2.2 KiB
The horn shattered the morning stillness like a blade cleaving ice.
Weylan was already on the wall, hands raw from the cold, breath rising in slow plumes. The night had blanketed Winter’s Edge in silence and snow, but now it was lifting—carried away on the first winds of something heavier. Inevitable.
The cry passed from tower to tower: “Banners. Imperial. From the south.”
He didn't need to ask what color. He saw it already: a thread of red through the snowlight, crimson flaring in disciplined rhythm. The Third Legion was coming—not with thunder, but with precision. With certainty.
Weylan slipped off his glove and undid the knot at his waist. The banner he had carried since the shrine, since Enric’s fall, since the escape: woolen, weather-worn, patched with his own clumsy stitching. And still, the crest of Talpis rose upon it—a crown of black antlers on a field of grey and pale gold, defiant against the frost.
He climbed the last stairs to the watchtower peak, where the wind snapped hard enough to steal breath. His fingers bled from the cold, but he didn’t stop. He found the old signal notch in the stone, long unused, and rammed the haft into it until it stuck, grinding against the ice-slicked mortar.
The banner caught.
For a breathless moment, it sagged. Then the wind seized it, tore it wide.
Antlers spread like defiance, reaching skyward, silhouetted against the pale dawn.
Weylan stood beside it—not as a herald, not as a soldier, but as a vow given form. Below him, the city stirred: couriers running, horns relayed, old shields hauled from wall niches like ghosts of a forgotten war.
Still, he did not move.
He watched the blood-red tide cresting the horizon, and he planted his feet against the stone. Let them come.
Behind him, far below, the Princess stepped from the shadow of the inner wall. The wind tangled her hair and cloak around her, but her gaze was steady, lifted toward him. She said nothing.
And for a heartbeat, Weylan believed that this—the banner, the wall, the cold—might hold.
That legacy might be earned, not just buried.
He stood tall, alone, beneath the banner of the antlers. And the wind howled like the forest kings of old. Let the empire come. Let their banners blot out the sky.