at the stacked stones. "They were looking for something specific or they were making a point."
"Or both," Thorne said. He was standing a few feet away, examining claw marks on a wooden door frame. "These cuts are too clean. Whatever made them was not in a frenzy. It was controlled."
We found the survivors in the tree line to the north, about thirty of them, mostly older Lycans who had been slow enough to get caught in the initial panic and ended up hiding rather than fleeing. They looked at us the way people look when they have seen something that rearranged how they understand the world.
I found the elder near the back of the group, an old male named Vesht, sitting against a tree with his hands loose in his lap. He had the eyes of someone still partially in whatever he had witnessed the night before. The thousand yard stare, soldiers called it. I had seen it before on men who survived battles they should not have survived.
"Tell me what happened," I said, crouching in front of him.
He took a moment. His mouth moved before sound came out. "They came in from the south road. Six of them, maybe seven. Moving like they were one thing, not separate. No sound between them. No signals." He stopped. "He was in front."
"Describe him."
"Tall. Old armour, not ours, older than anything I have seen worn. Plates across the chest with markings I did not recognise. He walked up to Davren's house and put his hand through the front wall like it was paper." Vesht's voice stayed flat through the whole thing, which told me the fear had already moved past the stage where it showed. "He looked at me. Straight at me. Then he said something."
"What did he say?"
"He said the unbonded carry no weight. That the bond is a chain cut from us at death, not something lost." Vesht looked at his hands. "He said the king's way was the true way but the king did not know it yet. He said death had shown him what life could not, that strength without bonds was the only strength that mattered. He said we were living proof of a failed system, clinging to connections that made us weak."
I stayed very still. Around me I heard Thorne shift his weight. The other survivors were watching us now, all of them waiting to see how I would react to what Vesht had just said.
"He said my way," I said quietly.
"Not by name. But he meant you. Everyone understood what he meant." Vesht finally looked up at me. "He sounded almost reasonable. That was the worst part. He did not sound like something dead. He sounded like someone who had worked something out. Like he was teaching us."
"And then what happened?"
"He took them. One by one. His... his people, the other dead ones, they went into the houses and pulled people out. The ones who fought, they did not kill them. They just held them until they stopped fighting. Then they carried them south. All of them. Thirty people carried off into the dark while the rest of us hid in the trees."
I looked at him for a long moment. Then I stood up.
Vesht had survived by hiding in the trees while the rest of his pack was taken. Whatever reason existed for that, whatever instinct or simple luck had put him behind a tree instead of inside his house when the attack came, the result was a man sitting in front of me having just told me that a dead Alpha walked through Greywood preaching doctrine about the nature of the bond and attributed the philosophy to me. He had watched his pack get taken rather than fight or warn anyone in time to matter.
"You saw all of this," I said.
"Yes, my king."
"From the trees."
He did not answer. He understood what I was doing.
I killed him quickly. One strike, clean, no hesitation. The others in the group watched without speaking. No one moved to stop me. No one protested. They knew why it happened. They knew what it meant when someone survived by hiding while their pack died.
I straightened up and looked at them. Blood dripped from my hand onto the leaves.
"The entire pack relocates," I said to Thorne. "Move them to the eastern holding camps. All of them. They were taken or they hid. Neither is a group I want living unsupervised on a border."
"My king," one of the younger survivors said. "We did nothing wrong. We just ran."
"You ran and lived while your packmates were taken," I said. "That is enough."
Thorne started giving orders to the warriors who had come with us. The survivors did not resist. They stood up slowly, gathering what few things they had brought into the trees with them, and began moving toward the horses. No one spoke. The body of the elder stayed where it had fallen.
Thorne said nothing until we were back on our horses heading toward the keep.
"They were victims," he said, not arguing exactly, just stating it.
"They were witnesses to Serath preaching my philosophy back at them with his dead mouth. I do not need that spreading through the border territories." I kept my eyes on the road. The sun was starting to drop toward the horizon. We had been riding most of the day. "The resurrected are getting smarter, which means the sect controlling them is getting smarter. Serath said something deliberate last night. It was not instinct, it was a message aimed at me."
"Which means they know your plans."
"Which means I need to move faster than they expect me to." I turned the thought over. "The ritual tests need to accelerate. Twenty is not enough for the next run. Tell Mireth I want fifty in the circle before the week is out."
Thorne rode beside me without responding to that. He had opinions about the pace. He kept most of them behind his teeth these days, which I appreciated. There was a time when he would have argued with me about orders like this. That time was past. Now he just executed and watched the outcomes.
"The mark on your wrist," he said after a long silence. "Is it spreading?"
I glanced at him. "Why do you ask?"
"Because you keep touching it. Because Mireth watches it every time you are in the same room. Because something is changing and I would like to know what before it becomes a problem in the field."
I pulled my sleeve back and showed him. The mark had grown since morning. What had been the size of a coin was now closer to the size of my palm, black lines spreading up my forearm in patterns that looked almost deliberate, like writing in a language I could not read.
Thorne looked at it without expression. "That is concerning."
"It is a side effect of the ritual preparation. Mireth says it is normal."
"Does Mireth say what happens when it finishes spreading?"
"No."
"Then it is not normal. It is unknown." He looked back at the road. "You are changing into something. I would like to know what that something is before I am standing next to you when it completes."
I pulled my sleeve back down. "When I know, you will know."
We reached the keep by late afternoon. Mireth was waiting in the outer yard, which she never did. She always waited inside, in the warmth, with her documents. Standing outside in the cold meant whatever she had to say could not wait for me to dismount and walk to a room.
I pulled up in front of her. "What is it?"
She looked up at me with the expression that meant the news was structural, not tactical. Not a problem to be handled but something that changed the shape of the problem itself.
"The rune calculations are wrong," she said. "The fifteen thousand figure, I made an error in the base conversion. The actual requirement is closer to twenty thousand. Possibly more."