Chapter 110: Border
The Ashwall was not beautiful.
Commander Ryla Fenward — Gharrek’s niece, Gnoll, thirty-two, assigned to the southern border command for the past six years — stood on the wall’s observation platform and looked south. The view was the same view that every Ashwall officer saw, every day, for the duration of their posting: a flat, brown-green expanse of borderland stretching to the horizon, where the colors shifted — the vegetation changed, growing denser, greener, lusher. The line where the Sovereign’s territory ended and Demeterra’s began.
You could see it. That was the thing that newcomers didn’t expect. The divine border wasn’t a line on a map — it was a line on the earth. The Sovereign’s land was managed, ordered, productive. Demeterra’s land was alive in a different way — wilder, thicker, the growth domain pushing the soil’s output beyond what natural agriculture could achieve. Her forests were taller. Her grasses were denser. Her rivers were wider.
And her territory was watching.
Ryla could feel it. Not the way a priest felt the Sovereign’s presence — that warmth, that ambient awareness. This was different. This was the sensation of being observed by something that didn’t like you. A pressure at the edge of perception, constant, like a headache that hadn’t quite arrived. Demeterra’s domain extended to her border, and her border extended awareness, and that awareness was aimed north like a cannon that hadn’t fired yet.
"Patrol report," said Lieutenant Tharen. Human. Twenty-five. Three years on the wall, which meant he’d stopped flinching at the border-pressure two years ago. "Night shift spotted movement in sector seven. Three contacts, estimated humanoid, moving east along the tree line on their side. Standard scouting pattern."
"Ours or theirs?"
"Theirs. Too far south for our patrols and moving with the vegetation — using the growth cover. Frogmen, probably. Gorvahn’s scouts."
Ryla made a note. Scouting activity had increased by twelve percent in the past three months — a subtle uptick that individually meant nothing and collectively meant the Green Accord was taking a renewed interest in the Ashwall’s deployment patterns. They did this periodically. Every few years, the Accord’s intelligence apparatus probed the border, cataloged positions, tested response times. Not preparing for war — preparing to prepare for war. Keeping the option open. Maintaining the data.
The kingdom did the same thing in the opposite direction. Ryla knew this because the Ministry of Whispers had briefed her on her own side’s reconnaissance operations during her intake — a briefing that had the dual purpose of informing her and reminding her that the Whispers knew everything she did, including the reconnaissance she wasn’t supposed to know about.
"Log it. Standard response — increased observation in sectors six through eight. No engagement. What about the Gryphon report?"
"Flight Beta’s dawn circuit confirmed the ground contacts. Gryphon Three picked up movement consistent with a medium-sized party — twelve to fifteen individuals, staying under the canopy. The Gryphon also flagged something else." Tharen hesitated. "Heat signature consistent with a divine creature. South of the treeline, approximately two kilometers inside Accord territory. The signature matches a Growth-Hawk profile — mid-grade aerial creature, Gorvahn’s Beast domain."
Ryla’s jaw tightened. Growth-Hawks were the Green Accord’s answer to Gryphons — smaller, faster, less durable, but bred in larger numbers. If the Accord was deploying one this close to the border, it was either running its own reconnaissance... or testing whether the Gryphon patrols could detect it.
"How long has the Growth-Hawk been on station?"
"Unknown. The Gryphon picked it up on the return leg. It could have been there for hours or minutes. The creature was stationary — perched, probably."
"Log it separately. Creature intelligence channel — direct to the Ministry of Whispers and the Warden Academy. If the Accord is running creature-recon on our border, the Wardens need to adjust the Gryphon circuit to ensure permanent coverage of sectors six through eight."
"Rules of engagement for creature contacts, Commander?"
"Unchanged. Observe only. Do not engage. Our Gryphons do not cross the border. Their Growth-Hawks do not cross the border. If that changes — if an enemy creature enters our airspace —" She paused. "Then we have a very different conversation. And the Hydra gets moved south."
***
The Ashwall itself was thirty-four kilometers of continuous fortification — a stone-and-stonesteel barrier three meters thick and twelve meters tall, studded with watchtowers every five hundred meters, garrisoned by twelve thousand soldiers rotating in three shifts, and supplied by a logistics chain that ran from the Ironfields foundries to the wall’s internal armories with the regularity of a heartbeat.
