Marcus left while they were both asleep.
He fed the fire enough wood to last a few hours, checked that Corvin was breathing steadily, looked at Liz once, and then stepped into the trees without a sound.
She was going to be angry in the morning. That was fine. Angry meant alive.
He moved east through the forest at a pace that ate distance without announcing itself, the Devil Loom Coat dark enough against the night that he was less a person moving through trees and more a shadow that had decided on a direction. An hour in he crested a low ridge and stopped.
He looked down and was quiet for a long moment.
The garrison was not what the word suggested.
What sat in the valley below had no business being called a garrison. A fortress was the honest word, old stone walls thick enough that a battering ram would have given up before making an impression, stretching across the valley floor in a rectangle that ate nearly half a mile from end to end.
Four towers rose at the corners, each one lit at the top with orange firelight that spilled down the stonework in long warm lines. Along the parapet between them guards moved in rotating pairs with the practiced spacing of soldiers who had been doing this long enough that the routine had become instinct.
The main gate faced west, iron reinforced, with two guard posts flanking it and a portcullis behind that Marcus could see even from this distance.
Supply wagons were still moving through it despite the hour, torches mounted on poles lighting the entrance road in both directions like the garrison had no interest in pretending it wasn't there.
Marcus crouched at the ridge line and counted.
He counted for a long time.
The courtyard inside the walls was organized with the particular efficiency of someone who had run a military operation before and knew which mistakes to avoid.
Barracks along the eastern wall, storage along the northern, training grounds in the center still occupied by a rotating shift of soldiers running drills in the torchlight. Not performance. Actual drills, the kind run at this hour specifically because exhaustion was part of the training.
Two hundred soldiers Corvin had said.
Marcus looked at the courtyard and thought the number was probably low.
What caught his attention after the scale was the people who didn't fit the uniform. People moved through the garrison yard in small groups, equipped well, carrying the particular ease of people who had been here long enough to stop being guests.
Three of them were sparring near the eastern barracks with Ashfang soldiers watching. Two more moved toward the storage building with crates between them, working the same as anyone else.
Not prisoners. Participants.
They'd chosen this.
Marcus filed that away and kept counting.
Then something caught his attention that had nothing to do with what his eyes were showing him.
A feeling. Not fear and not instinct exactly. More like standing too close to something that had been burning for a very long time and feeling the heat before you saw the flame.
It came from underneath the fortress, pushing upward through the stone steadily, and it carried the same ancient texture he'd felt in Cave Mrellie before the Hollow Keeper's chamber door. The same quality. The same age behind it.
But larger.
Whatever was in the cave had been sealed and contained and waiting to be ended. What was underneath this fortress felt different.
Not contained. Fed. Something down there had been receiving attention and resources and time and was considerably further along than anything should have been allowed to get.
He didn't move toward it. Noted the location relative to the fortress layout Corvin had drawn in the dirt and held it in his memory.
Then the system window appeared.
[NEW SIDE QUEST AVAILABLE]
[LIBERATE THE GARRISON]
[REWARD TIER: EPIC]
[ACCEPT / DECLINE]
Marcus looked at it for a long moment.
Epic tier. Every reward the system had given him so far had been useful in ways he hadn't anticipated.
Soul Reading had shown up already running before he knew it existed. The Warden's Seal was sitting in his inventory doing something classified. An epic tier reward from a garrison this size could be almost anything.
He pressed accept.
Might just test our capabilities, he thought.
He looked at the fortress below. At the guards on the parapet. At the players working alongside Ashfang soldiers like this was just another faction worth signing up with. At the soldiers running drills in the torchlight at an hour when most armies were sleeping.
"Malachar," he said quietly.
The summon didn't appear physically. Just the familiar weight of his presence settling at the edge of Marcus's awareness, patient and still, the way he always waited between summonings.
"That fortress down there," Marcus said, keeping his voice low. "Can we take it."
A pause. Not hesitation. The pause of something that had taken fortresses before and was doing the calculation out of habit rather than doubt.
"Anything for you, my liege," Malachar said. The words came from everywhere and nowhere, low and certain as stone. "Give the order and it falls."
Marcus looked at the garrison a moment longer. At the towers, the walls, the gate, the two hundred soldiers who didn't know yet that someone was standing on the ridge above them doing the math on how long they had left.
"Not tonight," he said.
He turned and walked back into the forest.
He took his time. The fire would still be burning. An hour there and an hour back meant Liz would have noticed the wood he'd added and known he'd planned to be gone a while, which meant she was either asleep anyway or sitting up waiting, and either way there was nothing to be done about it.
He came through the treeline into the camp's light with his hands in his coat pockets and his face carrying its usual expression of mild weather.
A voice came from beside the nearest root.
"Hey." Liz's voice, flat and awake and carrying the specific energy of someone who had not slept at all. "Sneaky man. Where from."
Marcus looked at her sitting upright against the root with her sword across her knees and her eyes sharp enough to cut something.