# Chapter 361: The Ambush at Greyfen Pass
The scout's words hung in the air, each one a fresh lash on Soren's already raw nerves. "The Ashen Maw… they're being torn apart. It's the Remnant. It has to be." Soren stopped pacing. The maps, the diagrams, the carefully calculated risks—all of it turned to ash in his mind. He saw Finn's face, heard Lyra's laugh, remembered the promises he'd made to every fighter who had sworn themselves to the Unchained. Cassian's plan, his cold, tidy strategy for a future date, was a ghost. The real war was happening now. He looked at Nyra, her eyes wide with the same horrifying realization. He looked at Bren, whose hand was already on the hilt of his sword, his soldier's instinct screaming at the betrayal of orders. "To the Maw," Soren said, his voice devoid of emotion, a flat, hard stone in the quiet room. "Sound the alarm. We ride now."
***
The Greyfen Pass was a wound in the earth, a deep, jagged canyon carved by some long-dead river. Its walls, sheer cliffs of crumbling grey rock, funneled the wind into a constant, mournful howl. The air was a thick, choking soup of ash and dust, reducing visibility to a few dozen meters and forcing the Sable League convoy to proceed at a crawl. The heavy, multi-wheeled transport wagons groaned under their burden, their iron-shod wheels crunching on the gravel-strewn path. Inside, the wounded lay on makeshift cots, the air thick with the coppery scent of blood and the sharp, sterile smell of healer's salves. These were the lucky ones, the Gifted fighters who had survived the last brutal skirmish but were too broken to fight again, their Cinder-Tattoos faded to a sickly, ashen grey, their inner fires nearly extinguished.
Captain Lian of the Sable League sat on her horse, a sturdy roan mare named Dust, her eyes narrowed against the stinging wind. She wore the League's practical leather armor, dyed a deep sable, and her face was a mask of concentration. The pass was a known risk, a necessary evil to transport their most vulnerable assets from the front lines to the relative safety of Elder Caine. Her Gift, a subtle form of sonic resonance that allowed her to detect structural weaknesses in rock, was a constant, low-frequency hum in her skull. It was a poor weapon in an ambush, but invaluable for navigating treacherous terrain. Right now, it was telling her nothing but the usual groans of a tired canyon.
"Status?" she called out, her voice barely carrying over the wind.
"Scouts report nothing, Captain," came the reply from a rider further back. "The ash is too thick. They could be hiding a dragon in these dunes and we wouldn't see it until it breathed."
Lian grunted in acknowledgment. It was the kind of gallows humor that kept soldiers sane. She had two Gifted guards riding point, their powers a reassuring presence. One, a burly man named Goran, could harden his skin to stone. The other, a wiry woman named Kael, could conjure shields of shimmering light. They were her vanguard, her living armor. The convoy was a precious cargo, not just of supplies, but of people. Friends. Allies. The thought of losing them here, so close to safety, was a bitter pill.
The wind shifted suddenly, dying down for a brief, unnatural moment. The silence that fell was absolute, a vacuum so complete it felt like a pressure against the eardrums. Lian's Gift screamed a warning, a high-pitched shriek of imminent collapse that had nothing to do with rock. Her head snapped up.
It started not with a war cry, but with a whisper. A soft, sibilant hiss from above, like a thousand snakes slithering down the canyon walls. Then the sky fell.
Arrows. Not the crude, fire-hardened shafts of wasteland raiders, but perfectly fletched, black-feathered missiles. They rained down in a disciplined, terrifying volley. But it was not the arrowheads that were the true horror. It was the substance smeared on them, a dull, chalky grey paste that flaked off in the wind. The first arrow struck Goran in the shoulder. He grunted, expecting the familiar sting, the rush of adrenaline as his Gift hardened his flesh to repel the blow. Instead, a convulsive shudder wracked his body. His skin, moments ago turning to a stony grey, softened, flushed, then went pale. The light in his eyes died. He slumped in his saddle, his Gift not just suppressed, but violently torn from him, leaving behind an empty, gasping shell.
