“How could anyone send a spy here? The footprints are also leading in the wrong direction.”

  The man in his late fifties had no answer. The footprints led further to the northeast, while the man-made figure lying in the snow was left untouched. By all means, it shouldn’t be possible. No man could cross Everwinter, let alone armies.

  “Unless someone is trying to make a very cruel jest of us, we’re dealing with a scout from the east.”

  “True. A joke, it must be that. Running through Everwinter? What a joke. There’s no chance of that. I’ve heard stories of people with sigils who can walk on snow without making a sound or leaving any prints making them impossible to track. This? If we were being invaded, they would at least try to hide their presence, no?”

  The footsteps are too deep, too wide. From birth children are taught across Kiria to always walk with caution, watch where they’re putting their foot down. The confidence, the brutal disregard for surroundings in those steps -- the Vulgars.

  Something clicked inside Albis. A shudder like none before escaped him, leaving only dread in his stomach. What if they wanted them to notice, to instill fear? Or worse, what if they simply didn’t care?

  “You should follow the footsteps, young one. Find the tricksters, give them a lesson, and come back before the sun rises to its highest. Understood?” Albis asked.

  “Fine. The kids will get the beating of their lives for this,” Jaris answered, giving a cruel smirk.

  If his gut feeling was correct, it would be the last time he’d ever see Jaris. Things like this never get easier.

  XxXxX

  The commander’s room was empty. Despite the lavishness of his clothes and the décor of the main chair, it was all a ruse to fulfill his ego. The village had no such power to defend or the riches to satisfy the invaders.

  “Commander Clovis, rest assured that it’s most likely my misjudgment, that’s all. You should know better than to fully trust my word on this. Maybe it’s just a distant scout from Novaarki?”

  A man in his thirties, his hair tied back in a dyed golden ponytail, stood at his desk, eyes closed in thought. Fake king, they called him. Like most kings, Clovis was not known for his patience, or thinking, in general. He had been silent ever since he received the report.

  “Do you take me for an idiot, or are you just that dumb? Novaarki is many miles away, and so is the war. It makes no sense they’d be here instead of at the current front near Bugdan. The sun is nearly set. Where the fuck is he?!” Clovis asked, fuming.

  “Maybe he’s in the village, but your guards didn’t find him—”

  Clovis smacked Albis across the table, sending him fumbling to the ground. “Such insolence,” he sneered. “My guards would find a single strand of hair in a wheat bale. A pathetic village fool? They’d find him in seconds.”

  “I repeat: He. Is. Not. Here.”

  Clovis turned, his white cloak flaring. “You have one of the Orders of the Stone. Order of Amberstone, if I remember correctly,” he said flatly.

  The sudden calmness made Albis more worried than the strike he had just received. “Yes, commander. But I’ve only ever managed to master the Carving of Suspension,” Parvis said, confused at the question. The fake king, befittingly, knew very little about who was who.

  “Great. That’s about as useful as a power can be against an invasion. The village will surely find great use for you in the battle to come.”

  “You’re leaving Dniper?” Albis asked aloud, before he could stop himself. It was beyond obvious.

  The fake king smirked. “Of course I am. I asked our glorious ruler to send me here as an advisor-governor for a time, and to force the men to conscription. I won’t risk my life so a dozen peasant families get to live. If I return, I can find my way around the current war without getting involved.”

  A disgust like none before rose in Albis’s blood. “After a year of living here, you’ll doom the village just like that?” He rose from his seat. “If our chances are so slim, why not proceed with an evacuation!?”

  “An evacuation? Don’t be ridiculous. It wouldn’t matter. There aren’t enough horses, and a Pangarian doesn’t leave his village without his horse. If they notice us leaving, they’ll catch up in minutes. You’d have a better chance defending within the wooden walls. Besides, you’ll act as my distraction while I escape—”

  Without thinking, Albis lunged at Clovis, grabbing his collar and pulling him down to eye level.

  “W-what the hell are you doing?” Clovis stammered, panic breaking through. He reached for the sword lying on the table, but Albis shoved him with all his weight against the wall.

  “Just because I’m a senile old man doesn’t mean I can’t deal with a wretched weakling like you,” Albis spat, shifting behind Clovis and locking him in a chokehold. “And a man of your status should know how the military treats cowards. At least, that’s how we treated them in my time.”

  It only took a few squeals and a cough before Clovis went limp.

  As Albis was about to let go, loud footsteps broke through his haze, and the door burst open a second later.

  “Commander Clovis, we—”

  Albis and the young man locked eyes.

  After a moment, the young man nodded without needing a word.

  “Horses, I heard. Monstrous ones. Ones that you could barely call a horse. We have minutes at most before they arrive, sir. You ought to leave as soon as possible.”

  Albis smiled. A good kid. Many good kids would die tonight.

  “I’m not young, but not old enough to be too weak for war. It is my duty to die protecting my home; my friends and my daughter. If you haven’t already, find the women and children and make them leave. It’s our battle to fight.”

