D
arius rode down from the ridge, the rising sun offering no warmth against the gold-trimmed steel of his armor.
Ahead, the men of the Dragon Guard marched like a segmented serpent across the sands. The discipline of the march was a steady grinding of boots.
He fell into formation near the head of the vanguard. The man who had lingered in the ashes was gone. The Prince had returned.
A rider in scaled obsidian broke from the point and slowed his mount, falling into step beside him. Even behind the featureless mask, Darius recognized the rigid posture. It was the Dragon-Oath who had held Mia at the edge of his blade.
The guard rode in silence for a dozen paces before his discipline frayed.
“The desert girl, my Prince,” the guard said. His voice was tight, betraying a flicker of jagged emotion unbecoming of the Oathed. He was outside the Stillness, his mind snagged on the memory of the duel. “My blade was at her throat. I had the kill. She slaughtered our men, and I was robbed of the chance to honor the fallen.”
Darius kept his gaze fixed on the horizon. Beneath his breastplate, the ghost of Mia’s warmth still clung to his skin, but his voice emerged like ice.
“She is broken,” Darius said flatly. “She is no threat to the Line.”
It was not a lie. But it was not what the law dictated.
The guard’s grip shifted angrily on his reins. “But she struck the Line—”
Darius turned his head. The gold in his eyes was hard, stripped of all the hesitation that had fractured him in the ruined camp.
“Why do we hold the Stillness?” Darius asked, his tone dropping into the heavy cadence of doctrine.
The guard stiffened in his saddle.
“Just as the darkness entered the world through the weakness of one man,” Darius recited, his voice carrying the weight of his father’s law, “and through that weakness, death spread to all men—so too does ruin consume us when we fail our duty.”
His voice took on a soft, teaching tone.
“Do we fight for pride? Do we kill for vengeance? No.”
The final words were spoken in a near whisper, but they bore the weight of truth that spanned millennia. “And to question our battle against the dark is to invite that same infection into your own soul.”
The words hung in the dusty air between them, cold and absolute.
The resentment drained from the guard’s posture, replaced by a reverent submission. He dipped his head—the sharp, deferential nod of a child who had been corrected by a master, understanding that the reprimand was a shield against a greater evil.
“I hold the mountain, my Prince,” the Oathed murmured. He spurred his horse and returned to the point of the march, his posture once again a flawless picture of obedience.
Darius watched him go, the taste of ash thick in his mouth. He had just rebuilt the cage, bar by iron bar.
The column maintained its pace, the sound of marching feet hypnotic in its precision. Then, cutting through the clatter of armor and the thud of hooves, came the sharp rattle of iron chains from the prison wagons being dragged near the rear.
“Darius!”
The voice was young and desperate.
Darius tightened his grip on the reins. He knew that voice. It was Alcim.
He did not respond to the panicked pleas. He kept his pace.
Alcim—the boy who had eagerly learned to correct his stance from this very prince, who had stood up to raiders twice his size—now only saw a friend who could aid his escape.
“Help us! They killed Su’dell!” Tears cut through the soot on the boy’s face, his hands gripping the iron bars of the wagon.
Darius kept his face carved from stone, his gaze locked forward. Slowly, the horrific realization began to materialize in the child’s eyes.
“Why aren’t you helping us like before?” Alcim’s voice cracked. “They attacked us for nothing. Please…”
The final plea caught against the armor of the Line. Darius slowed his mount, though his eyes refused to drop to the cage.
“Alcim,” the Prince of the Line spoke, his tone calm. “We have saved you, child. We bring you into the Line to be more than a soul lost to the dunes. You will be a shield and a sword against the dark.”
The boy’s tears stopped, his eyes narrowing in terrified confusion. “What are you talking about? I just want to go home. Where is Mia?!”
The invocation of her name struck like a hammer against the Stillness.
“She…” Darius started, a treacherous moment of hesitation fracturing his voice.
“She’ll come,” Alcim interrupted. The boy’s grip tightened on the bars, his voice suddenly fierce with the absolute, unquestioning faith of a child. “You watch. She’ll come for us.” The man trapped inside the armor of a prince understood the terrible truth.
She doesn’t know they live.
Mia had seen the ash. She had seen the burned weaver’s tent. She had felt the silence of the basin. She thought they were all already dead.
If she knew the truth, she would throw herself against the swords of the Dragon Line. She would never stop hunting the boy, and my duty would force me to kill her.
But if she believed the ash was all that remained… she would grieve, and she would survive.
It was an awful truth—the kind of secret a coward buries deep in the dirt.
Darius pulled hard on his reins, turning his mount away from the prison wagons. He rode sharply to the head of the column, signaling the captain of the vanguard.
“My Prince?” the Dragon-Oath asked, slowing his horse.
“The prisoners from the dunes,” Darius said, his voice carrying the strength of royal blood. “Divert their wagons from the capital. Send them to the Outer Marches of Beh-REET.”
The captain hesitated behind his obsidian mask. “The Marches? They are desert-born, my Prince. The cold will take half of them before they see the walls.”
“They will adapt, or they will break,” the Blood-Heir said flatly. Then he remembered the boy’s knuckled grip on the iron bars. The pure, blazing defiance in his tear-streaked face. “The boy who just spoke. Alcim. Pull him from the pens when he comes of age.”
“My Prince?”
“Put a blade in his hand. Train him as a Dragon-Oath.”
The captain stiffened. “An Oathed? But he is tribal filth—”
“He has heart,” Darius commanded, cutting the man off with the absolute authority of the Throne. “The Line will forge the rest. See it done, and strike their names from the imperial ledger. They do not exist.”
“I hold the mountain,” the captain murmured, bowing his head before pulling away to bark the orders.
Darius spurred his horse forward, facing the horizon. The wind bit against his face, but he didn’t feel it. He was already burying the truth beneath the heavy steel of his armor.
Mia would never know.
And he would carry the lie until the mountain crumbled.