As dawn broke, I saw that the countryside had given way from rolling hills and light woods into mountainous valleys. The peaks rose high and cold all around us, a bowl, but they were far taller to the west, their tops obscured by rolling clouds.

There were wide lakes in those valleys, foothills with little hamlets peppered across them like humble crowns.

For some reason, I'd expected something like Caelfall. But the lands of House Carreon were beautiful. I said as much to Emma, and she nodded.

"It is a pretty land, yes. At least in this light. You may not feel the same when you see the place in which I was born."

With that ominous statement, the coach rolled down into the valleys. We navigated switchbacking horse trails, though the path widened into a proper road once we descended from the hills.

"Can you feel him?" I asked as I sat with Emma in the coach. "Your great-grandfather?"

She frowned, her face tightening in concentration. "Sometimes. I think… only when he wants me to. He's coming after us, I know that much for certain. I suspect he'll move very quickly."

It wasn't until near afternoon that Qoth finally eased the harsh pace he'd set the chimera to. We rolled along the valley road, and as the vehicle slowed I poked my head out the door.

We were on a relatively flat plain with some woods scattered here and there. Some miles away it abruptly lifted into the foothills of the nearest mountains, which rose to a dizzying height. Those were the Fences of Urn, the subcontinent's largest mountain range and the divide between all the lands I knew and an older, stranger world beyond.

Nath's words about those lands came back to me. There are Onsolain guarding those peaks, I thought. Warrior angels, dwarf giants like Caim, and other things. They'd held back the threats of Edaea for more than half a millennium.

They'd be no help to me here. I focused on the structure quickly growing more distinct as we neared it.

The castle lay at the end of a long foothill stretching out from the largest mountain in the valley like the jutting root of a titan tree. The structure was indistinct at first, just the impression of a shape atop the cliffs. But as the hours passed and we reached late afternoon, we came near enough that what'd seemed small before quickly proved itself to be anything but.

The castle was enormous. The main keep rose at the top of the cliffs overlooking the valley from that foothill, like a sentry tower rising above the surrounding plain. Alone, that structure must have been seven hundred feet high, and the precipice below nearly twice that. It towered above the vale, a collection of dark, narrow spires linked by a lattice of walls and bridges.

But the main keep wasn't all of it. A forecastle guarded the only road up the foothill, a narrow slope that wound sharply in several places to create steep kill corridors guarded by strong towers. The fort at the bottom of the hill was three towers and a dense looking central keep with four tiers, each ringed by a network of parapets.

Emma peeked past me and pointed at the lower structure. "That fort at the bottom is called the Gate of Needles. It has never been taken by any enemy. The larger fortress atop the cliffs is my family's palace. Welcome, Alken, to Castle Liutgarde. Or as the valefolk are more wont to call it, Impalers Keep."

I shook my head at the ominous, brooding monster looming ahead of us. The forecastle alone was bigger than Castle Cael by far, and the main palace dwarfed it. "You spent your childhood here?"

Emma shrugged. "Until I was ten."

It looked like the home of a dark lord. I could imagine an ancient vampire king lurking inside, or an insane magi with delusions of godhood.

Emma's expression looked torn, like she was caught halfway between nostalgia and dread. "I hid when I learned we'd be leaving," she told me wistfully. "It took them most of three days to find me."

Staring at the beast looming larger as we drew near, I could believe it.

The picturesque landscape changed as we drew near Liutgarde, as though the fortress was the epicenter of its own climate. The castle's shadow loomed far larger than I felt it should over the valley and did not seem to conform to the passing sun, like it were a living thing trying to stretch itself over the plain.

The daylight grew less bright, the grass less green. We passed areas where the crystal clear lakes I'd spotted before seemed to have flooded out over the fields, drowning trees and turning them into waterlogged skeletons clawing for air.

Soon enough the coach began to roll through the first graveyard. It wasn't a proper graveyard, but I felt the shiver of death pass over my spiritual senses like a cold wind. I could spot mounds across the fields to either side of the road, rusted weaponry and armor buried in mud and crawling with moss and tough grass.

"It became custom during the reign of one of my distant ancestor's to leave invading armies where they lay," Emma informed me as her lidded eyes scanned the same scene. "She wanted all to know what became of those who tried us. The habit stuck. They call these fields the Crow's Feast."

There must have been thousands of corpses. Centuries worth of battle, all left as a testament to Carreon might. I suspected many of those were from the years before the crusades, a series of wars launched centuries back that cowed Edaean powers who'd habitually crossed the mountains to test us. Spirits might guard the passes, but mostly from more supernatural threats. Mortal armies still required Urnic steel to contend with.

