Rejected: The Alpha's Fatal Mistake
Kade
The march north took eleven days, the combined army moving with the careful, deliberate pace of a force that couldn't afford exhaustion before the fight that actually mattered, and it was on the twelfth morning, cresting a final ridge above the tree line, that Kade got his first real look at what they'd actually come to face.
The fortress rose from the mountainside like something grown rather than built, dark stone seamed directly into the living rock, narrow windows cut high and defensible into surfaces no simple ladder could reach, a single visible approach winding up a switchback trail that anyone with basic tactical sense would recognize immediately as a killing ground for whoever t