The capital of Issielios rose from the plain like a fortress born from the earth itself—black walls veined with pale gold, high gates plated in iron, and towers crowned with braziers that burned day and night. The Bahamut banner snapped above the inner keep: a dragon's wings outstretched across crimson cloth, its eye picked out in a gold thread that caught the sun.
The roads were crowded: ox-carts groaning under sacks of grain, soldiers marching in tight files, and families clutching what they could carry. Fear rode with them. Word of beasts pushing out of the deep forest had spread like fire on dry grass. Villages emptied. Waystations filled. Men spoke of tracks the size of shields and roars that rolled like thunder over the hills.
Zed rode in under the Latian standard, the phoenix picked in flame-thread above his father's retinue. Varun Latian did not waste motion or word; he sat straight in the saddle, eyes forward, one hand resting on the pommel of a plain sword whose sheath bore no gem or boast. The guards behind him wore red-trimmed armor and kept their formation as if it were stitched into their bones.
Inside the inner walls the city shifted from crush to order. The King's men had cleared the streets for bannermen; the crowd held back at corners, staring with a mix of hope and dread. Children pointed at banners and whispered clan names. Old men bowed, some crossing fingers over prayer beads. Drums thudded in a slow, steady pattern that seemed to measure the city's pulse.
The Great Hall of Council lay in the shadow of the inner keep. Its doors were plated in iron stamped with scenes of dragons coiling through storm-clouds. Within, light poured down from a high oculus and struck the polished stone floor, where veins of silver caught and flung it up the pillars. The air smelled faintly of oil, steel, and old incense—the smell of power and decisions that outlived the men who made them.
At the far end, upon the dais, King Azrael sat beneath Bahamut's bronze effigy. He wore no crown, only a scale-cloak that fell from one shoulder in a dark shimmer. His hair was black, his eyes a deep metal-gold that made lesser men stumble in speech. Power settled around him without effort. He did not need to raise his voice to be heard.
Zed stood a half step behind and to the right of Varun's shoulder—the place of a young master learning the weight of a banner. He kept his breath steady and eyes open. The floor here did not move; the danger did not roar at you from the brush; but it was a battlefield all the same.
The bannermen entered by rank.
First came Lord Bren Ironwood of the Ironwood Clan—broad as a gatepost, skin sun-browned, a beard shot with iron gray. He wore layered leather lined with thin plates, built to turn blades and blunt claws. At his hip hung a hammer rather than a sword. At his back strode four shield-bearers in bark-dyed cloaks. Behind them pages carried a standard showing a stone boar rearing before a mountain. When Bren bowed, the air sank as if pressed by a great weight. A dull, steady thrum rippled out—the spirit-mark of his contracted beast. In the glare of the oculus, for a blink, Zed saw the shape of it: a Granite Tusker, tusks ridged like cliff ledges, eyes like embers in ash.
Next, Lady Kyria Stormvale of the Stormvale Clan—tall, spare, with white hair braided tight, and a face that could have been cut from a lean blade. She wore a long coat with slits for ease of movement and thin metal rings sewn at the hems that chimed softly when she walked. Her standard bore a white roc on a field of slate blue. Wind pressed inward as she approached, cool and sharp; the ghost-wing of a Tempest Roc arched behind her shoulders in the light, then vanished.
Patriarch Maelor Blackthorn followed—wrapped in a black lamellar with thorns etched into each scale, lean and hawk-nosed, eyes like chips of obsidian. The Blackthorn banner showed a basilisk winding around a thorned branch. The hall's shadows seemed to pool at his feet for a heartbeat longer than they should have. A cold prickle brushed Zed's nape—the whisper of an Obsidian Basilisk's gaze, leashed but real.
Then Lord Cyran Leshonte—robes the color of night water, hair bound with a simple cord, a single jade bead at his ear. His features were calm, almost gentle, but his eyes missed nothing. The Leshonte banner showed a crane stepping across a crescent moon, ink-dark on pale cloth. As Cyran bowed, a soft hush moved through the hall, as if sound itself dipped in respect; Zed felt the brush of feathers in air that did not move, the elegant, watchful presence of a Duskmist Crane—wind and shadow woven thin and strong.
Behind Lord Cyran stood a small escort and, among them, Fuine.
