Chapter 2

‘Tale of An Unfortunate Adventurer’

Far inland, where the Vulsan Straits survived only in the stories of merchants, wandering priests, and caravan guards who claimed to have seen ships larger than villages, Aura learned that childhood boasts possessed an irritating talent for outliving the cubs who made them. She had once loved every account of forgotten kingdoms, ruined temples, hidden treasure, sleeping dragons, witches among standing stones, and wandering companies whose members spent their days defeating monsters and their evenings returning to taverns beneath banners heavy with glory. The old travelers who visited her village spoke most convincingly after supper, when the fire was bright, the wind was safely outside, and every hardship had already become an amusing part of the tale.

Aura listened from beside the hearth with her spotted tail wound around her feet and declared each spring that she would someday become the greatest adventurer ever to cross the northern kingdoms.

Her brothers refused to be surpassed by their younger sister and answered with promises of their own, naming the monsters they would kill, the kings they would rescue, and the wagonloads of silver they intended to drag home once the world had been given an opportunity to recognize them. Their parents tolerated these proclamations for years, assuming that time would carry them away with the other harmless vanities of cubhood. Time instead hardened them into family history.

When Aura finally became old enough to understand that dry employment, regular meals, and a roof unlikely to conceal ghosts possessed virtues poorly represented in heroic song, her mother recalled every youthful declaration with unforgiving accuracy. There existed, she observed, only one reliable method for determining whether brave words concealed brave hearts, and all three of her offspring had now reached an age at which the question could be answered. Their father agreed. If his children intended to spend another winter describing the legendary careers awaiting them, they could begin those careers somewhere beyond his table, where firewood did not gather itself and admiration was less expensive than food.

Aura attempted to explain that her ambitions had evolved, that the greatness of ancient heroes appeared perfectly secure without her assistance, and that respectable work within walking distance of home might better suit the wisdom she had recently acquired. Her brothers greeted this retreat with delight. They repeated her oldest boasts, improved the embarrassing portions through invention, and asked whether the future savior of kingdoms had become frightened of sleeping without her mother’s roof overhead. Pride completed what courage never would. Before Aura understood how thoroughly she had been cornered, packs were assembled, farewells exchanged, and the three siblings were walking north in search of a mercenary company careless enough to accept recruits with no experience beyond stories and sibling rivalry.

They found one sooner than Aura had hoped. The veterans looked over the three young snow leopards, asked whether they could carry equipment, endure orders, and keep their heads when someone nearby began losing his, then accepted their signatures before honest reflection could intervene. Aura placed her name beneath those of her brothers and watched the ink dry with the solemn dread of someone witnessing a door close from the wrong side. The company’s reputation promised honest contracts, hard discipline, and enough danger to prevent foolish creatures from remaining foolish for very long. Her brothers heard only the promise of contracts and danger. Aura heard the discipline.

The mercenaries began their education by loading them with more equipment than any childhood saga had mentioned. Packs pulled at their shoulders, bedrolls knocked against their thighs, cooking gear rattled behind them, and weapons that had appeared elegant upon village walls became inconvenient lengths of metal determined to bruise every joint within reach. The veterans explained in language considerably less polished than that of travelling storytellers that glory rarely arrived before firewood, latrine trenches, watch duty, blistered paws, and officers who regarded optimism as an illness best corrected through labor. Aura’s brothers received this instruction as a temporary indignity imposed before their natural talent could be discovered. Aura accepted it as evidence that every decision bringing her north had been a mistake.

Professional adventure resembled none of the tales recited beside the winter hearth. Most days consisted of marching beneath cold skies while carrying sufficient weight to drive an incautious recruit ankle-deep into the road, interrupted by drills, inspections, shouted corrections, and the endless maintenance of equipment that seemed to decay faster when its owner was tired. Meals arrived when circumstances allowed rather than when hunger demanded them, which meant cold stew swallowed while standing, smoked meat tasting of yesterday’s fire, and bread hard enough to survive being issued as defensive architecture. Sleep depended upon weather, watch rotations, and whether the ground beneath a blanket had retained enough water to qualify as a shallow pond. Rain found seams no tailor knew existed, frost formed inside boots, and smoke followed anyone seeking warmth. The songs had mentioned none of these things, perhaps because no singer had discovered a rhyme for waking before dawn to scrape frozen mud from someone else’s cooking pot.

