# Chapter 586: The March on Old Sable
The road to Old Sable was a scar of grey dust cutting through a landscape of dead scrub and brittle, leafless trees. It was a road the Crownlands had not traveled in a generation, a path leading into a memory of loss. Captain Bren marched at the head of his column, the rhythmic crunch of two thousand boots on gravel a grim counterpoint to the silence of the wastes. The air was cold and thin, carrying the scent of dry rot and something else, something metallic and electric, like the air after a lightning strike. It was the smell of the Bloomblight, a stench that grew stronger with every step toward the horizon.
That horizon was the problem. It was not a line of earth and sky but a roiling, bruised-purple cloud that churned and seethed where Old Sable had been. It was a storm with no wind, a sourceless, unnatural twilight that swallowed the sun. Flashes of sickly green light pulsed deep within the cloud, a slow, deliberate heartbeat of pure corruption. His men felt it. He could see it in the set of their shoulders, in the way their hands never strayed far from the pommels of their swords. They were Crownlands Wardens, hardened soldiers who had faced down bandit kings and put down peasant revolts, but this was different. This was a fight against the ghost of the world's end.
Bren's own face was a roadmap of old battles, a crisscross of scars that pulled at the corner of his right eye. He was a soldier's soldier, a man who preferred the clarity of a sword's edge to the ambiguity of a council chamber. Nyra Sableki's summons had been clear, her intelligence precise. A massive host of the husks, the walking dead of the Bloom, was gathering in the ruins of Old Sable. If they were allowed to coalesce, they would become an army, a tide of death that would wash over the fledgling settlements of the New Dawn. His job was simple: get there, break up the host before it could form, and burn the nest. A textbook hammer-and-anvil operation. But the textbook had never written a chapter on a sky that bled lightning.
"Anything from the scouts, Sergeant Kael?" Bren's voice was a low gravel, accustomed to command.
Sergeant Kael, a younger man with a perpetually worried look that belied his competence, spurred his horse alongside Bren's. "Nothing, sir. Not a peep. They ride out, and they vanish into that… gloom. No reports back. It's like the road just eats them."
Bren grunted, his gaze fixed on the pulsing storm. The scouts were his eyes, and right now, he was blind. That was the first rule of fighting a war you intend to win: never let the enemy blind you. The Bloomblight was breaking all the rules. They were marching into a fog, and the only thing waiting for them on the other side was the promise of a fight. The tension in the column was a physical thing, a thrumming vibration that ran through the soles of his boots and up his spine. He could feel the weight of every life behind him, a responsibility heavier than any shield.
They were passing through a narrow defile where the road was pinched between two steep, rocky escarpments. The grey light deepened to a near twilight here, the shadows long and hungry. It was a perfect place for an ambush. Bren's hand tightened on the hilt of his sword, his eyes scanning the ridges above. He saw nothing but wind-carved rock and clinging, skeletal weeds. The air grew still. The tramp of the boots behind him seemed to fade, replaced by a profound, pressing silence. The metallic scent of the Blight intensified, so thick he could almost taste it on his tongue.
Then the first scream tore through the air from the rear of the column.
It was a high, sharp sound of pure terror, cut off abruptly. Chaos erupted. Men were shouting, the sound of steel being drawn ringing out in a frantic clangor. Bren spun in his saddle, his heart hammering against his ribs. "Form up! Shield wall! Shields on the north face!" he roared, his voice cracking the sudden panic.
But the attack wasn't coming from the ridges. It was coming from among them.
Figures were rising from the dust on the sides of the road, where they had lain buried beneath shallow layers of ash and gravel, their grey rags blending perfectly with the ground. They were not the shambling, mindless husks he had fought before. These were men and women, their eyes burning with a fanatical, feverish light. They were gaunt, their skin stretched tight over their bones, but they moved with a horrifying speed and purpose. They were the King's Voice, Talia's intelligence had warned of them. A cult. A myth. Now they were very, very real.
They didn't have the look of soldiers. They were armed with a motley collection of rusted farm implements, jagged shards of metal, and crude knives. But they fought with a suicidal abandon that was more terrifying than any disciplined phalanx. A cultist, a woman with a wild mane of black hair and a look of ecstatic joy on her face, lunged at the horse of the standard-bearer next to Bren. She didn't aim for the rider. She plunged her rusty pitchfork into the warhorse's chest. The animal screamed, a sound of agony and betrayal, and collapsed, thrashing in the road, pinning the standard-bearer beneath it. The woman didn't even try to escape. She simply laughed as the Wardens around her turned their swords on her, her body jerking as the blows landed, her eyes fixed on the purple storm in the distance.
"They're not trying to break us!" Bren shouted, parrying a wild swing from a man who leaped from the ditch. "They're trying to stop us!"
It was a chilling realization. This wasn't an ambush designed to destroy them. It was a delay. A living, breathing roadblock. Every moment they spent fighting these fanatics was another moment the Blight army in Old Sable had to grow, to strengthen, to prepare. The cultists were a sacrifice, a human offering to their dark god.
The fighting was brutal, close-quarters, and filthy. It was not the clean clash of armies but a messy, desperate brawl in the choking dust. Bren's sword became a blur of motion, its edge finding a home in a cultist's chest, then sweeping around to take the head off another. The men were veterans, though, and they reacted with trained efficiency. The initial shock gave way to grim purpose. Shields locked together, forming a bristling wall of wood and iron. Spears jutted out, impaling the charging fanatics. The air filled with the grunts of exertion, the wet thud of steel hitting flesh, and the constant, unnerving laughter of the dying.
