Chapter 48: Eyes on the Enemy
Runt moved through the southern edge of Ashenveil’s territory at a pace that didn’t look like scouting. It looked like a Gnoll going for a run. That was the point.
His team waited at the border marker — a cairn of stacked stones that Aldric’s builders had placed three months ago, the outermost edge of Zephyr’s territorial claim. Beyond it, the divine bond would thin, then vanish. They’d be operating blind. No whisper from the Voice. No warmth from the mark. Just skill and silence and whatever gods lived in the space between here and there.
Four scouts. Two Gnolls — Fang and Creel, brothers from the same litter, both fast, both quiet, both capable of following a scent trail through rain. One Kobold tunnel-runner — Pip, small enough to hide in a drainage ditch and patient enough to stay in one for twelve hours. And **Harvin**, a converted Beastman border trader — half wolf-blood, half whatever else ran in Beastmen veins — who knew Thyrak’s territory because he’d spent twenty years trading across it.
Harvin was the most important and least reliable member of the team. He’d converted six weeks ago after Krug’s trade delegation passed through a merchant camp near Ashenveil’s southern border. His faith was Provisional. His loyalty was conditional. But his knowledge of the region was irreplaceable.
"Two weeks," Runt said, checking the supplies each scout carried — dried meat, water skins, medicine pouches. "We map. We count. We observe. We do not fight. We do not engage. We do not get caught. If you get caught, you don’t know where Ashenveil is, you don’t know who the Voice is, and you’ve been wandering alone since the war. Understood?"
Four nods.
They crossed the border at sundown. The divine bond faded like warmth leaving skin. Runt felt it go — a subtle hollowing behind his sternum where the connection to the Voice usually hummed. It wasn’t painful. It was absence. Like removing a glove and feeling cold air.
Harvin led. The terrain shifted within the first day — the swamp thinned, the ground rose, the trees changed from moss-heavy cypress to dry oak and iron-bark. Thyrak’s territory began where the soil turned rocky. You could feel the domain shift in the ground itself. The earth became harder, heavier, as though the Beast and Earth domains had physically imprinted on the landscape.
The first Stampist shrine appeared on the second day. A circle of stacked stones at a crossroads, with a carved Iron Hoof at the center — crude, weathered, old. Someone had left a bundle of dried meat at its base as an offering. The meat was rotten. No one had collected it.
"How often do the clergy come through here?" Runt asked.
Harvin shrugged. "Used to be monthly. Last few years, quarterly. Maybe less."
A god who didn’t maintain his border shrines. Runt filed that away.
***
They reached The Stamp on Day 334.
Runt had seen fortresses before — the war refugees had described their gods’ strongholds, and Ashenveil’s walls were growing larger by the month. But The Stamp was a different scale entirely. A massive stone plateau, flat-topped and steep-sided, with a fortress built directly into the rock face. The walls weren’t constructed — they were carved from the plateau itself, as though a god had taken a mountain and chiseled it into a military installation.
Which was exactly what had happened, probably. Centuries ago.
They observed from a ridge two kilometers southwest, concealed in scrub brush. Pip had burrowed into a shallow depression and covered himself with dirt and leaves until he was functionally invisible. Fang and Creel lay flat on either side of Runt, ears forward, breathing slow.
What they saw:
The fortress had one functional gate — western face, wide enough for four minotaurs abreast, reinforced with iron bands that were more rust than metal. The walls were thirty feet high and intact, but the stonework showed cracks that hadn’t been repaired. Moss grew in the joints. One section of the northern wall had a visible lean — not enough to threaten collapse, but enough to tell Runt that nobody was maintaining the foundations.
The patrols were consistent. Four minotaur warriors on each wall section, rotating every four hours. They followed the same route, at the same pace, at the same time. Runt timed three rotations and confirmed: identical. Down to the minute. They hadn’t changed their patrol pattern because they’d never needed to. Nothing had ever tested it.
No scouts beyond the walls. No perimeter patrols. No watchtowers beyond the fortress itself. The minotaurs’ defensive doctrine was simple: we are inside the big stone thing, and the big stone thing has never fallen. Therefore, the big stone thing would never fall.
Runt counted soldiers. Over three days of observation, he identified approximately 800 warriors through rotation tracking — counting unique individuals as they appeared on walls, at the gate, and during two training exercises in the fortress courtyard. All heavy infantry. War-hammers, battle-axes, iron shields the size of doors. No bows. No crossbows. No siege equipment. No cavalry.
Eight hundred minotaurs with the hitting power of battering rams and the tactical flexibility of a brick.