Aura learned quickly because invisibility appeared to be the only available form of safety. She walked near the edge of the column where the ground had been churned least deeply, kept her equipment arranged exactly as the quartermaster demanded, gathered wood without being reminded, and answered instructions with enough clarity to avoid receiving them twice. She discovered which veterans corrected mistakes and which merely searched for excuses to shout, which officers noticed initiative and which interpreted it as insubordination, and where to stand during camp construction so that competent work would be seen without attracting further responsibility. She spoke only when speech served some purpose and complained only inside the privacy of her own thoughts. Before long, several veterans had ceased remembering that she was new. Aura regarded this as the first genuine achievement of her adventuring career.

Her brothers chose the opposite method. Each remained convinced that one spectacular demonstration would reveal the warrior concealed beneath his inexperience, and neither allowed previous humiliation to interfere with the next attempt. They volunteered first during sparring, challenged mercenaries twice their weight, ignored warnings delivered by creatures who had campaigned longer than either brother had been alive, and treated every bruise as evidence that fate feared their potential. One returned from training with purple ribs after attempting to wrestle a boar whose patience had survived several wars but not the snow leopard’s boasting. The other acquired a broken nose during sword drill, had it reset by the company physician, and broke it again before the swelling from the first injury had subsided.

Their equipment disappeared, their straps loosened, their practice blades slipped from their paws, and their evening explanations grew more elaborate as their injuries became less dignified.

The company found them invaluable. Wagers circulated after supper concerning which brother would reach the physician first, what portion of his face would require attention, and whether either might survive until the next village without provoking someone whose tolerance had already been tested by harder creatures.

The physician stopped asking what had happened and began preparing bandages whenever one of them approached. Aura washed blood from their fur, wrapped bruised joints, retrieved possessions they had left beside roads, and listened while each explained why the day’s failure had resulted from weather, equipment, treachery, poor instruction, or the unreasonable competence of his opponent. Neither considered silence among the possible remedies.

Despite everything, they remained her brothers.

Aura remembered sharing blankets through lean winters, stealing sweetcakes from their mother’s kitchen, and listening beside them while old travelers transformed hardship into glory. She pitied their injuries even when those injuries had been earned through perfect stupidity, and she protected them from ridicule whenever protection did not require lying beyond her ability.

Yet with each passing day she understood more clearly that affection could not supply judgment to creatures determined to avoid acquiring it themselves. They had entered mercenary life expecting the world to confirm their importance.

The world answered with mud, labor, and repeated blows to the face.

By the end of the first week, adventure had surrendered nearly every secret the childhood stories concealed. Aura’s shoulders ached beneath her pack, the pads of her feet burned inside damp wraps, and sleep arrived only after cold had exhausted its effort to keep her awake. No treasure had appeared, no forgotten monarch had offered gratitude, and the only ruins she encountered were abandoned sheds used to shelter animals. The nearest thing to a monster was a quartermaster capable of discovering missing equipment from half a field away. Even so, Aura continued marching.

Pride had carried her into the company, caution kept her from attracting its worst attention, and stubbornness placed one foot ahead of the other whenever courage failed to report for duty. Watching her brothers limp toward another evening fire beneath fresh bandages, she began to suspect that the rarest talent among celebrated adventurers had never been the strength required to kill monsters.

It was the judgment required to avoid dying for no reason before reaching one.

Chapter 1

‘A Blade of Vulsa’

The western coast of Vulsa had never welcomed strangers, and it showed little tenderness toward those born beneath its storms. Black cliffs climbed from the Vulsan Straits in broken shelves of basalt and iron-dark stone, each tide gnawing another fragment from a country already old when the first northern halls were raised above it, while the forests upon those heights bent beneath generations of salt wind until the pines grew twisted rather than tall. Gulls nested in the cracks and screamed at every approaching sail, their warnings carried inland across roofs built low against the weather and walls thick enough to withstand raiders whenever the straits delivered enemies instead of rain.

The northern canines respected those waters because only fools refused respect to anything capable of swallowing fleets, but they never trusted them, for the Vulsan Straits had a habit of returning unpleasant things long after sensible folk had committed them to the depths.

During the previous weeks the fishermen had recovered no bodies, broken spars, empty boats, or fragments of sailcloth by which the vanished might be named. They brought stories instead. Fishing craft disappeared within sight of shore, smoke climbed above abandoned villages across the western waters, and traders arriving from Ro’Edyne spoke of burial mounds standing open beneath the moon while an old sorcerer wandered beyond the dignity of his grave. Every account contradicted the last concerning the creature’s appearance, the ruins from which it had risen, and the number already dead, yet all agreed that something ancient had begun walking through Ro’Edyne and that the living vanished wherever its shadow passed. By the time those rumors reached the coastal holds of Vulsa, they no longer sounded like frightened gossip. They sounded like unfinished business.