But many must have been native. There were humans and elves who'd lived here before the exodus, and Urn's history was full of war.

I knew many must have belonged to rival Houses too.

It wasn't just mounds and decayed armaments, though. I soon began to spot the grim markers left to either side of the road. Iron pikes, each tall as a small tree, their lengths turned brittle and red from rust. I doubted all that rust to just be from rain and time.

As we drew closer to the Gate of Needles, the pikes didn't just line the road. They dotted the fields around the forecastle in the hundreds, an eerie forest.

Emma stared at it all impassively. She seemed unbothered, aloof.

She grew up staring at this every day. Every time she looked out a window, she'd see the mountains and the lakes… but she lived in an island of death.

Astraea probably had too. And Emma's grandmother, and parents.

We finally stopped before the gates of the forecastle. The bastion loomed large and squat, functional compared to the elegant spires of the palace above. I noted the iron portcullis recessed inside the murder tunnel.

"I don't suppose you have a key?" I asked dryly.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Emma rolled her eyes and stepped out of the coach after me. She ordered Qoth to stay and keep watch over our transportation, to which the changeling familiar just tipped his tricorn.

I followed the youth to the iron gates. She studied it a moment, then lifted her right hand. She'd clenched it into a fist, displaying the red ruby on her ring finger.

She spoke words in a language I didn't understand. I felt a shiver in the air, and thought I could hear an uncanny whispering emanating out of the surrounding fields. I glanced about nervously, feeling as though I were being watched. The forest of pikes seemed to spread out forever from this vantage.

A groaning, bitter noise filled the air. The iron portcullis started to rumble, then lift as rusted chains turned on their own. It produced a tremendous, grating sound. I grit my teeth.

When it was done, Emma let out a breath that misted in the mountain air. "I see the ghosts of Liutgarde still recognize my authority. That is good. It should make getting about easier."

I didn't feel so confident. "You've been gone a while, and the living have fled this place. The dead are often embittered when the places they feel belong to them are intruded upon."

I didn't bring up another point, that I'd just watched her use necromancy. Many nobles did, though not exactly by design. The dead cling to old places of power and memory, and those who rule such halls often have some influence over them regardless of the taboo.

But this was more than that. Emery Planter, the Earl of Strekke, had blasphemed with his necromantic practice, but he'd more or less just released the dead wild onto his lands. What the Carreons did was worse, because it technically wasn't against the Church's edicts.

All castles are haunted, and the lords and ladies of Urn are permitted to command any who guest within their halls. The dead are bound by those same laws, much more strictly than the living.

The Carreons took that custom and used the loophole to make opening doors easier. They even drew the dead to them with the mass graves they left outside, spirits who inevitably became immured here. It was like one big fly trap.

Emma sniffed contemptuously, unaware of my inner turmoil. "This is my home, and I've been gone only seven years. They can begrudge it all they like, but I shall not be kept out. Besides, I am certain they will remember me."

That was exactly what I worried about. And I didn't have my enchanted axe.

Emma started moving forward without another word, and I kept my thoughts to myself as I followed her. We passed into the bailey of the fort. It was empty, stark walls rising to either side to close us in. Another gate lay ahead, this one leading to the road that would take us up to the main castle.

Emma stared around, frowning. "Strange. There were still soldiers here when we left, servants. Mother insisted they'd remain, that they would wait for us. But it's abandoned."

"This part at least," I said. "Doesn't mean it's all empty. Keep your guard up. Anyone who is here will have heard the gate opening."

Emma nodded and forged ahead. I kept close, wary and watchful, my hand lingering near my rondel dagger where it lay sheathed at my belt. My cloak scratched along the ground. It was gravely and dry, mountain turf.

I still had the sensation of being watched from all directions. The castle ghosts, I suspected. Their presence felt like an almost physical pressure against my senses.

I knew Emma felt it too. She grit her teeth, her attention fixed stubbornly forward as she moved at a brisk pace. Her boots clipped against the hard ground.

It happened very suddenly. One moment it was silent, and we were walking, and then something changed around us. Emma gasped and stumbled. I caught her.

"What's wrong?"

"I… I don't…" Her eyes lifted to mine, then slid past them to stare at something behind me. All the color drained from her face.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. A strange, chattering noise filled the air. A creaking sound echoed around the courtyard.

The portcullis slammed closed at our backs. It sounded like the world breaking. Emma jumped in my arms. I let out a snarl and turned.

And froze. They were all around us.

The dead.

They filled the bailey, rose over the walls, hung from the parapets and the towers. All of them stared at us.

No. They stared at Emma.

