Chapter 1: The Head in the Hills
Chapter 1: The Head in the Hills
They arrived at dusk.
Not because they planned to—but because dusk is when cursed things like to begin, and Bastards rarely show up early.
The wind whistled low through the Vale of Stilled Breaths, carrying with it the smell of damp moss and the faint tang of copper. The path had long since vanished, swallowed by grass that grew too tall and too still. Even the birds refused to chirp here.
“Feels like we’re being watched,” Pig Knight Bastard rumbled.
Deth didn’t answer. She was staring ahead.
Through the mist, rising from the hills like a memory no one wanted, the fortress appeared:
The Owlhead.
The Fortress
It was just as the legends whispered.
A stone citadel carved into the shape of a great horned owl’s head—weathered by time, choked in ivy, one eye glowing faint gold, the other dark and cracked. Its massive beak formed a jagged archway leading into shadow.
“That’s a whole-ass owl,” said the Bald Eagle Gunslinger.
“You think that’s offensive?” Pig Knight asked.
“Only if it starts talking. Then I’m shooting it.”
Deth ignored the exchange. She was already reaching for her bow—not to draw it, just to feel it.
Lord Verminok floated a few feet above the moss, robes trailing like rotted banners, his voice a gurgling sigh.
“Its beak is the mouth of the forgotten. Its eye weeps the light of those who confess. I have dreamt of this place.”
“You dream about owls?” Bald Eagle blinked. “You’re even weirder than you smell.”
“And yet,” Verminok rasped, “your soul tastes like processed cheese and unfulfilled promises.”
Local Absence
No villages surrounded the fortress anymore. Just scattered stones, rotted fence posts, and the occasional tool half-buried in dirt.
They passed a wooden wheelbarrow still filled with bones.
“No bodies,” Deth murmured. “No crows. Just bones.”
“What took them?” Pig Knight asked.
“Not what,” she said. “When.”
The Whispering Arch
They stood beneath the beak.
The archway loomed high above them, its interior dark but humming—like a mouth about to speak.
Inscribed across the stone were three words in a language only Verminok could read. He floated closer, running a slime-dripping finger across the letters.
“TRUTH. FEAR. SACRIFICE.”
“Well,” said the Eagle, cocking his pistols, “I already don’t like this.”
“It’s not for liking,” Deth said. “It’s a trial.”
“Who’s on trial?”
“All of us.”
The First Choice
At the base of the arch, three paths unfurled like freshly revealed scrolls—one leading downward into darkness, one upward into wind-blasted towers, and one straight ahead through a series of spiraling doorways.
A plaque at the split read:
TO KNOW THE SPELL, KNOW THYSELF.
ONE PATH PER HEART.
ALL PATHS RETURN.
They looked at each other.
“We split up?” asked Pig Knight.
“We don’t,” said Deth.
“But we must,” Verminok replied. “These are not steps to be taken in formation. These are… reflections cast by intention.”
The fortress groaned—deep and low, as if resenting indecision.
“Alright,” Deth said. “Choose your mirror.”
She pointed.
“Pig—straight. I think that one’s Fear. Verminok, take the tower. That reeks of Truth. Eagle—you and I are going down. Sacrifice sounds like a goddamn party.”
“Hell yeah,” the bird grinned, flexing his wings. “Let’s go give something up we’ll regret.”
Into the Owl
And so they parted.
Pig Knight disappeared into the spiraling hall, muttering something about bad dreams and worse instincts. Verminok ascended without a word, his trail of ooze sizzling softly against the steps. And Deth and the Eagle descended into the dark, side by side, not speaking.
The Owlhead watched.
Its gold eye pulsed.
And somewhere within the walls, an ancient voice whispered not words, but feelings—truths unspoken, fears unnamed, and prices unpaid.
The Trials had begun.
Chapter 2: The Trial of Fear
The stone closed behind him with the sound of a breath held too long.
Pig Knight stood still, letting the silence settle. There was no torchlight, no voice telling him what came next. Just the weight of his cleaver—Sorry—hanging heavy against his back, and the sound of his own heart thudding under steel.
A glow stirred beneath his boots.
Runes. Hundreds of them, carved into the floor in a wide spiral. They flickered orange, then blue, then dimmed again, like a heartbeat faltering after too much time in the dark. With each step he took, the spiral shifted—ever so slightly, like it was alive and didn’t enjoy being walked on.
He passed through a corridor lined in mirrors—not glass, but strange, shivering liquid, rippling despite the still air. Each reflection showed a different version of him.
One lay dead on a battlefield, still clutching his weapon.
One stood atop a throne of bones, crowned and alone.
One wore no helm. Just a face. Soft. Tired.
Another cradled a child that wasn’t his.
He grunted. “I ain’t afraid of what ain’t real.”