At the wall’s eastern end: the Gryphon Roost. A purpose-built structure — half stable, half watchtower — with a landing platform on the roof and nesting chambers large enough for creatures with thirty-eight-meter wingspans. Flight Beta was stationed here permanently — four Gryphons and their Wardens, rotating on six-month deployments from the Academy in Ashenveil. The Roost was the wall’s eyes. The garrison was the wall’s muscle. Together, they turned a thirty-four-kilometer stone barrier into a surveillance network that reached two hundred kilometers south.
It was the kingdom’s most expensive single piece of infrastructure. The Ministry of Coin’s annual report listed its maintenance cost at two hundred and eighty thousand Iron Marks per year — more than the entire Academy system, more than the Crucible’s temple network, more than any other single expenditure except the kingdom’s food production subsidy.
Two hundred and eighty thousand Marks to maintain a wall that had been attacked three times in two hundred and fifty years.
The Third Demeterra War had been twelve years ago. Ryla had been twenty when it started — a junior scout in the Frostmarch, transferred south when the border heated and assigned to a reconnaissance unit that spent three months behind enemy lines mapping the Accord’s supply routes. She’d seen combat. Real combat — not the War College’s choreographed demonstrations, not the training arena’s controlled violence. The kind of combat where you couldn’t see your enemy until they were close enough to smell, where the ground tried to grab your feet because the growth domain had literally turned the soil against you, where you killed people you’d never met because they were standing between you and the way home.
She didn’t talk about it. Border veterans didn’t. The war was twelve years ago and the wall was here and the border was quiet and talking about it was like scratching a wound that had scarred over — technically healed, permanently changed.
The wall’s memorial hall was on the ground level of Tower Fourteen — the central command tower, the largest structure on the Ashwall. Not a grand memorial. Not the kind of monument that Ashenveil built for its heroes and founders. A stone room, twenty meters square, with names carved into every wall. Names of soldiers who had died defending this position. Three wars’ worth of names.
The First Demeterra War: four hundred and twelve names. Fought when the kingdom was young, the army was small, and every casualty was a significant percentage of the total force.
The Second Demeterra War: one thousand, nine hundred and thirty-one names. The big one. The war that had tested the kingdom’s survival and produced the military doctrine that everything since had been built on.
The Third Demeterra War: six hundred and seven names. The most recent. The most efficient. The fewest casualties, the most decisive result — and still six hundred and seven people who had been alive at the start and weren’t at the end.
And a separate plaque, smaller, on the east wall. Not names. Creatures.
Divine Creature Losses — Southern Border, All Engagements
First Demeterra War: 0 mortal creature losses. Hydra deployed — lost venom head (Year ~47), regrown Year 52 at reduced capacity.
Second Demeterra War: 3 Gryphons killed, Hydra deployed (3 heads, combat-effective).
Third Demeterra War: 1 Gryphon killed (Stormcrest, Flight Alpha, Year 238). Hydra combat-effective throughout.
Enemy creature kills: Thornwyrm killed (Year ~217, Hydra engagement). 4 Growth-Hawks downed (Gryphon air combat, Years 195-217).
Four Gryphons dead in two hundred and fifty years. Four divine creatures — each one a decades-long investment of divine energy, each one bonded to a Warden who had trained for years. The creature losses were listed separately because their deaths were different. A soldier died and the army mourned and replaced them. A divine creature died and the sky mourned — the remaining Gryphons in the flight refused to fly for three days after a flight-mate’s death, circling the body in decreasing spirals until the Wardens could coax them away.
Total human casualties: two thousand, nine hundred and fifty names.
Total creature casualties: four Gryphons.
Ryla walked through the memorial hall every morning. Not for ceremony — for calibration. The names reminded her what the wall was for. Not for standing on. For standing between. Between those names and the next war that would add more.
The latest addition was a plaque at the hall’s entrance, installed by the Ministry of War after the Third War’s conclusion:
The wall stands so the kingdom doesn’t fall. The soldiers stand so the wall doesn’t fall. The names on these walls stood. They do not stand anymore. Remember why.
Below it, in smaller text, the kingdom’s unofficial border motto — the phrase that every Ashwall soldier learned on their first day and carried for the rest of their service:
The south is green. The south is patient. The south remembers.
