The wind moaned through the broken teeth of the shrine, carrying with it the wet stink of death. Calder pressed his back against the cold stone and listened — the kind of stillness that only came after too much killing.
Somewhere beyond the ruined stones, something moved.
Soft. Careful. Wrong.
Calder shifted his grip on Dog's Hunger, feeling the weight settle into the bones of his arm like an old promise. Rain dripped from the battered crossguard. His shoulder throbbed where the arrow had torn through leather and skin, but he ignored it.
He moved slow and low through the wreckage. The shrine's broken pillars leaned like drunkards into the mist, casting long, crooked shadows. Moss crept up the shattered statues — blind saints with rusted swords and split scrolls.
Once, men had knelt here and bled for the gods.
Now, the gods bled with them.
The Greyward Marches had no memory for victory. Only for the places where men had screamed longest before they died.
Beyond the shrine, the land flattened into a corpse-field.
Spears jutted from the mud like broken ribs. Shattered shields, rusted mail, and the tattered rags of banners stained black with rain. Bones surfaced in the muck — fingers reaching, jaws gaping. Some bodies were old enough to be skeletons. Others were fresh, steam rising from them where the rain met blood-warm flesh.
Calder picked his way through the mire.
Every step a slow sinking.
Every breath a taste of old iron and rot.
He spotted the scavenger after cresting a low ridge of broken stones.
A smear of motion against the mud.
The figure was crawling, clutching something under a filthy cloak, trying to stay small.
Calder watched him for a long moment.
Weak. Ribs showing. No weapon heavier than a broken knife tucked into a frayed belt.
Another piece of trash the Marches hadn't gotten around to killing yet.
Calder moved downhill, boots squelching through the muck. He didn't bother hiding his approach. If the scavenger had enough fight left to matter, Calder would end it quickly.
The man flinched at the noise, froze, and then scuttled backward like a rat, nearly sinking himself waist-deep into a pool of stagnant rainwater.
Calder stopped a few paces away, Dog's Hunger hanging low in his hand.
The scavenger's eyes were wide and glassy. Fevered.
Calder leveled the blade without ceremony.
"You sick," he said flatly, "or just stupid?"
The scavenger made a thin, broken noise.
"No, m'lord," he rasped. "No plague, swear it. Just cold. Just bad luck."
Luck.
Calder almost laughed.
Luck was what men blamed when death came for them slow instead of quick.
He should have kept walking.
He almost did.
But a flicker of color under the man's cloak caught his eye — something not mud-brown or blood-black.
Blue.
Silver.
A field torn by filth but still fighting to shine through.
Branholt colors.
Calder's boots shifted, sucking free from the mud with a wet, tearing sound.
"Where'd you lift that?"
The scavenger, seeing Calder's attention sharpen, fumbled desperately at his cloak.
He yanked free a sodden bundle and tossed it toward Calder's feet like a man throwing meat to a wolf.
The cloth hit the mud with a dull splat.
Calder crouched slowly, ignoring the scream of his bruised knees and the grinding throb in his shoulder.
He peeled back the rags.
Saw what he already knew he would.
The wolf's head.
The blue and silver, faded but stubborn.
And heavier — a cracked, blackened signet ring.
House Veyne.
Garran's blood.
Calder's gut twisted slow and heavy.
The Marches spun around him — not with shock, but a grim, leaden inevitability.
Of all the cursed fields in all the broken miles of the Greyward, it had found him.
Not a banner. Not a song.
A broken ring in the muck.
A dead man's claim pulling at him across the grave.
He looked down at the scavenger.
Thin. Trembling. Mouth working, begging.
Calder didn't hear the words.
Didn't care.
He stepped forward.
Put a boot into the man's chest, hard and final.
Bone cracked underfoot. The scavenger choked once, folded in half, and lay still.
The rain washed the rest of him away.
Calder stood over the corpse, breathing slow and shallow.
The ring sat heavy in his gloved palm.
It should've been impossible.
Thousands of miles of ruin.
Tens of thousands of dead men.
And this.
The gods weren't just watching.
They were laughing.
He tucked the signet ring into the battered pouch tied to his belt — the same one that carried a half-empty iron flask and a crumbling scrap of cloth from Branholt's last standard.
A fool's collection.
But some stones stayed in the gut whether you wanted them or not.
Calder adjusted the frayed cord binding his hair back against the rain.
Checked Dog's Hunger with a rough tug.
Listened to the Marches breathe around him — low, wet, hungry.
He moved through the broken fields again, slower now, the weight of old promises grinding against his bones like bad armor.
The land stretched before him in broken ridges and gouged valleys.
The Marches weren't built for men.
They were made for bones to sink quietly into.
Calder trudged through a ruined orchard — nothing left but twisted, blackened trunks that clawed at the storm-gray sky. Charred branches creaked under the weight of the rain. Burn scars striped the earth where fire had rolled through years ago, killing everything but the stubborn weeds.
A mass grave yawned open at the orchard's heart — a pit lined with skulls and snapped ribcages, half-swallowed by mud.
No markers. No stones.
Just the memory of slaughter, gnawed clean by weather and time.
Calder paused there.
Not out of reverence.
Out of habit.
Places like this twisted the air.
Sometimes a man's bones remembered dying even if his mind didn't.
He knelt by the edge of the pit, cutting a line through the muck with the tip of Dog's Hunger.
A mark.
Not a prayer.
Not forgiveness.
Just a simple, brutal acknowledgment that something had existed here long enough to die for it.
That was all the Marches ever gave back.
A scar and a grave.
If you were lucky.
Calder moved on.
The storm worsened, slashing the fields into rivers of black mud.
Feral dogs watched him from the wreck of a collapsed granary, ribs showing, teeth bared.
