The Lord of the High Reach

Chapter 66: Just like last time...

"Get up! Bramm!" Jarly screamed, stumbling across the tilting deck as the sea monster breached again, its dripping, multi-eyed mass looming directly over the shattered gunwale.

Bramm watched in paralyzed, vivid horror as a massive, thorned tentacle whipped across the deck, coiling tightly around Jarly’s waist. Jarly shrieked, his fingers digging into the deck seams, looking straight at Bramm with wide, bloodshot eyes full of a frantic, pleading terror. With a sickening, wet crunch, the appendage constricted, snapping Jarly clean in half against the broken railing. The spray of hot, crimson mist hit Bramm’s face, burning his eyes.

The desperate screams of the drowning and the dying merged into a chaotic, agonizing chorus. To his left, Harl—the old cook who always saved the burnt bread crusts for the gulls—was thrown straight into the jagged rocks, his final, gurgling cry cut short as the surf turned red.

Over the roar of the gale, Malo, the youngest hand on the crew, was pinned against the capstan, his legs shattered, screaming frantically for his mother as a wave of black brine crashed over him and dragged him into the foam.

The horrific, wet shouts and agonizing screams of his remaining friends rose to a deafening, desperate crescendo across the ruined deck.

"Bramm! The hull is breaking!" Tove screamed, his fingers slipping from the shattered mainmast as a shadow fell over him. "Bramm, look out—!"

"Save the line! Someone save the—!"

"Help me! Ocen, please, it’s got my leg!"

"No -"

***

A sudden, violent tremor shook Bramm’s shoulders. He blinked hard, the sea-spray vanishing, the roaring gale snapping back into the quiet, heavy crunch of alpine mud.

He was back at the camp. The visions had stopped, leaving him stranded in the freezing cold. His eyes flickered, and the flame before him came back into view.

A dark, bitter wave of self-loathing immediately rushed in to fill the silence. Why aren’t you looking at them? he berated himself, his inner voice snarling with venomous spite. How dare you look away? You should be suffering. You should be hearing every single one of their final gasps because your failure put them in the dirt.

"Chief?" Telarin’s voice rang out from beside him, a hand extended toward Bramm’s trembling shoulder, his own pale face tight with concern for his commander. "My Lord, you’re bleeding. We need to get you inside to see Lady Elspeth."

"Leave me," Bramm growled, the words tearing from his throat like rough gravel.

He let out a short, broken laugh that ended in a wet, ragged cough, more dark crimson pooling at his lips.

"There were things I could have done... which I didn’t and now, look at them. Fourteen men drifting off into eternal sleep," Bramm whispered, his voice cracking under the immense weight of his guilt.

"Just like last time... just like that time."

He muttered under his breath. His eyes closed faintly as sadness welled up in his heart. It had been just like the time he had lost his crewmates to the claws and clutches of the sea beast.

He couldn’t have done anything different back then, but he swore it would be different this time, and although he knew he could not protect everyone. Seeing the first of his men fade away only days after being reintroduced to the world made his heart ache.

His dark, bitter words hung heavy in the freezing air. For a long, agonizing moment, no one spoke. The only sound was the crackle of the dying campfires and the low, agonizing groan of the wind moving through the plateau.

Then, a sudden, sharp crack shattered the silence.

Adara stepped forward, her heavy boots crunching in the reddened mud as she closed the distance between them.

She stopped barely a foot away, her amber eyes burning with a cold, piercing intensity that forced Bramm’s unfocused gaze to lock onto hers.

"The soil doesn’t care about your tears, Chief, and neither do the fallen," she said, her voice dropping into a low, cutting register that possessed the absolute weight of iron. "The dead do not sleep any sweeter just because their commander chooses to starve himself of peace in the dark."

"Look at the line we kept," she commanded, ignoring the low growl vibrating in his throat. "In the highlands, death isn’t a calculation you can outwit with strategy or forethought. It is an unyielding law. A soldier doesn’t pull their blade to guarantee their own tomorrow; they draw it to buy a single inch of safety for the person standing beside them."

She gestured to the surroundings, where the last remaining members had begun to gather around him. Their gazes locked onto him, nodding as Adara continued.

"Those fourteen knew the price of the mountain when they climbed it. They didn’t offer their lives to buy your perpetual mourning—they offered them to buy this holdfast a future."

She slowly took a step back.

"If you let your resolve rot into self-loathing, you are retroactively stripping the honor from every drop of blood spilled on that stone. You turn a warrior’s sacrifice into a worthless, meaningless waste. The only monument the dead ever truly demand from the living is a stronghold that never falls again. Gather the grief, harden it into something cold and lethal, and build a fortress so massive that the valleys below will tremble at our name. But you do not get to abandon the living while the rest of us are still holding the steel." fɾeewebnoveℓ.co๓

The cold mountain air rushed into Bramm’s lungs, sharp and biting, finally clearing the last lingering taste of salt and ash from the back of his throat. He remained motionless for a long moment, his eyes fixed on the dark, blood-stained timber of the gatehouse.

Adara’s words still hung in the freezing space between them, a heavy, unyielding truth that refused to let him sink back into the numbing comfort of his own despair.

Slowly, the frantic trembling in his massive shoulders subsided. The manic, fractured light in his dark blue eyes hardened, settling into a cold, dangerous focus.

He reached up, his calloused fingers wiping away the smear of dark blood from his lower lip. He didn’t look back down at his hands. He didn’t look at the mud.