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.
