"And when the sky is spent...
trust the one who carries the moon in his veins."
And so, the story continues...
The Pass had gone quiet.
Inside the crude stone perimeter, the air hung heavy with smoke, wet iron, and the sharp stink of fear barely held in check.
"Shields," Bailor ordered.
Not a shout. Just a hard, controlled word passed from mouth to mouth.
"Rock wall. No fire. No steel on stone."
Nearly a hundred men moved as one.
Slow.
Deliberate.
Shields rose and locked together overhead, forming a jagged shell of iron. Loose stones from the split ridge were hauled into place hand to hand, each set down with deliberate care to avoid noise.
Frantic, but organized.
Minutes.
That's all it took.
They had built themselves a bunker between the twin cliffs: rough walls, a shielded roof, and narrow openings facing each end of the Pass.
They built a box.
No.
It's a tomb with guard posts.
Bailor stood at the center, atop a flat slab of shale. His gilded armor caught the brazier light—an image of a true Lord Commander, even with a Legion of bandages and wide eyes.
The horn's echo was still dying off the far cliff. He'd called the halt himself.
No more noise.
He swept his gaze across the remnants of the Fifth.
Bandaged men. Bloodshot eyes. Broken shields.
Still standing.
"Steady yourselves!" His voice was a practiced baritone, cutting through the silence. His voice didn't need to boom.
It carried.
He let his words sink in as his men listened.
"The vines hit us when we charged… when we burned them… when we screamed." His jaw tightened, the gold plates of his gorget catching the firelight.
"So, we give them nothing."
A ripple of focus passed through the ranks.
Not confidence.
Not yet.
But they stopped shaking.
"The Brier is not a god. It is a mindless beast." Bailor continued, his voice steady, commanding. "And beasts can be understood." He pointed toward the Eye without looking at it.
"We do not provoke it," Bailor continued. "We do not advance. We wait."
One exhausted soldier near the outer wall shifted his footing too quickly, armor scraping against stone with a harsh screech.
Every man nearby froze.
Even Bailor stopped speaking.
Nothing came from the dark.
No movement.
No twitching vines.
"Steady," Bailor snapped.
The man froze, his glare pinning the man.
"Control," he said quietly. "That is how we survive."
The tension eased by a fraction.
Bailor's cape snapped in the cold draft as he turned back to the crowd. "General Ful is on the way." That earned more eyes.
More hope.
"We hold the mouth of the Pass. We hold the walls. And we hold time itself."
He stopped pacing, looking each survivor directly in the eye, letting his absolute certainty infect them.
He pointed toward the shadowed depths of the Needle Eye.
"When the sun reaches its peak, we will carve our names into history."
His voice rose now, filling the stone enclosure.
His voice rasped, as if the victory was already won. "We are the Legion…" He leaned forward, counting the achievements on his gauntleted fingers. "…who had crossed the Riverbed of ice thorns!"
A murmur of assent rippled through his men. They shifted, settling into their positions, their breaths slowing. At the mention of the ice-spiked riverbed they had survived, a collective intake of breath stirred the ranks.
The tension eased, just slightly.
"…who had survived the Cursed Vines!" A low growl went through the veterans, their grips tightening on their spears as they remembered the thorned coils.
"And before this day ends…" Bailor hissed, his eyes wide with a manic, driving ambition, "We are the Legion…"
He paused, letting the words hang in the air like a blade poised to strike.
His gaze swept over his men, lingering on each face as if daring them to doubt him. Then, with a voice like thunder rolling across the pass, he continued:
"…who will drag out the Young Wolf himself."
That struck deepest.
Barik.
The name alone made gauntlets tighten on spear shafts.
A sudden, fierce sharpening of the air.
The old, familiar hunger of the hunt instantly replaced the fear of the mountain.
Bailor's voice dropped to gravel, as if the victory were already won.
"Only WE could do that."
The murmur that came back wasn't assent.
Only I... am capable of this, Bailor thought as he looked over them.
Only I! And his name would carve the greatest legend of the Iron Order! He reveled in the thought, though he kept it locked behind his teeth, unspoken.
A muffled, disciplined salute followed as a dozen soldiers tapped their fists softly against their leather-wrapped breastplates, careful not to disturb the Brier. They settled into their positions, breaths slowing, waiting for high noon.
Morale was a fragile glass. Thin. Cracked.
But Bailor had stopped it from breaking.
At that moment, it hadn't shattered.
No.
Not yet.
For a moment, it worked.
The wind moved.
Armor creaked softly.
No one spoke.
Then the ground ticked.
It was a small sound.
Almost nothing.
A faint, brittle click beneath the soldiers' boots.
The ground was slowly freckled with white, frost creeping across the stone like a disease.