She wore plain traveling clothes—soft ash-grey with a pale purple belt that drew the line of her waist, and her long black hair was tied at her hip with a short green cloth. No jewels, no war paint. And yet the eye was pulled to her. Not by daring cuts or bright color, but by a still quality that set her apart from the stir of men and banners. Her face was clear and unadorned, her gaze steady. When she lifted her eyes once, briefly, Zed felt—more than saw—the natural ease of her qi, like cool water running under smooth stone. She looked away at once. She did not speak. She stood three paces behind her father, hands folded, as if she were another quiet pillar in the hall. But Zed filed her away. A face you did not forget. A presence you did not mistake.
Last among the bannermen to step forward was Varun Latian. He bowed without flourish.
"Your Majesty," he said.
"Varun," the King said in that quiet, iron tone. "Storms gather. We must bind them or break under them."
The herald's staff struck the floor three times. The bronze rings on its length rang together with a clean, bright sound.
"Let the council be heard," the herald intoned.
The map-tables were rolled out—six long slabs of dark wood hinged together, carved with ridges and rivers, valleys and keeps. Brass pins marked clan seats and outposts; red glass beads marked confirmed beast movements; black stones marked villages already emptied or destroyed. At the map's heart the King stood, and the bannermen took their places around the edges. Zed drew near at Varun's side, eyes tracing the lines he knew from long hunting runs and recent war councils at home.
The pattern was simple and brutal. The beasts had started to shift.
A crimson wash showed the deep forest to the northwest darkened to the edge of black. The marks there told stories without words—scattered master lairs cut, and two lord signs struck entirely. Zed did not need a scribe's note to know those were his doing. In the days since, the emptiness had sucked at the wilds like a broken tooth. Packs shifted. Masters fought. New roads formed in blood.
Red beads bled outward from that bruise across ridges, down to the plains, toward farms and trade roads. Beasts do not love order. But they love the path of least hunger. They were coming.
"We have two problems," the King said, and his finger cut a line from the northwest bruise to the first ring of villages, then to the capital's southern granaries. "The first is the wave—the push of beasts driven by the vacuum in the deep. The second is men—feeding them, housing them, and keeping their courage whole."
"Call the levies," Maelor Blackthorn said at once, voice flat. "Seal the outer roads. Put fire to the fields outside the inner ring to deny cover. Pull our people behind stone and let the wave break itself bloody."
"Fire your own fields?" Bren Ironwood rumbled. "You can harvest ash if you like the taste."
"Better ash than graves," Maelor said.
Lady Kyria's rings chimed softly as she leaned in. "We'll need eyes. More than we've ever had. My rocs can range from the northern ridges to the sea. If we move now, they can chart the flows within a day and mark heavy paths. We'll need roving strike bands to cut off dense packs and keep them from forming a single wall."
"Strike bands stretched thin will get eaten one by one," Bren said. "Hold the ring. Make them come to stone and spear."
Cyran Leshonte's voice slipped into the current without raising it. "Both are true. We must harden the ring and bleed the wave before it reaches it. If the packs are starved, they will scatter—beasts bite each other when hunger grows. If they arrive fed and whole, they will bite us."
A murmur. The King said nothing. He did not need to. The hall bent toward his silence.
Varun's gaze cut to the southern map, where outlying villages were marked with pale squares. Zed saw it too, the way the lines formed: vulnerable points, thin roads, bridges that could choke a flight, runestones that could be lit to blind night raiders.
"Evacuations," Varun said. "Farm belts into clan-walls. Clan-walls into the capital if it fails. We open our granaries and double ration lines."
"Open granaries?" Maelor's mouth thinned. "Feed ten thousand who do not fight so the men who do fight starve next month?"
Zed drew a quiet breath, felt Varun's weight of presence beside him, and spoke before Maelor could turn the hall into a wall.
"The granaries will not starve," Zed said. He kept it clean and clear, no ornament, no swagger. Just the truth he had cut his own hands to find. "This is not only a disaster. It's a harvest. If we pull people into the walls, we can hunt without fear for the scattered. We set teams to skin, butcher, salt, and render. We trade meat and hides to the other realms later if we must, but we will not need to if we move fast. The forest will be lean after the tide. We will have a year, maybe two, where the near lands lie quiet. We can plant wide fields, push fresh furrows where fear has kept us back. If we live through the hit, we will have more food than we burned. If we argue our granaries shut now, we'll have no hands left to bake the bread later."
