The Demon of the Black Ravine

The blood red sun dipped below the craggy peaks of the Fellmarch Mountains, casting long shadows across the valley where the exiled King Leander's army was encamped. The night watchmen were taking up their posts, their torches flickering in the chill mountain wind. Around the campfires gathered Leander's most loyal knights - a ragtag brotherhood forged in the fires of war and bound by unbreakable oaths.

First among them was the gallant Sir Rian of the Hall, his imposing figure unmistakable even in the fading light. His broadsword hung heavy at his side, its blade nicked and scarred from a thousand battles. Yet it was his piercing blue eyes that revealed the true steel of his spirit, for in them burned an unwavering determination to see his beloved king restored to the throne. 

Beside Sir Rian sat Sir Lantris of the Yew Tree Bow, Lady Abigail's silken handkerchief tied defiantly around his arm like a lady's favor. His sword hand rested on the intricately carved bowstave that had felled many a foe from dizzying heights. At his side lounged his rakish cousin, Sir Samwell, running an expert thumb along the edge of his dagger, ever watchful.

The roguishly charming Sir Mal of Volari sauntered over, a half-empty wineskin in his hand and a crooked smile on his lips. "To King Leander," he toasted with a wink, taking a deep pull before passing the skin to the next man.

That man was the towering Sir Kade of Rivergorge, his brow creased with the cares that had etched lines into his scarred face. With a grunt of acknowledgment, he drank and handed the wineskin to the grey-bearded Sir Threep and his lank-haired companion Sir Bren who accepted it with silent nods. 

Across the fire, the sharp eyes of the aged Sir Angus followed every motion, his gnarled hands slowly sharpening his blade. Though years had bent his back, the old knight was still spry enough to make any foe pay dearly for underestimating him. 

At his side sat the bear of a man they called Sir Nygell, his thick arms bare to the cold as he calmly checked the lashings on his heavy steel mace. Sir Vardis nursed a mug of ale, using the other hand to absently stroke his neatly trimmed beard as he gazed into the flames. 

Sir Rodrik and the impetuous young Sir Tyril Elfling completed their circle, the two men an odd pair bound by the kinship only battle could truly forge. Where Rodrik was quiet and methodical, Tyril was a livewire of emotion and energy ill-fitting for knighthood. Yet in their own ways, they had both proven their worth time and again on the long road to this final confrontation.

As the full dark of night settled over the camp, the knights fell into a contemplative silence, knowing that with the dawn would come the clash that would decide all their fates. For some, it would be their last night among the company of trusted brothers-in-arms. But not a man there had any doubt their swords would taste blood in the name of their exiled king.

Come the morning light, they would ride out to bring an end to the reign of the Usurper King Ulfric and his cruelties. The path would be pitched in blood and sown with sacrifice, but the twelve core knights of Leander the Just stood ready to pay any cost to restore the rightful monarch to his throne.

The night seemed to hold its breath as the twelve knights of Leander the Just fanned out in four trios from the king's camp deep in the Fell Woods. Their mission was to scout the vale surrounding the usurper Ulfric's keep, probing for weaknesses to exploit when the main host made its final march upon the inner sanctum.

Though the path ahead promised only bloodshed and hardship, the companions were heartened by the familiar cadences of their small, close-knit bands stealing through the inky shadows. These were the men whose bonds had been forged and reforged in the scorching crucible of war over the three long years since their beloved king's exile.

Sir Rian moved at the head of his handpicked team - the lethally accurate archer Sir Lantris and the bear-like Sir Nygell. The big man's heavy tread was almost comforting in its solidity as they wended along the eastern approach, his mace gripped tight should any lurking threat stir from the undergrowth.

Swallowed up by the gloom to their north were the stealthy shadows of Sir Mal, Sir Kade, and the wizened Sir Angus - that foxlike trio tasked with sniffing out the usurper's watchful eyes along the vale's rim. While to the west crept Sir Threep, Sir Bren and the hot-blooded young Sir Tyril Elfling whose thirst for glory had yet to be tempered by a deeply personal loss.

