Mud.
That's the first thing I remember.
It wasn't the clash of steel or the scream of dying men. Not the taste of copper on my tongue or the stink of blood and piss baking in the summer rot. Just the mud—thick, cold, swallowing.
I woke to it sucking at my face like a grave too eager to wait.
The sky above me was gray, not with clouds, but with smoke. Fat, curling plumes of it rising off a hundred bodies, armor half-melted, flesh crackling. The battlefield was quiet in that strange way after battle—like the world's too tired to scream anymore.
I pushed myself up with a grunt. My fingers squelched through something that wasn't just dirt. Pieces of man. Pieces of horse. A hand, still clutching the broken haft of a pike, jutted from a shallow ditch beside me. I didn't look at the face.
Didn't need to.
We'd lost. That much was clear. Our banners had been trampled, stained black with mud and blood, just like our pride. House Ravelle—what a joke. We were the dregs of a fading noble line, pressed into the king's war like cattle through a butcher's gate.
And me?
I was nothing. Just another blade-for-hire in the ranks. No sigil on my chest, no name to call out in the charge. Leo. That was it. Short. Ugly. Unimportant.
But I was breathing. That put me ahead of most.
I staggered to my feet. My armor hung off me like wet cloth, dented in the chest, shoulder plate gone, left gauntlet missing. My sword was nowhere to be seen, but the hilt of a fallen knight's longsword stuck out from the chest of a rotting charger nearby. I yanked it free.
Heavy. Good balance. Bit of rust at the edge. Better than nothing.
I started walking, but there was nowhere to go. Just fields of ruin in all directions. Men who'd fought beside me lay in heaps, eyes open to the sun, jaws slack, as if caught mid-question.
Why?
That question never mattered on a field like this. You could scream it to the sky and all you'd get was silence and crows.
The only movement came from a lone figure picking through the dead on the far end of the ridge. Hooded. Limber. Not armored.
Scavenger.
I watched as they knelt beside a corpse, peeled a ring off a swollen finger, and tucked it into a pouch. Next was a coin purse. Then they moved on. Fast. Practiced.
I should've ignored them. Walked the other way. But hunger and desperation make poor counselors. And I needed something—anything—to buy a night's rest or bribe a border guard.
I approached without stealth, sword resting on my shoulder.
"Hey."
The figure froze, then rose slowly. Not a man.
A woman. Young. Barely past her second decade. Pale, with that gaunt look that comes from too many weeks without bread. Her hair was tied back in a rough braid. Her clothes were leather, patchworked and stained from years of crawling through battlefields like this one.
She sized me up. Eyes flicked to my blade, then to the blood dried on my neck.
"You ain't dead," she said flatly.
"Not yet."
"Shame. Dead men don't need boots."
I looked down. Mine were caked in filth but still whole.
"You can try," I said, "but they bite."
That got the faintest hint of a smirk from her. She lowered her hand from the knife at her hip.
"I'm not here to fight," she said. "Just scavenge. You're welcome to the same."
"I'm not dead enough to be desperate."
She raised an eyebrow. "You're standing on a pile of corpses in torn armor, holding a dead man's sword. Could've fooled me."
Fair point.
I gestured to the horizon. "You know which way the rest went?"
She shrugged. "If they ran, east. If they died, you're standing on them."
I exhaled through my nose, nodded. She turned to leave.
"What's your name?" I asked.
She paused. "Why?"
"Gotta know what to call the one who robs my boots later."
She gave me a long look. Then: "Nyra."
"Leo."
She vanished into the smoke.
I didn't follow her.
Not right away.
Instead, I spent the next hour dragging the least rotted bodies into a pile and setting them alight. It wasn't mercy. It was habit. The old priests used to say burning the dead stopped them from walking again.
I didn't believe in ghost stories. But on days like this, I wasn't sure.
When the flames took the last of my squad, I whispered their names—not for their sake, but mine. So I wouldn't forget. So someone would remember.
Then I turned east.
Toward the Wound.
That night, I camped under a crumbled archway, ribs hollow, sword laid across my chest like a shield. Rain came slow and steady, washing the blood from my arms but not my mind. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw fire. Screams. The moment Sergeant Vael's eyes went wide and he mouthed my name before the axe took his jaw.
I didn't sleep. Not really. Just drifted in and out, half-conscious, twitching at every crack of twig.
Dawn came gray and colorless. Another corpse of a day.
And then she returned.
Nyra.
Her boots kicked up dirt beside my bedroll. I sat up fast, hand on my sword, but she didn't flinch.
"I found a caravan trail," she said. "Abandoned. Maybe two days old. Could be coin left behind."
"Why tell me?"
She shrugged. "Figure you're too dumb to rob. Might as well drag you along."
"How generous."
She handed me a strip of dried meat. I stared.
"Deer?" I asked.
"Rat. Don't ask where I got it."
I chewed in silence.
We traveled together after that. Not friends. Not allies. Just two souls who weren't dead enough to stop moving.
She talked little, and when she did, it was sharp and short. But she knew the land. She knew how to read the sky, how to spot bandit signs etched in bark, how to find clean water in a valley full of rot.
I followed. Learned. Watched.
And somewhere between dusk and another cold morning, I realized something.
She wasn't just surviving.
She was waiting.
For what, I didn't know.
But I'd seen that look before.
It was the same one I wore, before the war. The same hunger.
Not for food.
For purpose.
And then we heard the whispers.
A name passed from mouth to mouth in the border towns. A name that made men go pale and merchants bury their ledgers.
Blackthorn.
A warband. No banners. No loyalties. Just iron and blood. They moved like smoke and killed like fire. And someone was paying them in relics pulled from the Wound—relics that should've stayed buried.
Nyra said we should stay clear.
But the moment I heard that name, something in me stirred.
A memory.
A face.
A voice saying: "When they come for me, tell them Leo remembers."
I didn't know what it meant.
But I would find out.
Even if I had to walk through fire.
Even if I had to bleed for it.