The silence that followed the storm was heavier than the storm itself. Hollow Pass lay behind us, a scar of fire and blood in the stone belly of the mountain, and yet no cheer rose from the throats of those who still marched. Victory had been claimed, but it was a victory steeped in poison. I could feel it in every dragging bootstep, every sunken shoulder. Soldiers who had once carried the proud banner of the South now carried only the weight of survival, and the heavier weight of all who would never walk beside us again.
The wind that whistled down from the broken ridges stank of ash and old blood. The ground was painted black, not only from the fire that had swept the heights but from the shadow the scarred commander's words had left behind. Wrong vessel. They had been spat with the same certainty a priest reserves for prophecy, and though my blade had torn his chest open, the echo of his voice lived still, gnawing into my skull.
I rode at the head of the column, though I longed for the anonymity of the rear. Kael was there, close enough to catch the flinches I could not suppress, far enough not to look at me unless necessary. His silence had become a wall as unbreakable as the shields we once locked in battle. I had known Kael since boyhood, through campaigns that had burned towns to the ground and through oaths sworn with blood, and yet now… now there was distance in him. Not just the distance of command, but of doubt.
The men whispered, too. Not loud enough for me to catch every word, but I didn't need to. I had heard the cadence before: the speculation, the unease. It had always been there, in some measure, ever since the South began following me into impossible wars. But now the words of a dying enemy fed those whispers like oil on fire.
Wrong vessel.
Wrong for what? Wrong for whom?
The System did not answer, though I felt its presence more keenly than ever. It pulsed in me, restless, as if the blood spilled at Hollow Pass had woken some deeper hunger within it. My veins burned with its echo, and sometimes, when I blinked, the world tilted—not the tilt of weariness, but of two realities trying to overlay one another. Roads shifting into rivers of bone, faces dissolving into masks of shadow, the ground itself warping as if refusing to decide what form it would take. I told myself it was exhaustion, that the burden of command and blood had bent my mind. But in my marrow, I knew better.
The System was changing. And it was changing me.
We left the Pass as a broken serpent, hundreds reduced to fewer than two, the column winding down the charred slopes. I could hear the coughs of smoke-poisoned lungs, the muted cries of wounded carried on makeshift stretchers, the labored groans of horses that had been pushed past endurance. The banners we bore—once red, bright as the fires of the South—hung limp and blackened.
I wanted to speak, to give them something, anything, that might put fire back in their bones. A commander was supposed to do that. My father, even in his madness, had always found the words. He had woven fire out of syllables, made men believe that blood and pain were stepping stones to eternity. I searched myself for that fire and found only embers choking on ash.
By midday the sun was a dull red coin, swallowed by the haze that clung to the mountains. We halted at the mouth of a valley, where a thin stream trickled through a bed of stones. The men collapsed around it, drinking like beasts, faces streaked with soot and desperation. Some tore at hard bread or strips of dried meat, but most simply lay staring at the sky, as if it might offer something the earth no longer could.
I dismounted, my legs heavy, and walked among them. A commander's duty was not only to lead but to be seen, to be a symbol. They watched me, though few held my gaze for long. There was reverence there, yes, but beneath it, fear. A kind of superstitious dread, as if I were a vessel not entirely mine anymore. Perhaps they were right.
Kael approached at last. He had cleaned his blade but not himself; ash and blood still clung to his armor, making him look like a revenant dragged from the battlefield. His eyes found mine, hard and steady.
"We can't keep this pace," he said without preamble. "Half the wounded won't survive another day if we don't find shelter."
I nodded. "We'll follow the stream. It should lead us to lower ground, perhaps even a village."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then we make one." My voice was flat, without conviction, but it was all I had.
Kael studied me, his silence heavier than any words. Once, he would have offered counsel, even defiance, to sharpen my resolve. Now, he only looked, as if searching for the man he had once known and finding shadows instead.
Night fell like a smothering hand. The campfires that sprang up were few and weak, as if the men feared drawing attention even from the stars. I sat apart, the weight of the System thrumming in my chest. When I closed my eyes, I saw it: a circle of light carved into nothingness, its edges alive with runes I could not read. In its center, a vessel—sometimes it was me, sometimes it was another face, shifting too quickly to hold. And always, a voice: Not you. Not yet.
I woke gasping, hand on my sword. The night was quiet save for the rasp of dying fires and the occasional cough. But the dream clung to me like oil. Not you. Not yet.
The next days blurred. Valleys and ridges, each as lifeless as the last. Men fell—some from wounds, others from weariness. We buried who we could, but more often we left stones piled over their bodies. Each cairn was another weight pressing down on me. A commander counts his dead, but I felt as if I carried them inside me, their silence filling the hollows of my bones.
The stream widened, became a river, and still no village appeared. No sign of the South's people, only emptiness, as if the land itself had been abandoned to ash and wind. The men began to murmur of curses, of gods turning their faces away. When they looked at me, I could feel the question in their eyes: was I the curse?
On the fourth night, it happened.
The river had led us to a basin, ringed by cliffs like the ribs of a broken beast. The men were asleep or close to it when the earth shuddered. At first I thought it a quake, but then the air itself seemed to split, a soundless rupture. I stood, hand on blade, as a fissure opened in the ground at the basin's center. Light spilled from it—not the light of fire or moon, but something colder, sharper, as if the bones of the world glowed.
The men woke screaming. Horses reared and tore their tethers. Kael shouted orders, trying to rally them, but the light grew, swallowing the night. From within the fissure, shapes began to climb.
Not men. Not beasts. Something between. Their bodies were wrought of stone and shadow, faces smooth and eyeless, limbs ending in blades of obsidian. They moved with the certainty of things that had never known doubt.
The System inside me surged, a pulse so strong it drove me to my knees. Words burned across my vision, not in any tongue I knew, yet their meaning was carved directly into my skull:
[Trial of the Vessel Initiated]
The scarred commander's voice returned to me in memory. Wrong vessel.
But the System had chosen me. Hadn't it?
The stone-shadow things spread through the camp, cutting men down before they could rise. Screams filled the basin, echoing against the cliffs. I rose, sword in hand, and the System rose with me, its fire coursing through my veins. My blade moved faster than thought, carving arcs of crimson and shadow. Each strike seemed to split not only flesh but reality itself, tearing rents in the air where sparks of unreality bled.
Kael fought at my side, his shield a wall against the creatures. He glanced at me once, eyes wide—not with fear of them, but of me. I moved like something no longer bound by mortal weight, each blow ringing with a resonance that shook even the cliffs.
The System whispered, a susurrus beneath the roar of battle. Prove it. Prove you are the vessel.
I fought until my arms were numb, until the ground was slick with shadow-stone ichor. The creatures did not bleed as men did; their wounds dissolved into dust that tasted of rust and memory. One by one they fell, until the fissure closed with a final crack, swallowing the last scream of the night.
Silence returned, but it was not the silence of peace. It was the silence of aftermath, of men staring at me not as a commander but as something else. Something other.
Kael's face was pale in the firelight. He did not speak. He did not need to. I saw the question in his eyes, the same one that now haunted me:
Had I proven myself the vessel? Or proven that I was not?
The System gave no answer.
And so the march continued, the Road of Ashes stretching endlessly before us, a path not just through mountains but into the heart of whatever fate the System had bound me to.
But with every step, I knew one truth more surely: the road ahead would demand more than blood. It would demand me.
And perhaps, when the end came, it would prove that the scarred commander had been right all along.