The sun was beginning to fall, bleeding gold across the scorched field. The air stank of blood, ash, and ruptured flesh. What had once been a grassy ridge now bore the marks of siege fire, shattered weapons, and cracked stone, a graveyard without ceremony.
The Stormriders, sweeping down like a silver wind, their elite mounts bearing wounded and dead alike from the battlefield. Cloaked in black-blue armor etched with clean sigils of wind and flight, they began the grim task of cleansing the field. Their presence was quiet but commanding.
Above the bloodied slope, a hollowed-out hill now bore the remains of a broken cohort: Kael, Wen Tu, Bruga, Ryoku, Nyzekh. Armor torn, blood staining their robes, skin bandaged with haste. Yet they stood. They had survived.
The Saran and the surviving Stormguards, barely thirty of the hundred, reformed without command. The wedge that had once crashed into elite orcs now divided into three ten-man teams, each led by a remaining Iron Hand. Their helms still shone dully beneath the dusk, motionless save for the ordered gestures of their doctrine.
Altan stood near the fallen warlord's body, silent.
Kael approached slowly. The wind stirred, lifting the war-dust like rising ghosts.
Altan turned to him. "Why did you stay?"
Kael didn't hesitate. He reached into the folds of his ruined armor and pulled a folded seal.
"We broke the seal when we heard the second wave was coming. Ten thousand strong. Scouts estimated they'd reach the gate in half a day."
Altan said nothing.
Kael continued, voice low. "We could've retreated. Most of the wounded couldn't walk. We were barely thirteen hundred, and half of those were injured."
Wen Tu stepped closer. "We knew what it meant if we left. The steppe would fall. Their families. Their tribes. We hold the gate, or the steppe drowns in green."
Ryoku grunted, half-smiling. "It wasn't hard to decide."
Kael turned to look back at the others. "Nyzekh was the first to speak. He said we fight."
Altan shifted his gaze. "Why did you suggest it, Nyzekh?"
The disciple stepped forward from the broken line, blood dried into the folds of his uniform. His expression was calm, distant. "Three days after we left the Gate Citadel, I felt a shift in the wind."
Altan narrowed his eyes slightly. "Stormwake."
"I sensed your presence," Nyzekh said. "The pressure in the air changed. Breathing became sharper, like the sky was listening. It was faint, but I knew. You were following the cohort. Watching us. Observing."
Altan was silent. The other disciples looked at each other, shocked, confused.
Then Altan asked quietly, almost too soft for the wind to carry, "And even then, why still suggest we fight?"
Nyzekh's answer was immediate. "Because we need to pass the test. There are more bloody battles ahead of us. You are molding us beyond the crucible. This was never just a war, it is preparation."
The silence that followed was absolute.
Then Altan looked up to the horizon.
"You've endured more than I asked. And made the choice I hoped you wouldn't have to make."
He looked back at them all, bruised, burned, broken in places.
"Let's return," Altan said at last. "You've all earned your rest."
The Stormriders finished securing the wounded and lighting pyres for the dead. One pyre for Stormguard. One for the hill itself, a tribute to unnamed sacrifice.
As night fell, the sky opened with faint snow.
Altan remained a moment longer, watching the battlefield lit in flickering fire.
He turned his back to the flames only when the last light of the warlord's cleaver had faded into ash.
Behind him, ten thousand would march. But in front of him, his students had become something more.
They had not broken. And that, he knew, mattered more than victory.
Years later, something had taken root.
A lone tree grew from the center of the hill where the disciples and Stormguards had made their final stand. But it did not grow alone. Around it, a grove slowly took shape, twisted roots and pale leaves fed by blood that once soaked the earth.
The goblins and orcs called it cursed. Haunted. They would not pass through that land, not even at day.
But to the nomads and steppe tribes, the hill became something sacred.
Monk's Hill, they called it. And the grove that surrounded the lone tree became known as the Stormguard Grove. They left offerings of carved bone, wind charms, and prayer-braids among its branches. Some claimed the wind there whispered names of the fallen. Others said they had dreams of flame and lightning beneath its boughs.
Even the Stormriders, when they passed by on patrol, lowered their heads.
An old nomad saying endured:
"We leave our offerings not for the dead, but to be remembered by them."
And so the memory of the stand lived on, in bark, wind, and sacred silence.