vaelora/Stories/Crown of Blood/Interlude - What the Dead Remember.md

The wind that scoured the ravine felt carved from ice and regret. It howled low between broken stones, slipping through the barren pines like a whisper too old to remember its meaning. Marcas dismounted in silence. The hooves of his destrier crunched into a carpet of crusted snow and ash.

He stood motionless for a moment, scanning the site with the same cold discipline he used to read battle reports. A ring of blackened stones marked a fire, long dead. The snow had not yet fully covered it. Scattered footprints led from the shallow hollow to the east, half-lost to drifting frost. And there—just beyond the fire—rose a cairn of dark stone, shaped in haste, but not without care.

Marcas moved toward it without a word. He removed his gauntlet and pressed his hand to one of the stones. It was still faintly warm from the sun. A smear of blood clung to the edge, half-frozen in place. The print was full-handed—someone had died here, and someone had buried him.

“Here,” he said.

Behind him, the soldiers stood at silent attention. Their cloaks snapped in the wind, crimson against the bone-pale world. None of them looked toward the other rider—the one in darker garb, whose uniform bore the black-on-bronze seal of the Imperial Practicum of Theurgical Operations.

His name was Magister-Legate Daen Verrin, an officer of the Sixth Scholam, educated by the Magi of Anderon. His blade was regulation length, bone-hilted, and meticulously polished. No crude talismans adorned him. The glyphs stitched into the seams of his cloak were tight, geometric, and symmetrical: language bound by law, not faith.

Daen dismounted and stepped beside Marcas, squinting at the cairn.

“It’s recent,” he said. “Three nights, perhaps. The binding should hold.”

Marcas nodded once.

“What do you need?”

The theurge gestured to the prisoner.

Lord Caerin had stopped pleading long before they reached the hills. Now he merely watched with a gaunt, sunken stare, as though hollowed out by the weight of lost titles. His noble coat was torn at the shoulder; his feet bled into the snow from too many hours of forced riding.

“I told you,” Caerin rasped. “She was a child. You let her run. That was mercy.”

“There is no mercy in fire,” Marcas replied. “And she did not burn.”

Verrin moved smoothly—ritual, not cruelty. He drew a line in the snow with a wand of ironwood capped in silver. Ash from the soldier's own kit was scattered with precision, forming a sigil of concentric rings. He produced a ceremonial knife, standard-issue, from a lacquered box. Not chipped. Not bloodstained. Not crude.

He looked to Marcas.

“Authorization?”

Marcas gave a short nod.

The euphemism came, as it always did, clean and practiced.

“Proceed with sanctioned invocation of vital residue. Consent assumed by condition of active rebellion.”

Caerin never screamed—only gasped, once, as the blade moved. Verrin's incantation followed, precise and sterile. His voice echoed unnaturally through the ravine.

The blood spilled into the snow, hissing faintly. Glyphs flared beneath it—crimson and gold. Cold air contracted, the very sky seeming to draw breath.

From the cairn, something stirred. A shimmer began to bleed from the cairn.

It rose slowly, not with ceremony, but like something disturbed from sleep too long denied. The **spilled blood** hissed in the snow, soaking into the carved sigils. It was not the death that drew the spirit—**it was the excess**, the squandering of life, a raw **invitation** cast crimson into the snow.

The air thickened, the wind slowed, and **a pressure gathered**, humming deep in the marrow. Even the veterans among them shifted uncomfortably. The horses stamped nervously, ears pinned.

Then, it came.

**No face. No limbs.** Only **an outline**, an echo of a man rendered in frosty light and regret. It hovered over the cairn like a question half-asked, trembling. As it moved, thin flakes spiraled in its wake—motes of wind and bone, stirred by memory. It rose from the stones like steam from ice, no face, no voice, only _shape_. The shape of memory and duty, carved in frost and aching bone. The spirit hovered above the cairn—its form flickering, tremulous.

Daen Verrin stepped forward, his voice steady, ritualistic.

“**Warrior,**” he said, for no name had been carved into the stones. “We call you to testify.”

The spirit twitched as though struck. A ripple of force passed through it—grief, recognition, pain. The blood in the glyphs pulsed once.

“Where did the heir go?”

There was no speech. Not truly. But something passed through the gathered men—a **weight of thought**, foreign and cold.

The spirit turned east. Not its head. It had none. But the **intention** moved, and the snow caught the gesture. The wind flared briefly, revealing **a trail of footsteps** hardening beneath fresh fall.  A gust of wind whipped around the cairn, violent and sudden. The eastern tracks lit up, as if outlined by spectral breath. Snow hissed upward, spiraling into a short-lived vortex. The trees bent eastward. Something unseen pointed—not with limb, but with _will_. 

Then—**a whisper**, curling on the edge of hearing. *Edge... the edge... of winter...* Then the “voice”, if it had ever been one, **fractured into a wail**. Not audible, but felt. The presence suddenly collapsed inward, wind swirling violently before falling still.

Only silence remained.

Marcas narrowed his eyes, stepping into the line of motion. “What lies east?”

A soldier came forward, fumbling with his pack. “Sir—map of the highlands, if I may—”

He unfolded the cloth map on a flat stone. Marcas traced a gloved finger along the marked paths. One waystation stood east of the ravine: **Winter’s Edge**, a remote stronghold clinging to the cliffs, long used as a final retreat for royal forces.

“There,” Verrin said, tapping a small mark near the foot of the Mourning Peaks. “A border-hold. _Winter’s Edge._ Fortified. Last known to be loyal.”

Marcas studied the mark. Then the cairn. Then the blood.

“Then that is where she runs.”

He looked to the trail beginning to vanish beneath new snow.

“Then that is where we ride.”

Then, like breath exhaled in midwinter, it faded—dispersing into the wind, into the cold, into memory.

No one spoke for a time.

Marcas stepped forward at last, his voice a low thing:

“We ride east. They’ll not reach sanctuary unchallenged.”

He glanced once to the body in the snow. It was already cooling, the light drained from Lord Caerin’s face.

“See that he’s buried,” he added, before turning from the ring of blood and snow.

There was no triumph in his bearing. Only forward motion. Only purpose.

Behind him, Verrin murmured one last word to the wind—part absolution, part procedural closure.

The snow closed over the scene. And the ravine, once again, remembered nothing.