***
Ryn arrived at the border on the last day of Sunsteel.
The Academy’s border rotation was the final mandatory field experience of the first year — three days at the Ashwall, observing garrison operations, touring the fortification, and being reminded that the kingdom’s peace was not free and was not guaranteed and was defended by real people standing on real stone watching a real enemy that had tried to kill them three times and would, eventually, try again.
The Academy group — fifteen students plus faculty — traveled by military coach from Ashenveil. Eight hours on the Iron Road, south through the Southmark’s agricultural belt, past Bridgeport’s trade warehouses, through three military checkpoints, and into the border zone — the fifty-kilometer strip between the Ashwall and the nearest civilian settlement where the atmosphere changed from "kingdom" to "garrison."
The change was physical. Ryn felt it when the coach passed the final checkpoint — a heaviness in the air, a dimming of the ambient warmth that pervaded the kingdom’s interior. The Sovereign’s presence was fainter here. Not absent — the border was still within the god’s territory. But thinner. Stretched. The way a fire’s warmth thinned at the edge of its reach.
And something else was present. A counter-pressure. A weight from the south that pushed against the Sovereign’s domain the way water pushed against a dike — constantly, patiently, without violence but without relent.
"That’s her," Thresh said quietly. The Kobold’s fur had flattened against his body — the instinctive Kobold response to perceived threat. "Demeterra. You can feel her domain pressing against the border."
Ryn could feel it. A green weight. A living pressure. The sensation of standing at the edge of one god’s attention and feeling another god’s attention begin.
Commander Ryla met them at the wall’s main gate. She was shorter than Ryn expected — Gnolls were never as tall as Minotaurs, and Ryla was small for a Gnoll — but she moved with the compressed energy of a coiled spring and spoke with the economy of someone who didn’t waste words on things that didn’t matter.
"Three days," she said. "You will observe. You will not touch the equipment, climb the wall without escort, or approach within fifty meters of the southern parapet without a qualified officer. You will not make noise after dark. You will not use lights after dark. You will not ask why." She paused. "The south has eyes. We do not give them things to see."
The tour started at Tower Fourteen. The memorial hall. The names.
Ryn stood in the stone room and read the walls. Two thousand, nine hundred and fifty names. Each one a person who had walked to this wall, put on armor, picked up a weapon, and never walked home.
Thresh was silent beside him. Even the Kobold’s relentless analytical engine had nothing to say in a room full of dead soldiers’ names.
Lysa was absent — her rotation had been the previous month. But if she’d been here, Ryn knew what she would have said. Something precise. Something analytical. Something that framed the names as data points in a historical pattern.
She would have been right. And she would have been wrong. Because the names weren’t data. They were people who had done the ordinary, repetitive, unglamorous work of standing between a kingdom and the thing that wanted to destroy it.
The commoner’s burden. The soldier’s version. Not twelve percent of your harvest. One hundred percent of your life.
Ryn left the memorial hall and climbed to the observation platform. He looked south. The border stretched to the horizon — brown-green on this side, dense green on the other. Two gods’ territories, pressed against each other like tectonic plates.
The south was green. The south was patient. The south remembered.
And the wall stood. And the names grew. And the kingdom held its breath and built and prayed and waited for the next time the patience ran out.
That night, unable to sleep, Ryn climbed back to the observation platform. The border was black — no lights on the Accord side, nothing visible beyond the treeline. But the sky was occupied.
A Gryphon was returning from night patrol. Ryn heard it before he saw it — the deep drum of wingbeats, the whisper of displaced air pressing down from above. Then the creature appeared: a vast bronze shape against the stars, wings folded, dropping toward the Roost at the wall’s eastern end. Its eyes glowed gold — divine sight, cutting through the darkness the way the Sovereign’s awareness cut through everything.
The Gryphon landed. A Warden — barely visible at this distance — dismounted and walked toward the command tower. Delivering the night report. Creature contacts. Heat signatures. The Growth-Hawk’s position.
The border was defended by stone and steel and twelve thousand mortal soldiers. But it was watched by something older. Something that flew higher. Something whose golden eyes never closed.
The south is green. The south is patient. The south remembers.
And the sky remembers too.