The mirrors didn’t respond. But the corridor narrowed.
Reflections began to twist. One showed him weeping over a broken comrade. One showed his hands soaked in blood—Deth’s bow lying snapped at his feet. He turned away before he could see the next one. He didn’t want to know whose armor was melting in that last reflection.
Then a voice came—not spoken, not screamed, just present.
“Pig Knight. Bastard-born. Blade-heavy. Soft-souled. Do you even remember your name?”
“I don’t need one,” he said.
“What do you have, then?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Friends who don’t run. Enemies who do.”
“And what of fear?”
“I got room for that too.”
The corridor behind him vanished. All that remained was a spiral staircase leading down, carved into stone like a throat swallowing its words.
He followed it.
At the bottom, the chamber opened wide. Round. Carved with claw marks and cracked runes, and lit by an amber glow that came from nowhere and everywhere.
And in the center stood himself.
Taller. Meaner. His armor was darker, mottled with rust and blood. His helmet cracked at the tusk. The cleaver in his hands looked just like Sorry—but larger, heavier, and pulsing with something alive.
“You’re soft,” said the other.
“I choose,” Pig Knight replied.
“You care. You love. That’s weakness.”
He rolled his shoulders, stretched out his neck.
“Damn right I do.”
They clashed.
No magic. No illusion. Just steel, bone, and breath.
The room erupted in sound—iron slamming into iron, boots skidding over dust, the scrape of blade against tusk. Pig Knight swung wide, his cleaver arching like a church bell at war, but the other caught it with a snarl and turned the blow aside.
They circled. Close. Mean.
“You were meant to die loud and early,” the mirror growled. “Be forgotten.”
Pig Knight surged forward, shoulder-first. He slammed the bastard into a pillar. Stone cracked. So did ribs. But the reflection only laughed.
Then came a punch to the gut—armor denting inward. A second to the chin—his helmet jolted sideways. Pig Knight staggered, spitting blood and fury.
He swung. Missed.
The other landed another blow. Then another. The room spun.
Pig Knight dropped to one knee, catching his breath, hearing the voice again—so close now it felt like it was behind his eyes.
“You’re not built for this.”
“Maybe,” he wheezed.
Then he headbutted the bastard.
Hard.
The mirror reeled. And Pig Knight rose like a landslide.
“But I didn’t.”
Now he didn’t swing like someone trying to win.
He swung like someone who already had—just by still being here.
Blade. Elbow. Boot. Grunt. Slam.
He struck with the weight of friends who believed in him. With the shame of all the things he’d never said. With the fear that maybe he wasn’t enough—and the defiance that maybe that didn’t matter.
The other Pig Knight fell.
Hard.
Didn’t rise.
Pig Knight stood over the broken thing that had worn his doubts like armor. His breathing was ragged, steam rising from the cracks in his gear. He sheathed Sorry across his back.
“I ain’t afraid of bein’ soft,” he said. “But I ain’t gonna be cruel to survive.”
The chamber pulsed once.
Then a wall peeled back like a wound opening. Light spilled in—soft, not blinding. Memory-colored.
He turned to leave, but paused.
The body on the floor was gone—crumbled into dust. Only a shard of mirrored metal remained, humming faintly.
He picked it up.
Looked into it.
Saw himself.
Tired. Bruised.
And enough.
He slipped the shard into a pouch on his belt and walked into the light.
Chapter 3: The Trial of Truth
The walls breathed.
That was the first lie.
Verminok’s rotted feet touched the stone, but it was not stone. The spiral staircase twisted inward, not upward, as if the owl’s skull had been inverted and made into a question.
He stepped forward. His robe left a streak of sludge behind him that quickly dried and flaked into forgotten words.
The voice came before the air.
“Verminok the Oozing.”
“You rot with confidence. You speak with worms. You answer questions no one asks.”
“But tell us—what truth have you never dared to speak aloud?”
He said nothing.
He never spoke to voices that had no smell.
Each step bled.
Not metaphor. The staircase oozed—first red, then green, then a pale milky fluid that steamed like memory under pressure.
He kept climbing.
The walls whispered. “You were once a boy.”
He sneered. “So were you.”
They hissed.
“You believed in something once.”
“I still do.”
“You loved.”
He stopped. Touched the wall. It twitched.
Then he scraped it with a bone claw.
“Truth,” he muttered, “is not some wide-eyed thing begging to be touched. Truth is a maggot, writhing beneath comfort.”
The first door was made of mirrors.
Not glass—reflections. Fluid and alive. They didn’t show him. They showed everyone else.
Deth, wounded. Holding his hand.
Pig Knight, laughing over a fire, calling him “friend” like he meant it.
The Eagle, reloading in silence, nodding once before a battle.
And beneath them all—himself, half-visible, always in the corner. Always watching.
A truth whispered:
You care.