The ghosts looked real, tangible as they'd been at the moment of their death. They drooped on iron pikes smeared with blood and shit, their eyes eaten by crows and flesh crawling with maggots. Some hung from the walls by ropes around broken necks, their faces purpled, but most had died by impalement. The pikes rose from the courtyard, from the tiered walls and the towers, so the whole fort did indeed look like it sprouted a thousand needles.

It was like the entire iron forest we'd walked through outside had transposed itself here, into this closer space to pen us in.

The air was full of the buzzing drone of flies, the cawing of crows, the creaking of rope and strained metal. I could hear another noise beneath it. The chattering of teeth, as though each and every one of the hundreds of bodies were suffering from deep cold.

Or rage.

"Carreon," they whispered. Emma stiffened in my arms.

"Shrike daughter."

"Impaler scion."

"Witch."

"Murderer."

"Blood of traitors."

"Bastard child."

"Curse you."

"Damn you!"

"DAMN YOU TO HELL—"

"Die. DIE."

"Go to Hell."

"Die and BURN."

Emma clamped her hands over her ears, crying out. The voices were a cacophony, each indecipherable from the rest so the noise became like a torrent of hate. I scanned the scene for any kind of escape.

Within the crowd of dead forms, I saw a familiar figure clad in a funeral dress. Through her veil, Lorena Starling bared red teeth at me.

I slammed down on my panic. You've faced worse than this. They're just angry ghosts.

Emma still had her hands clamped over her ears. She looked like she couldn't decide whether to weep or scream.

"Make them stop!" She sobbed. "Make it stop. I'm sorry, I'm sorry for all of it, please just stop."

"It never stops!"

"The pain. The PAIN."

"Hate you, hate you, hate hate hate—"

"It can stop. Kill yourself."

"End it!"

I called up my power and spoke aloud.

"This child is the rightful ruler of this land. Make way for her or depart, but you will not bar us!"

My voice echoed with aura. The dead screamed at me. Lorena's voice called over the rest, high and wailing.

"You are both outcasts. Both damned. A traitor and the blood of traitors!"

I stood, helping Emma to her feet with a firm hand. She looked dazed, barely aware of her surroundings. Blood ran down the sides of her neck from her ears.

"Make way," I repeated. My voice became louder, battling with the cacophony.

The impaled dead raged at me. They seemed to stretch unnaturally tall, almost fusing to the poles upon which they'd been hung, forming thin and ungainly shapes. Their eyes and mouths gaped wide like melting wax.

As they loomed closer, I spoke again and slammed them with a golden gauntlet of will.

"MAKE WAY."

And the dead parted. They did not flee or cease their angry discharge, but those standing between us and the gate leading deeper into Liutgarde reeled back as though a blast of wind had struck them.

I started pulling Emma forward. She stumbled, but kept her feet. She shouted something I didn't hear. There was wind now, roaring above the courtyard and whistling over the foothills as though a storm had blown in.

Lorena howled with laughter at my back. "You will fail her! Or she will betray you! She is the child of hate and murder."

I ignored her. We drew near the gateway. The impaled figures leered over me, barely resembling anything human anymore. The air was full of the stink of blood, feces, ozone, and rust.

"You will be made to kill her, Headsman! Does she know your purpose? Have you not realized that's why they sent you!?"

"Keep moving," I ordered Emma. I pushed her ahead of me, making sure my body was between her and the ghosts.

"You cannot escape this, murderer!"

I turned just as Lorena Starling hurled herself at me. She'd become a shrieking, bright thing made all of mist and light and hate. Her claws reached for my neck.

I did not move, but I let the sacred fire in me flare out. It burned me.

But not as badly as it burned Lorena.

The dead noblewoman reeled back, screaming as golden fire crawled over her form. She clawed at her own face, at her shoulders, ripping chunks off her ethereal form. But the fire kept spreading, kept burning her until she turned into a gilded plume streaking into the sky.

I lost sight of her as the rest of the dead closed in.

"They're in the tunnel!" Emma shouted.

I turned and realized she was right. We'd entered into the gate tunnel. Worse, the portcullis on this side was closed. I doubted Emma would be able to command it open again.

A trap.

I could try to break it, but without my axe I had no proper channel for a strong enough Art. My knife was too fragile, as were my fists.

There were too many. They stretched forward like worms, toothless mouths distended. The gate began to open with a shrieking, monstrous sound. Dark, unnatural fog began to pour into the tunnel. It engulfed the ghosts, crashing over me and Emma like a wave.

Everything went dark. The last thing I heard was Emma's panicked shout, and the beating of wings.

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