The cold didn't come like a hammer.
It seeped into the Marches slow and pitiless — a heavy sickness in the air, a dulling of the earth's breath.
Calder Vane knew this winter well.
It was the only kind he trusted anymore — the kind that didn't lie with false hope or mercy.
Survive or be stripped to the bones.
Simple.
Honest.
As honest as a blade under the ribs.
They moved before dawn, slipping through woods knotted with black roots and mist so thick it seemed to bleed from the trees themselves.
The warband had thinned again.
Not by betrayal — not yet — but by the simple culling of those too slow, too soft, or too unlucky to survive the last raids.
Those who remained had been tempered like broken steel — ugly, mismatched, but dangerous.
Calder led from the front, Dog's Hunger slung loose across his shoulders, the patched cloak hanging heavy with frost.
Each step forward was a silent wager:
I will outlast you. I will bleed you before you bleed me.
Ahead, Thornhollow's stronghold rose from the river mists — a crumbling garrison, more rust and rot than stone.
A fortress built by better men, now kept alive by fear, greed, and inertia.
Calder crouched behind a ridge of frozen brush, studying the walls, the movements.
He didn't just see men and battlements.
He saw weaknesses:
The drunken slouch of a sentry atop the gate.
The way patrols staggered out of step at the south tower.
The cracked mortar in the outer walls, too old to hold under real weight.
Every fortress has a breaking point, he thought.
Same as every man.
They watched all day, hidden by the Marches' patient decay.
The warband crouched in silence: Dren Malco muttering under his breath, Saelen Crow-Eater sharpening her chipped blade with rhythmic strokes, Thann Veyr gnawing at his lower lip until it bled.
Branwen sat apart, arms wrapped around his knees, staring at nothing.
Good.
Distance kept a man alive longer.
Closeness made it hurt more when the knife slipped in.
That night, Calder scraped a rough map into the frozen dirt, kneeling by firelight so dim it barely reached his boots.
His voice was low, cutting, as he laid out the plan:
Strike the storehouses first — starve them of hope.
Burn the barracks — break their cohesion.
Smash the gate when the guards panicked.
No siege.
No demands for surrender.
Only ruin.
Only blood.
That was the language of the Marches.
That was the tongue Calder spoke fluently, bitter syllable by bitter syllable.
Before they moved, Calder paused, hand resting lightly on Dog's Hunger.
He glanced across the warband — these fractured men and women held together by hunger and fear — and knew:
None of them would outlast the winter if they didn't keep moving, keep striking, keep bleeding others faster than they bled themselves.
Survival wasn't a right.
It was theft.
Every breath you drew meant stealing one more from someone weaker.
He didn't resent it anymore.
He accepted it.
Like scars.
Like winter.
The attack began before sunrise.
The storehouses went up fast — fire biting into the dry wood with a roar that shattered the morning's hush.
Guards scrambled from their posts, half-blind, weapons forgotten in favor of clutching at smoldering cloaks and screaming horses.
Calder moved among them like a ghost wrapped in cold iron.
Dog's Hunger rose and fell in brutal arcs — a spear cleaved clean in two, a shield ripped apart at the seams.
The blood steamed on the frozen ground, painting ugly black stains across the white frost.
The gates crumbled under the warband's push.
Rams fashioned from felled trees slammed into weakened wood.
Screams rose behind the walls — not battle cries, but the panicked keening of men who knew they'd been abandoned by luck and preparation alike.
Calder led the charge through the broken threshold, boots sliding in mud churned red.
One guard lunged at him — a young man, barely old enough to shave.
Calder knocked the sword aside with a brutal twist of his wrist and drove his knee into the boy's gut, sending him sprawling.
He didn't kill him.
No need.
The Marches would.
Better to let him crawl back to Thornhollow's strongholds with the stink of fear trailing behind him like smoke.
The battle inside was a slaughter, fast and pitiless.
Saelen Crow-Eater swung her battered sword with relentless force, each blow sending blood and bone in wide, ugly arcs.
Dren Malco darted through the chaos, knives flickering in and out of ribs and throats like a miser counting coins.
Thann Veyr charged recklessly into a cluster of guards, barely managing to hold his own before Branwen barreled into the fray at his side, shield raised high.
Calder fought with grim efficiency — not because it was glorious, but because it was necessary.
He wasn't a hero.
He was a scythe swung by the hands of hunger and broken oaths.
When the last screams faded into gurgles, Calder stood atop the shattered gate, Dog's Hunger dripping black in the gray light.
The stronghold burned around him — not a beacon, but a warning.
There would be no clemency.
No prisoners worth keeping.
Only the ruins left behind for the crows and the mist to claim.
Later, Calder sat in what remained of the garrison's hall, the heavy timbers still smoldering under the collapsed roof.
A rough map lay spread across a broken table, scavenged from the captain's office.
Blood smeared the ink in places, but the lines were still clear:
Outposts.
Supply routes.
Names that once meant authority.
Now they were targets.
Branwen approached, boots silent on the cracked stone.
He looked thinner in the firelight, face hollowed by hunger and something deeper — disappointment, perhaps.
Or the slow realization that ideals made poor armor.
"You're turning the Marches into a graveyard," Branwen said, voice tight.
Accusation and sorrow laced together like old scars.
Calder didn't lift his gaze from the map.
"They made it a graveyard first," he said.
"We're just the worms."
Outside, the wolves howled again — closer now.
The sound wound through the broken stones like a blade through old wounds.
Calder listened without fear.
The wolves didn't frighten him.
The cold didn't frighten him.
Only silence frightened him — the silence that came when there was no one left to fight, no debts left to pay.
What would he be then, without blood to bind him to the world?
Nothing.
And nothing survived long in the Marches.
He rose slowly, gathering the bloodstained map into a rough roll.
Dog's Hunger scraped against the stone as he slung it onto his back.
No speeches.
No comfort.
Just the endless march forward, step by step, wound by wound.
Outside, the warband gathered in ragged clusters, patching gear, binding wounds, stripping what little loot the dead had carried.
Varrick sharpened his axe with ugly, slow precision.
Saelen cleaned her sword without glancing up, her thick fingers steady and methodical.
Dren Malco laughed low and mean over a flask stolen from the dead captain's belt.
Thann Veyr sat apart, hands trembling, muttering prayers Calder doubted any gods still heard.
Branwen watched it all with a face like a shuttered window.
Closed.
Guarded.
But not blind.
Not anymore.
Calder tightened his cloak against the creeping chill and strode among them, heavy boots cutting deep into the frozen earth.
They needed another target.
Another reason to bleed forward instead of turning inward.
Idle hands reached for throats faster than they reached for shields.
In the Marches, movement was survival.
Stagnation was death.
Tomorrow, they would move again.
Another outpost.
Another ruin to carve into the bones of the land.
Calder Vane — the Stonewolf — would see this oath through to the end.
If only because there was nothing else left for him but the cold, the blood, and the ashes.