He scoffed. “I consume. I do not care.”
The mirror melted.
He moved on.
The next floor was worse.
It was filled with books. Every one of them about him.
Each page written in the handwriting of someone who hated him. The Owl. The Crag King. The old professor who called his mind “a coffin stuffed with glowworms.”
He opened one.
It read: “He is not wise. He is afraid.”
He didn’t burn it.
He closed it gently and placed it on the floor.
By the third floor, the tower was alive with sound.
Not voices. Not song.
Just a low, vibrating hum—like a thousand throats trying not to scream.
The floor pulsed beneath him, a membrane stretched over breath.
At its center floated a jar.
No pedestal. No frame. Just the jar—hovering, softly lit from within.
Inside it: a child’s face. Pale. Familiar. Wrong.
Its eyes opened.
It blinked.
Its lips did not move, but the voice was his.
“Is this what you buried?”
Verminok did not answer.
The face drifted closer to the inside of the glass. The lips parted now—just enough to smile.
“Do you remember what you were?”
Silence.
Then the face peeled. Like skin sloughing from spoiled fruit. What remained beneath was raw and wriggling.
A maggot.
Coiled and ancient, yellow-white and glistening with memory.
It spoke now with something older than language.
“You were not born. You were fed.”
“You chewed your way into light through the bowels of a dying wizard.”
“You found his tongue still twitching… and made it your own.”
Verminok stepped forward. His bone-crowned head dipped slightly, like a relic in worship. He lifted one hand, clawed and blackened with centuries of unkind knowledge.
He touched the jar.
It did not shatter.
It rotted.
Collapsed in on itself like a grave too long ignored. The maggot vanished.
The air didn’t explode. It exhaled.
And with it came truth.
Not words. Not memories.
Just understanding.
He had never been human.
Never a child. Never a boy with hopes, or dreams, or pain that had language.
He had been hunger.
Still was.
He fell to one knee, more from revelation than shame.
His hand trembled.
And in that trembling, he did something he had not done since the first whisper of intellect grew in that corpse-ridden dark:
He considered the idea that there might be more.
Not forgiveness.
Not identity.
But the potential of it.
A shadow of a seed.
Not rot.
Not pride.
Just something almost tender.
And then the tower responded.
The walls peeled back. Not violently—gently. Like skin accepting a scar.
A stairwell opened. This time, spiraling up.
He stood.
He did not smile.
But neither did he sneer.
He reeked of death.
And possibility.
Chapter 4: The Trial of Sacrifice
He didn’t trust stairwells.
Too narrow. Too quiet. Too much time to think.
But this one? This one was insulting. No twists, no whispers, no bleeding glyphs or floating riddles. Just a long, clean hallway of pale stone, lit by flickering torches spaced perfectly apart, like whoever built it was proud of their spacing.
Bald Eagle Gunslinger adjusted his hat, checked the pistols at his hips, and sighed.
“If this ends in feelings, I’m shooting someone. That includes myself.”
He walked.
The door at the end was waiting—simple wood, brass handle. No traps. No drama.
He hated it.
When he opened it, the world changed.
He stood on a cliff that wasn’t there a second ago.
Behind him: nothing. No hallway, no fortress, no floor.
Below him: black ocean, rippling with stars that blinked like dying memories.
Ahead: them.
Not enemies.
The Bastards.
Deth, bandaged and bloodied, supporting Pig Knight as he limped.
Verminok, flickering like an afterimage, leaving a trail of rot and tears that didn’t fall.
They stood at the edge of another cliff. Between them, suspended in the void, was a massive golden scale. Empty.
The scale whispered.
“To carry what you’ve learned… you must give up what you hold most sacred.”
The Eagle narrowed his eyes.
“That so?”
The scale didn’t answer.
Instead, the void shimmered. And from it emerged a single figure.
Another Eagle.
But cleaner. Crisper. Younger. The war medals still shining on his jacket. The smug pride in his grin not yet stained by failure.
A military parade version of himself.
A version that never joined the Bastards.
“You could have been a hero,” the other said.
“I could’ve been a billboard,” the real Eagle muttered. “What’s your point?”
“You used to believe in rules. In cause. In flag. In order.”
“And now I believe in people.”
The fake Eagle sneered. “People are messy. People fall. People die.”
“Yeah,” he said, eyes narrowing. “But they got back up.”
The scale pulsed. A ghostly light filled the air, and suddenly there were three shapes hovering over the left pan:
His old service badge
A folded flag
A black-and-white photo of his unit—most of them gone
The right pan sat empty.
“You must offer something of equal weight,” the voice said.
He didn’t move.
“You must choose. Yourself… or your truth.”
He adjusted his belt. Exhaled. Looked down at his guns.
Then he did something no one—not Deth, not Pig, not even the tower—expected.