  The kid didn’t argue. He quickly paced outside, with Albis taking the commander’s sword and following at a slower pace. The Dniper hall was a small wooden structure, as expected from a far-northern Kiria village.

  It had gotten even colder, he noted as he stepped out of the hall. Two layers of wool were barely enough for this winter. How could an army cross their Ice Deities’ accursed land? Thoughts alike were distracting Albis from reality of the situation.

  The walls, which he had helped repair them many times, hadn’t been used in his lifetime. The sharp logs always looked reassuring to him, made him feel safer within them, even now.

  A low thud was growing louder as he made his way along the passage to the gate. A few dozen men stood around it, their weapons unready, unsharpened.

  But when he peeked through the entrance, every distraction — even thoughts of his daughter — disappeared.

  Nothing could have prepared him for the sight.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Fifty meters away, a horde of horses, no, some sort of horse-human hybrids sprinted toward them. The figure of a man was seemingly halved, only torso, head, and arms visible above the horse, controlling its reins. The horses bore no eyes, their noses pierced by gigantic nails. Did the horses see through their masters’ eyes?

  Every horse was dark black, along with the upper half of the human figure. No matter how talented one was with their Order, Albis doubted such a monstrosity could ever be conceived through any of the five orders.

  A deity, he vaguely guessed. Only divine magic could birth something like that.

  A hundred horse-men charging into a village of five hundred unpowered inhabitants.

  “Don’t put away your weapons. Never lose hope, there have been many battles in history where victory was achieved with worse odds” Albis said. “There’s no running but forward.”

  Every man trembled, but none ran. It wouldn’t have mattered.

  The horsemen galloped forward. No formation. No visible strategy. Pure savagery.

  Albis stepped forward, raising his right hand. His sense for his Order hadn’t dulled with age despite him evading any training. The old man never thought he‘d need to fight ever again, here of all places.

  A glowing orange circle formed before him, etched with a carved cube at its center. The Order of the Amberstone with carving of Suspension.

  Just as they were about to cross the gate, Albis poured his energy into the symbol, and at an instant an invisible wall formed. Several horsemen smashed into it with crushing force, bone and metal cracking against seemingly nothing.

  “Attack!” Albis shouted.

  He disolved the barrier, but kept his order activated; right behind the fallen horsemen, he erected a time barrier. Fifty of the Pangarian horsemen practically froze in place, suspended mid-motion, weapons half-raised, snow hanging in the air around them. They moved so slowly that It might as well be frozen in time.

  The untrained peasants gave everything they had to the concussed horsemen that laid on the ground. Some thrust forward their spears, some stabbed with spades, some struck with bare fists, shattering their own bones in the process.

  Five seconds left.

  A boy stabbed one of the horsemen through the heart, yet the creature didn‘t stop moving

  Then the horseman’s body rose anew.

  The horse beneath him split apart, spine cracking as the upper half of the man lifted himself free in a smooth backward roll. The village men were too stunned to react.

  The horse was left in a widening pool of blood whilst the Pangarian stood unharmed, despite the wounds that the villagers previously inflicted across every visible part of his body.

  “Fucking bastards,” the horsemen muttered in old Pangarian, a vulgaric dialect. A filthy language, befitting such cretinous people.

  The Pangarian warrior moved first.

  He drew a sword from his back and lunged forward, striking one of the unprepared peasants through the throat. Blood sprayed across the snow.

  Some froze in shock. Others retaliated instinctively.

  At that same moment, more horsemen tore their bodies free from their horses, emerging just as unharmed as the first one leaving their stallions in a huge piles of blood. They were far more ready and swift; One crushed Albis’s cousin’s skull with a mace before he could react. Another Pangarian drove a knife into some kid‘s ribs with ease ending his life in less than a second.

  It wasn’t even close, Albis realized.

  Even if every man from the village weren‘t sent to the war. Even if they had possessed a few more with Orders among them.

  They had never stood a chance.

  The old man was breathing heavily. He hated to admit it, but he was at his limit. Albis bit down his pride. We were enough of a distraction to buy women and children some minutes. But I have to make sure she made it if it‘s the last thing I‘d do.

  He turned back and ran, both to recover his strength and to find the remaining villagers who hadn’t fled. Yet as he turned the corners of the village streets, dread and exhaustion were replaced by… despair.

  In the back corner of the house, two guards were lying on the floor. Lifeless. Nearby, a teenage girl’s guts were splattered across the ground, while a Pangarian man delivered another strike to an already fallen child.

  They were not here to conquer. Not here to exploit the people. Their only goal was complete massacre.

  The monster in front of him was tall and slim, wearing a long black cloak with metal plating over his chest and leather beneath it. Then the man turned, and Albis saw that he had been right in his assessment.

  A monster. Conceived by a human and a dragon.

  Every dragonborn bore the same white pupils, surrounded by grey sclera. The skin, as it is with every dragonborn, was white that of his eyes. However, what was unusual was the lack of scales on his body – only his neck appeared to bear it. Tail missing was another feature that was missing. His odd features didn‘t distract Albis enough not to spot a faintm cobalt blue glow on his hand.

