Morning came reluctantly to the snow forest, gray light filtering weakly through heavy clouds that promised more snowfall before nightfall.
Lide was already awake before any of the others stirred, sitting near the dying embers of last night's fire with Bart's confiscated notebook open on his knee. He did not read it. He simply held it, gaze fixed on some middle distance beyond the camp's low doorway, gray-blue eyes catching what little light crept through the gaps in the plank roof.
The conversation with Morgana sat heavy in his chest, though his expression betrayed nothing of it.
A knight-guardian.
He turned the phrase over again, the way he'd turned it over half the night, weighing its cost against the promise beneath it. His soul, held hostage by a Greater Demon who served a prince intent on usurping belief itself—that was not a debt he could simply walk away from, no matter how the terms of repaying it might trouble him.
People like me, he had told her. He meant it. Whatever the Shadow Scions were fighting over, it was not his war. But a war that swallowed his soul whole, one demon's bargain at a time—that, he could not simply ignore either.
The riders began to wake around him, groaning against stiff limbs and the lingering cold, old Bart among the first to sit up and immediately pat down his coat in search of his notebook before remembering, with a wince, exactly where it had gone.
He said nothing about it. Neither did Lide.
They broke camp within the hour, packing away what remained of the charcoal and hard bread before pushing further into the forest along the trail of orc tracks. The snow had not fallen heavily enough overnight to erase them, and if anything, the prints grew clearer the deeper they went—more of them, layered atop one another, boots and bare, calloused feet mixing together in a way that told Lide this was no longer a handful of scouts.
"Commander." One of the younger riders, crouched low near a cluster of broken branches, called him over with a note of unease in his voice. "There's blood here. Old, but... a lot of it."
Lide dismounted and crouched beside the stain, now more brown than red beneath a thin dusting of fresh snow. Claw marks scored the bark of the nearest tree, deep gouges that suggested something considerably larger than an orc had passed through recently.
"Wintermaw," he murmured, more to himself than to the rider. "Or something like it."
"A Magical Creature this far south?" Old Bart's voice carried more alarm than he likely intended, quickly reining it back in when Lide's gaze flicked toward him.
"The forest's borders have never held such things back," Lide said flatly. "Only distance and disinterest did. Both are shrinking this year."
He straightened, studying the way the tracks diverged here—orc prints scattering wide around the blood and claw marks, as though even they had given the creature a wide berth.
Interesting.
Whatever had passed through was strong enough to make orc scouts wary. That alone told him more than any report from Horton Fort's demon lords could offer.
"We've seen enough," Lide said finally, turning back toward the horses. "Their main force has already crossed the Frost-Speaking Plain, as I said. What remains here are stragglers, and something else besides that isn't ours to hunt without better numbers."
"Then we're heading back?" Bart asked, equal parts relief and confusion coloring his weathered face.
"We are heading back," Lide confirmed. "But not to Horton Fort. Not yet."
He said nothing further on the matter, swinging back onto his snow horse and setting a pace that left little room for the men to question him, though the murmurs among them afterward carried a familiar undertone—wondering, as they always did, exactly what schemes turned behind their silent commander's calm expression.
Lide gave that wondering no attention. His thoughts had already moved elsewhere, toward a report he intended to send by far less conventional means than any courier bird Horton Fort's demon lords might intercept.
Slime Kingdom, he thought, gray eyes distant beneath the pale winter sky. You should know what's crossing toward your borders, even if I owe you no loyalty for the telling.
......
Winterhold, several days' journey south.
The Gel Network hummed quietly within its usual channels, threads of information passing between outposts, trade stations, and border fortresses in the steady, unglamorous rhythm that had become the backbone of the Slime Kingdom's expanding reach.
Among the routine reports—grain shipments, adventurer registrations, minor territorial disputes—one message arrived through an unlikely relay: a scattered, secondhand account passed first through a border trader, then a Slime courier stationed near Horton Fort's outskirts, before finally reaching the desk of a small, meticulously organized Slime currently buried beneath a mountain of parchment.
Pum paused mid-sort, several eye-stalks swiveling toward the newly arrived scroll with sudden, focused attention.
Orc migration, early by nearly a month. Sighted near Horton Fort's patrol routes. Unconfirmed reports of a large Magical Creature presence accompanying or trailing the migration.
The information was thin, secondhand, filtered through at least two parties who had no reason to lie but every reason to exaggerate out of fear. Still.
Early. That detail alone was worth flagging.
Pum quickly cross-referenced the report against the kingdom's existing intelligence—Arno's adventurers freshly returned from Misty Bay Harbor, the trade routes recently mapped along the southeastern border, the ongoing expansion at Gold Lionheart Fortress. None of it directly overlapped with an orc migration in the far north, and yet the timing nagged at something in Pum's carefully ordered thoughts.
If the orcs move early, and the Forge Region's demon lords are as indifferent as rumor suggests, then the border pressure will fall somewhere. And somewhere is rarely a place anyone chooses conveniently.
Pum compiled the report alongside the recent Misty Bay Harbor intelligence, wrapping both into a single dispatch bound for Winterhold's think tank scholars, and—given the northern report's unusual nature—a secondary copy earmarked directly for His Majesty the Slime's attention, wherever he currently happened to be.
That errand fell, as it often did, to one of the swifter Gel Network couriers, who set off without complaint into the cold.
......
Chen Yu received the dispatch two days later, gel body settling into a thoughtful, rippling stillness as he read through Pum's neatly organized summary aboard his Flying Sword, already midway through his planned inspection route toward the southeastern border.
Orcs moving early. A Magical Creature trailing them. He turned the information over, weighing it against everything else competing for his attention—Morrigan's growing ambitions in Misty Bay Harbor, the New Xirik Society's unsettling reach into belief itself, and now this.
Everything wants to happen at once, doesn't it.
Still, an early migration in the distant north was not, for the moment, a fire demanding his immediate attention—not with the Forge Region's demon lords nominally responsible for that territory, however little they seemed to care. What mattered more immediately was strengthening what he could reach: the border fortresses already under his banner, the trade routes still fragile with a wary neighbor, and the quiet, steady growth of the kingdom's own people.
He tucked the report away for later consideration, one thread among many, and let his gaze drift back toward the horizon, toward Gold Lionheart Fortress rising slowly into view beneath the pale winter sky.
One thing at a time, he thought, small cheerful bubbles rising despite the weight of it all. First, let's see how the fortress is doing.
Behind him, unseen and unheeded for now, the snow forest's orc trails pressed on, and somewhere among them, a lone knight rode south with a soul-debt on his shoulders and a promise he had not yet decided how much he regretted making.