Silence, then a few low hums, uncertain, curious.
"Words from a young master who hasn't bled a levy dry," Maelor said.
"He's bled more than most levies," Bren Ironwood said, blunt as a hammer. "Leave the boy. Hear the plan."
The King's eyes were on Zed now. They did not crush; they weighed. Zed did not look away.
"We need rings," Zed went on. "An inner ring for shelter and storage—every clan brings their people inside their walls and uses empty courtyards as dormitory halls. A second ring of patrol lines—riders and flyers moving in loops, carrying word, marking heavy flows. A third ring of strike bands—small, fast, hard. We don't fight walls of beasts with walls of men; we cut the tendons under their run. We hit the heads of packs before they all face the same way. We break masters before they pull twenty under them. We kill what leads and the rest arrives late and fighting itself."
Lady Kyria nodded. "You've hunted them."
"Yes," Zed said.
"Your bands will need speed," she said. "Wings and wind. My rocs can drop a signal and pull out. We can carry casks and men. But we will ration flight. Birds tire."
"Your men can fly my birds," Cyran said, "but they do not know the winds over the forest ridges. We assign Leshonte riders to Stormvale birds. Paired teams."
Lady Kyria's mouth quirked. "If your riders can ride my birds, Lord Cyran, I will send them home with a cask of wine each."
"They can," Cyran said, calm as still water. "And they will not spill the wine."
A brief, low line of laughter took some iron out of the air.
The King lifted a hand. "Numbers."
Scribes set to work. Runners brought tallies and ledgers. The herald read out current counts—grain in store, salting salt, spare harness, spare spearheads, numbers of carts and draft beasts. The hall began to move like a machine being built as it ran.
Bren Ironwood laid his hand flat on the table. "Ironwood will send eight hundred heavy infantry to hold the southern ring roads and bridges. We'll bring wagons and men to anchor kitchen lines. We will set field forges in three points and turn iron to heads until our arms give out."
"Stormvale will commit four hundred flyers and two hundred ground lancers," Lady Kyria said. "We will own the sky from ridge to river. We will not be everywhere. We will be where you tell us to be. Give me a signal code that a farmer can use and a child cannot mistake. Beacon braziers on the ridge-huts. Smoke by day, flame by night. Three short, one long—heavy flow. One long, two short—lord sign."
"Blackthorn will send three hundred shadow scouts and five hundred bow," Maelor said, each word clean as glass. "Our scouts will mark the dark routes beasts prefer and kill the masters who move in it. We will not be asked to hold bright gates. We do not hold gates. We close them."
"Leshonte will send two hundred healers, two hundred alchemists and apothecary aides, and three hundred windrunners with light blades," Cyran said. "We will stitch the men who break and return them to you on their feet. We will keep the stores from rotting. We will weave wind over the worst crush to break scent and slow fear."
Varun's voice filled the line with no strain. "Latian will bring seven hundred red-sash spear and three hundred phoenix wardens for the inner ring—the breaks in the refugee lines, the choke-points in the streets, the houses that will flood when fear runs. We will also keep one thousand in reserve inside our walls to guard the people we bring in. We will open our granaries."
Maelor's eyes slid to Varun. "The boy's plan."
"The clan's duty," Varun said.
The King let the numbers settle, then spoke, still quiet. "You will also bring your people, Lord Varun."
"We began three days ago," Varun said. "Our inner courtyards are already marked."
The King looked to Zed. "How many villages can you pull inside your walls in five days?"
"Ten entirely," Zed said at once. He had counted roads in his head while the talk spun. "And parts of five more. If Stormvale birds ferry the old and the small, we can beat the fourth night. We'll quarter them in training yards and the lower granary halls. We'll need Latian women at the cookhouses from first light to last."
"Done," the King said to Lady Kyria. She nodded once.
"Merchants," Bren said, eyes narrowing at his own figures. "We will need them. The tide will give us meat and hide. We'll have no salt enough. We can boil lake brine all day and not keep up. We'll trade. But roads will be cut."
"We are not alone on wheels," Cyran said mildly. "Not while the sky still stands."
Zed listened and learned. He kept his face still, but inside he marked the way edges clicked and snagged. Bren spoke with the directness of a man who met walls with his shoulders. Maelor's words slithered sideways and then struck straight. Kyria's voice cut clean and never stumbled. Cyran's words turned men by simply standing where they would end up anyway.
