It was the hour before light, that bruised part of morning when sleep grows thin and the cold feels oldest. I had just begun to drift again when the knock came—hurried, dull, flesh to wood.

  "Sir," came the voice, strained but respectful. "It's the village. Disturbance. People on the road."

  I rose with practiced ache. No time to panic, no need. My boots were at the foot of the cot, my coat folded over the back of the chair. Mesk was already there with the rest—belt, gorget, sabre. He did not need instruction. There was no fumbling, no clatter. Just the methodical motions of a man who’d done this longer than I’d commanded him.

  The village—Kesselbruck—lay some few hundred meters southward, a huddle of damp cottages and thatched hope, separated from the fort by a single road carved through the marsh like a scar. We called it a "road". Truly, it was a raised spine of stone and timber barely wide enough for one cart to pass.

  I stepped out onto the parapet. The eastern sky was still black, cowered in that darkness that promised a long, cold night. Below, the road shimmered with movement—too fast, and too many. Figures stumbling, rushing. Old men with crutches. Children on hips. One woman held a rooster like a relic. Villagers. Fleeing.

  The wind carried their cries, ragged with cold and panic.

  "Rouse the yard," I barked. "Get me all officers, all watch leads. Sound the drum."

  Mesk was already halfway to the stairwell.

  "Drill stations! All hands! Muskets and powder to the wall! Get the horses saddled and the scouts mounted—we need eyes on the village before we shoot at shadows!"

  The orders came from my throat like it had always been there. The muscle remembered, even if the men would not.

  "Load the guns," I called down, seeing the silhouettes of our half-buried cannon along the south wall. "Full charge. I want ball and chains. Make noise if nothing else!"

  Lanterns bobbed into movement. Boots hit stone. Pikes clattered as they were pulled from racks and thrust into unsteady hands. The youngest among them blinked like calves for slaughter, but they moved. Formation tempered fear.

  The drums began. Slow at first, then firm. A rhythm to beat back hesitation.

  I looked again to the dark road, were villagers still came, some falling in the rush, some clutching the hems of others. Their faces were gray with frost and fear.

  And ahead of them—still too far to see clearly—was the thing that drove them.

  But for now, the men moved. And that meant we had a chance.

  The drums carried us—wordless order through the birth-throes of panic. Every beat a command older than language. Our drummer boy had come from the village—Kesselbruck’s own—and he’d been a good one. Had rhythm in his bones and a smile too quick for his years. We liked him. We would see to it that his mother was kept safe.

  A rolling cadence now, urgent and insistent. I saw the line of men form by instinct, dragged forward by that beat. Even the slowest ones picked up their feet as if pulled. It was the drum that moved them, not me. Not yet.

  I looked to their faces. Some hollow. Some clenched like fists. But many met my gaze, and held it. That, too, was instinct. In confusion, men look to command. To the rock. Not because it always knows, but because it must pretend it does—until instinct and training takes over.

  "Troops! Parapets! Steady and hold!" I shouted, voice hard over the beat.

  The drum slowed, softened—like a boil settling to a simmer. Still present. Still urgent. But now mirroring the rising breath of tension, that moment before the blade is drawn and doubt is severed.

  Then came my officers—those few still sharp enough to hold a line and grim enough to know what it costs. Riedel led the way, jaw clenched like a man already counting the dead. Vollmer moved precisely, already calculating vectors, wind, and time. Brandt limped but did not waver, his cane rapping the stone with quiet punctuation. Kristoff kept close, eyes narrowed, face pale in the half-light.

  They fell in beside me without word or signal, their eyes fixed on the rising motion in the fog. Each man already knew something was wrong. They could smell it in the air—the marsh too still, the drums too slow.

  No one spoke the question, but it hung between us like a frost: why this direction? Why now? Why like this?

  Riedel finally voiced it. “Not the Gustavics?”

  I didn’t answer immediately. I just watched the marsh. The fog hadn’t lifted. The stragglers where still hobbling across the path.