And in the southern wood stalked the cohort of Sir Samwell, flanked by the implacable Sir Vardis and the ever-stoic Sir Rodrik. More than brothers-in-arms, these twelve men moved and thought as one in symbiotic concert - extensions of the exiled King Leander's very will.

Overhead, the boughs remained frustratingly still and silent, no mournful dove call echoing back from Sir Lantris's bow to signal the path was clear. Somewhere in the enveloping darkness of the Fell Woods, the king kept watchful vigil with the five legions of their amassed army awaiting that singular note.

Then the woodland quiet was shattered by an explosive roar that set Rian's hand instantly on his sword hilt, his pulse quickening. From the shadows ahead materialized a hulking ogre slavering its hunger amid guttural battle cries.

"Ambush!" bellowed Nygell, his mace whistling in a lethal arc as he caught the first of a volley of wicked obsidian arrows on his shield.

What followed was a lightning-paced cyclone of clashing steel, bestial roars and panicked whinnies. Rian's sword lashed out with cold precision even as his eyes struggled to discern foes in the frantic churn of ogres and forest trolls that burst upon them. He caught flashes of Nygell's towering form wading into the heart of that morass bellowing his bloody challenge. 

Nearby, the acidic twang of Lantris's yew bow sang out like the skirling of a maddened falcon until the archer was sent sprawling by a crushing blow. In that same stuttering heartbeat, Rian felt the bone-jarring impact of a trollish gauntlet seize his buckler and wrench him from the saddle.

As he tumbled hard to the ground, gravel shredding his face and palms, his sight was consumed by a terrifying yawn of utter blackness. Somehow in that endless plummeting moment, he understood with soul-withering horror that he had been thrown over the precipice of the infamous Ravine - an unfathomable abyss from which no soul could hope to escape once consigned.

Rian's strangled scream tore futilely against the howling vacuum. The pale moonlight disappeared as he plunged ever deeper into the waiting black maw, the rest of his existence already careening towards its abrupt, brutal termination.

His two remaining companions could only listen as those agonized echoes faded into deathly stillness once more. Swallowing bile-thick grief, Nygell renewed the charge to buy what little ground they could for a regrouping.

Sometime later, the burly knight dragged his battered, mud-caked destrier into Leander's hushed encampment nursing a shallow troll-arrow gash. Across his saddle bow lay the unconscious form of Lantris, one side of the archer's face painted crimson with a river and tributaries of blood. The mourning dove signal had dissolved into pained, gurgling wheezes before falling silent in exhaustion and blood loss.

Already the other scattered trios began to materialize from the gloom of the Fell Woods bearing grim faces and grievously wounded brothers on litters. Murmurs rippled through the legionaries assembled like a funerary hymn as the extent of this night's losses became clear.

Of the legendary Order of the Twelve sworn to King Leander, only eleven remained. Their finest swordsman and most implacable champion now fed the insatiable hunger of the Ravine that had swallowed so many brave souls before him. 

Leander stood tall amid that circle of bloodied, haunted faces - his most trusted captains and councilors. As the murmurs stilled, he clasped forearms with each man in turn, sharing the weight of their unspoken sorrow and steeling their resolve in those few moments of sorrowful silence.

Tomorrow there would be a proper burning of rites for the heroic Sir Rian. On that pyre would go all their rage, their doubts, and any hint of surrender flickering in their grieving hearts. From those ashes would rise the pure flame of cold, merciless vengeance to light their blades on the longer, more arduous path that now slaked before them.

They would have their reckoning upon the usurper Ulfric's twisted skull or see every last one of their number entombed before yielding even a single keep to that deformed worm's domination. This night had been a shattering crucible, but it was one from which Leander's true Twelve would be reborn, hardened and inextinguishable.

The feather-stuffed pallets within the tattered tents offered scant comfort for the depleted ranks of King Leander's most trusted knights. They had limped, bloodied and hollow-eyed, back into their encampment amid the sheltering eaves of the Fell Woods - brothers reunited by harrowing loss. 

As they tended to the talon-scoring gashes and mailed dents that marked their battered flesh, a pall seemed to descend over the normally raucous camaraderie. Wearied minds relived those horrific moments when brave Sir Rian had been torn from their midst with a soul-rending scream, swallowed whole by the shadows at the edge of oblivion.

