Chapter 66: Soldier’s Choice
Torben Moss had killed eleven men in the Vyreth war. He remembered each of them.
Not their faces — faces blurred after the first few. What he remembered was the sound. The specific noise a body made when a spear went through it. The wet punch of impact, the gasp that followed, the weight on the shaft as the dying man gripped the thing that was killing him like he was trying to hold onto something. Torben remembered the weight.
He was twenty-six. Human. A foot soldier in Demeterra’s border garrison at Redfen — a walled outpost of two hundred stationed on the southern edge of her territory, positioned to watch the grasslands that separated the Rootmother’s domain from the unclaimed north. He’d joined the Verdant Legion at seventeen because the alternatives were farming and nothing. His brother Kael had joined the same year. They’d drilled together. Marched together. Shipped south together when the Vyreth war began.
Kael had died in the third month. A Scorchling fire-javelin through the chest during a night raid. The fire had cauterized the wound on entry, which meant Kael had lived for eight minutes after the impact — long enough for Torben to reach him, long enough for Kael to grab Torben’s arm and say nothing because the lung was already gone.
Torben had burned the body. Standard procedure. Rootist doctrine required burial in soil so the goddess could reclaim the organic material, but there was no soil in the Scorchling’s ashen wasteland. Just cinder and heat and the smell of burned everything.
He’d prayed at the field shrine afterward. Knelt in the ash, both knees, hands flat, head bowed. The standard Rootist posture. He’d said the words — By root and branch, I return to the earth. The Mother grows, and I grow with her — and felt nothing. Not warmth. Not comfort. Not the subtle pulse of divine recognition that the priests always described.
Nothing.
He’d been feeling nothing ever since. Eighteen months of nothing.
***
The trader arrived at Redfen on a supply cart from upriver.
He wasn’t unusual. Supply traders passed through every ten days, bringing grain, salt, cloth, and the occasional luxury from deeper territory. This one had the same cart, the same goods, the same weathered look of a man who spent his life on roads. He set up in the market square — a cleared patch of mud between the barracks and the grain store — and laid out his goods on a tarp.
Torben noticed the tools first. They were different from the standard iron that the Legion’s quartermaster distributed. The metal was darker, with a sheen that caught the low afternoon light differently — not the dull gray of worked iron but something denser, more deliberate. The edge on the knife blade the trader was showing to the cook was wrong. Too clean. Too precise. No smith in Redfen could produce that kind of edge.
He drifted closer. Not intentionally — the way soldiers drifted, hands in pockets, face neutral, pretending not to be interested while cataloging everything.
"Northern make," the trader said, noticing him. "Different alloy. Holds an edge longer than anything south of the grasslands."
"Where north?"
"Settlement called Ashenveil. You heard of it?"
Torben hadn’t. "No."
"Most people haven’t." The trader shrugged. "They keep to themselves. Don’t cause trouble. Good smiths, though. Best I’ve ever traded with."
"What god?"
The trader paused. It was a brief pause — barely noticeable — but Torben had spent eighteen months watching people for tells, and the pause was a tell.
"The Grand Ordinator," the trader said. "Forge god. Keeps to himself, like his people."
Torben picked up the knife. The weight was wrong — lighter than it should be for the blade’s size. The balance point sat exactly at the junction of blade and handle, which meant it could be thrown or used for close work with equal effectiveness. Military-grade geometry in a civilian tool.
"What’s life like up there?" Torben asked. He put the knife down carefully.
The trader didn’t answer immediately. He folded a cloth over his tools and looked at Torben — not the blank assessment of a merchant evaluating a customer, but something more measured. Reading. Calculating.
"Different," the trader said. "Five races living together. Kobolds working alongside humans. Lizardmen and minotaurs drilling in the same formations. They’ve got a currency system — iron coins — and written records for everything. Every person has a role. Every role has a purpose."
"Sounds organized."
"It is."
"And the god?"
The trader leaned against his cart. "He answers prayers."
The words were simple. The trader said them the way you’d say the sky is blue — not as a revelation but as a fact so basic that emphasis would be redundant.
"Every god answers prayers," Torben said.
"Does yours?"
The question hung. Torben didn’t answer. The trader didn’t press. He just packed his tools, sold a bag of salt to the cook, and left a small iron object on the tarp where Torben had been standing — a disc the size of a thumbnail, stamped on one side with a symbol Torben didn’t recognize. Half-gear; half-flame. An eye in the center.
He didn’t call it a gift. He didn’t explain it. He packed his cart and moved on to the next stop.
***
Evening.
The Redfen shrine stood at the garrison’s east wall — a carved wooden post surrounded by a stone basin, identical to every other Rootist shrine in Demeterra’s territory. The spiral-root symbol was worn smooth by years of weather and the hands of soldiers who touched it before patrol.
Torben knelt. Both knees. Hands flat. Head bowed. The standard posture.
By root and branch, I return to the earth. The Mother grows, and I grow with her.
The words came automatically. Eighteen months of repetition. The muscles remembered even when the mind had stopped caring.
Around him, other soldiers knelt. Seven of them tonight — down from twelve last month. The evening prayer wasn’t mandatory. Attendance had been declining since the war ended, a slow erosion that no one acknowledged because acknowledging it meant admitting something was wrong. The garrison priest — a tired old Frogman named Thriss who’d served the shrine for twenty years — led the prayer with the same cadence he always used. Flat. Practiced. Empty of the conviction that Torben vaguely remembered from before the war.
Torben said the words. He breathed. He waited for the warmth — the pulse, the connection, the acknowledgment from the goddess that his priests swore was real, that old Thriss described as "the Mother’s hand on your heart."
Nothing.
The shrine was just wood. The words were just sounds. The soil beneath his knees was just dirt — cold, packed, carrying none of the living warmth that the faithful were supposed to feel. Maybe it was him. Maybe the war had broken whatever receptor in his soul was supposed to receive divine acknowledgment. Maybe Kael’s death had used up whatever supply of faith Torben had been born with, and now there was nothing left to give.
Or maybe the goddess just didn’t care about a border soldier with eleven kills and a dead brother and a faith that had been draining away for a year and a half.
He stood. The other soldiers filed out. Old Thriss extinguished the shrine lantern and disappeared into the barracks.
In his bunk, Torben turned the iron disc over in his fingers. Half-gear. Half-flame. The eye at the center stared up at him from the dark.
He didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t know who had made it or what god it represented or why the trader had left it.
He put it under his pillow.
He didn’t pray again that night. But for the first time in eighteen months, he thought about what it might feel like if someone answered.