Thane Gorsky's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Thane Gorsky stood at the base of the fortress wall, watching his men haul timber toward the northern gate. The gate was wood, just wood, and everyone knew it. The walls rose thick and solid around it, but that entrance would crack under a real attack. He was building something that could hold against the south, but time was running short. Rylan Foil appeared from the gate passage, carrying something that caught the low sunlight. A metal sphere, the size of two fists pressed together. He walked straight to Thane without stopping, his face set in a way that made the other men step back. When he reached Thane, he held out the sphere. Grooves covered its surface, carved in patterns that spelled out measurements, angles, stress points. Thane turned it slowly. The grooves showed the gate's weight distribution, the places where the wood was already splitting. Numbers marked how many days until collapse. Not weeks. Days. Thane looked past Rylan toward the gate. Behind it sat the barricade Rylan had built, wooden stakes layered with ice to hold sharp edges. It was meant to be the second line if the gate fell. But the sphere told a different story. The gate would fall before any attack came. The weight of its own cross-beams and the frozen hinges were tearing it apart from within. Everything Thane had planned, every position and fallback, was built on a foundation that was already failing. He closed his hand around the sphere. The defense plan was finished. They would need to rebuild the gate from the ground up, or abandon the northern approach entirely. Thane turned to the men hauling timber and called them back. They would start again, today, and they would not stop until the gate could hold. The fortress would not stand on a lie.