**Chapter One: The Ashen Covenant**

The wind carried the taste of iron across the Bleached Flats, a copper tang that settled on the tongue like a curse. Three days the corpse had waited, sprawled across salt-crusted earth where nothing grew save the memory of green. Carrion birds circled overhead, their wings cutting black arcs against a sky the color of old pewter, but none descended. Even scavengers knew when death carried the stink of something worse than rot.

Kneeling in the shadow of the body, Varg Knot-Sworn pressed his thumb to the dead woman's throat. Cold skin split beneath his nail, revealing not blood but ash. Fine grey powder spilled from the wound like hourglass sand, catching in the creases of his weathered hands. The same ash leaked from her eyes, her ears, the corners of her mouth. A harvest of cinders where life should have been.

"Third one this fortnight," he muttered, voice rough as quarry stone. His left hand—three fingers missing, taken by frostbite in the Northern Wastes—trembled as he closed her staring eyes. The pupils had burned away, leaving pearls of calcified tissue that reflected nothing. "Same damn sigil."

The pentagram carved into her sternum wept black tar. Each point bore a nail of hammered iron, rusted to the color of dried blood. The runes circling the symbol weren't etched but branded, flesh raised in angry welts that spelled names in a tongue older than the kingdoms bleeding themselves white in the east. Varg had seen that script before, carved into the walls of the Sunken Cathedral when he'd gone down with the Ninth Company. Half his men had walked into those waters and never walked out. The other half had walked out wrong.

Boots crunched salt behind him. Varg didn't turn. In the Bleached Flats, you learned to recognize footfalls or you learned to die. These belonged to Sister Maligna, though the title sat on her like a stolen coat. She'd earned it the same way she'd earned the scars latticing her shaved scalp—one betrayal at a time.

"She was alive when they started," Maligna said. No greeting. No questions. Just the facts, stripped clean of mercy. She crouched beside him, her robes—once white, now the color of old bone—pooling in the dust. "See how the ash follows the nerve paths? They kept her breathing through it. Made her watch."

Varg's remaining fingers found the object clutched in the corpse's right hand. A child's tooth, milk-white and perfect save for the root end, which had been dipped in gold. He'd pulled five others from previous victims. They made a small constellation in his pouch, clicking together like dice when he walked.

"Circle's complete," he said, nodding toward the hill where the Watcher stood. Always the same hill, though the Flats stretched endless in every direction. The skeletal figure hadn't moved in the hour since they'd spotted it, but its robes shifted in a wind that touched nothing else. "Seven bodies. Seven teeth. Seven days until the Black Moon rises."

Maligna spat. Her saliva hissed where it struck the salt, leaving a tiny crater. "Old magic. The kind that requires payment in screaming." She drew a blade of polished obsidian, its edge singing as it left the sheath. "We could end this. Cut the heart from the pattern before it wakes."

"Patterns don't have hearts." Varg stood, joints popping like damp firewood. Forty winters had carved him from oak to wire—lean where he'd been broad, sharp where he'd been merely hard. The rope burn around his throat, hidden beneath a scarf of wolf-hide, pulsed with its own heartbeat. Some nooses never quite let go. "Just hungry mouths."

The Watcher raised its staff. Bone against bone, a sound like dice in a cup. Across the Flats, other shapes began to resolve. Not walking. Not quite. They flickered between here and there, existing in the spaces where the eye grew tired. Each carried the weight of failed harvests, of children sold for bread, of wars fought over which color flag deserved to fly above corpses. The Watcher collected such things the way other men collected coins.

"Covenant's broken," Maligna continued, cleaning her nails with the obsidian knife. "Whatever slept beneath the Salt Wastes is waking hungry. These aren't sacrifices—they're invitations written in meat."

Varg had seen invitations before. Received one himself, carved into the chest of his daughter nine years past. The tooth she'd carried had been her own, plucked from a mouth that would never speak again. He'd tracked the killers across three provinces and found only more teeth, more ash, more questions wearing the masks of answers. The Watcher had been there too, standing on hills that shouldn't exist in a land flatter than a priest's promises.