Bailor's horse, the only one in his group, reared first, its ears flat against its skull, sensing the danger before any of them.
With a shrill whinny, it bolted, galloping toward the mouth of the Needle Eye, as if drawn by an unseen hand. Kept running straight to Eris, flanks heaving, eyes white with fear
Bailor's eyes went wide. "You traitorous—"
His vice frowned.
"Commander...?"
The earth answered.
Then the ground didn't vibrate.
It punched.
A crack split the silt before the rock wall, thin as a hairline at first, then yawned wide with a hiss like steam escaping a furnace. Silver light pulsed from the fissure, snaking toward the stones like liquid lightning.
Explosions.
Not fire.
Not stone.
But bursts of silver energy erupted from the ground beneath Bailor's men. Three soldiers screamed as the blasts tore through them, their armor pierced, their bodies thrown back like broken dolls. Two more staggered, eyes wide open from shock, bleeding from the shrapnel of shattered rock.
The spikes were not straight. But angled. Like a spiderweb drawn in blood. They took whoever stood on them: up through boot, through leg, through chest, lifting them before they could scream.
For a heartbeat, no one understood.
Then the second blast came.
The icy ground totally erupted.
Not in lines.
Not in patterns.
"Shields!" someone shouted.
But no one knew where or what they had to face their shields.
The icy ground totally erupted.
Not in lines.
Not in patterns.
But in violent, jagged bursts, throwing men into one another in a frenzy of steel and blood. It burst sideways from the ground, shattering their formation as if it had never existed.
"What in the hells?!" Bailor shrieked, thrown from his perch as another spine tore through the bunker.
"Abandon the wall! Now!" Bailor roared, his voice lost in the screams of his men. His men scattered, climbing over the rock wall, trampling each other in their panic.
A spike of silver-veined stone erupted beneath Bailor, piercing his thigh before he could react. It burned with a cold heat, like frost and fire twisted together, as it tore through his flesh. He collapsed, roaring in pain, his hand clutching the wound as blood seeped through his fingers.
Bailor sprinted, his thigh burning with every step. The spike had torn through his armor, grazing his flesh, not deep, but enough to sting like hellfire.
The rock wall they had frantically built was suddenly their greatest enemy as the earth's pressure forced the shale inward.
The shield roof came apart. Men didn't push. They burst, tearing their own wall down to get away from the cold that was killing them faster than the thorns.
Up the slope!" he roared. "Move! Move!" But there was nothing to hold onto on the slope of the twin peaks. Men fell, back over their fallen comrades.
A second spike took him before he finished. It punched up through his calf, tearing through muscle, scraping bone.
He went down hard. The slab under him split like dry wood. Bailor swore under his breath, his teeth clenched against the pain.
His adjutant was on him before the spike hit. The man hauled Bailor up by the collar, stepping over bodies—dead, dying, still twitching—and dragged him toward the wall as another spine tore through the fray, pinning two more men before they could run.
Bailor didn't look back.
Looking back was for dead men.
They hit the slope, swearing as he frantically escaped. He kept going, and only when his boots found dirt instead of frost did he dare stop.
He dropped to one knee. Breath sawed in and out.
Half his cohort was with him.
Maybe.
The box was gone. In its place was a clot of rock spikes, crisscrossing each other, with bloodied silver frost smoking off them. Some even had dead bodies hanging on them.
The disciplined silence Bailor had cultivated vanished into a cacophony of panicked boots and clashing steel.
The Legionnaires, trapped in their own fortress, were like rats in a flooding nest, scrambling over one another to escape the blind, lashing vines that were now whipping through the fissures in the floor.
Bailor spat. His spit froze before it hit the ground. His hand went to his thigh, fingers coming away red.
And there, in the distance, stood his horse—unharmed, calm, as if it had found sanctuary in the shadows of the Needle's Eye.
"Damned beasts!" Bailor spat, his voice raw with frustration.
"This isn't the Brier!" Bailor shouted, stumbling back.
"What is it?" another man cried.
Bailor didn't answer.
Because for the first time,
he was no longer unperturbed.
He had accounted for the vines.
For the Walkers.
For the terrain.
But not this.
The earth answered a call none of them could hear.
And Bailor felt it then.
Not fear of the enemy in front of him,
But the sickening realization that the ground beneath his feet
Was no longer his.
"Gas?!" someone said.
But there was no gas. No flame. Only the silver light, fading as quickly as it had come, and the corpses smoldering where it had struck.
"Vents," Bailor muttered. "Old volcanic vents."
He had to believe it. Because the other answer was that the mountain had teeth, and it had chosen to bite.
His men had to believe it too; otherwise, they would feel death god itself had come for them instead.
The seam snapped shut with a sound like a book closing.
Silence.
