Ruins of Dunmar Hold, Southern Edge of Velgrath
They arrived at dawn. Or what passed for it—just a smear of weak gray light through overcast skies. The ruins of Dunmar Hold sprawled across a bluff of broken shale, its towers collapsed inward like snapped bones. Black moss clung to the stone, and half the gate had crumbled into a chasm split by the shifting earth during the Great Quake thirty winters past.
Harwin spat. "If you'd told me we were riding to a tomb, I'd have brought incense."
"It's not a tomb," Aeron said, dismounting. "It's a reminder."
The wind howled through empty windows. Birds had long since abandoned the place.
Only the dead nested here.
They entered through the side wall, where frost-heaved masonry left an opening wide enough to crawl. Inside, the old hall still stood—a shell of itself, its rafters exposed to the sky, ivy hanging like a widow's veil. A few cracked benches, blackened hearthstones, and the remnants of banners long rotted.
Aeron knelt at the center, brushing aside snow and ash. Beneath it, scorched stone. He traced a sigil once carved there: a thistle wrapped in a crown.
The crest of House Thorne, half-burned, half-buried.
Harwin stood over him. "You knew this place?"
"My grandfather's last stand. He refused to bend the knee to the usurper. They razed it, and every man inside. But the name—" Aeron's hand clenched into a fist. "—the name never burned."
That night, they made camp in the old wine cellars, the only place dry enough to sleep. The boy found a rack of rusted swords buried under dirt and rat bones. One bore the markings of Thorne steel—triple-forged, narrow hilt, runes worn nearly smooth.
He held it up. "This yours?"
"It was ours," Aeron said. "Now it's yours. Hold it like it means something."
Later, Harwin approached him with a quiet intensity. "You're building toward something. I've seen the way you listen. The way you look before you speak."
"I'm not building," Aeron said. "I'm remembering. There's a difference."
"Aye," Harwin muttered. "But the dead don't need keeps."
"Neither do ghosts," Aeron said. "But we need both to scare the living."
Before dawn, Aeron climbed to the broken ramparts. The sky had cleared, and he could see smoke in the far east—thin trails from patrols or merchants. But to the south, no banners yet flew. Only wind and silence.
He took the token coin from his cloak, the one split with fire and time.
And with flint and steel, he scorched the earth beneath his feet.
A signal fire rose.
Low. Small. But lit.