And the King? He did not fill the hall with noise. He picked the threads worth pulling and pulled them.
Zed felt Fuine's gaze once, a light brush like the touch of a leaf drifting down. He did not look back. He did not need to. He knew where she stood now by the quiet in the air.
A runner burst in with a slate from the northern ridges. He knelt, head down, chest rising fast.
"Report," the King said.
"Two packs broke near the Oatford," the runner said. "Master signs pushing behind them. The western ridge beacons lit—the pattern for heavy flow."
"How heavy?" Lady Kyria asked.
"Two hundred, no—three, mixed. Boars, longmaws, bone-cats. And something else. Deeper roar. Could be two masters, or one big."
"We test the ring today," the King said. "We will see if the plan breathes."
Assignments clicked into speech. Orders flew. Scribes wrote fast enough their wrists would ache for days. Seals slammed wax. Runners sprinted.
The King set quotas with no drama. "Ironwood—two hundreds to the Oatford bridges. Stormvale—one hundred flyers to ridge-line, forty to ferry the old from the nearest three hamlets into Latian walls. Blackthorn—one hundred shadow scouts on the Oatford's eastern wood, close aim on anything that commands. Leshonte—mobile healers at the Old Mill yard. Latian—two hundreds to receive refugees, three to hold the south gate, and I want your young master with the second ring strike band."
Varun did not glance back. "He is ready."
Maelor's lips made a small shape, not quite a smile, not quite a sneer. "We will see."
Zed inclined his head once. He did not say yes. He did not need to. He would stand where the order put him and he would not step back.
The council moved into the deep work—the iron bones of a city bracing itself. Supply chains were named and handed to men whose faces were sharp with long habit. Quartermasters got stamped orders that would unlock sealed stores and make them enemies for months and heroes for years. Alchemists were told what to brew and where to send it: blood-staunchers to the bridge wards, fever draughts to the close quarters inside clan walls, smoke bombs to the ridge watchers for cover on retreat. Scribes assigned spare carts to carry orphans and infirm. A small, neat woman from the royal kitchens took three pages of notes and left with a look that could split a man from his laziness.
Cyran Leshonte raised one quiet hand. "One more thing," he said. "Fear. It is a thing like wind. It will blow. If it blows wrong, it will carry fire."
The King nodded once. "Say it."
"We put singers at the gates," Cyran said. "And storytellers in the halls. Call it foolish if you like. But I have seen men hold longer when a voice tells them that tomorrow has a shape. Songs that fit steps make men march. Stories that fit fear make it small enough to fit in a hand. We will not make poems on the wall. We will make men stand a little longer when their legs shake."
Silence. Then Bren Ironwood snorted, not unkindly. "Put a drum with them. Loud. Men fight better when their own hearts sound like someone else's."
Zed watched Fuine's father while he spoke. He did not look at Fuine. But he felt—he could not name it—a small thread tie itself from where she stood to where he would walk. He did not tug it. He did not cut it. He just let it be.
The King laid both palms on the table. "We do not debate the tide," he said. "We ride it. If we ride it well, it will leave us on a higher shore."
The herald's staff struck the floor again. Once. Twice. Thrice.
"Let the banners move."
The hall emptied without panic, only with purpose. Bootsteps and orders and the hiss of seal-wax cooling. Pages rolled the maps and buckled them into leather tubes. The King stood last and alone under Bahamut's bronze shadow, then turned and was gone.
Outside, the day had shifted. Clouds had drawn up from the south like a pulled cloak. Flags rattled harder on their poles. The first old woman had already been lifted into a Stormvale sling and borne skyward in a harness that made her look for all the world like a sack of grain with hands. She laughed anyway. A drummer thudded a marching beat at the inner gate. Latian runners painted new symbols on the cobbles to mark ration lines and water points. A line of children stood staring at a Blackthorn scout who had wrapped a strip of cloth around his eyes and was still somehow walking without bumping anyone. He pretended to hit a pole and bounced off, and the children shrieked, and their mothers' mouths smiled for the first time in days.
Zed walked with Varun down the steps. The Latian escort fell in around them without a word. Men made space.
"Speak," Varun said quietly, without looking at him.
"The plan breathes," Zed said. "It will still bleed. We need more stretchers than we think. We need more salt than we think. We need to pull the village we promised first, before anyone second-guesses, and we need to post two hundred at the south gate at all hours because people will panic and try to go back for chickens."
