Chapter 215: Shadows At The Wall
Renner watched from the tower as the first construction crews laid down the last of the western ramparts.
He had arrived before dawn—slender silhouette among the laborers and laboring in silence. His pale skin was flushed by the day’s chill, worn wrappings clinging to him, relics still rattling at his belt.
He’d come to Esgard with one goal: to climb—and break—the mountain called Ian Night, the Demon Blade.
Renner wasn’t born from nobility. He came from scorched houses and rotting fields, from crack paths where the Southern Army spilled blood like rivers.
He built his legend through pain and ceremony—earning rings and chains, a broken sigil from one throat and dried hair from another.
Each trophy told a story: a step closer to summoning the darkness he’d claimed to hold at his side. None of this had been vanity. He had been building a ladder out of corpses.
Now, as the wall rose around the city, as the crowds buzzed with talk of another siege tide—the so‑called beast tide—Renner saw himself as an artist waiting for his canvas to complete.
The Crucible had welcomed him. They had called him strange. Dead-eyed. Moving like glass about to snap—and faster than the blink of a prayer. That wasn’t rumor. It was power. A power that Ian would soon understand.
He had watched the first two tides pound the city’s defenses. The first surge was beasts—the men turned to seals, the beasts to terror.
The second, Oathbreakers, tall and calm, they studied before striking. He’d come late to that one, watching as the dead rose beneath Ian’s command, the shadow‑borne army of a thousand bones.
Even from afar, Renner had recognized power—the throne of dominion that Ian had claimed, Crown of the Forgotten glowing like a black star above the breach. But he hadn’t felt fear.