"There's a village," he said, pointing toward a smudge of smoke on the horizon. "Three leagues north. They still burn their dead there." He didn't mention the dream that had woken him for seven straight nights: a circle of children standing knee-deep in ash, their mouths opening to reveal not tongues but roots, growing downward into something vast and patient that waited beneath the world.

Maligna followed his gaze. "Red Kettle. They trade in salt and sorrow. Lost two girls last winter to the white cough." She paused, head cocked. "You hear that?"

Varg had already heard. The sound of breathing where no breath should be. The corpse's chest rose once, fell once. Ash poured from the wound in the pentagram's center, forming words in a script that hurt to perceive. He recognized three symbols—the same three that had appeared on his daughter's skin when they'd found her floating face-down in the well.

The Watcher began its descent. It moved like a marionette handled by a drunkard, all wrong angles and the suggestion of joints bending where joints shouldn't exist. Where its feet touched the salt, the earth cracked. Not broke—*cracked*, as if reality itself had grown brittle. From those fractures leaked a sound like distant weeping.

"Choice time," Maligna said, though her tone suggested choices had died with the old world. "We run toward the village and maybe save them. Maybe. Or we run toward the Watcher and maybe learn why your girl's killer signs his work with baby teeth."

Varg pulled the scarf away from his throat. The scar beneath resembled a necklace of purple roses, each knot a memory of the day he'd failed to die properly. "Not much of a choice."

"Never is." Maligna slit the corpse's palm, collecting three drops of ash-blood in a vial of smoked glass. "But I've got a theory about these teeth. About why they take them from the living instead of the dead." She stoppered the vial, tucking it into a pouch that squirmed independently of any wind. "Want to hear it?"

The Watcher raised its staff higher. Where the shadow fell, the salt turned black. Varg could see shapes moving in that darkness—things that had learned to wear human faces but hadn't quite mastered the art of wearing them *right*. One looked like his daughter. Another like his wife. The third wore his own features stretched too thin across too many bones.

"Save it for the road," he said, though they both knew the road was a lie. There was only the Flats, and what waited at their center, and the slow understanding that every step carried them closer to something that had started eating the day Varg first drew breath. "We're going to need stronger allies than theories."

Maligna's laugh held no humor. "Allies? In the Flats?" She gestured at the horizon where the village smoke rose like a prayer or a warning. "There's only the dying and the damned. Sometimes they're the same person."

They walked. Behind them, the corpse sat up. Ash poured from its mouth in a steady stream, spelling out names in a language that existed before mouths learned to lie. The Watcher followed at a distance that never changed, close enough for its shadow to taste their heels. Ahead, Red Kettle burned its dead in pyres that cast no warmth, while something vast and patient stirred beneath the salt, counting teeth in the dark.

Varg touched the pouch at his belt. Seven teeth. Seven invitations to a feast where the guests were the meal. Somewhere in the distance, a child began to scream—a sound like a violin string drawn across the edge of the world.

The wind shifted. Now it carried not just iron but the memory of iron, the ghost of every weapon ever drawn in anger. Varg had killed thirty-seven men in his life, women too, and one child who'd been holding a grenade instead of a toy. He'd learned to recognize the moment when violence stopped being a choice and became gravity. This was that moment, stretched thin as wire across the throat of the world.

Behind them, the corpse stood. Its eyes held galaxies of ash. Its mouth opened and spoke with his daughter's voice: *"Daddy, why did you let me drown?"*

They didn't look back. In the Bleached Flats, looking back was how you learned to walk with holes where your sanity used to be. Instead they walked toward Red Kettle, toward the certainty of fire and the possibility of answers, while the Watcher's shadow grew long enough to touch the edges of every map that had ever dared name this place.

The Black Moon would rise in six days now. Somewhere beneath their feet, something vast shifted in its sleep and dreamed of teeth.