Kael fared no better. Three arrows thudded into her light shield. The barrier, usually a brilliant, solid wall of force, flickered violently, colors swirling like oil on water before shattering into a million motes of fading light. She screamed, a high, thin sound of agony, clutching her head as the feedback from her Gift's destruction fried her nerves. She fell from her horse, hitting the ground with a sickening thud.
Panic erupted. The Sable League soldiers, trained professionals though they were, were unprepared for this. Their Gifted were their anchors, their tactical advantages. Seeing them fall so easily, so… unnaturally, was a psychological blow as much as a tactical one. Lian drew her sword, its steel a sliver of defiant light in the gloom. "Form up! Protect the wagons!" she roared, her voice a raw command.
From the ash dunes on either side of the pass, they emerged. Not charging, not screaming, but rising. Grey figures, their robes the exact color of the swirling dust, seemed to coalesce out of the very air. They were ghosts in the storm, their faces hidden by deep cowls, their movements unnervingly silent and synchronized. They carried not swords or spears, but a brutal assortment of implements: heavy maces wrapped in chain, wickedly hooked polearms, and short, thick-bladed axes that looked designed for crushing, not cutting. They were the Ashen Remnant.
They moved with a chilling efficiency that spoke of countless hours of brutal practice. They did not engage the regular Sable League soldiers in a fair fight. They ignored them, flowing past the desperate defensive lines like water around stones. Their targets were the Gifted. A soldier with a minor talent for pyrokinesis raised his hands, a flicker of orange appearing in his palms. A Remnant cultist, moving with impossible speed, slammed a mace into his chest. The impact was secondary. The grey paste on the weapon's head did the real work, snuffing out his Gift before the fire could even form, leaving him stunned and vulnerable to the follow-up blow that ended his life.
Lian fought like a woman possessed. Her sword was a blur of motion, her Gift screaming a constant, frantic commentary on the structural integrity of the canyon walls around her. She parried a blow from a hooked polearm, the metal screeching in protest. She drove her blade into the chest of a cultist, who fell without a sound. But for every one she cut down, two more seemed to take their place. They were relentless, emotionless, their attacks focused and precise. They weren't trying to win a battle; they were conducting an extermination.
She saw a Remnant fighter break through the line and head for one of the wagons. Inside, a young Gifted, no older than sixteen, lay with a bandaged leg. His Gift was a simple one—he could make plants grow, a useless talent in a fight, but one that had been used to cultivate healing herbs in the settlement. The cultist wrenched the wagon door open, the wood splintering. Lian tried to cut him down, but another Remnant intercepted her, their axe forcing her back. She could only watch in horror as the figure in grey leaned into the wagon.
The world seemed to slow down. The wind, the screams, the clang of steel—it all faded into a dull roar. Lian saw the cultist kneel beside the terrified boy. She saw the glint of an ash-wood dagger in the dim light. She couldn't hear the words, but she saw the shape of them on the cultist's lips, a soft, final benediction. *"The world is cleansed, one curse at a time."* The dagger plunged. The boy's body jerked once, then was still.
A cold, white-hot rage, pure and absolute, obliterated Lian's fear. Her Gift, which had been a chaotic storm of warnings, suddenly focused. She felt a tremor in the cliff face to her left, a hairline fracture, a point of immense pressure. With a scream that tore at her throat, she poured every ounce of her will, every shred of her pain and fury, into that point. *Break.*
The canyon wall exploded. A ton of rock and dust, dislodged by her sonic assault, thundered down, burying a half-dozen Remnant fighters and creating a chaotic barrier. The sudden shift in the pass's geometry caused a momentary lull in the fighting. Lian used it. "Fall back! Through the gap! Now!" she yelled, her voice hoarse.
Her soldiers, seeing the sudden opportunity, scrambled to obey. They dragged the wounded, fired their crossbows in a desperate covering volley, and retreated through the newly created opening. Lian was the last to go, her body aching, her mind reeling from the psychic backlash of overusing her Gift. She took one last look back. The Remnant were already scaling the rubble, their grey forms moving with the same terrifying, unhurried purpose. They had not won. They had not lost. They had simply… paused. And Lian knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the bone, that this was not an end. It was a beginning. They had come for the wounded. They would come for the strong next.