No roads led to the Morglade.

  For eight and ten leagues, it was a barren place of bitter dirt and wind-swept rocks over cragged hills. The priestesses of the waking eye claimed it was cursed long ago after the last heretic druid was killed there, and his foul blood spilled into the ground, poisoning the lands forever. Only a strange yellowed-leaved sedge, seen in scattered flashes, grew across its cragged hillsides. Cruel and untamed as it was, the Morglade was a refuge for wild dogs and desperate men to roam free out of reach of men’s laws.

  Now, there was a dark smoke stirring at its highest peak. Armed men with savage beards patrolled the hill, glowering over slewn corpses on the hillside. Among the fallen, a woman, shaken and bloodied, was forced to her knees in line with other kneeling still living men, their heads sunk low in defeat. The woman’s name was Lorna Reeds, and she belonged to an outlaw brotherhood that had taken refuge in the Morglade and made it their home. But those days were over—the black moon legion had finally come for them.

  “Pray to your fallen god,” said a man with a mountain-folk tongue. Lorna raised her head, eyes watering from the fumes, to see who had spoken. Glaring down on her was a grisly man, thick bearded to his waist, clad in mail armor. He darkly smiled at her, amused at what he had said. “I’m told he’s dead—buried under the world. Tricked by a woman.” The man chuckled to himself before stomping away. Many of these same men circled the defeated, armed with swords, axes, and beards, breathing down like beasts on their prey.

  Before the war of the queens, Lorna Reeds had been a fisherman’s daughter, wearing her mother’s hand-me-down dresses and cleaning fish for her father. Now, she wore men’s trousers, borrowed leather boots, and a leather jerkin over a now ruddy white shirt. Under her eye, a shallow cut from a blade whipping across her face bled down her cheek, leaving a dark weeping mark.

  At the hill’s crest, wagons and carts, once made into ransack fortifications, were burning, and a smokey haze loomed over the heads of the kneeling outlaws as far as their eyes could see.

  Lorna carefully told the man beside her, “Grey take us. Who are these wretched men?”

  “Shush...” answered the man kneeling next to her. He shivered with a grizzled look, brown hair, and a face beaten with one eye closed. He then spoke to her quietly, “They’re Vinndash—men from the iron mountains—tamed and obey the golden queen now.”

  She whispered back, “Will they show mercy?”

  “No, not from them. But it is for the queen to say.”

  “But…” she said, “what shall happen to the—”

  “QUIET.” The man grew irritated. He leaned into her ear. “If you care for them—hold your tongue.”

  Another Vinndash, squatter than his kinsmen but no less formidable in physique, came strutting to the front, clad in a black-fur cloak and carrying a chewed war-axe. He was known as Vilmer Croy, and as his clan’s custom, he wore a fur cloak made from the black wolves in the iron mountain’s southern valleys. The old war-axe he wielded was taken off the first man he killed at age eleven, and the victim was his father. Vilmer called the axe Papa to spite his own father’s memory. His dark eyes glowered over the line. He bellowed over the kneeling line with a grungy voice, “Silence. All of you. Or I’ll take your heads.”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Soon, the noise of pounding hooves came from below and grew louder. Lorna strained her eyes to see through the gloom of smoke. Three strange riders came galloping in a hazy dream. In the center rode a dark-clothed figure, feminine in frame, on a horse of startling white with an unseemly crimson-red blasted across the beast’s face and up its legs from its hooves. Only a sliver of the rider’s fair face could be seen behind the frayed edges of the black shroud she wore, covering her body down to her boots. Loose threads from the shroud’s trim flowed in the air as she rode towards the line.

  “There’s your answer,” the man told Lorna, “The black witch means death.”

  Flanking the black-shrouded rider were two wild women. One, with fiery red hair, long and unruly, whipping in the wind, rode on the right. The other with sky-blue hair, neatly brushed with a single loose flock blowing across her face, rode on the left. Both were dressed in leathers and wore braces on their forearms. A stocked quiver and bow were strapped on their backs, and a vicious dirk sheathed to their sides.

  The dark rider yanked on her reins in leather gloves, and all three came to a halt twenty paces away. The riders sat calmly. The woman in the black shroud on the red-faced beast was called Joanne Ballassteer. She was a captain in the black moon legion, a daughter of the grey, and the chief to the Lysaneea horsemen from the western dusk lands. She was also known—more infamously—as the daughter of the mad wizard, Grieves Ballassteer. Or so the Lysaneea claimed so.

  Nudging her red-faced horse forward, Joanne crept closer, leaving her two wild-haired companions behind in a smokey shadow. She lowered the hood of the shroud, revealing a fair white face and midnight-black hair down to the shoulders. She peered over the line with motherly eyes, seeing each fallen man and woman. After noticing them each in turn, she raised her gloved hand to the air and spoke in a stoic, reserved voice, “Do not despair.” Her tender words carried over the wind. “Today, you will walk in the fields of grey. And suffer no more…”

  Hearing the dark lady’s words, Lorna broke into a quiet sob.

  “Until whence time,” Joanne continued, “the lord of all rises from his slumber under the world and returns… you’ll be awaiting. But you will be eternal. Without hunger or thirst… or pain. But you will be awaiting. He, who made the stars, can never die. He will bring us to another kingdom, one where sorrows are mere dreams. But until he rises and claims his throne, you must wait for him, lingering without starlight, roaming as a shade, in the grey lands of death.” Joanne’s eyes became downcast. “And so, I bid you farewell. Go with love on your journey. May we meet again in the fields of grey.” Joanne lowered her gloved hand and nodded to the Vinndash in the black-fur cloak.

  Vilmer Croy, half bored, spit and croaked out, “Aye. End it.”

  A shudder fell down the line. One by one, the Vinndash soldiers seized a victim and slashed a throat. An eruption of morbid grunts, squeals, and other terrible noises followed. Any who dared to run or fight were hacked down swiftly. When Lorna was taken by the hair, and her head yanked back to bare her throat, she cried out in one last desperate plea. She needed someone to hear her. Yet, her words were lost in the shuffling and the gruesome acts around her. Only Joanne paused on her mount, not sure what she heard.

  When the blade sliced into Lorna’s neck, she tried once more to scream, praying her words would get out. But only a raw gurgle came from her. She fell forward to the ground, struggling to hold herself with her hands. Finally, her strength waned, and she collapsed. Her head landed on the dirt, her blood seeping into the dry ground. Slowly, the world changed around her—fading and shifting—until it was nothing but an endless horizon of grey.