The boy's name was Taren.
Alric learned this three days later, when the child finally spoke again. They had taken shelter in the hollow of a shattered watchtower, its stones still warm from the fires that had gutted it. Taren sat with his back against the wall, his injured leg stretched out before him, watching as Alric sharpened his sword with methodical precision.
"They called you the Shadow King," Taren said quietly. "My father said you could walk through walls."
Alric's hands stilled. The whetstone hovered over the blade. "Your father?"
Taren's fingers traced the edge of the ragged cloak Alric had draped over him. "He was a guardsman. He told me stories about you. Said you were the only one who could stand against the False King."
A muscle in Alric's jaw twitched. Another life lost because of him. Another ghost to carry.
"Your father was wrong," Alric said, resuming his work on the blade. "I couldn't even save my own."
Taren was silent for a long moment. Then, in a voice so small it barely carried: "What do we do now?"
Alric looked up. The boy's eyes were dark, hollow—too old for his face. He had seen the same look in the mirror.
"Now," Alric said, sheathing his sword, "we find others who survived."
It was a wretched place, a bog choked with mist and the stench of rotting reeds. But it was also the last refuge of Blackveil's scattered survivors—those who had fled before the final assault or slipped through the enemy's net in the chaos.
They found the first of them at dusk: a huddle of figures cloaked in mud-stained gray, their faces gaunt with hunger and grief. At their head stood a woman Alric recognized—Captain Elyra, Lira's second-in-command. Her left arm was bound in a sling, her right gripping a notched shortsword.
When she saw Alric, her expression twisted between relief and fury.
"You're alive," she spat. "How convenient."
Alric didn't flinch. "Elyra."
She stepped forward, her blade trembling. "Lira is dead. Blackveil is ashes. And where were you when the gates fell?"
The accusation hung in the air like smoke.
Behind him, Taren shifted uneasily. Alric didn't turn. "Fighting," he said simply. "Dying. Failing." He met Elyra's glare. "Same as you."
For a heartbeat, he thought she might strike him. Then, with a ragged breath, she lowered her sword.
"There are thirty-two of us left," she said. "Mostly wounded. No supplies. No allies." Her voice cracked. "No hope."
Alric reached into his cloak and pulled out the ring—the Will of the Kings. It glinted dully in the fading light.
"Then we make our own."
He stood before the survivors—men and women who had once been soldiers, servants, children. Now, they were all the same: broken, furious, and alive.
"The False King thinks this war is over," Alric said, his voice cutting through the murmurs of the fen. "He thinks we are finished." He clenched the ring in his fist. "But we are not his victims. We are his reckoning."
A murmur rippled through the crowd. Elyra folded her arms. "Pretty words. But we're barely more than corpses ourselves. How do you plan to fight an army?"
Alric smiled. It was a cold thing, sharp as a blade.
"We don't fight the army," he said. "We kill the king."
And as the shadows coiled around him like living things, the survivors listened.