He holstered both pistols.
Stepped forward.
And said, “I’ll give you the truth.”
He removed his hat.
And spoke words no one had ever heard from his beak:
“I ran.”
“Back then… when the bombs dropped and the kids screamed and the line broke—I ran.”
“I didn’t stay and die like the others. I didn’t hold the flag. I didn’t protect the last medic. I ran. And I lived.”
“And I built a damn myth out of that run so I could feel tall again.”
He raised his chin.
“And now I know—I was never supposed to be a hero. I was supposed to find the ones who weren’t either… and fight anyway.”
The scale groaned.
Tilted.
Balanced.
The right pan glowed.
The cliff vanished.
He stood once more in the tower—at the edge of a wide, open chamber. The air was warm, almost gentle.
In front of him stood the Bastards.
Deth nodded.
Pig Knight gave him a thumbs-up.
Verminok oozed something that could only be described as respectful.
The Eagle tipped his hat. “Let’s never talk about that again.”
They laughed.
The final doorway opened.
Light poured through.
Chapter 5: The Watcher in the Hall
It started with silence. No whispers. No riddles. No illusions. Just a hallway, stretching far ahead like the spine of something long dead.
Deth took one step forward. The torches along the walls flared to life.
Each flame lit a doorway. Each doorway framed a memory.
Not hers.
Theirs.
First: Pig Knight. She watched him face himself—not in thought, but in steel. No magic. No mercy. Just a war between what he feared he was and what he refused to become. She saw the moment he chose softness over cruelty. And how that choice made him stronger.
She smiled. “You stubborn bastard.”
Second: Verminok. She expected rot. Expectation met. What she didn’t expect was shame. Confession. The quiet ache of something trying to grow where only consumption had ever lived. He wasn’t proud. He was honest.
“Maybe that’s worse,” she whispered. “Maybe that’s braver.”
Third: The Eagle. A cliff. A golden scale. And the weight of lies too heavy to keep flying. She watched him disarm—not his guns, but his legend. He stood unarmed, stripped of every heroic fantasy.
And still—he stood.
“That’s the truth,” she said. “You’re still here.”
The hallway ended. And the door at the end was different. Not made of wood or stone. But of feathers. Layered. Dark. Wide as wings. They opened as she approached, revealing a single vast chamber. Circular. Empty.
Except for the owl.
It dropped from the ceiling like silence breaking. Twice her height. All bone and feather and glyphs etched into its skull. Its eyes burned—one gold, one cracked and dark. Its wings opened with a sound like truth being pulled from a wound.
It didn’t speak. It judged.
Deth drew her bow.
The fight was not fair. It never is, when fear flies.
The owl moved with memory—countering before she attacked. She bled. Bruised. Still, she stood.
“You want to know what I fear?” she growled. “That I’ll die alone.”
The owl lunged. And stopped. So did time.
A cleaver sang.
Pig Knight exploded into the chamber like a cannonball wrapped in pork and vengeance. His cleaver “Sorry” crashed into the owl’s talon, slicing two wicked claws clean off.
The owl shrieked. Then shrieked again as a pair of gunshots rang out— Bald Eagle Gunslinger, wings spread, pistols blazing mid-air, soaring in a circle around the beast.
“Ain’t no way we’re letting you hog all the death.”
Deth grinned, spit blood, nocked another arrow.
From the shadows—Verminok. Floating. His robes seething. His crown of bone and larvae crawling with spell-light. He raised one hand. Black ooze shaped like talons burst from the floor and wrapped the owl’s wings.
“You will remember what it feels like to rot.”
Together, they struck. Pig Knight swinging like a butcher with a purpose. Bald Eagle raining lead from above, feathers catching torchlight like falling stars. Verminok unraveling spells written in bile and grief.
And Deth— at the center. She ran up a falling feather mid-leap, launched herself into the air, and fired an arrow straight into the owl’s golden eye.
It cracked. Split. And the owl fell—not like a bird. Like a mountain.
The ground shook. Dust and feathers filled the air. The owl lay broken, melting into ash and time.
Inside its shattered skull: treasure. Relics. Forbidden scrolls. Weapons of forgotten wars. A horn that only blows once. A crown that whispers lies. They filled their packs fast. Because the tower was coming down.
They ran. The chamber split. The roof collapsed behind them. Pillars crumbled like dying thoughts. The Owlhead began to cave inward, its glowing eyes flickering like a candle before death.
They burst out the beak-shaped archway as the statue crumbled. Stone dust rose behind them like judgment giving up. They didn’t look back.
At the hilltop, they stopped to breathe. Bruised. Bleeding. Laughing.
Deth reached into her pouch and pulled out a card. Pinned it to a broken shard of owlstone. Smiled at the others.
“A Bastard was here.
The world’s a bit safer.
But also slightly not.”