Varun's mouth tipped a fraction. "You'll take the second ring assignment?"
"Yes," Zed said.
Varun nodded once. "Good. Don't make speeches. Make holes."
They crossed an inner court where fresh-lashed poles had been set for beacon baskets. Zed felt a glance and found its source.
Fuine had stepped out from the shade of a stone arch. She did not approach. She simply inclined her head—a small, formal acknowledgment that could have been for any ally her clan had just made.
Zed returned the nod, nothing more, and kept walking. It was not the time to be anything but a banner.
At the Latian quartermasters' tent, he began the small wars that make up the big ones: rope, tarps, spare boots, sling-lines, spearheads. He assigned runners to runners. He marked three meeting stones where second ring bands would cycle in and out for water, salt meat, and an hour's sleep if the world permitted it. He took eight men who had flown once and gave them to the Stormvale handler with orders to learn faster than fear. He gave Jiro a job near enough to matter but not near enough to break—tally and carry at the south gate, eyes up, feet quick, tongue quicker if the wrong carts tried to push past.
By late afternoon the first refugees began to pour into the Latian walls, a river made of many streams. Zed's plan lived or died now on simple, human things: lines that did not tangle, water that did not run out, food handed with firm hands that did not shake. He had seen men die with spears in their hands and smiles on their mouths; he had seen men die because a hallway narrowed and everyone thought they should be first. He walked the line. He spoke low and steady. He pointed. He lifted sacks. He moved a crying boy to the front with a nod and did not explain to anyone who grumbled behind him. They stopped grumbling.
Evening fell. The ridge-line to the northwest coughed a small flame, then a long one, then three short—messy, like a singer trying a song for the first time. But then the pattern steadied. Three short. One long. Heavy flow.
Zed's strike band formed in the second ring muster yard. Ten men. Two women. Light kit. Short spears and hooks. Three with crossbows. One with a medic's satchel. He checked their straps, said nothing of pride or heroes, and only spoke a single, practical promise.
"If we do this right," he said, "we eat hot tonight."
They laughed, because that is what men do when told the truth has a joke sitting on it.
From the wall above, a shadow paused. Zed did not look up. He did not need to. He felt the quiet there.
Fuine watched him for one heartbeat, as if she were measuring something that had no number—then turned and walked with her father toward the healers' quarter where the Leshonte banners hung, crane and moon moving softly in the wind.
The city began to hum with a different sound. Not fear. Not yet. Readiness. The beat of men and women who knew where to stand and how to hold. Beacon baskets were packed with resin knots. Drums were tested and tuned. A singer with a rough voice took a post at the south gate and sang an old work song that set feet to the same slow beat the drummer kept. Soot rose, mixed with the first stars.
At the northern edge, far beyond the last house, on a ridge where scrub clung to rock, a Stormvale flyer loosed a whistle. Air struck back. A hundred wings beat in answer. The first scouts arrowed out into the dusk.
The King stood on his tower with no cloak now, wind taking at his sleeves, eyes on the black line of trees that cut the horizon. He lifted one hand, not in benediction, not in command, but in acknowledgment—to the living thing the city had become. In the quiet of that height, a bronze dragon above him gleamed, and if statues could hold breath, this one did.
Zed drew a slow breath in the mustering yard. He had walked alone in forests where even the birds did not dare to sing. He had bled out on moss and rock and woke to pain that had to be turned into something sharp to survive. This was different. There were no trees to vanish behind, no single beast to break and eat and be done with. There were lines. There were lives. There was the long, hard work of making chaos smaller than your courage.
He rolled his shoulders. His body answered, clean and strong. Somewhere deep, a bond pulsed once, slow and steady. The presence in his dantian did not stir, did not rise—not yet. Fine. This was a field for men.
A runner came, breathless. "Second ring. Oatford spur. Word is heavy. Sir."
Zed nodded. "Move."
They moved.
Behind him, Latian drums found the same beat the singer held at the gate. In the healers' quarter, Fuine bent over a ledger, setting out rolls of bandage and bowls of ground herbs. She paused, just for a moment, eyes going to the north as if she could see through the walls and the miles and the dark.
Then she set her hands to the work that would meet whatever came back through the gates.
The banners of Issielios lifted, caught, and held.
And the city waited for the wave.