Our procession moved again. Slow, but steady.

  The Pot Solution had taken more from us than it gave. Every attempt left burns—hands wrapped in rags, palms leaking through the cloth. The smell of singed hair hung in the air long after we were done. In the end, Ahlia did it. She stepped into the heat, lowered the steel over Malin without flinching, and walked back out again. The metal still shook from the fire inside.

  What tents hadn’t been scorched were taken down. Canvas folded while still warm to the touch. Poles clattered into bundles. Much of our equipment was bent, blackened, or crushed underfoot, but anything that could still be lifted was brought. Useless or not, it came with us.

  The followers had thinned. Wives of hired men gave their last farewells, no longer arguing or pleading—simply accepting. The scholars’ families left in the same quiet way. Children were sent off under guard. Most of the whores were gone before dawn; they understood better than any of us what sort of road lay ahead.

  It was clear to everyone now: whatever name our mission once held, it was gone.

  This was a march into danger—ours or the world’s.

  Felthaven emptied with hardly a word. We had ordered evacuation, but the order was needless—they had been waiting for it, bags half-packed, eyes fixed on the ridgeline as if expecting the sky to split again at any moment.

  The clouds had not lifted since the storm. They hung low and swollen, dragging their weight across the valley. No one doubted they would break a second time, and with far less restraint.

  The tally was taken as we departed.

  Eighty-six sheep, dead. Three shepherd hounds with them. No wounds worth noting—no burns, no tearing—merely bodies gone slack in the mud. Whether it was fear, lightning, or something worse, no one could say.

  Two of our own.

  Gallus Schinker, scholar-in-study, crushed beneath the ribs of a collapsed tent. His notes scattered across the ground, unreadable under the soot.

  Birger Viglund, a gunner—killed by lightning, so the men claimed. His death was inconclusive, and their word had to be taken.

  John drifted in and out of consciousness, muttering fragments of names and memories we had no business hearing. He would need to be questioned again once his mind settled back into itself.

  And Halvdan had not spoken a single word to me since I gave voice to what touched me. He had found a different carriage for now. I would let him digest the new order in peace.

  I lifted my eyes from the map and took in the line around me.

  Wagons ahead, wagons behind—an uneven column of cracked wheels, hurried repairs, and men walking with their weapons unshouldered, always glancing into the trees. The scouts fanned out along the flanks, checking every rise and hollow as we pushed through the thinning woods. No conversation carried. Only the grind of axles and the occasional call to halt when someone thought they saw movement on a ridge.

  At the rear crawled the thing I tried not to look at for long.

  A wagon dragging a coffin in name only—boards warped, joints split, ropes knotted together from whatever scraps we could find. The whole assembly groaned under its own weight. A jury-rigged wheel frame kept it from capsizing, though it swayed with every rut in the road.

  And atop it, straddling the center like a throne built in haste, sat the pot.

  The same steel pot that held the Walking Flame.

  Fire spat from its seams without rhythm, violent bursts that reminded me less of a saint’s miracle than of a blast furnace forced past reason. Each flare lit the nearby trees in brief, sharp color. The wagon-bed blackened further each hour, and the men assigned to guard it kept their distance, hands raised against the heat.

  Damned it all. God damn it all. What station did He truly hold above us?

  I kept my eyes low as the thought churned. The sky offered nothing but threat now—no comfort, no promise. Only thunder waiting its moment, darkness crouched behind the clouds, the memory of that red veil still clinging to the edges of sight. I had no desire to look into it again.

  How long had He been in multiplicity? How long had there been more than one presence crowding the heavens? Had these unseen things pushed into His realm, or had He pushed into theirs? Or were they simply two faces of the same power—rival truths bound together, indistinguishable except in their cruelty?

  Malin came to mind—death walking in human shape, yet burning with something like grace.

  Guitred—immortal, but held together by spite and torment.

  Ahlia—her pain unending, her salvation carved from that very pain.

  I felt myself drift toward the edge of some thought I didn’t want to meet. Some realization waiting to latch onto the mind and never let go.

  What cosmic madness had touched me?

  A hard thump at my leg snapped me out of the drift.

  Renhard stood there, pistol still in his striking hand. His face was set tight, the lines around his mouth carved deep with contempt. He slid the weapon back into its holster. At least that told me he wasn’t here to finish me.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Get your mind out of the gutter, you sodden fuckin’ oaf.” His voice was a low grind. He looked me over, slow, weighing whether I’d lost more than my wits in the storm.

  “The clouds parted and screamed at us. Men lost. Supplies burnt to cinders. Tents gone. And you still insist we march.” He tapped his temple with two fingers, that slow rhythm meant to insult. “Half the rags, wives, and bastards have fled. What d’you think that does to morale? Their women walking away from them like they’re already corpses? The whores leaving before they can even pretend there’s hope?”

  “It is good,” I said. “They slowed us. They ate our food. And they would only raise the death toll when the inevitable comes.”

  Renard’s eyes lit up—sharp, quick. For a moment I was certain he meant to draw on me, end the argument with a single shot. Instead he stepped back, boots sinking slightly in the rutted earth, and lifted his arm in a crisp arc.

  “HALT!”