The old shore thane received every messenger beneath the same smoke-blackened rafters, seated in a high chair carved from timbers salvaged after a shipwreck three generations before his birth, while rain beat against the roof and the Vulsan Straits boomed through the cliffs beneath his hall. His retainers argued over whether the dead should be answered with hunters, priests, or enough locked doors to ensure that Ro’Edyne endured its own misfortune without assistance, but none possessed the ships, numbers, or appetite required to pursue a sorcerer whose first achievement had been escaping death.

The thane listened with one weathered paw against his muzzle and the other resting near the sword at his side, offering neither approval nor refusal while the debate circled itself and lesser warriors discovered increasingly respectable names for fear. Consensus remained nowhere in sight when the hall doors burst inward beneath a single kick. Iron hinges tore loose from the frame, thick oak split across its grain, and both leaves crashed among the benches in a shower of splinters that sent retainers reaching for weapons before they understood what had entered. Rain swept through the broken doorway carrying pine sap, cold stone, and the metallic promise of lightning, while the stranger filling the threshold appeared broad enough to have brought the storm in upon his shoulders.

He was an enormous grey wolf dressed in scarred mail darkened by rain, its rings repaired so many times that no living smith could have named the hand responsible for its making. Water ran from the heavy fur of his mane, crossed the old cuts upon his muzzle, and fell steadily onto the shattered threshold, while an axe rested across his back above an empty sword baldric that seemed less an absence than a place deliberately reserved.

Amber eyes passed once across the armed retainers, discarded them as matters requiring no immediate attention, and settled upon the thane. No herald followed him through the rain, and no announcement was required. Every soul in the hall recognized Vulsa in the stranger before he spoke, for certain northern wolves carried their homeland in the way they stood: weight balanced without thought, shoulders loose beneath armor, and movement pared down until every unnecessary gesture seemed an indulgence belonging to warmer countries. He crossed the floor directly, boots grinding splinters into the rushes, and stopped before the high chair near enough that the thane could smell cold rain upon him through the hearth smoke. Spears lowered around his flanks, but the stranger looked only at the old wolf and the weapon beneath his paw.

“You have unfinished business in the west, coward!” the Vulsan spat, delivering the words as a warrior might report a storm already visible beyond the shutters. The thane studied him without answering, his fingers settling more firmly around the worn hilt at his side.

“Across the straits,” the stranger continued. “Ro’Edyne burns because your thin-blooded line failed to leave the Wraith Mage in his grave.”

The retainers shifted uneasily, more offended by his certainty than his entrance, yet the thane remained still except for the tightening of his grip. That small movement drew the Vulsan’s attention with greater force than every spear in the chamber. His ears lifted, his nostrils widened once, and the severe lines of his face changed as he regarded the sword not with curiosity, but recognition.

The thane drew it slowly, perhaps hoping that age and ceremony might restore the authority destroyed alongside his doors. Rust stained the fuller from guard to point, shallow chips interrupted the edge, and generations of repair had replaced the original grip with plain cord wound over a hilt worn nearly smooth, yet beneath the neglect there remained a proportion no common smith had given it. Firelight entered the metal and seemed to travel farther than the corroded surface should have allowed. The Vulsan stepped forward until scarcely a handspan separated them, ignoring the runes, the battered guard, and the old paw holding it as he stared into the blade itself. His expression did not brighten with surprise. It hardened around an answer found after long suspicion.

“He knows,” the Vulsan said quietly, and the thane had only begun to wonder what had spoken when the stranger closed one hand around his wrist and crushed until failing fingers opened. The old wolf gave a strangled cry as the weapon was twisted from his grasp, but the blade had already passed into hands that understood its balance. Spears leveled from every side, axes cleared belts, and half the hall rose prepared to defend blood, property, and dignity in whatever order survived the first blow. The Vulsan turned the sword beneath the firelight, tested its weight with one small movement of his wrist, and rested its point against the timber floor. He did not look around him. The gathered weapons belonged to another question, and he had already found the answer to his own.

“Sacred steel,” the thane hissed, cradling his injured wrist against his chest. “It has belonged to my blood for four hundred winters.”

The Vulsan looked at him then. “No. It has survived your blood for four hundred winters.”

A murmur passed through the retainers, but no one advanced. The thane’s muzzle drew back from his teeth as anger restored a portion of what pain had taken from him.