Calder met their gaze, slow and steady.
Predators knew predators.
They slunk back into the ruins, wiser than most men Calder had known.
The Marches whispered in the rain:
Go back.
Die slow.
Bury yourself with the rest.
Calder ignored it.
He reached a low hill crowned with the remains of a watchtower.
Only half the stones still stood. The other half lay shattered across the slope, covered in creeping green moss slick as grease.
Calder climbed, boots slipping, legs burning with the effort.
At the top, the view opened wide:
To the west: endless fields of dead corn and smoking ruin where Thornhollow's mercenaries had passed.
To the north: the black spires of the Shardwood, mist curling from its poisoned heart.
To the east: the broken spine of the Craven Fields, where rebellion and dreams both went to rot.
And somewhere past that — if Garran's blood was still wet on the stones — the last survivors of Branholt's fall.
If any still lived.
If any were worth finding.
Calder crouched against a chunk of fallen masonry, pulled free a worn length of linen from his belt pouch, and set to work.
The arrow wound across his shoulder needed re-wrapping.
The leather patch on his left vambrace had split again.
His right boot's sole had come half-loose in the fight.
Nothing fancy.
Nothing heroic.
Just the slow, miserable arithmetic of survival.
He cleaned the wound with whiskey — teeth gritted, eyes narrowed to slits — and stitched the worst of it closed with a rusted needle threaded with gut twine.
The kind of work that, in a cleaner world, might have rated an oath or a prayer.
Here, it was just another thing a man did if he didn't feel like dying this particular afternoon.
He worked in silence, the storm snarling and snapping at the tower ruins around him.
The crows had come out again, black dots circling high against the gray sky.
Waiting. Watching.
The Marches didn't waste time on what might be.
It bled you out, fed the bones to the dogs, and moved on.
Calder tucked the patched flask into his belt, slung Dog's Hunger back over his shoulder, and hauled himself upright.
The ache behind his ribs was a familiar weight.
Old scars pulling tight.
Old debts grinding at the marrow.
"You owe me, Stonewolf."
Garran's voice, half-remembered.
Rough with laughter. Thick with blood.
"You'll pay me back. One day."
Calder spat into the mud.
The only thing worse than dying was remembering why you hadn't.
He descended the hill with the rain hammering at his back, each step heavier than the last.
The trail east would be cold.
Thornhollow's men didn't stick around long after a slaughter — they moved fast, took what they could carry, and left the rest for the worms.
Calder wasn't fast.
He was stubborn.
It would have to be enough.
He stopped once more at the edge of the orchard, where the trees knelt like broken prisoners in the mud.
Cut another line into the muck with his blade.
A scar for memory.
A wound for what had been lost.
No words.
No banners.
No salvation.
Only debts.
And the steel to see them paid.
The eastern wind carried the stink of burned villages and churned earth.
Calder adjusted the strap of Dog's Hunger across his back and began to move.
No destination beyond the next bloody step.
No plan beyond the old one: survive first, bleed second, bury the rest.
A rutted path wound eastward along the ridge. It had once been a merchant's road, if the toppled milestones and the faint gouges of wagon wheels were any proof.
Now it was just another open wound across the Marches, a strip of dying mud leading nowhere good.
Calder trudged into it without ceremony.
Toward dusk, the rain finally thinned to a cold mist, and Calder found shelter under a shattered overhang — the remnants of a granary long since gutted by fire and scavengers.
He dropped his pack with a grunt and knelt, muscles aching, fingers stiff with chill and exhaustion.
Methodical. Brutal. Necessary.
He worked with the tired efficiency of a man who had repaired more broken armor than he'd ever broken bones.
He checked Dog's Hunger first:
The edge still battered but serviceable.
Pommel tight.
Grip soaked and swollen — he rewrapped it with a strip of hide stripped from a dead man two winters ago.
He inventoried his knives:
Three left.
Two balanced for throwing, one heavier for close work.
Blades cleaned. Blades ready.
The heavy dagger he wore under his coat was notched but intact.
He ran a stone across it anyway, the rasping scrape loud in the silence.
There would be killing ahead.
No sense dying because he'd gotten lazy.
As night fell across the Marches, Calder built no fire.
Light was death out here.
Better to freeze than burn on someone else's pyre.
He huddled under the overhang, cloak pulled tight, one eye half-open, fingers resting loosely on Dog's Hunger's hilt.
The Marches breathed around him — a living, rotting thing, whispering in a thousand broken voices:
Give up.
Lay down.
Join the bones.
Calder let the whispering crawl across his skin, into his ears, around the cracked walls of his heart.
Listened.
And lived anyway.
Sometime deep in the black hour, when the mist thickened and the crows stopped their endless circling, Calder closed his hand around the cracked signet ring tucked in his pouch.
He turned it over once between his fingers.
The metal was pitted, scarred, ugly with years of bad memory.
Just like him.
No prayer passed his lips.
No oath.
He didn't need them.
The Marches taught you what mattered early:
Steel.
Blood.
Debt.
Everything else was for men who believed there would be a tomorrow worth singing about.
Before dawn, Calder rose.
Bones popping.
Joints stiff.
The taste of iron and rot thick in his mouth.
He cinched his cloak. Checked his boots. Slung Dog's Hunger over one shoulder.
And without a word — without looking back at the broken granary, the dead fields, the whispering bones — Calder Vane set his boots east.
Toward the blood debt he hadn't asked for, hadn't wanted, but could no longer ignore.
Each step was heavier than the last.
Each breath tasted more of graveyard air.
But he walked anyway.
Because survival wasn't enough anymore.
Because somewhere in the drowning ruin of the Marches, a promise had been broken.
And Calder Vane was not the kind of man who left debts unpaid.
Not in this life.
Not in any.