Bren fought his way toward the center of the chaos, his mind racing. This was a new kind of enemy. They didn't fear death. They welcomed it. How do you fight an enemy who has already won in their own mind? You can't break their morale. You can't make them retreat. You can only kill them, and they seemed perfectly willing to oblige.
A young Warden, no older than Finn, the boy who idolized Soren, was pinned against the rock face, his shield splintering under the onslaught of two cultists. Bren moved without thought, his years of experience taking over. He drove his shoulder into one of the attackers, sending the man stumbling. His sword flicked out, a quick, brutal thrust that ended the second cultist's charge. The boy stared at him, wide-eyed and panting, his face spattered with blood.
"Stay with the line, son!" Bren barked, turning to face the next wave. "Don't let them through!"
The cultists kept coming, surging out of hidden dips in the land, scrambling down from the rocks where no one had thought to look. They were everywhere and nowhere, a plague of zealots. For every one they cut down, two more seemed to take their place. The cost was mounting. His men were dying, not for victory, but for time. The thought was a bitter ash in his mouth. He was trading the lives of his soldiers for minutes on a clock he couldn't see.
He saw Sergeant Kael go down, a half-dozen cultists swarming the officer, their knives rising and falling in a silent, frenzied rhythm. A roar of pure rage tore from Bren's throat. He hacked his way through the press, his sword a heavy, deadly instrument of vengeance. He reached Kael's side, but it was too late. The sergeant's eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the bruised sky. With a final, desperate surge, Bren cut down the remaining cultists, his chest heaving, his arms burning with fatigue.
He stood over Kael's body for a heartbeat, the sounds of the battle washing over him. The delay was working. He could feel it in his bones. The storm ahead seemed to pulse brighter, the green flashes more frequent. The Withering King was watching. It was waiting. And these madmen were its ushers.
"Push forward! Don't stop for anything!" Bren's voice was raw, stripped of all but the core of command. "We break through this rabble or we die trying! For the Crownlands! For the Dawn!"
His words had an effect. The remaining Wardens, their faces grim and set with determination, redoubled their efforts. They fought not as defenders, but as a battering ram, driving forward step by agonizing step. They paid for every inch of ground in blood, but they moved. The defile began to open up, the rocky walls falling away into a wider, dust-choked plain. The main body of the cultists was here, a writhing mass of bodies blocking the road completely.
This was the heart of the obstacle. Bren knew it. This was the final sacrifice.
"Form wedge!" he commanded, his voice hoarse. "We're going through them. Now!"
The Wardens reformed, their shields angled into a massive, pointed formation. Bren took his place at the very tip, the point of the spear. He was the oldest man here, the most scarred, but he felt a fire in his gut that had nothing to do with age. It was the cold, clean fire of purpose.
"Charge!"
The ground shook as the wedge of soldiers slammed into the cultist line. The impact was immense, a solid wall of flesh and steel meeting a soft, yielding target. Men screamed. Bones broke. The wedge plowed forward, a unstoppable force of grim-faced soldiers cutting a swath through the fanatical sea. Bren was at the epicenter, his sword rising and falling, a metronome of death. He was no longer thinking, only reacting, his body a vessel for years of brutal training.
He saw a face in the crowd, a girl who couldn't have been more than sixteen, her eyes wide with a terrifying, holy fervor. She screamed a word that was lost in the din, a prayer to her monstrous god, and lunged at him with a shard of glass. He didn't hesitate. His sword took her in the throat. Her light went out, and another body fell to the dust.
They broke through.
The wedge emerged on the other side of the cultist line, leaving a trail of the dead and dying behind them. The road ahead was clear, but the cost was written on the faces of the survivors. They were bloodied, exhausted, and hollowed out by the sheer, senseless ferocity of the fighting. A quarter of their number, gone. For what? For a few hundred yards of dust.
Bren pulled his horse to a halt, his chest heaving. He looked back. The cultists were not pursuing. They were milling around their dead, some kneeling, others simply standing and staring back at him, their job done. The delay was complete.
One of them, a man with a thick, braided beard and a body covered in crude, swirling tattoos, began to walk toward him. He was unarmed. His hands were raised, not in surrender, but as if in supplication. He walked with a strange, lurching gait, a smile plastered on his face.
Bren watched him come, his sword still in his hand. The man stopped ten paces away. His eyes, burning with that unholy light, fixed on Bren.
"It is done," the man said, his voice a raspy whisper. "The offering is made. He is pleased."
"Who is pleased?" Bren demanded, his voice low and dangerous.
The man just smiled, a ghastly stretching of his lips. "He who sleeps. He who remembers." He took another step forward. "We have given him time. Time to wake. Time to remember the world he lost."
Bren felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold air. This was more than blind fanaticism. This was… communication.
The man suddenly lunged, not with a weapon, but with his bare hands, his fingers curled into claws. It was a final, pointless act of aggression. Bren's sword moved with a will of its own, a single, economical horizontal slash. It was a perfect cut.
The cultist staggered, his eyes wide with shock. He looked down at the red line that had suddenly appeared across his stomach. His entrails began to spill out, steaming in the cold air. He fell to his knees, then onto his face in the dust. But as he died, a wet, bubbling laugh rumbled in his chest. He lifted his head one last time, his eyes finding Bren's.
"He wakes…" the man gurgled, blood foaming at his lips. "He remembers…"
Then his head fell to the ground, and he was still.
Bren stood over the body, the man's last words echoing in the sudden, profound silence. He looked at the road ahead, then back at the storm cloud, which seemed to pulse with a new, more vibrant energy. The delay was over. The offering had been made. And now, the god was waking.