Tomorrow came.

  It came with the pounding of war drums and the thunder of stone slamming wood.

  It came with blood-red banners rising in the morning mist, and a siege cry that shook the walls of Osogorsk like the voice of the world cracking.

  The drums had started before the mist had even cleared from the valley.

  Low and slow—like the groaning of something older than time, echoing from the hills. The men on the walls paused their work, hammers raised, bows unstrung, as though some part of their blood remembered a sound like that in the womb of the world.

  Bhraime Montclef stood atop the inner curtain wall, his cloak snapping in the mountain wind. Below him, the town of Osogorsk boiled with frantic motion—carts of stones rolled into place, boiling oil hoisted to parapets, prayers whispered over swords newly whetted. There was no joy in it. No illusions. Only preparation.

  “They’ve begun,” said Alavastor, his captain, stepping up beside him. He wore half his armor already, his gauntlets bloody from dragging an oxen-drawn ballista into position.

  “They haven’t begun,” Bhraime said, not turning. “That’s just the voice of their gods. When they begin, we’ll know it by the smell.”

  Alavastor snorted. “I suppose we’ll get to smell plenty before this is done.”

  Behind them, a bell tolled in the town square. The third hour. The bell’s voice was cracked, tired. Like everything else here.

  “Report,” Bhraime said, still watching the dark hills to the east.

  “Three thousand accounted for,” Alavastor replied. “Six hundred knights, iron-armored and mounted. Twelve hundred foot—pikes, short blades, some of the Karvosi halberds you favor. A thousand bowmen. Rest are sappers, healers, and the old bastards too proud to run.”

  “And the walls?”

  “Strong enough to hold a cough. Not a storm.” Alavastor squinted toward the dark horizon. “If we sally out at first light, we might catch them on the move. Break their lines before they settle in.”

  “No,” Bhraime said. “They want us to come to them. That’s how Warmonger plays. He builds the cage and lets you fling yourself against the bars.”

  Alavastor cracked his knuckles, then his neck. “Then we wait in here to die?”

  Bhraime turned at last. His face was weathered, creased by sun and grief in equal measure. His eyes were steel—not cold but forged hard. “We wait in here to kill. Every hour we hold, every corpse we leave on their threshold, buys another day for the emperor’s real armies to gather. Our names will buy that time.”

  Alavastor grunted. “That your idea of comfort?”

  “No,” Bhraime said. “That’s my idea of a plan.”

  A messenger boy came hurrying up the stone steps, red-faced and panting.

  “My lord,” he said, voice cracking with youth. “We’ve… we’ve seen them.”

  Bhraime nodded once. “Speak.”

  “They’re not… not just orcs, sir. There’s—goblins in the brush. Big ones, too, with tattoos and banners. Some kind of beasts with them. Lizards. I saw a man eaten whole.”

  Alavastor exhaled slowly. “Well. That’s new.”

  “How many?” Bhraime asked the boy.

  The boy hesitated. “More than I could count, sir. More than I could dream.”

  Bhraime nodded again, slowly, and turned back to the east.

  From here, he could see the high passes choked with dark shapes. Banners of rawhide and bones waved in the wind, and firelight moved like serpents among them. And beyond that—just barely—he thought he saw the glint of something massive. Tall as siege towers. Armored in black. A shape too big for a man.

  “Warmonger,” he whispered.

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  The town square had been converted into a rallying yard.

  Soldiers gathered there in full harness, visorless in the rising heat. Old men with crooked teeth poured oil into trench channels. Women passed buckets from hand to hand. A pair of young soldiers were helping a priest chalk rune of protection onto the stones. They had drawn them incorrectly. Bhraime knelt and redrew them without a word.

  When he rose, his commanders were assembled. Men from the steppes, knights from the Empire’s heartlands, foreign mercenaries with polished breastplates and desperate eyes.

  “You know what comes,” Bhraime told them. “You’ve seen the hills. You’ve heard the drums.”

  Nods. A murmur. One man wept silently into his beard.

  “We are three thousand,” Bhraime said, lifting his voice. “They are more. But they are not better. They are not trained. They are not disciplined. And they do not love each other the way soldiers of the Empire do.”

  There was laughter at that—short, barked, nervous. He waited until it died.

  “This is our line,” he said. “No farther east. There are no reinforcements. There is no retreat. We will hold until the mountains break or the gods take us.”

  He raised his sword, and sunlight caught the blade. It was old—older than the Empire. The edge shimmered gold and green.

  “For Osogorsk,” he said. “For the Empire.”

  “For the Empire!” they roared.

  “For memory!” Bhraime cried.

  “For memory!”

  As night fell, the hills came alive with movement. Fires. Shapes. Chanting in a dozen broken tongues.

