The wind at Stone-End had a way of clawing through every seam of leather armor and every crack in the crumbling mortar of the walls. It was a constant, malevolent presence. It howled in the depths of winter, a predator searching for weakness. It whispered in the brief, fleeting summer, a rumor of the cold to come. And now, in the damp, bone-aching chill of early autumn, it moaned like some old, forgotten ghost that refused to leave this desolate place. The garrison had grown used to it, though "used to it" only meant that they cursed it less loudly than before, their anger having long ago curdled into a permanent, weary resignation.
Captain Marcus Aquilius walked the north wall with his cloak cinched tight, his heavy legionary boots crunching on a thin layer of frost that had formed despite the gray, oppressive daylight. The fort was no fortress, not anymore—if it ever had been. Its stones bore the weathering of centuries, pitted and flaking like old bone. In places, the walls were patched with rough, unseasoned timber where proper Imperial masonry had once stood proud, the wood already slick with green moss. He ran a gloved hand over a support beam, feeling the rot beneath the surface. He had sent three separate requisitions to the provincial capital at Drakmoor for stone and mortar. All had gone unanswered.
The Empire had built this fort in a forgotten age, when emperors still believed the frontier mattered, when the line between civilization and barbarism was a thing to be held with stone and steel and unwavering resolve. Now, it was a ruin with a garrison clinging to it like barnacles on a sinking hull, a testament to an age when the political games in the southern capitals mattered more than the lives of the men who guarded its borders.
Below him in the muddy yard, a dozen legionaries were huddled around a single cookpot, their shoulders hunched against the cold. The fire beneath it was small and smoky, fed with damp wood. Marcus watched them stir a thin broth that steamed weakly, the smell barely reaching him on the wind—the scent of warm water with the ghost of barley and a single, sad-looking onion floating in it. They were men hardened by years of service on the frontier, their faces etched with the lines of hardship, but even the hardest steel grew brittle when neglected. One soldier, a lanky youth named Decius, dipped a wooden ladle, scooped a mouthful, and spat it back into the pot with a grimace.
"Gods piss on this swill," he growled, the words lost in a plume of white breath.
"Careful," his comrade, a barrel-chested veteran named Titus, replied with a humorless grin. "You'll add too much flavor." He tore at a crust of bread so hard it snapped in two like bark, the sound unnaturally loud in the cold air.
Marcus slowed his pace, his footsteps silent on the stone, listening. He wanted to know the true state of his men without demanding formal reports from his centurions. Reports could lie, glossing over hardship with phrases like 'morale remains adequate'. A soldier's bitterness, however, could not.
Another voice, younger and sharper, belonging to a recruit named Publius, piped up. "They say Governor Servius sits on three full storehouses back in Drakmoor. His personal guard eats roasted boar while we boil our own boot leather."
The comment earned a round of dark, angry mutters. "Aye, and drinks wine from the Emperor's own vineyards, the fat bastard," Titus added, his voice low and dangerous. "While he sends us sour water and promises. I'd trade a month's pay for one decent wineskin."
A bitter laugh went around the circle. "A month's pay?" Decius scoffed. "What's that? We haven't seen Imperial coin in a season. I'd wager the governor used it to polish his marble floors."
A centurion, Varro, a man whose face was a roadmap of old scars, stalked over from the barracks. His presence alone was enough to silence most men. He cuffed the young recruit, Publius, lightly across the back of the head. "Keep your tongue in your head. Grumbling about governors won't stop a barbarian axe."
The youth went quiet, rubbing his neck, but the truth of his words hung in the air like the smoke from their pathetic fire. Varro was right to maintain discipline, but Marcus knew the boy had spoken a truth he himself wrestled with every night. The winter shipment of grain, salted meat, and leather was not late due to storms or logistical errors, as the official missive from three months ago had claimed. It had been deliberately denied. Stone-End was not forgotten; it was being erased.
He continued his walk, the anger a cold, hard knot in his gut. Governor Gaius Servius had coveted the command of the Northern Marches for years, a position Marcus had been awarded for his service in the Eastern Wars. This was Servius's revenge—letting Marcus and his men die on the wall, a neat and tidy solution to an old rivalry. He would let the Frostfang clans solve his political problem, then ride in with his own well-fed legions to "restore order" and claim the glory. This was no failure of Imperial logistics. It was murder by decree.
