It had been raining mercilessly since before sunrise. One of those cold, persistent rains that soaks you to the bone and turns every step into mud, every order into a murmur drowned by the sound of falling water. The fortress walls loomed like a cyclopean tomb in the midst of the fog, and throughout the stronghold, Dante's rebels trembled – some from cold, others from fear.
It was the fourth day of the siege.
Dante stood by the outer parapet, his soaked cloak clinging to him like a second skin. His eyes scanned the landscape ahead with suspicion but found nothing but silence and rain. The enemy – the fearsome General Lucien Darcos – remained hidden, still as a wolf lying in wait. There were no drums, no shouted orders, no skirmishes to test the defences. Only the dull murmur of water and the distant sound of wind battering the drenched trees.
This isn't normal, he thought to himself. Not with Darcos. This is the fourth day he's kept us pinned here, and he hasn't even bothered to attack. Not even a stealth assault. He hasn't even sent a fucking ultimatum.
The silence had become more oppressive than any attack. It felt alive, heavy, as if the gods of war themselves were holding their breath. The crows didn't fly. Not a single dog barked in the abandoned villages nearby. Only the rain, ceaseless, beat against stone, iron, skin. Dante felt it deep in his gut: this was a waiting game. And Darcos wanted to win that game.
– That fucking tosspot is up to something – said Iago, approaching, covered in mud up to his knees. – What do you want me to do today? This miserable twat of a drizzle's going to make it hard to use cannons and muskets against them.
Dante narrowed his eyes at the horizon. The fog was finally starting to give way, pushed back by a warm wind from the south, breaking into damp tatters, like veils rising from a corpse. As the mist lifted, what had once been hidden was revealed: muddy hills, trees stripped by the rain, and the positions of the Ferralian camps.
– Keep your eyes open, Iago – he said in a low but firm voice, not taking his gaze from the plain. – There's something wrong with this. Darcos is too quiet.
– You think they're going to attack again?
– I don't think so. Not yet. They're waiting for something.
But there was something else. A small detail that had been gnawing at Dante since he noticed it, like glass splinters under the skin.
– Do you see the banner? – he asked at last.
Iago raised an eyebrow.
– Which banner? Their camp's full of them.
Dante turned to him, his face grim.
– The golden dragon. Curled around a black mountain. Draven Dragomir's banner.
– How am I supposed to know? – Iago replied, not grasping the seriousness of the situation. – They all look the same. All black. Those puffed-up twats have no imagination! They use black for everything like it's going out of fashion.
The doubt lingered in Dante's mind as the rain began to ease. But it hadn't stopped. It still fell in thin, persistent threads, as if the sky itself hesitated between fury and mourning.
– No cannons today, Iago – he ordered curtly. – Not until it stops raining. This cursed rain deadens the shot and drowns the fuse. We'd only be wasting gunpowder to make noise.
Iago didn't argue. He knew that, in a war of attrition, the winner would be the one who managed what they had best. The wall might seem eternal for now, but the gunpowder reserves were not.
Along the western road – still half-covered by the low fog that refused to lift – something was moving. At first, indistinct shapes. Then, lines. And finally, the truth, like a dagger driven into the belly of the morning.
Banners. Tall, proud, swaying slightly in the damp wind. The black and dark of Ferralia, yes. But in the centre, several bore a golden dragon curled around a black mountain. Draven Dragomir's banner.
– By all the damned gods of the Eternal Underworld… – Dante muttered.
The camp trumpets announced his arrival before the echo faded. The Ferralian soldiers parted along the road like a black sea, and, at the centre, beneath a heavy cloak, came Draven – mounted on a horse black as coal, in armour dark as pitch, with eyes that seemed to see nothing, and yet everything at once.
Behind him, fifteen hundred soldiers. Disciplined, marching like a living wall, unhurried, unflinching. They came to reinforce what was already an army of just over eleven thousand. Now, they must number around thirteen thousand, against the four thousand and something defending Rocciaguarda.
But what froze Dante's blood were not the troops. It was the six monsters that followed them.
Six twenty-four-pound cannons.
Reinforced wheels, wide mouths, dragged with effort by horses and chains. Siege weapons. Breaching weapons. And that calibre – as rare as it was massive – wasn't just for show. It was meant to open walls.
– The gates won't hold – said Iago, hoarsely. – Nor these stones, if they know where to hit.
Once in position, the cannons began to fire. Each shot was a mechanical thunderclap, a dagger to the eardrums, a vibration that shook the fortress walls down to the bones of those leaning against them. The projectiles blasted craters in the stone walls, ripping out ancient blocks as if they were mere pebbles. The fortress trembled. It didn't collapse – not yet – but it began to groan like a wounded beast that knows the end is near.
From atop the battlements, Dante watched in silence, arms crossed, face tense. Each Ferralian shot was like a note in the city's requiem.
– You're not going to retreat? – asked Iago, hands covered in soot. – If the wall gives way, those bastards will be on us with no mercy.
