From Deadbeat noble to Top Rank Swordsman
Chapter 68: The Truthmarch Begins

Chapter 68: The Truthmarch Begins

The snowfall had not yet stopped.

It followed them like a shroud as Leon and his party emerged from the Vale Below. The horses trudged slow but sure, their breath pluming in the cold. Kellen rode ahead, silent, scouting the path through the cragged hills while the two silent wardens flanked the rear, eyes sharp beneath grey hoods. Eliane rode beside Leon, her gaze unreadable.

Neither had spoken since they left the Truthwell.

Only when they passed the frozen ridge into daylight did Eliane finally ask, voice low, "Are you going to tell them? About Elberyn?"

Leon didn’t look at her. "No. Not yet."

She didn’t press further.

The journey took two days. By the time they returned to the fortress, the garrison had changed. The walls bristled with new guard lines, the banners of old houses raised in strange alliances. Word of the Archive theft had spread faster than expected. From the merchant plains to the river sanctuaries, messages poured in. Most offered questions. A few offered help.

And one bore a warning.

Tobias Virell.

The name had been marked in charcoal at the bottom of a sealed missive, its ink laced with Council sorcery. A man once assumed dead. A man whose loyalty had shattered with the Fifth Oathbreaking.

Leon read it twice, then burned it.

"He’s watching the march," Kellen said that night, hands clasped near the brazier. "He won’t act yet."

"No," Leon agreed. "He’ll wait until the truth moves."

They stood in silence for a time.

When morning came, the gates opened.

The Truthmarch began with only forty.

Scouts. Shieldbearers. Two Witnessed. Eliane. Kellen. Leon. All sworn to carry the knowledge recovered from the Well to the Grand Circle at Caer Durell—where the remaining Accord seats still met in ceremony, if not agreement.

Their banners were blank.

Leon had ordered it.

"They don’t need to know who we were," he said. "Only what we carry."

The path to Durell cut through three provinces, two contested valleys, and one cursed ruin. Every step would be watched. Every night, tested. But the march would not falter. Not now.

They travelled swift and lean, avoiding known chokeholds. Villages along the way whispered of the marchers, but no towns barred their path. Something in the silence of the banners unsettled even the most hardened of warlords.

On the fourth night, they reached the pass of Murien’s Rest.

There, the Council waited.

Not in numbers, but in shadow. A single rider blocked the narrow path. Black-cloaked. Pale-eyed. His mount was hornless, bred from stitched flesh and marrow.

Kellen drew first.

Leon stopped him. "Let me."

He rode forward slowly.

The rider smiled.

"So. The Witness arrives."

Leon remained still. "Step aside."

"There is no aside. The path only ends."

Leon dismounted.

"Then we’ll walk through it."

The rider reached for his blade.

Leon struck faster.

The second blade flared white. One swing. One breath.

The rider’s head hit the stone. His body didn’t fall.

It simply unraveled.

The road cleared.

No words followed.

The march moved on.

The fifth night came bitter and blue.

Winds screamed through the valley ahead, a narrow choke of broken towers and leaning stone arches—the ruins of Veylin’s Stand. A battlefield lost to time, yet never claimed by memory. Snow lay thicker here, as if refusing to melt even in flame.

The march slowed.

Leon called a halt beneath the leaning remnants of a spire. Scouts fanned outward. The wardens stood back to back, their swords drawn not out of threat—but respect. The stones beneath them were old. Soaked in oathblood.

"This place," Eliane murmured, eyes roaming the shattered reliefs still clinging to the archway’s ribs, "it wasn’t marked on the maps."

"It wouldn’t be," Leon said, lowering from his horse. "The Accord buried what couldn’t be rewritten."

Kellen knelt near a half-covered emblem chiseled into the floor. He brushed aside the snow. A broken symbol—two wings, torn at the centre.

"The Sigil of Mourning," he said quietly. "This was a sanctuary."

"It was," Leon answered. "And then it wasn’t."

No one spoke for a time.

The wind whistled low, then shifted.

One of the scouts returned—his eyes too wide.

"There’s someone in the chapel ruins."