At the western wall, the quartermaster, Lucan, intercepted him. Lucan was a portly man whose cynicism was as pronounced as his belly, though both had shrunk in recent months. He gestured to the main storehouse, its doors hanging slightly ajar.
"The last of the salted meat is gone, Captain," Lucan reported without preamble. His face, usually ruddy from drink, was pale and drawn. "We're on quarter-rations of hard bread and whatever the foragers can dig up, which is mostly frozen roots and bitter herbs. We can't hold out for another month like this. We can't hold out for another week."
"I've sent three ravens to Drakmoor," Marcus said, his voice flat.
Lucan gave that mirthless chuckle Marcus was beginning to hate. "I'm sure they were received, Captain. Maybe the governor is using your letters for kindling. It's said to be a cold autumn in the capital."
Marcus dismissed him with a curt nod, unwilling to let his own rage boil over in front of the man. Sarcasm was Lucan's shield, but it was a luxury Marcus could not afford. He was the commander. He had to embody a resolve he wasn't sure he still possessed.
As he returned to the main rampart, he paused to watch another group of soldiers dicing in the mud. They squatted in a loose circle, passing a single, dented cup of watered-down sour wine between throws. The dice were crude—carved from animal bone and worn smooth from constant use.
"Come on, wolf's head, wolf's head," one muttered as he shook the dice in his calloused hands. He threw, and the men groaned as the dice showed double crows—a bad omen. Another threw, winning the pot with a boar, and laughed so hard he nearly toppled into the muck.
The stakes were pitiful. One man wagered a strip of dried, questionable meat; another, a pair of threadbare wool gloves. It was all they had left. Pay had not arrived in two months. One soldier, Titus from the cookpot, in a fit of gallows humor, pulled off his boot and held it up like a prize.
"I wager this fine Imperial leather!" he declared with a grand gesture. The sole flapped loose, half-rotted from the constant damp. The men howled with laughter.
The laughter died abruptly when the man's toes poked through the hole in the sole. They were raw, cracked, and oozing a thin, clear pus from the onset of trench foot.
"Better not lose that boot, Titus," another said quietly. "Might be all that's left for supper tomorrow."
Titus scowled, his brief moment of humor extinguished. The silence that followed was heavier than any laughter had been. Marcus moved on before the gloom could settle further.
He paused at the north parapet, the highest point of the fort, and stared out. Beyond the pathetic ditch and the sharpened wooden stakes that served as an outer defense stretched a barren expanse of rocky hills and frost-bitten scrub. Farther north, a jagged wall of mountains, the Frostfangs, rose into the low, gray clouds. The peaks seemed close enough to touch, though in truth they lay a two-day ride away. The wind, it was said, was born in those mountains, and it carried their breath down into the lowlands—cold, sharp, and biting with the promise of violence.
That was when the gate horn blew a single, sharp blast. The sound of hooves on stone, frantic and desperate, drew every eye.
Three scouts stumbled in, their cloaks stiff with frost, their horses lathered in sweat and wide-eyed with terror. They barely managed to dismount before the lead man, his face pale and lips cracked, cried out, "Captain! Movement in the passes! The northern ridges!"
The yard went unnervingly still. The dice game stopped. The men at the cookpot froze. Every ear strained, every heart pounded in the sudden, heavy silence.
"Raiders?" Varro barked, stepping forward, his hand already on the hilt of his sword.
The scout shook his head violently, his breath coming in ragged, white puffs. "Not a raid. Bigger. Far bigger. Campfires, Captain—dozens of them, maybe hundreds. We saw banners from the high ridge. Whole clans moving together. The wolf, the raven… all of them."
The dice clattered to the muddy ground, forgotten. The cookpot hissed and spat. Every soldier stood frozen, the words sinking into their bones like ice water. This was what they had been dreading through the hungry nights and the cold, bitter days.
Marcus felt his fingers grip the cold stone of the wall. Small raiding parties he could handle—thirty men, fifty, even a hundred at most. His legionaries were disciplined, and the walls, for all their faults, offered an advantage. But if whole clans had united and come down from the Frostfangs… that was no raid.
That was a war they could not possibly win.