Tyrek Gnawer's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Tyrek had killed the wrong man once, and the mistake still burned in him. Now he crouched in the reeds and watched a fourth soldier pass without knowing which had cut down his family. That was the trap. He wanted their blood, all of it, but he could not name a single face. If he struck the innocent, the guilty walked free. So he waited, and he wrote nothing in the ledger he carried against his chest. Bailey had pulled him from the reeds a season ago, bleeding, half-drowned. The strange boy told him the killers wore a mark. Tyrek did not believe it until tonight. A soldier stumbled from a tavern, drunk, and pulled back his sleeve to scratch. There, on his forearm, an inked axe ringed by arrows. The same axe Tyrek had seen on the man who dragged his mother into the yard. Tyrek followed him into the dark. He took him near the water, where no scream would carry. He struck him behind the knee, then the skull, and the soldier went down. He hauled the body across the marsh to the old reed mill. Its walls sagged. The broken machinery inside had not turned in years. Tyrek bound the soldier to a post and waited for him to wake. When the man's eyes opened, Tyrek held a candle to the tattooed arm. "This mark. What is it?" The soldier spat. "You're dead already." Tyrek pressed the flame closer until the skin blistered. "The night by the reeds. A family. A woman, two children. Your unit did it. Give me the names." The man screamed, then broke. "The axe. We're the axe men. Executioners. Whole company wears it." He named the sergeant who gave the order. He named three who held the torches. Tyrek opened the ledger and wrote each one by candlelight, the faces the soldier described, the ranks, the barracks where they slept. "How many?" Tyrek asked. "Forty of us. Maybe more." Tyrek's hand went still. He had come hunting a few faceless men. Now he held a list of a named unit, a company of forty who all wore the same axe. The men who slaughtered his family were not strangers anymore. They were soldiers of a marked command, and every one of them belonged to the King's war. He closed the ledger. He knew who they were now. He also knew he could not fight forty alone. "You won't reach them," the soldier said. "They'll hunt you first. They already know one of theirs went missing tonight." Tyrek looked out through the mill's broken window at the black water. His revenge finally had a shape. So did the danger. The axe men would come looking for the man he had taken, and they would follow the trail straight back to him. He tucked the ledger away and stepped into the dark. He had names at last. Now he needed an army. Although he had a unit he led in King Colton’s (Bailey’s) army; he wasn’t sure which men would run and tell Bailey about his path for vengeance.