The silences between them grew heavy, punctuated only by the muffled sobs of men too physically and emotionally spent even to properly grieve their fallen champion this night. Leander himself had moved like a wraith among them, his calloused hand a leadened brand of comfort on each slumped shoulder, his eyes reflecting a tempered midnight darkness. 

At last, the bruised and battered knights succumbed to their body's desperate pleas for rest, drifting into fitful trances of dreamless black. Senses dulled by sheer exhaustion, not one among them marked the subtle turning of the hourglass toward the bewitching hour before the birth of a new, ill-omened dawn.

Insensibly, the first chill breath of wind stirred the perimeter watchfires, causing the dancing shadows to lengthen in seemingly serpentine contortions. By faint gradients, the forest around their camp fell under a deathly hush, as if the very trees themselves had ceased their perpetual swaying sapsucker to behold whatever foul trespass was about to be committed. 

Then the first rank appeared, ragged silhouettes resolving from the gloom in grisly lockstep - a full legion's worth of hulking, grotesque figures whose thunderous footfalls shook the ground in macabre cadence. Ancient, moss-eaten ogres and feral forest trolls swarmed eagerly forward with crude horn and tusk at the ready. 

At their vanguard marched a single, solitary knight in stained tabard and dinted plate whose haunted visage seemed to glow with a sickly greenish pallor entirely at odds with the warm, ivory tones of natural flesh.

The wraith-like specter of that blasted warrior was welcomed into the awed silence by a rustling inhalation of unified shock and dread. For there, leading the usurper's foul host in brazen mockery was... Sir Rian.

A lancing javelin of ice shot through Leander's gut as those dead, hollowed eyes met his across the few hundred paces of killing ground separating them. Though every logical process in the exiled king's mind balked and shrieked to refute what was plainly before him, there could be no denial of the damning truth writ in the marrow-freezing rictus of the thing that had once been his most loyal and beloved sword-arm.

Without conscious thought, numb fingers fumbled for the hilt of the kingsblade at his hip even as the forest around them seemed to stir at an imperceptible wrongness slithering in the demon knight's wake.

As one, the exhausted perimeter guards snapped to readiness, scores of cocked crossbows and notched longbows leveled to repel this inconceivable trespass. Though Leander's own lips parted to issue the howling challenge, no sound would emerge, strangled by the creeping tendrils of dread spreading like a cancer through his soul.

Then Sir Rian raised his empty right hand and unfurled his fingers in an unmistakable gesture of calculated parley. There was the barest perceptible pause before a host of unnatural, guttural utterings and hideous trills rippled from his armed escorts. Almost subliminally, the legionaries of the encamped host found their readied bows drooping, the wearied tension to unleash hellfire slackening into bewildered inertia.

As if by sorcery, all was reduced to an eerie standoff frozen betwixt one solitary breath and the next.

The shadowed Rian turned his sunken gaze back to his former commander, soulless pits burning with smouldering accusation. When at last his cracked and lightless lips parted, they shaped a single Name.

"Leander..."

The debased honorific hung like a cancer, pregnant with such venom and finality as to rob the exiled king of his ability to recoil. Somewhere deep within, he could already feel the first unraveling strands of whatever hope or ideals had sustained these past three years of exile and conflict. In the wake of Rian's miraculous, ominous resurrection, all that remained was the lurking void at its core. 

His next words were freighted by a pause lifetimes in the making.

"Your Majesty has been judged...wanting."

All around, there came the unmistakable clink and rasp of armored battalions moving into strategic rings of containment. Horns split the unnatural quiet followed by the trampling approach of heavily armed cavalry bearing the black serpent and fang standard of House D'Valen. 

King Ulfric's personal royal guard had arrived to pierce the heart of King Leander's resistance, and at their vanguard stood the hollowed-out abomination of their most beloved knight cradling a heavy oaken coffer bursting with king's ransoms at his feet. And thirty sacks of silver beside.

For as his predecessor had mounted this last doomed campaign, the usurper King Ulfric had secured for himself the means to the bitter, conclusive end...

-TO BE CONTINUED-