Chapter 3: The Wolves of Verenthia

The Iron Covenant had four members now. Kael, the mercenary captain with a decade of blood on his ledger. Seraphine, the Heretic of Ashwood, who could still hear whispers from the void where the gods had fallen. Bren, a deserter from the Imperial Legion whose hands had built the very war machines now hunting them. And Orin, a poisoner who had killed half the Verenthian royal family and felt precisely zero remorse about it. They met in an abandoned watchtower on the Verenthian border, where wolves howled at a moon that looked too red to be natural. Bren unrolled a map. ‘The empire’s eastern front is thinly garrisoned,’ he said. ‘If we strike here, at the Iron Pass, we cut their supply lines to the capital.’ Kael studied the map and felt the weight of a war he had never wanted.