Farcastles

FARCASTLES: CHAPTER EIGHT – THE SHADOW ROAD

The road east of Daggerpoint didn’t appear on any map they carried. It was less a road and more a scar—a stretch of land where nothing grew straight and the dirt had forgotten how to rest. Trees on either side leaned away like they’d seen what came down it before.

No birds. No wind. Just the sound of boots on ground that didn’t want them.

Roots curled across the trail like veins. When Ern stepped on one, it pulsed faintly under his heel.

The five walked in silence. Smoke still clung to their clothes, and the weight of the map seemed heavier than it should have been. Ern felt it in every step, like each mile cost him more of the boy who had left the village with a tin cup and no idea what he was walking into.

Gellon was the first to speak.

“So. What do we call ourselves?”

Torv grunted. “Alive.”

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“I mean it. We’re not just conscripts anymore. The North didn’t send us here. We followed smoke and found secrets. That makes us something else.”

“We don’t need a name,” Sarra said, eyes forward. “We need answers.”

“Still,” Gellon said, “when people sing about us later, I’d rather they have something better to call us than ‘that group that didn’t die.’”

“We haven’t finished not dying yet,” Myrr added.

They crested a hill by afternoon. Below lay a flat, broken stretch of earth. At its center, half-swallowed by thorn and ruin, stood what remained of a stone watchtower.

“That’s on the map,” Sarra said. “A marker.”

As they approached, the air thinned. Ern tasted metal on the wind. Not blood—older. Like iron soaked in forgotten things.

The tower leaned slightly, its shadow stretching too far for the sun's position.

Myrr knelt by a circle of stones at the base.

From the shadow beneath the tower, something rose.

Not another creature. Not quite. A figure. Cloaked. Its face was a polished disc of glass, reflecting each of them—but wrong.

When Ern looked, he didn’t see his face.

He saw himself in armor that didn’t exist yet. Older. Hardened. Blood on his hands.

“Return it,” the figure said, voice echoing with both male and female tones, like layers of people speaking in discordant harmony. “Or be claimed by what made it.”

It raised one hand—not as a threat. As a sentence.

And vanished.

No smoke. No wind. Just absence.

They stood in the silence left behind.

Gellon swallowed. “Okay. What the actual hell was that?”

“Memory,” Myrr said, eyes still on the space where the figure had been. “Wearing a mask.”

Torv checked the edge of his blade. “We should move. Now.”

Sarra turned slowly to Ern. “Still with us?”

He nodded. His voice caught in his throat.

“I think so.”

They walked on. No one looked back.

But Ern swore the shadows moved with them.

The road hadn’t changed.

But it felt like it remembered their names.

“Another ritual site,” they murmured. “But different. This one was used to seal something, not summon.”

Sarra ran her hand over the stones. “This isn’t North or South work.”

“Then whose?” Ern asked.

The air darkened—not from clouds, but from something pulling the light tighter.

Ern blinked. The shadows didn’t just deepen—they bent. Sound seemed to warp, flattening like fabric stretched too thin.

Then came the voice.

Not loud. Not angry. Just… wrong. Like hearing a memory through someone else’s dream.

“You carry what was meant to be forgotten.”

The stones vibrated. Vines recoiled. The tower pulsed once, faint and low—like a heartbeat trapped beneath stone.

Sarra drew her blade. Gellon stepped back. Myrr whispered something sharp enough to taste.

Torv moved without a word and placed himself squarely in front of Ern.