  “God willing,” I muttered. “But I don’t like the shape of what’s not there.”

  "Marauders?" Brandt rasped, his voice like dried leaves scraping a window. "Have the cutthroats finally dropped their stones?"

  Vollmer shook his head. "No, not here. Too exposed. We have too great a position. If it were the Gustavics, they’d flank us. Quiet-like. Take the north ridge, damn them to hell."

  Kristoff was scanning the southern fog, torchlight reflected faintly in his eyes. "And no cannon? No scouts ahead? They’d never try a frontal approach. Suicide."

  "Unless they’ve gone mad," Riedel muttered, jaw tight.

  "The riders will get us answers," I said, more to myself than to them.

  We all turned our gaze to the marsh path. There they were—our pistoliers—five riders flashing like fireflies through fog, torches held high, the steam off their mounts visible even at distance. Riding like the Devil himself had licked their backs. Already at the edge of Kesselbruck.

  The silence between the next few drumbeats was long enough to feel like prophecy.

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  They filtered into Kesselbruck like pebbles thrown across a board—quick, scattered, precise. Torches high, sabres sheathed. Moments later, the first wave of villagers pounded on our gates, fists and palms and sticks alike. We opened for them, of course.

  "Gatewatch!" I barked, already descending the stairs. "Question any with a tongue left in their skull! Dumbfounded or not, I want recognition, I want numbers—enemy, beast, anomaly, I do not care! Give me cause!"

  Inside the yard, the panic was more contained. Mesk and the reserve men herded the villagers inward, pushing them past the gates like cattle through a firebreak. Some collapsed on the stone. Others stood trembling. One boy was still clutching a mud-soaked doll.

  I turned back to my officers. "Give me status of your lines. I want numbers, ammunition, and names of the ones who’ve pissed themselves. We hold this wall if the sky cracks in half. Understood?"

  Riedel nodded first, terse and fast. Vollmer followed with a wordless salute. Brandt spat into the dirt, his version of commitment. Kristoff looked paler than usual—but he was already moving, shouting names down the north stair.

  They’d follow me into fire. And fire, I feared, was coming.

  We didn’t wait long. The first rider was already halfway back before the last refugee cleared the gate. He tossed his torch wide as he rode—marking the path, a light for the cannon to aim. The others followed suit. A trail of fire along the road, like a fuse set to our powder stores.

  “An army of them!” he screamed as he pulled hard at the reins. “Blemmye! Hundreds! Spears, clubs, walking like they’ve drilled for war! Where in the hells are they coming from—and who taught them to march?!”

  My throat dried. I stepped back to the parapet and stared into the haze where the torch-flares still guttered.

  A murmur began among the men on the wall, and then a hush.

  From the fog, forms emerged. A slow and steady train of towering forms..

  Blemmye. Dozens, then scores. One after another, walking with awful precision. They bore tools more than weapons—driftwood spears, clubs wrapped in cord, rusted blades that remembered service. And they sang.

  It was faint, and with the timber of something entirely unhuman. But it was song.

  The language was older than I could place. Half-recognized syllables that scratched something in the back of the skull. A rhythm of memory. Of return.

  And then the one at the front—taller, broader, bearing what might once have been a banner—stepped clear of the mist.

  It walked the path between marsh and wall like a king on pilgrimage. Its face set where a chest should be, its limbs moving in the slow rhythm of ceremony. Behind it, the procession followed.

  This was not an assault. Not yet, at least

  This was a reminder of something claimed. Of something lost. And, perhaps, of something coming back.

  “They let out our livestock!” cried one of the villagers, his face wild with salt and snot. “Shoed them away! Opened our doors, reached for us—but we ran, oh God, we ran! They were so many!”

  It needed to stop. Now. And I feared whatever came next would not be stopped at all. This wasn’t a raid. This was something else—something remembering how to move like men, but not born of our world. A claim made by precense of will, force, and mass.

  If this was war, it would be treated as such.