Dante didn't reply immediately. He was counting the time between each shot, like a watchmaker listening for the ticking before the final explosion.
– When the wall gives… – he said at last – … and when those shit-eaters think they've won, that's when I'll make them pay for everything they're doing to the people who fight for justice.
And the wall gave way. Not with a sudden crash, but with a series of cracks and a slow collapse, as if the very stone surrendered to the inevitable. A breach opened in the western wall – wide, uneven, full of rubble and hanging dust. That would be the way death came.
Lucien Darcos, cold as the steel of his talon, did not wait for the dust to settle. With cruel precision, he launched the first wave. Hundreds of men and women, bayonets raised, advanced as one. A human battering ram, ready to crush everything that remained.
But the rebels were ready. They had dug trenches behind the wall. They had positioned howitzers on the inner balconies, reloaded with dry powder under canopies, and awaited orders.
When the Ferralians crossed the dust of the breach, what they found was not an empty wall – it was a wall of fire.
The initial volley swept the front like a scythe through a ripe field. Soldiers clad in black fell in heaps, screaming, their muskets flying from their hands. Those who came behind tripped over the bodies of the first, and those who tried to retreat were pushed forward by their own comrades.
Improvised projectiles, made of boiling oil and resin, were thrown from side windows, spreading panic and the stench of burnt flesh. Dante, wielding a sabre, led a lightning-fast counterattack through the flanks of the breach, slicing through enemy lines like a blade through melted butter.
The first charge was short, but brutal.
When the sound of gunfire ceased and the smoke began to clear, the breach lay covered in corpses. The surviving Ferralians fled, slipping in the blood and mud. Some dropped their weapons. Others didn't even manage to fight.
– This was just the first charge – he told all his rebels. – Darcos always sends the first wave to die… just to test the pulse of the wall.
In the silence that followed, the sound of drums could be heard. And more drums. More marching formations preparing for the next wave.
The second wave came before the bodies of the first had cooled. Lucien Darcos was not a man for hesitation. When he lost soldiers, he did not mourn – he replaced them. And when he bled, he bled to probe, to test, to learn. This time, he sent more fusiliers, more veterans of the campaigns against Dante, people with hardened faces and empty eyes, who knew well the scent of gunpowder and fear.
When they charged again, the fighting was fiercer. The rebels, despite their defensive position, felt the weight of the advance. Several missed their targets when they fired. Others fell on their own parapets, without time to cry out. Dante, with his fists clenched, saw one of his young recruits run through by a bayonet before he could reload. The stones of Rocciaguarda drank blood – a great deal of blood.
But, like the first, the second wave was repelled. At the cost of lives. At the cost of time.
At that moment, as if the world itself paused to take a deep breath, the rain ceased. The clouds parted like curtains pulled back by invisible hands, revealing a sky heavy with lead, but tearless.
Iago raised his hand, and his artillerymen aligned the muzzles of their old bronze cannons, loading them with sacred haste.
The thunder of the first volley was like the roar of a waking monster. One of the Ferralian support regiments burst into flames, gunners and scouts scattered like dry leaves in a bonfire. Those who survived fled or crawled. Iago smiled for the first time since the day had begun.
But on the other side of the field, among black banners and standards, Draven Dragomir mounted his dark horse, surrounded by the Dragospire militia – ruthless soldiers, with cuirasses black as ash, eyes painted with charcoal and muskets forged in Ferrumia's Mother-Forge.
They were the Fire Dragons, as they were called in the Green League. Soldiers who did not retreat. Who did not surrender. Who, according to legend, followed Dragomir like a cult follows a god.
– More are coming! – Dante shouted, almost hoarse, seeing the golden dragon by the fallen wall. – Dragomir is leading the next wave. Ready the final surprise!
When Draven finally advanced with his soldiers, in a rhythmically cruel gallop like an execution drum, they found the courtyard rigged like a trap – tight and carved, in order to turn their numbers into a disadvantage.
But the Dragons did not hesitate. They advanced in silence. They slashed. They endured wounds that would kill others. And they did not break, not when set aflame, not when their bodies were pushed into barrels of burning oil, not even when death struck their cuirasses with every step.
Dante kept fighting, dirty, wounded, with a chipped sabre in his right hand and his left arm giving way to pain. But he moved towards Draven without hesitation, without a cry, like one walking to the gallows.
Draven saw him. He pulled the reins, turned his horse and charged, sword low, ready to kill him – as he had so many others.
But Dante did not flee. He waited. And when the horse lunged at him, he dodged at the last possible second and drove the tip of his sabre into the animal's shoulder blade. The blow didn't kill the mount, but unbalanced it, and Draven, pulled by momentum, fell from the saddle with the dry sound of iron against stone.
The horse fled. The two men remained.
Draven rose in silence, picking up his sword – a curved blade, almost Solterran, its edge blackened by use and dried blood. Dante, gasping, kept his guard up.
