Wind swept across the broken marshlands east of Frostfang, stirring the black reeds until they hissed like a thousand blades drawn in anger. Under the leaden sky, the Widow of Crows advanced, her banner flapping in the bitter breeze: a ragged scrap of crimson cloth, embroidered with a crow clutching a broken crown in its talons.
Her soldiers came on foot, on horseback, in ramshackle carts — a tide of displaced men and women drawn to her promise of vengeance and conquest. Their armor was battered, mismatched, scavenged from countless battlefields. Yet in their eyes burned a singular, fanatical light: the will to destroy Frostfang for good.
The Widow herself rode a warhorse as black as night, its mane braided with strips of human hair. Beneath her cloak of crow-feathers, she wore a breastplate carved with runes so old even the marsh witches whispered of curses in their making.
Her face was pale as bone, her eyes cold and measured, with a gaze that saw the world not as it was, but as it should be — a world rebuilt on the ashes of kings.
She raised a gauntleted fist, halting her host on a low ridge that looked down upon the ruin of the first army. The vultures still wheeled over the fallen, and the reek of rotting flesh rose in waves.
A smile touched her thin lips.
"Do you see, my crows?" she called, her voice carrying over the wind. "Do you see what happens to those who fight alone? They crumble."
Her followers answered with a ragged cheer, rattling rusted swords and spears.
She nodded, satisfied.
"Frostfang is wounded. Its wolf-king bleeds. When we strike, it will fall."
Behind her, a masked priest spoke low. "And if the rumors are true, Widow? If the witch who raised the dead still stands with them?"
The Widow's smile never faltered.
"Then I will break her, too."
---
Far to the west, the wounded city stirred to the new threat.
Aldric stood atop Frostfang's ramparts, wrapped in a cloak against the chill. Below him, masons and laborers toiled to patch the shattered gates. Hammers rang, wood splintered, mortar splashed. He could see how exhausted they were, how thin their faces had grown, yet they worked with a quiet, desperate purpose.
Kaelin approached, helmet under one arm, sweat streaking her soot-smeared skin.
"They're coming again," she said grimly, as if she had never truly believed peace would last.
Aldric nodded, jaw tight.
"I fear we have little time."
Kaelin's eyes burned with determination. "Then we make time. We train those who can stand, patch the walls, stock the cellars. We do not die easy."
He almost smiled, hearing in her voice the same iron that had carried them through the siege.
"You will command the outer gate?"
"Aye," Kaelin said, tapping the haft of her hammer against the stone. "And I'll teach the bastards to fear me all over again."
---
In the temple courtyard, Rowena gathered the children whose parents had been lost in the siege. Her gentle hands bandaged cuts and bruises, brushed away tears, handed out crusts of bread far too small for such hunger.
One small girl, her hair tangled, clutched Rowena's sleeve.
"Miss? Is the bad lady going to come here?"
Rowena crouched, meeting the child's wide, frightened eyes.
"Yes," she said honestly. "But we will stand. You are safe with us."
The girl nodded slowly, too wise for her few years, and ran off to share a crust with another child.
Rowena stood, shoulders sagging under the weight of so many fears, and looked toward the distant horizon, where black crows wheeled like an omen.
---
Maerlyn, meanwhile, had retreated to the crypts beneath the shattered cathedral. There she studied the bones of kings, her candlelight playing across yellowed skulls and scraps of rusted crowns.
She traced runes into the stone floor, binding protective wards in a language so old it rasped like breaking ice on her tongue.
"Widow of Crows," she whispered to the darkness. "You will not have this city."
The air grew cold, the shadows listening.
Yet even as Maerlyn worked, something ancient and cruel twisted within her magic — a sense that she had woken powers no mortal was meant to touch. Sometimes, at night, she could still hear them whispering, begging to be released again, to finish what they had started.
She feared the day she might say yes.
---
Three days before the Widow's army was expected to reach the gates, the first scouts returned: the enemy had nearly doubled in number, and they dragged siege towers of blackened iron behind them, each tower topped with a crow's skull nailed to the mast.
Panic trembled through Frostfang's streets.
Aldric gathered the city's remaining soldiers and townsfolk in the courtyard of the keep, his voice a clarion call above their fears.
"You stood before, when all hope was lost," he thundered. "You held the walls against the Vulture King, against the marsh hordes, against death itself. Now I ask you to stand once more — for your children, for your homes, for the very breath in your lungs."
He raised his sword, its blade newly honed.
"The Widow of Crows comes for our throats. Let her find us unbowed!"
Cheers rose, ragged but growing stronger, as if the flame of courage had only been sleeping and now woke again.
---
That night, Aldric walked alone through the ruined market, past shuttered shops and burned-out inns. Each ruin was a wound, each broken door a ghost.
He stopped before what had been a tailor's house, remembering how the tailor had sewn his first tabard when he was just a boy learning to hold a practice sword. The building lay in blackened heaps, nothing left to salvage.
Rowena found him there, drawn by the silent grief on his face.
"You're carrying too much," she told him softly.
He shook his head. "It is mine to carry."
Rowena reached for him, took his hand, forced him to look at her.
"No," she insisted. "It is ours to carry. Together."
Aldric let out a shuddering breath, resting his forehead against hers. For one heartbeat, he let the walls inside him crack, and grief poured through.
---
At the city's southern watchtower, Kaelin drilled a squad of untested recruits by torchlight, forcing them to hold their spears steady despite trembling hands.
"If you break," she growled, "the Widow's dogs will gut you. If you hold, you might just live. Remember that!"
They nodded, pale, but there was something steady in their eyes now.
Kaelin watched them march away, her heart aching. So many were barely more than boys. She turned and looked eastward, where fires glimmered across the plain.
"They're coming," she whispered to the night. "By every god who watches, they are coming."
---
In the deepest crypt, Maerlyn opened her old grimoire and traced lines of ink so black it seemed to drink the candlelight. The pages spoke of things beyond death, of doors that should never be opened.
She hesitated, quill trembling.
A voice rose in the back of her mind, soft as a lover's breath:
Set us free again, Maerlyn. Let us finish it for you.
Her fingers clenched.
"No," she hissed. "Not yet."
But she could not deny the temptation, as heavy as chains on her soul.
---
When dawn came, the Widow of Crows stood on a ridge within sight of Frostfang's walls. Her eyes drank in the city, the broken ramparts patched with new timbers, the half-ruined towers rising stubbornly against the sky.
"So," she murmured, "the wolf-king still has teeth."
She gestured to her lieutenants, signaling them forward.
"Ready the crows," she commanded. "At dawn tomorrow, we break them."
---
That evening, as the Widow's siege engines rumbled closer, Aldric gathered Rowena, Kaelin, and Maerlyn in the great hall.
"This is the end of it," he told them. "One way or another."
Kaelin slammed her hammer against the table. "Then let's make the end theirs, not ours."
Maerlyn's gaze was distant, haunted. "I will guard what I can," she murmured. "But if they break through…"
Rowena placed her hand atop Maerlyn's. "Then we will hold them with steel, and with faith."
Aldric nodded, the fire in him blazing anew.
"Then let us stand. As one."
Outside, the crows circled, shrieking their harsh, prophetic cries. The night was thick with dread, but somewhere beneath it pulsed a fragile thread of hope.
---
The Widow of Crows had come to break them. Yet Frostfang would answer with iron, with courage, with all that remained of its battered heart.