  “Joseph’s Wrath!” I shouted, and the gunners stirred as one. That green-tinted bastard of bronze squatted atop the south parapet like a coiled beast—its mouth hungry and patient. One of our oldest pieces. One of the loudest.

  “Warning shot,” I said. “Close. Make him heed.”

  They knew the drill. And thank Joseph, they remembered it well.

  Three seconds. That’s all it took. Flint to steel. Cord to touchhole.

  The roar was unholy. The smell hit first—sulphur, char, old grease burning off iron. Then the recoil. And then the silence of flight.

  A cannonball makes no sound in the air. Not really. Not till the moment of reckoning. Then comes the whine. The whistling turn. The scream of speed shifting.

  It hit the dirt just ahead of their front line—no more than a man’s stride before the one with the banner. The sound of impact was obscene. And the note it left in the earth... stayed.

  The blemmye stopped.

  Their leader—still at the front, still upright—turned his gaze toward the fort. That gaze, if it could be called such, found me on the parapet. I felt it like a weight behind the eyes. I'd heard tales, from old scouts and half-mad pilgrims, about the Blemmye stare—that it saw the shape of your name more than your face. I’d never put stock in such tales. Until now.

  It did not move his gaze as he made ready to respond.

  With a low and strange grunt, it lifted its club—crudely bound, ugly as sin—and hurled it to his right. The thing flew like shot, turning once, then twice, before plunging with a wet crunch into the marsh.

  Then It stepped forward with the truest of intention. Its gait was steady, ceremonial. A march that belonged to another age.

  It raised its arm.

  It stretched it out into an accusing point. A long, harsh gesture, pointed back to the darkness he came from.

  A gesture of warning. Or challenge. Or both.

  It had heard our cannon—and answered.

  Very well, it seemed to say. But I will be heard.

  "What the fuck is that thing doing?" Brandt barked, voice cracking through the thick air. "Does he not know what a cannon does?!"

  Vollmer turned on his heel, already shouting to his flank. "First line, brace! Ready shot! Form on the wall!"

  Kristoff looked from the blemmye to me and back again, dumbfounded. "Sir, is it—challenging us?"

  Riedel grunted. "Madness. It's got no cover. It’s going to try and force the wall in with its bare fucking chest."

  I snapped out of it, the fog in my mind sharper now than the one in the marsh.

  "Hold the goddamn line!" I shouted. "Hold! And aim at the thing! What do you think, that it’ll climb the wall like an arachnid and tear the roof off with its teeth? We hold!"

  The men stilled, but only just. Their hands trembled on musket barrels. Their eyes darted—not at the blemmyes now, but to the fog behind them. Because something had shifted. The blemmye moved like a man stepping forward in court. But it wasn’t us it judged. It was the silence that followed him.

  Then Vollmer called up from the east tower, breath short: “Captain—Gustavian camp’s alive. Lights moving. Line buzzing like a fucking beehive.”

  That snapped something clean in me. The cannon shot hadn’t just drawn the attention of those in front of us—it had roused those to the east. The Gustavians were stirring. Watching. Maybe more.

  “They’ll think it was meant for them. They’ll wait for the second shot. Or fire first.”

  Too many pieces in motion. Too many barrels primed.

  The situation was no longer a standoff. It was a lit fuse—with no telling which powder keg would blow first.

  And then, it spoke.

  “Men! Fools! Will thee not heed the call?"

  The words rang clear across the field, like a sermon through bellows. The voice of a priest, full of contempt and mourning.

  My good God above, I thought. It talks like clergy.

  “Have thee not felt the changing order?" it thundered. “How doth the sky darken thus? Wilt thee hide behind stone and spear?"

  Beside the crying children, the wind, and the distant mutter of the Gustavic lines coming alive, the fort made no sound at all.

  “Judgement cometh, inevitable as entropy! It apporaches even now!"

  It spread his arms in the purest revelation. The wind echoed his final words:

  “Wilt thou heed the call?"