The Deserters Road
The column of smoke on the horizon had been visible for two days before Alric finally accepted it was not a village burning but the remnants of the Sixth Army's last camp. He had been walking away from it for a week, though he still wore the grey surcoat with the king's sigil torn from the breast, and still carried the regulation short sword that marked him, to anyone who cared to look, as a man who had broken the only oath that mattered. The borderlands here were empty. The war had swept through like a brush fire and left nothing but charred farmsteads and silence.
He found the cave on the third day, following a stream uphill because the water was clean and he had learned, in three years of campaigning, that clean water in a war zone meant the source was hidden. The entrance was narrow, barely wide enough for his shoulders, and the stone around it had been carved with symbols he did not recognize — not the angular script of the northern kingdoms, nor the flowing calligraphy of the south, but something older. Something that predated the war, predated the kingdoms, predated perhaps the very idea of borders.
Inside, the air was cold and still, and the walls were lined with iron plates bolted directly into the stone. Each plate bore writing — the same unknown script — and at the centre of the chamber, on a plinth of unworked granite, lay an open book bound in metal. The pages