Leon and Eliane followed at once. Through a cracked arch, up a winding slope of stone dust and bent trees, they came upon it: the skeletal frame of a once-great chapel, its stained glass now scattered across the snow like frozen blood.

And in the centre, seated where the altar once stood, was a woman.

She was old. Far older than her frame should’ve endured. Wrapped in moth-eaten robes, her back straight, her eyes unblinking.

Before her, a brazier that burned with no wood, only light.

"You’ve come late," she said, her voice like cracked parchment. "But not empty."

Leon approached cautiously. "You are one of the Witnessed?"

She smiled faintly. "One of the Buried. Not all Witnesses wear names."

Eliane stepped forward. "The Accord is dying. The Council corrupts the truth."

"And so you dig up ghosts?" the woman asked. "Or do you carry fire?"

Leon removed the ring and held it forward.

Her expression changed.

"Ouroboros in flame," she whispered. "The mark of the Pale Envoy."

She stood—not slowly, not feebly. Her shadow stretched far across the altar floor.

"Then the Well has opened. The Silence is broken. The old oaths must stir again."

Leon nodded once. "Will you bear witness at Durell?"

The woman stepped down, slow and certain. "I will do more. I will speak where silence was taught. And when I speak, the Accord will remember what it forgot."

Leon met her eyes. "Then we march."

She bowed, not low, but true.

And when the march moved again that dawn, it moved with forty one.

Snow still clung to the hem of their cloaks by midday.

The march didn’t break formation, but tension rode with them now—sensed in the way each rider checked the trees more often, the way boots hit the earth with less rhythm, more readiness. The encounter at Murien’s Rest had sobered them. But the woman from Veylin’s Stand? She had unsettled them.

"She doesn’t blink," one scout whispered that evening by the watchfire. "I don’t think she sleeps."

"She prays," another said. "But not to any god I know."

Leon heard none of this. He stood apart, watching the tree line beyond the ravine they’d camped near. Durell was three days away, if the weather held. But weather hadn’t been honest in weeks.

Behind him, Eliane approached, dragging a folded scroll from her pack. "Dispatches from the rear lines. One broken seal."

He took it, his eyes scanning quickly. Reports of movements—small bands bearing Council banners had been seen trailing the eastern edge of the march. No direct engagements yet. But too close.

"They’re herding us," Kellen said from his post on the boulder behind them.

Leon nodded. "Into something."

A pause.

"Into someone," Eliane corrected.

That night, Leon didn’t sleep. Nor did the old Witness.

He found her sitting again, cross-legged beside the brazier. It hadn’t gone out once. When she noticed him, she spoke without looking.

"They are afraid of what you might prove."

"They should be," Leon said.

"No." Her voice thinned like mist. "They should be afraid of what you might remember."

He stared at her for a while. "What are you?"

She finally turned her eyes on him.

"I am the last tongue of a vanished vow. I remember the Accord before the Council."

He knelt beside her slowly. "You were at the First Table?"

"I cleaned its ash," she replied. "And once, long ago, I sharpened the quill that wrote the Twelfth Oath."

Leon inhaled sharply.

"That oath was struck from record."

The woman’s smile was quiet, almost mournful. "No oath is ever truly gone. Only left unsaid."

The fire between them shifted, suddenly flaring.

And in the glow, Leon saw something—not in the flames, but reflected in her eyes: a great hall, domed and filled with torchlight, twelve figures standing in a circle; and at the centre, a child.

Not older than nine. With a mark over his heart. An ouroboros, faint and new.

Leon blinked. "That was me."

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

He rose without another word.

By morning, the frost on his shoulders had melted, but the weight on his spine had not. The march resumed with forty-one, but every step after felt heavier.

He didn’t tell Eliane what he saw.

But when the clouds broke briefly on the seventh day, and sunlight painted the valley in white and gold, it was the Witness who lifted her eyes first.

"We are being watched," she said.

Leon followed her gaze to a distant cliff edge.

A figure stood there. Cloaked. Motionless. Watching.

Then, like smoke, it vanished.

And far ahead, the towers of Caer Durell began to rise beyond the next ridge.

The final leg of the march had begun.