“You break my hall, lay hands upon me, and steal what my fathers carried before yours learned their names?” The Vulsan did not answer, sliding the corroded weapon into the empty baldric across his back. It settled there with the ease of something returned to its intended place. “There is a corpse across the Vulsan Straits that thinks himself still alive. I intend to correct that mistake.”

The thane laughed once, bitterly and without humor. “And if you do not?” The grey wolf turned toward the broken doorway as rain swept across the floor between them. “Then neither of us needed it.”

He turned and looked at the old thane with a cold, dismissive air. “Either way, it’s not like you were going to use it, were you?” The old thane looked at this new Vulsan with cold hatred. Hearing these old, bitter truths long denied, spoken with a cruel grin, he knew the blade was no longer his.

No order to stop him came from the high chair, and none of the retainers volunteered to repair that omission. They kept their spears lowered while he passed between them, allowing pride to survive where courage might not, and listened as his footsteps crossed the ruined threshold and disappeared into the storm. The thane remained standing with his injured wrist pressed against his ribs, staring at the empty space beside his chair where a relic had rested for generations without revealing anything of itself. Upon the floor, rainwater gathered among the splinters of his doors and carried black flecks of rust from the blade toward the hearth.

A longship left the Vulsan coast before sunrise beneath a sky the color of hammered iron. The passage across the Vulsan Straits should have required only several days in a kinder season, but those waters recognized no obligation to preserve the schedules of travelers, and the wind strengthened steadily until the horizon vanished behind moving walls of water. The crew reefed sail, hauled ropes, bailed without rest, and fought the steering oar while waves lifted the vessel high enough to expose black valleys between them before hurling it down again beneath curtains of spray.

The Vulsan remained near the prow with one hand closed around the hilt above his shoulder, neither praying for calm nor complaining of its absence. Storms belonged to the north as surely as wolves, and anyone requiring fair weather before committing himself to danger had no business leaving a warm hall. By dusk the world had narrowed to rain, lightning, and the heaving deck beneath his boots, while the straits no longer resembled water so much as a mountain range collapsing in every direction at once. The wave that destroyed them came from the starboard darkness, taller than the mast and nearly silent until its weight descended. Timber burst apart beneath it, sailcloth vanished, and oars, barrels, planks, and bodies disappeared into black water before the wreck had finished understanding that it was no longer a ship.

Beneath the surface there was only cold, pressure, and the ancient blade dragging at the Vulsan’s shoulder while the Vulsan Straits attempted to divide him from it. He surrendered the axe first, then shield, pack, and every piece of armor that prevented his ascent, but his hand never opened from the sword. Broken timber struck him somewhere in the darkness, turning the water briefly warm around his head, and the current pulled him through wreckage already scattering across miles of night. He remembered no stars, shore lights, or voices from the crew. He remembered the leather grip beneath his claws and the certainty that whatever waited in Ro’Edyne had already killed enough without receiving this weapon as tribute.

Morning found him among the breakers upon a stony shore. He crawled from the surf coughing saltwater, one knee sinking between wet rocks while the hand around the sword remained clenched so tightly that his claws had cut grooves through the replacement cord. Most of his armor had gone beneath the Vulsan Straits, together with his shield, axe, provisions, and every comfort a sensible traveler might have required, leaving only a torn mail shirt, waterlogged leather, and the blade for which the passage had been undertaken. Behind him the tide drew pieces of the longship back into deeper water, erasing the wreck one fragment at a time and leaving no sign of the crew beyond a broken oar turning slowly in the foam. Ahead, the forests of Ro’Edyne rose beneath low clouds, their dark pines climbing inland across hills where no smoke marked a friendly settlement.

Somewhere among those woods walked the dead sorcerer, and somewhere beyond them waited the reason an ancient weapon had endured four centuries of ceremonial neglect before finding a hand prepared to carry it into danger.

The Vulsan rose, secured the sword across his back, and walked inland while the Vulsan Straits buried their own dead behind him.

Beyond the Blade of Kings

“The Sword”

“In the realm where the cold wind cries,

And fallen evils start to rise,

North he marched through ash and frost,

Counting neither gain nor cost.

From coward’s hall the steel was torn,

Four hundred winters left forlorn;

Through blackened straits where longships died,

The Wolf held fast beneath the tide.

No axe, no shield, no crew remained—

Still in his hand, the Blade was claimed,

and the fear within the realm was real,

Off he stormed armed with Vandyrian Steel!”