The duel began without words. Only steel.
Draven struck with military precision. Wide, fast, calculated blows. Dante defended with all he had, dodging each attack. But he was more exhausted from the fighting than he realised. He was cut on the flank. On the shoulder. On the side of the face. But he struck back too. A blow to the belly. Another to the arm. And a third that chipped the black armour.
Both were bleeding. Both faltered.
But Draven, though not younger, was stronger and more experienced.
In a final charge, he disarmed Dante with a powerful blow that sent his sabre flying from his bloodied hands. The rebel fell to his knees, chest heaving, eyes narrowed in pain.
Draven raised his sword.
And at that instant – before the final blow fell, before Dante could even murmur a prayer – something glinted in Dragomir's back.
A blade, driven with force. With rage. With love.
The point of a dagger broke through Draven's mouth, ripping through tongue, teeth, the bones of the palate. The general's eyes widened, and the sound he made was not a scream – it was a gurgle. A wet, grotesque sound of flesh and iron.
Iago stood behind him, eyes wet with fury and fear, hand firm on the dagger's hilt.
– That's one less son of a bitch to lead this army of dogs.
Draven fell with a metallic thud. He still breathed for a few moments, short spasms, until he finally stopped.
Dante remained there, on his knees, breathing convulsively, staring at the body of a monster defeated – but not vanquished without cost – with both of their blood mixing on the ground. His hands trembled, not from fear, but from exhaustion – the kind that clings to the bones like ancient rust.
– Fall back! – the word came out like a stone thrown into a bottomless well. – Everyone to the second wall!
There was no need to repeat it. The rebels, dirty, wounded, but alive, began to retreat in an orderly formation, just as they had practised. There were few casualties in the withdrawal. Most of the Ferralian soldiers hesitated to advance after what had happened to Draven Dragomir. His militia, though they had fought with fury and honour, had withdrawn upon seeing their lord fall.
Iago climbed to the artillery platform like one mounting the gallows, but he did so with the same mocking smile as ever.
– We've still got powder, Dante – he shouted as he helped reload a cannon. – And if we've got powder, we can still make those pricks suffer.
The guns began to spit fire and iron once more, pounding the Ferralian ranks that now crowded before the abandoned wall. It wasn't just the physical impact of the cannon balls that affected them – it was the sound, the vibration, the terror of watching their comrades be torn apart by people dressed in rags and poorly paid. Ferralian morale, once ironclad, was beginning to crack – but it hadn't broken. Not yet.
But Dante wasn't celebrating. He remained silent, leaning against the wall, blood still drying on his face and hands. He watched the skies as though expecting an answer to fall from them, but all he saw was the sun beginning to crackle through the clouds.
We can't go on like this, he thought to himself, so no one would hear his pessimism. Not with ten walls. Not with a hundred. We could have every wall in the world, and those leeches would still find a way to tear them all down.
From the south, wind began to blow, carrying with it the acrid smell of dried blood, gunpowder… and, surprisingly, an army. Reinforcements were not expected – and yet, they were coming.
They appeared first as dark smudges on the horizon – elongated shadows riding at a slow march, as if time itself were bringing them to this siege. One of the rebels cried out, and his shouts spread along the wall like a rumour through a court:
– It's the High Lord! It's Magno Ferroforte! The Royal Army is here to finish us!
Those who were already close to dropping their weapons began to cry. Others fell to their knees, murmuring prayers or blasphemies, as if either might carry the same weight. Even the most hardened veterans hesitated at the sight.
Iago, covered in soot and dried sweat, left the cannons for a moment. He grabbed the spyglass with trembling hands, brought it to his better eye, and tried to make out the colours of the advancing host. But a few seconds later, he pulled the glass away with a growl.
– I can't make out the bloody colours – he snarled. – The banners are furled, and the dust's covering the uniforms… Dante, you look, your eyes are younger than mine.
Dante took the spyglass with wounded fingers, still marked from the fight with Draven. He raised it to his eye, hesitant, and the world narrowed to a single line of advance. Riders – yes, and many. Gleaming armour, warhorses, long lances. But what caught his attention was what they carried on their backs.
– They're not Ferralian… – he murmured, not realising he was speaking aloud.
– Then who are they? – asked Iago, with nervous impatience.
Dante slowly lowered the spyglass. Silence fell again, like a blanket of snow across his weary shoulders.
– They have wings – he said. – Winged Cavalry. They have black wings strapped to their backs.
– The Winter Wolves…? – asked Iago, incredulous.
– Yes… it has to be them. And if Elizaveta has returned, then Elias and our promised reinforcements are with her – said Dante, unable to contain his emotion. – Ready yourselves! Fix bayonets! When our allies descend the hill, we'll launch a counter-attack from within the fortress!
In unison, the roar of approval was deafening. Where once there had been tired eyes and spirits on the verge of breaking, now life had returned – a new energy, ready to burst from the cage of Rocciaguarda and march toward freedom.