  And from the center of it all, high on a black hill, the shadow moved. Too large for a horse. Too broad for a man. It wore bones as armor. Its eyes glowed yellow. It watched.

  It waited.

  And it hungered.

  The first salvo hit the eastern tower at dawn—a fist-sized stone dipped in pitch and lit with wildfire. It struck just below the crenellations, and the whole tower shuddered. Men screamed, vanished in the flames.

  “Fire crews to east tower!” shouted a runner.

  Bhraime was already sprinting down the inner rampart, sword drawn. Smoke billowed as he passed. Behind him, the signal flags snapped—enemy siege engines engaged.

  From across the valley, trebuchets like giant skeletal arms hurled more burning stones. Black smoke poured from the sky. Goblins scurried under cover of the barrage, pushing siege ladders, screaming their gods’ names in a dozen screeching dialects.

  “Loose at will!” roared the archer-captain.

  Arrows sang down, but it was not enough.

  The ladders hit the walls.

  At the southern gate, the trolls arrived.

  Two of them—huge, shambling brutes covered in festering boils and wrapped in rusting chains. They rammed a battering tree trunk into the gate with the force of gods drunk on rage.

  Boom.

  Boom.

  Crack.

  Wood splintered. Men held ropes across the inner yard, trying to reinforce the bars with barricades. Bhraime saw one poor bastard crushed beneath a falling crossbeam.

  He turned to the wall guard. “Keep them off the ramparts. If the trolls break through, we fall.”

  “Yes, general!”

  A goblin scout darted over the parapet and was met with Bhraime’s sword. It didn’t so much as cut the creature as unmake it—one clean stroke through throat and shoulder. Another came. Another fell.

  By now, the walls were alive with screams and smoke.

  To the north, a roar rose—Alavastor’s cavalry had sallied out.

  They came down the northern gate like a lightning bolt—three hundred steel-clad horsemen thundering across the open ground, their lances leveled, sunlight gleaming on their helms. They smashed into a host of orcs mid-formation and scattered them like leaves in a gale.

  “For the Empire!” Alavastor roared, his horse plunging through a pack of goblins.

  An ogre lumbered forward to meet him—twelve feet tall, wielding a rusted slab of iron. Alavastor ducked the swing, drove his lance through the creature’s gut, then yanked free with a spray of black blood. It fell with a roar, flattening a dozen behind it.

  “Press through! Ride through their hearts!”

  For a moment, it looked like they might break the line.

  But the horde was too vast.

  They closed in, clawed and bit at the flanks. Trolls hurled rocks. Lizardmen leapt onto horses from crags, pulling knights to the earth and tearing out their throats with hooked spears.

  Alavastor fought on, slashing left and right, a living tempest.

  But they were being surrounded.

  Back in the town square, Bhraime heard the war horn sound—retreat call.

  He cursed, grabbed his helm, and ran.

  The southern gate exploded inward just as he arrived.

  The trolls burst through, dragging burning gates behind them. Men screamed. A child stumbled from a hiding place and was crushed beneath a troll’s heel.

  Bhraime didn’t hesitate. He ran into the breach.

  “Fall back to the inner street! Protect the civilians!”

  He ducked under a troll’s swipe and drove his blade into the beast’s knee. It howled, toppled—flattening two goblins as it fell. He pulled the sword free and turned just in time to catch a lizardman leaping for his throat.

  Steel flashed. The creature dropped, twitching.

  From above, arrows continued to fall. Osogorsk’s walls were still holding, barely—but inside, chaos was flowering.

  Alavastor’s cavalry returned broken.

  Of the three hundred who rode out, fewer than eighty made it back.

  Their horses were bleeding, foaming. Men were missing limbs, eyes, faces. Alavastor was covered in black blood, one arm broken at the shoulder. He dismounted, handed off his reins, and walked straight to Bhraime.

  “We cracked their third line. Didn’t matter,” he said, voice hoarse. “They just kept coming.”

  “You should’ve turned sooner.”

  “Would’ve, but I kind of like living.”

  Neither smiled.

  The sky darkened by mid-afternoon—not from weather, but smoke. Fires had caught in the upper quarter. Civilians were being ushered into the chapel crypts. Wailing. Prayers. The sound of iron striking bone.

  Bhraime stood atop the high tower as sunset painted the battlefield red.

  Warmonger still hadn’t moved. He watched it all from his beast-throne. Unstirring. Unbothered.

  That night, Shermongrin’s voice rose again. The shaman stood beneath the stars, arms raised, howling a hymn to whatever dark thing these monsters worshipped.

  Then came the wind.

  Hot. Rancid. And with it—a new sound.

  Drums. Again. But deeper. Slower. Closer.

  The next wave would come soon.

  Bhraime turned from the tower.

  “To arms,” he said.