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Chapter 47 - The Last Stand of Sunstone

Hope is a stubborn weed, but the legion's approach was a killing frost. Malleus and Noctua, the two members of the Ashen Canopy left to guard the forest, sent a desperate runner to Sunstone. They had harried the Hegemony's flanks, creating rockslides and leading patrols astray, but it was like trying to stop a tidal wave with a wicker fence. They were only two men against a thousand. The legion was not being deterred. They were three days out.

Elara knew what this meant. It was not a raid. It was an extermination.

She gathered her people in the village center. The faces staring back at her were filled with a stark, quiet terror. They were hunters, farmers, and artisans, not soldiers.

"The men of iron are coming," Elara announced, her voice steady despite the tremor in her heart. "They will show no mercy. We cannot defeat them." She let the brutal truth hang in the air, extinguishing the last, foolish embers of heroic defiance.

"But we are the people of the Warden," she continued, her voice rising. "And the Warden's law is survival. The survival of our children. The survival of our future."

Her plan was a desperate gamble, born of a mother's fierce love and a leader's heavy sacrifice. The fighting men and women of the village would stay. They would hold the palisade for as long as possible. Not to win. Not to bargain. But to buy time.

Their true legacy, their only hope, lay with their children.

She turned to Malleus, the hulking, masked Enforcer who had come with the runner. His presence was terrifying, but he was a relic of their age of safety, a final gift from their lost king.

"Malleus," she said. "The Warden's Spire. You know the way?"

He nodded, his black iron mask a pit of shadows.

"Take the children," she commanded, her voice thick with unshed tears. "All of them. Take them to the Spire. It is the only place in this forest the Hegemony will not dare to go. Guard them there. Keep them safe. This is my final decree as Chieftain."

A wail went through the crowd as mothers and fathers understood the sacrifice she was asking of them. To part with their children, perhaps forever, sending them into the heart of the Warden's own lair, entrusted to a masked monster. It was a choice between a certain death and a terrifyingly unknown life.

There was no time for long goodbyes. The parting was a flurry of tear-streaked faces, of last desperate hugs, of small hands clutching treasured trinkets. Elara knelt before her own son, a boy of five named Kaelen, after the Hegemony spymaster's name she had overheard her Warden whisper in his troubled sleep once, a strange tribute. He had his father's kind eyes and her own fierce spirit.

"You must be brave, little hawk," she whispered, pressing the old Warden-doll into his hands. "Go with Malleus. He is a friend. Stay in the dark King's house until I come for you." It was a lie, a kind lie, and it broke her heart to tell it.

Malleus, the silent Enforcer, became the unlikeliest of shepherds. He gathered the twenty-seven children of Sunstone, a huddled, weeping flock, and with a last, acknowledging nod to Elara, he led them away from the village and into the deep woods, on the secret path to the Ashen Spire. They were Sunstone's living memory, a desperate exodus into the heart of shadow.

The remaining two hundred villagers prepared for the end. They did not have steel, but they had ingenuity. They dug pits lined with sharpened stakes. They boiled pitch and gathered stones. They reinforced the gate with everything they had. The hunters took to the trees outside the walls, bows in hand, ready to sell their lives dearly.

They did not have to wait long.

The legion arrived not with the roar of a conquering army, but with the cold, inexorable efficiency of an exterminator. They surrounded the palisade, their ranks a perfect, glittering wall of iron. Catapults, rebuilt and improved, were wheeled into place. General Kael gave the order.

The first volley shattered the gate. The second tore through the roof of the great hall. Fire and splintered wood rained down. The defense of Sunstone lasted less than an hour.

The hunters in the trees were ruthlessly efficient, their arrows finding the chinks in the Hegemony armor, felling a dozen soldiers before they were systematically hunted down and killed. Elara, standing on the archer's platform over the broken gate, fired arrow after arrow, her face a mask of cold, defiant fury. She fought not for victory, but for every extra minute she could buy for Malleus and the children.

When the legionaries finally stormed the village, it was a massacre. The villagers fought with the desperation of cornered animals. They used axes, hunting spears, and farming tools. They fought in their homes, in their fields, in the ashes of their great hall. It was brave. It was desperate. And it was futile. The tide of iron washed over them, extinguishing the life of Sunstone hearth by hearth.

Elara was among the last to fall. She stood her ground on the steps of the council hall, her bow broken, a short spear in her hand. A Hegemony centurion, his shield scarred and his armor dented, faced her.

"Surrender, woman," he said, showing a sliver of respect for her ferocity. "The Archon wants the Chieftain taken alive."

For an answer, Elara screamed a wordless cry of pure, undiluted rage—a cry not for herself, but for her lost son, her dying people, and her absent, silent king—and charged. She managed to score a deep gash on the centurion's arm before his sword found its mark.

She fell, the world dissolving into a red haze. Her last sight was of the sky above the smoke-choked trees of the Blackwood. Her last thought, a final, fading pulse through the cold, slack line of the Soul Anchor, was a single, heartbreaking question sent into the void.

'Did they make it?'

When the fighting was done, General Kael walked through the ruins of Sunstone. Every building was burning. Every man and woman lay dead. It was a total, absolute victory. His scouts reported no survivors, no one who had fled into the woods.

He stood over the body of the Chieftain, the fierce woman with the spear. He felt a grim satisfaction. The stain of the Blackwood was finally being cleansed.

He gave the order to torch everything that remained.

And miles away, deep in the mountain's heart, a hulking figure of black iron and bone ushered a small, terrified group of children through the doors of a silent, waiting fortress. The last child, a small boy clutching a crudely carved doll, looked back at the plume of smoke rising from the direction of his home. Tears streamed down his face, but he made no sound. The Spire was now a sanctuary. An orphanage. The final, desperate legacy of the village that had prayed to the Ashen King.

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