  The shout rolled through the column. Wagon-braces creaked as drivers reined in their teams. Men slowed mid-stride, weapons half-raised, the usual clatter of travel tightening into a hard, expectant quiet.

  He seized my coat and pulled me down from the cart. My feet hit the mud unsteadily, the jolt running up through already-tender ribs.

  “The University promised good pay for this,” he said, close enough that his breath—stale liquor, old blood—hit my face in uneven bursts. “What in God’s sullen name is gold worth if you are fucking dead?”

  His grip tightened, forcing my spine straight. The lines around his mouth twitched, as though holding in something sharper than anger.

  “For some ragged academic longing for his body to rot?!”

  “Let go of him at once, if you wish to see a single coin again in your life!”

  That voice. Interfering when he was not needed. Halvdan.

  To his credit, Renhard’s grip did slacken a fraction at the barked command. His fingers eased from the collar, though the tension in his arm remained coiled and ready.

  “You wish t’ speak for this cretin? What for, can’t you see he begs for my blade already?” Renhard snarled. I heard his sword drag a slow inch against the leather of its sheath—a threat made tactile.

  “Sir, to what end is an expedition if it does not bring news?” Halvdan began, sliding into that polished cadence he wielded like a tool. His tone gave off that faint scent of superiority he never bothered to hide. “Do you truly think this is an expedition to martyrdom?”

  Renhard’s jaw tightened. Halvdan continued.

  “Records written, for none to read? Witnesses, measurements, all for naught?”

  He tapped a quick, insistent finger against the spine of his book, eyes fixed on the sellsword with a scholar’s cold focus.

  “No. A return will be made—when answers are found. And haste, sir, will decide whether that time is soon… or in the far future.”

  He stepped forward, closing the gap with quiet, deliberate poise, his boots settling into the mud without a sound out of place.

  “And so I ask,” he said, voice lower now, “how does halting our advance and strangling your master help in finding a shortened return?”

  A long moan followed—low, drawn out, the sound of a predator ready to kill but too drained to finish the motion. Then his fingers slipped from my coat. He let go.

  “ADVANCE!”

  The command cracked through the air with the same sharp snap as before. Even soaked in anger, Renhard’s discipline held; the column lurched forward at once, wheels creaking, boots grinding back into motion.

  He rounded on Halvdan instead, rage shifting targets without losing heat.

  “Reign in your lunatic before he’s killed. If I don’t do it, he’ll surely do it ’imself.”

  Then he strode off, shoulders rigid, searching for something else to break under the weight of his temper.

  My neck throbbed from the rough handling. I felt the tug where seams had given way, cloth strained by fingers that meant to bruise. Still—I stood. A small victory, perhaps.

  Halvdan’s eyes met mine. Pity softened the edges of his stare, as though he were already watching a man slip into his grave. He took in my posture, my breath, the wildness he feared was rising in me.

  “What nonsense have you spouted now?” he asked, voice pitched low, meant only for me. “What—more of your doom and gloom? Skies that judge us and gods that hate us?”

  “I spoke the truth. Same as I did to you.”

  That shifted something in him immediately. A look I had not seen in years surfaced—raw anger, stripped of his usual restraint. He swallowed it down, forced his voice into a narrowed, trembling hiss.

  “The truth? By all that is holy, you have spoken nothing but death and bile since you collapsed,” he said, each word clipped by the effort to keep them quiet.

  “You dismissed even the notion of ‘gods’ a month ago. Mocked it. Now you concede to several! You stare at the horizon as though it promises some release no one asked for, and no one needs.”

  He didn’t understand. He couldn’t.

  “I have been reached, Halvdan,” I said. “Touched, to my core—to my bones. Voices of saints and demons, words that would shatter any sane man.”

  “Who calls you sane, Otto? Renhard was prepared to kill because he sees what I see—a man on the brink, dragging the camp with him into oblivion. Tell me it is not so. Tell me you have a purpose clearer than marching to the edge of the world just to lay down.”

  “I do.”

  The words barely left my throat.

  I looked back along the line.

  Somewhere behind us, Ahlia sat in her meditation, holding her blood in check through sheer will. Guitred—dead, alive, whatever he was—rode stiff on a wagon, locked in battle with a darkness we could not see. And above us, always above us, that sky waiting to open again.

  “I intend to find what has cursed us,” I said. “The heavens are out of our reach.”

  I took Halvdan by the arm. He twitched as if to return the hold, out of old habit, but the strength of that bond was thinning, fraying with every league we marched.

  “But the darkness can be found on earth too,” I said. “Tell me—what do we find in the North?”

  “The North?”

  His voice was small. Uncertain.

  “The Eastern League,” I answered. “In their blasted land of soot and hellfire. Further from sanity than any land we know.”

  Halvdan paled. The color left him so quickly it might as well have been torn out.

  “You do wish us dead,” None of his performance was needed—just a plain, exhausted conclusion.

  “No.” I steadied myself on the word. “But death we will find. Along with the answers we seek.”

  “And what is that, my friend?” he asked, though the word friend trembled.

  “Understand me, Halvdan,” I whispered. This thought belonged to no one else. It could not leave us.

  “I do not wish to see us dead.”

  I shaped each word like a stone set into earth.

  “I only wish to see what wants us dead—and to kill it myself.”