Day 2 of the Forty-Day Campaign
The clearing stank of blood and damp iron. Smoke curled from a half-burned wagon, and the crows had begun circling even before the fighting was over.
Fornos Dag stood at the edge of the carnage, his coat pristine as ever, his eyes locked not on the dead, but the living. A dozen ragged men and women were on their knees in the mud—captured bandits, ambushed by Fornos' newly formed scouts using traps and Kindling's strength as a shock force. They'd tried to run. They hadn't gotten far.
Brassheart loomed nearby, a monolith in the fog, its armor still stained from earlier kills. Its slow, almost contemplative movements made it more unsettling than a berserker golem. It didn't rush. It waited.
Kindling knelt beside one of the captives, restraining him with one thick hand as the man kicked and shouted hoarsely. The other prisoners had gone quiet after watching their strongest man get folded like a chair.
Fornos stepped forward, unhurried, calm.
"Violence is waste," he said, his voice even, layered with the quiet rhythm of someone who had spoken to many rooms before this one. "But it's sometimes necessary to open a conversation."
He gestured to the remaining crate—opened earlier that morning—and from it, an assistant pulled out the first collar.
"I bring you a choice."
The prisoners looked up, tense.
"This is called an Aether-Loop Stabilizer. Ancient design. Lost in most circles." Fornos held the collar with a reverence that suggested sacred purpose, letting its glyphs catch the light. "When worn, it prevents your spirit from 'leaking'—which can cause exhaustion, confusion, and madness in cursed lands like this one."
"Bullshit," one of the bandits growled. "That's a slave collar."
Fornos didn't scowl, didn't even blink. Instead, he crouched beside the speaker, tilting his head slightly.
"I admire the bluntness. But if it were what you said, don't you think you'd already be wearing it? Would I give you the option?"
The bandit didn't answer.
"I could force it on you. But that would be crude. No. I offer it because it helps you. You wear it, and you earn food, shelter, and your life. You take it off, and… well, you might feel the effects of this land's aura clawing into your sanity."
He tapped the copper ring on his finger.
"I wear one myself. Different design, same principle. Mana bleed affects everyone."
A soft hum of unease passed through the group. One of the prisoners—young, gaunt, maybe seventeen—shuffled forward. "It's just to stop magic sickness?"
Fornos nodded. "And a tracker function. Very minor. Only so I know if you collapse. I don't like losing people."
He motioned to Kindling, who brought the collar forward. Fornos gently placed it around the youth's neck and clicked it into place. The faint glyphs flared for a second, then dimmed.
"No pain?" Fornos asked.
The boy shook his head, clearly waiting for some hidden agony that never came.
"Good," Fornos said, then turned back to the others. "Your turn."
The effect was slow but sure. Seven more followed, each one hesitating less than the last. Hunger, exhaustion, and the hope of safety weighed more than pride. By mid-morning, ten collars had been deployed. Two more would be applied by day's end, after treatment for injuries.
Fornos walked among them afterward, speaking not as a commander but as an organizer.
"You're not cannon fodder," he said. "You're part of something new. I don't care what you were. Raiders, deserters, mercs gone rogue—irrelevant. You're mine now. And I protect what's mine."
He didn't say what would happen if that protection was refused.
He didn't need to.
Brassheart was still standing near the tree line. A few prisoners had asked about it—if it was a war relic, or one of the southern knight builds. Fornos only said it followed orders.
It had executed two during the ambush. One with a blade. One with a simple crushing motion, the kind that made everyone else very eager to surrender.
Later that day, Kindling and a pair of scouts brought in two new captives—scruffy, pale men with odd gear: carved rods, toolbelts, fragments of codex plates tied to their hips.
Handlers.
Not top-grade. Probably freelancers from one of the broken skirmisher companies in the southeast. But still valuable.
Fornos didn't collar them immediately.
Instead, he brought them into the officer tent—now a rebuilt outpost made from salvaged stone and a reinforced canvas roof. There, he spoke to them over a table scattered with charts and relay markers.
"You know golem theory?" he asked the taller of the two.
"Basics. We worked with crude shock units, desert pattern. Sand-limbed things. Poor structure."
"But you interfaced with them directly?"
"Yes."
"Then I'm offering you something better." Fornos pushed forward two contracts—short, straightforward, with only a few veiled threats buried in legal jargon. "No collars. Just loyalty. You work under me. You get access to clean cores and material we're salvaging. Room to build something serious."
The handlers looked at each other.
"You're not part of a house," one of them said, skeptical. "What's stopping someone from flattening this camp?"
Fornos gave a half-smile. "Because they won't know where we are."
He stood, gesturing toward the map. "And by the time they do, they'll want to join us more than stop us."
Both men signed.
As the sun dipped low and the fires began to crackle in the rebuilt fort's courtyards, Fornos stood on the overlook again. Below, his newest recruits were being fed. Some had started sharpening weapons. Others cleaned armor or worked with Kindling on simple constructions. The handlers had already taken inventory of the toolsets from the crate.
Fornos rubbed the copper ring on his finger slowly.
Twelve new fighters. Two handlers. Ten collars active.
Not bad for a single day.
But this was just the outer ring. The next step was to draw out the real players—the isolated cells of trained men, the disillusioned Golem Knights, the minor mercenary units on the brink of collapse. He didn't want only survivors.
He wanted contenders.
And he was ready to make them bleed for the privilege.