The Words On Iron
The voice was not human, but it spoke in the cadences of a person who had once been. It told Alric to sit, and he sat, because his legs had gone weak and because the sound carried with it an authority that bypassed his will entirely and spoke directly to the part of him that still understood command. The iron book lay open before him, and now, impossibly, he could read the words. They rearranged themselves as he watched, the etchings flowing like mercury across the metal pages, forming sentences in the common tongue that he understood with a clarity that felt like remembering.
The Covenant was older than the kingdoms. It had been struck between the first peoples of the borderlands — not kings, not generals, but the nameless men and women who had worked the soil before anyone thought to draw a line through it and call one side theirs. The terms were simple: the land would sustain those who lived upon it, and in return, they would shed no blood upon it in anger. The iron plates were the witnesses, forged from ore pulled from the very hills they stood in, and the book was the record, updated by no human hand whenever the terms were broken.
Alric turned the pages. The record was long. Every war, every border skirmish, every act of violence committed on this ground had been noted in precise, dispassionate script. His own army's passage was there, catalogued in entries that read