The Lord of the High Reach

Chapter 65: The Past

Much was already underway, the battlefield was slowly being cleaned, and most important of all. The dead warriors were carefully lined up... well, what was left of them anyway.

Many of the beasts had been Razor Boars, but there were also a great variety of predators mixed in, and his men were gouged and torn to shreds. Some weren’t even recognizable anymore. frёewebηovel.cѳm

Adara stood near the Gore Broc’s head, her amber eyes reflecting the dim flickers of the torches. She was methodically wiping the black, gelatinous marrow of the beast from her steel seax using a scrap of canvas, her gaze locked on the pristine, five-inch iron-dense mattock claws of the monster.

"The local skinners and blacksmiths in the border towns won’t have the coin for this," Adara stated, her voice entirely level, completely devoid of the exhaustion weighing down the men around her. She didn’t look up as she spoke to Bramm.

"The sheer volume of common red hides hitting the market at once will tank the local value by nearly half. But these..." She tapped the flat of her blade against the Gore Broc’s skull. "The orange spectrum components would still be expensive. The high house merchant guilds will buy these at peak value."

Bramm looked at the staggering harvest of carcasses choking his holdfast. It was an absolute fortune, an astronomical sum of wealth that could buy enough granite, iron mail, and siege engineers to turn this rustic timber encampment into an unyielding stone fortress.

But as he looked down at the pale, the fourteen men being lined up beneath the canvas sheets, the weight of the gold felt secondary to the weight of the stones they would need to carry tomorrow.

"We don’t sell to the local merchants," Bramm commanded, his voice gaining a hard, resonant edge that made Telarin and Resven look up despite their pain. He pushed himself off the axe-handle, standing fully upright, his heavy, weathered frame towering over the bloody field.

"War is raging between the two Great Houses and even with the beast tides, the war will only halt temporarily. Many would most likely have lost their homes and their sanctuary. The border villages and towns will not be able to defend against a beast tide like this... if there are any survivors, they may be roaming the regions with no protection and no home." His voice raised an octave, the pain seared through his limbs, but he kept standing straight, showing no visible reaction.

"No, we will only sell a chunk of them. Some will be needed here, the cities will be dangerous and trading now will be risky. We will keep most of the materials and sell them later... the meat we keep to ourselves."

"If the great houses are emptying their halls to butcher each other in the lowlands, the refugees will start moving up the ridges before the first frost. We’re going to need more than timber and goodwill to keep them alive."

He pointed his calloused hand toward the massive pile of beasts.

"Skin them," Bramm rumbled into the alpine night. "We harvest every ounce of core-essence and every scrap of materials we can. We paid for this mountain in blood tonight, now we will continue onwards with the victory in our hearts and the battle behind us. Tomorrow..."

"Tomorrow we bury our dead and give them their due respect!"

The night continued to pass, but no one would sleep this night.

When the moon was at its zenith, most of the area had been cleaned up. A few campfires and torches were lit. The remaining men had been lining up to see Elspeth the last few hours, but Bramm didn’t.

He sat on one of the logs around the campfire near the gatehouse. His eyes locked onto the dazzling dancing flames, but his mind had slipped entirely away from the enchanting flames and the cold alpine air.

The silence of the aftermath began to warp.

***

The freezing merchant deck violently pitched, tossing helplessly in a pitch-black northern sea.

The thunderous roar of a raging, salt-heavy gale battered the hull, drowning out the world under a suffocating, throat-choking reek of brine, rotting kelp, and iron-dense blood.

"Brace the mainmast! Bramm, get the harpoon rigged, you dense bastard!"

Jarly’s voice screamed directly into his ears, raw with a terror that scraped his throat raw. Jarly was right there—the same Jarly who loved sour apples and always complained about the dampness in his left knee. Bramm looked down at his own hands. They were smooth, unscarred, his posture lighter.

Then, the ocean erupted.

A massive, many-tentacled primal beast breached the black swell, its skin a sickening, glowing crimson that matched the color of the blood-tinted tide currently washing over the shifting deck.

The creature lunged with feral, terrifying speed, a colossal appendage slamming down onto the midship. The impact tore through timber like dry parchment, sending a rain of razor-sharp splinters screaming through the air.

"It’s taking the midship! Bramm! The harpoon!"

The desperate, wet screams of his old shipmates tore through the howling wind as the beast began dragging men straight off the deck into the churning abyss. Bramm lunged forward, throwing his raw, unawakened physical weight against the heavy wooden frame of the harpoon launcher, his hands slipping on the wet wood as he tried desperately to lock the iron sights onto the crimson monster.

But a sudden, cataclysmic shudder ripped through the entire vessel. The colossal strength of the beast didn’t just smash the deck—it dragged the shattered hull sideways, violently rocking the ship straight onto the jagged, razor-sharp edges of a looming, black-stone cliff face.

The sound of iron-reinforced timber grinding against the merciless stone was deafening. The deck buckled upward. A massive, splintered support beam from the mainmast snapped under the trauma, collapsing directly across the deck. Bramm didn’t have time to dodge. The crushing weight of the oak beam slammed squarely across his chest and legs, driving him down into the slick, bloody deck boards.

He was pinned. Completely trapped.

He thrashed violently, his fingers clawing at the splintered wood, his muscles straining until they tore as he tried to hoist the massive beam off his body. Lacking any shred of aura to grant him superhuman strength, his mortal muscles were entirely insufficient to lift the crushing weight.