The courtyard training exercises told the rest of the story. On the second day, Runt watched a formation drill — four hundred minotaurs assembling into a charge line. It took them eleven minutes to form up. Once they charged, the ground shook hard enough that Runt felt it through the ridge. The power was undeniable. A full minotaur charge would flatten any shield wall short of a castle gate.
But they only knew the one move. Form up. Charge. Hit. Repeat. There was no flanking maneuver. No reserve positioning. No coordinated withdrawal. The officers — larger minotaurs with iron crown-bands — gave two commands: advance and hold. That was the entire tactical vocabulary.
"The southern cliff," Runt said to Fang, gesturing. The plateau’s south face was nearly vertical — sixty feet of sheer rock with sparse handholds. No wall fortifications on that side. No patrols. The minotaurs hadn’t bothered because nothing with hooves could climb it, and they couldn’t conceive of a military force that didn’t have hooves.
Something with claws, though. Something low-profile, cold-blooded, designed to grip stone.
Runt looked at the cliff and thought of the drake hatchlings back in Ashenveil.
***
On the way back, they passed through two border villages.
The first was a Beastmen settlement — wolf-types, maybe fifty residents, living in wooden longhouses surrounded by livestock pens. A Stampist shrine dominated the village center, larger and better maintained than the crossroads shrine. An elderly wolf-beastman sat beside it, watching strangers pass with the wary stillness of someone who’d learned that visitors meant taxes.
Runt’s team didn’t stop. They passed through as traders — Harvin’s cover story, familiar and believable. But Runt observed. The livestock was thin. The storage buildings were half-empty, and it was autumn — they should have been full. The shrine’s offering bowl held a few strips of dried meat, the minimum acceptable tithe, placed with the enthusiasm of someone paying a fine.
The second village was worse. Thornwatch — larger, maybe eighty residents, a mix of Humans and Beastmen. The Stampist shrine here had been recently repaired, which told Runt that it had recently been damaged, which told him something about how the residents felt about their god’s clergy. A group of young Beastmen sat near the village’s edge, doing nothing. Unemployed. Untrained. Unhappy.
Harvin, walking beside Runt, said quietly: "It’s been like this for years. Thyrak takes thirty percent of everything. Meat, grain, leather, metal. His minotaurs eat half of it. The rest goes to the temple. Nothing comes back."
"Nothing?"
"No blessings. No healing. No protection. Nothing except the promise that if you stop paying, the minotaurs visit." Harvin’s lip curled — a wolf-beastman’s reflex. "He hasn’t given a blessing in a decade. Maybe longer. His priests come for the tithe. That’s the entire relationship."
Runt thought about the Chapel in Ashenveil. The gold flame. The healing Krug dispensed to anyone who needed it, convert or not. The blessings that went to every soldier, every farmer, every pregnant mother. The difference wasn’t subtle. It was an entirely different concept of what a god was supposed to be.
They crossed back into Zephyr’s territory on Day 341. The divine bond snapped back like a rubber band — warmth flooding Runt’s chest, the hum of connection returning. The hollowing filled. The Voice was there.
The debrief happened that evening, in the command post. Krug, Vark, Harsk, Nix. Runt drew the map with charcoal on a flat stone — he still preferred drawing to speaking. The Stamp. The patrol routes. The cliff face. The border villages. The numbers.
"Eight hundred warriors," Vark repeated. "All heavy infantry."
"All heavy infantry," Runt confirmed. "No archers. No cavalry. No scouts that I could find outside the fortress. Their border intelligence is a handful of Beastmen runners who report to the fortress weekly." He tapped two marks on the stone. "Two border villages. Here and here. Both undertaxed in loyalty, overtaxed in tithe. The nearest one — Thornwatch — is eighty people. Mixed Human and Beastmen. They haven’t received a blessing from Thyrak in years."
"Years?" Harsk asked. The Gnoll alpha knew what a god’s absence felt like. He’d lived it.
"Years," Runt confirmed. "His priests come for the tithe. That’s the entire relationship. They collect and leave."
Vark stared at the map. Eight hundred against their current three hundred. Bad odds, on paper.
"Their cliff face is undefended," Runt added. He tapped the southern wall of the drawn fortress. "Sixty feet. Vertical. They don’t patrol it, don’t watch it, don’t think about it. Nothing with hooves gets up there."
A silence. Vark looked at Krug. Krug’s eyes were distant — listening to the bond.
Through the bond, one word from the Voice. The same word He’d said when Thaelen offered to teach archery. The same word He’d said when Runt found the drake colony.
Good.
Then, a moment later: Call the council. It’s time to plan.