***
Back at the mouth of the Needle Eye, Eris slowly withdrew his hands from the dirt.
His palms were stained with a shimmering, silver grit, and a thin trail of blood ran from his nose, cooling instantly in the harsh mountain air.
He stumbled backward, his knees giving out, but Kaylah caught him by the back of his tunic, holding him upright. "Breathe," she urged, her voice tight. "Eris, breathe."
Eris choked in a lungful of air.
It burned.
Then—
A thunderous hoofbeat echoed through the pass.
All eyes snapped toward the sound as Bailor's horse—wild-eyed, flanks lathered—galloped into the shadows of the Needle Eye.
It skidded to a stop just feet from Eris, its nostrils flaring, its breath coming in ragged bursts. It didn't bolt. It didn't rear. It stood there, trembling, as if it had found the one place in the world where it was safe.
Like it was asking for shelter.
Like it knew him.
Eris reached out a trembling hand, his fingers leaving silver-dusted smudges on the horse's dark muzzle.
Barik stared at it.
"That's Bailor's mount," he muttered.
Barik grabbed Eris' arm, yanking him deeper into the shadows of the Black Brier, away from the open pass.
"What in the hells was that?!" he hissed, his wide eyes darting between Eris and the ridge.
"What happened?" Dara whispered, her gaze fixed on the distant Legion camp, where the disciplined Fifth was dissolving into a screaming mass of panic. "I thought the Brier only targeted what it could hear."
"It does," Eris said weakly, his voice hollow, completely drained of energy.
His pupils were still unnaturally wide, the remnants of the Serpent's Eye fading slowly.
"But I didn't make a noise." His lips twitched, dry. "I made a connection."
He couldn't explain it with words.
So he showed them.
He opened his left hand.
The Obsidian Stain.
The plum-sized black void at the center of his palm was starkly open.
Only this time, it wasn't consuming light.
It was bleeding silver.
Where it had once greedily swallowed the silver power of the Great Serpent back at the Oak, it was now acting as an exhaust. It spewed a faint, rhythmic mist of silver light.
Along his forearm, the intricate patterns of his Frost-Lace had faded to the dead, dull color of old scar tissue—until none of it could be seen.
It had used the void as a conduit, channeling the silver energy through the veins beneath the ground, prodding the sleeping streams to act for him.
"The silver veins," Eris whispered, his voice raw. "Ruvio said... 'the mountain remembers winter... remembers me.'" (1)
His hand trembled. "I just woke what was sleeping. And it's easier for them to remember me with my Frost-Lace."
Barik's expression hardened with sudden understanding. He had seen the boy absorb the power at the Great Oak; he had just witnessed the reverse. Eris hadn't created a weapon; he had acted as a lightning rod.
The group fell silent.
Eris looked at them, his pupils still dilated from the Serpent's Eye. "The deep-seeing eye let me see the veins," he continued, leaning weakly against the weeping stone. "But the Frost-Lace was what touched them."
He pointed shakily toward the ground beneath the pass.
"I didn't create the spikes. This pass is full of pressure left behind since the fall of Celestia. I just… touched a nerve. The Frost-Lace guided it." His voice faltered. "Still, I missed most of the veins."
Dara stared at him, her daggers half-drawn, as if unsure whether to protect him or fear him. "You turned the land itself into an executioner."
"Eris tapped the veins," Kaylah corrected, her eyes flicking back to the distant Legion camp, now scattered and shaken.
"And yet," Dara muttered, "he still nearly wiped out half a Legion."
From deeper within the pass came the distant sound of shouting.
"They're afraid…" she muttered. "…shouting about gas."
"Good," Barik growled. "Let them."
Then he exhaled heavily and glanced toward the ridge.
"The Walkers missed the fun. Probably left their position. If not, they could've whittled down the survivors."
The Brier stirred behind them, its thorns creaking as the vapor from the blue powder faded. The path was closing.
Dara noticed immediately.
"The mask is fading," she warned, her eyes tracking the shifting thorns. "We need to move."
Barik clenched his jaw. "Then we must hurry."
Understanding the lore wasn't finished.
And the Brier wasn't done with them yet.
He looked at the remaining blurred line below. "Alright. The last verse..." His voice hardened. "Eris."
Eris steadied himself against the wall. He focused on the blurred carvings. And then he read, his voice barely above a whisper—almost reverent:
"And when the sky is spent…"
The silver in the stone flickered.
"…trust the one who carries the moon in his veins."
Silence fell over the group.
Then—
A distant rumble echoed from the depths of the Needle Eye, like stone grinding against stone.
The Brier stirred behind them, its thorns creaking as if awakening from a long slumber.
And the frost-lace on Eris's arm—faint, but pulsing—flared once, like a dying ember struggling to burn.
***