  The Order of the Runestone.

  In a rush of panic, Albis bent down, grabbed a rock, and hurled it. Anything to buy even a second. Anything to reach his daughter.

  He ran across paths he had walked a million times, never this fast, not even in his youth. His white, messy hair flailed in the wind.

  A small hut came into view.

  His sons were dead in war. His wife had left ages ago. His daughter was the only thing he had left.

  To his relief, the door was locked.

  “Are you in there?!” he shouted.

  No answer.

  She left.

  Relief, bitterness that the only family he had left, and surrender to his inevitable fate all washed over him. It was over.

  His heart pounded violently. A warrior like him, on the verge of a heart attack.

  I can’t move. Can’t breathe. And there are lives I could still be saving.

  I’ve become just as cowardly as the traitor Clovis.

  “Father?” a feminine, muffled voice broke through his despair.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, nearly as confused as he was afraid. “You should be miles away from this hell.”

  A short silence followed — or maybe it was the rush of blood in his ears stretching a second into minutes.

  “What are you talking about? Wait, I’m coming to open the door,” she shouted from inside.

  “That would save me a lot of trouble.”

  Albis fell to the ground.

  His ear rang violently. He knew blood was spilling from his mouth, though he couldn’t feel it. Despite the blow to his head, he could still hear; it was his vision that failed him.

  The last thing he managed was to activate his Sigil of Suspension, forming a barrier so his daughter would stay put behind doors.

  “That’s a very long line of defense for such a desolate and scattered village. Either it was much larger in its prime, or very poor leadership led to wasting so much wood,” a young man said. “This is where your village will meet its demise, Holder.”

  He isn‘t here to kill me, Albis realized. Pangarian warriors were brutal, but not ones to torture for nothing.

  Not only that -- within the limited space of the suspended barrier, everything still held together. His daughter stood safely trapped inside a small transparent cube.

  “What do you want from me?” Albis asked weakly, once he regained his bearings. “I can’t teach you anything about the Order of the Runestone. You know that.”

  The dragonborn smiled at that. “True enough. We were ordered to kill every fit man in your village. The rest? Technically capture, practically do whatever we like. Let me cut to the chase: I want to make a pact.”

  A pact. Albis’s mind raced. The chances were nonexistent that he would receive anything truly worthwhile in return, but maybe…

  “In Diev, what the hells are you doing?” a blond Pangarian soldier came running, coming face to face with the dragonborn. The two of them were the only ones not wearing helmets.

  Albis had been out for longer than he thought. Houses were already burning. The hundred-year-old wall, never before used, would soon become ash. Dniper will be lost to history.

  But he still had hope.

  I won’t succumb to being a weakling, he told himself.

  The dragonborn shoved the fat man to the ground without hesitation. The blond fell to the ground, his armor chestplate failed to hold due to his weight and popped from his chest.

  “Watch where you’re stepping, Reigen, or you’ll be going home without a horse at best.”

  “Aren’t we angry tonight, princess Verdek,” the man scoffed as he rose. “But you’re right. It’s your prey. We won’t be having fun for a long time after this is over so enjoy while it lasts.”

  With him gone, the dragonborn turned his attention back to Albis.

  “We have a deal, don’t we?” Verdek asked to which Albis hesitantly nodded.

  “With the Carving of Oath, I will put you to work. On your heart, swear that you will protect Princess Matilda of Kiria once your kingdom falls. You will not act in any way that does not contribute to her protection.”

  Our princess.

  For what reason a dragonborn serving the Pangarian Empire would gain from protecting the only daughter of the King, Albis could not fathom. Yet, the deal was too good to pass; protecting one of Kiria‘s royal family could prove instrumental to saving his homeland from savages.

  “On one condition,” Albis said, surprising even himself with the remaing conviction still in his voice.

  Vardek looked at him, mildly surprised.

  “If I keep Princess Matilda safe, until either she or I meet you again, you will keep my daughter… Ariana safe.”

  You could never read a dragonborn’s face. Their eyes told no stories, showed no emotion. As stoic as a dragonborn, as the saying went.

  “Very well. But some of these conditions will be more to my liking,” Vardek replied.

  He placed his right hand against his own neck and activated his Runestone. The Carving of Oath flared to life, then he placed his left hand on Albis’s neck and began the enchantment.

  “I, Vardek, son of Emperor Varnik of the House vi Ebartahl, promise to keep Ariana, daughter of Albis, alive. In exchange, Albis will protect Princess Matilda of Kiria. A constant reminder of our deal will echo in his mind every few minutes.”

  “If I, Vardek, fail to keep Ariana alive, the Oath will dismantle. If Albis fails in his duty, he will perish alongside the Oath.”

  A rather vague oath, Albis noted. But he knew a proper Runemaster never repeats an oath once spoken.

  “Shall the Oath bind us both.”