The pattern held for three nights.
Three nights of darkness swallowing paladins whole. Three nights of screams echoing from the ridge, from the valley paths, from the shadows between their camp and the mountain.
Three nights of Commander Aldric Thorne counting bodies at dawn and finding the numbers insufficient.
Seventeen men the first night. Twenty-three the second. Nineteen the third.
Not defeated in glorious combat.
Erased.
Dragged into darkness like prey taken by something patient and hungry. Their blessed sigils found abandoned on stone, still glowing, still pure, but their owners gone.
Sometimes they found blood. Sometimes they found nothing at all.
The survivors spoke in fractured sentences, their eyes too wide, their hands shaking even in daylight.
They spoke of demons that moved like liquid shadow, of traps that seemed to grow from the stone itself, of a silence so complete it felt like being buried alive.
On the fourth day, Aldric banned night patrols entirely.
His adjutant, Serath, had protested. "Sir, if we cede them the darkness, they could move freely. They could position for a full assault on our camp. We'd be blind, vulnerable—"
"We're already blind," Aldric had said, his voice flat. "The difference is whether we're blind in our beds or blind walking into whatever hell they've prepared for us."
But ceasing patrols created a worse problem: uncertainty.
Without scouts, without eyes on the demon positions, the Radiant Empire's tactical superiority evaporated. They couldn't advance without intelligence.
They couldn't retreat without appearing defeated. They were trapped in stasis, pinned by an enemy they could no longer see, measure, or predict.
For two more days, they waited. Watched. Prepared.
And each night, the darkness pressed closer to their camp, and the sentries jumped at every sound, and the blessed fires seemed smaller, their light more fragile against the absolute black of the Ashard mountains.
On the sixth morning, Aldric made his decision.
"Full formation," he commanded, his voice carrying across the camp with the authority of a man who'd led armies through worse.
"Every soldier, every mage, every blessed weapon we possess. We march on the demon outpost at dawn."
Serath's eyes widened. "Sir, a direct assault without reconnaissance—"
"Is exactly what they won't expect." Aldric's jaw set. "They've been picking us apart in the shadows, using fear as a weapon. Fine. Let them face the light in full strength. They'll see what happens when the Radiant Empire stops reacting and starts crushing."
He looked at his assembled lieutenants, at the two hundred men who remained of his original force.
Two hundred paladins, each a veteran, each blessed, each trained to bring holy fire and righteous fury to the enemies of humanity.
"They think they've learned to fight in the dark," Aldric said, his voice rising. "But we've subjugated darkness for as long as we've known, we are the light...and the light fears nothing."
The camp erupted in war cries, in the clash of blessed steel on blessed shields, in the unified roar of men who'd been afraid for too long and were eager to remember their strength.
They marched at first light, a column of armor and holy fire, their sigils blazing like a river of stars flowing toward the mountain.
The narrow valley paths couldn't contain them—they spread across the approach, a wall of light and steel, unstoppable.
The demon outpost appeared ahead, carved into the mountainside, its broken walls and smoke-stained stone a telling to prolonged siege.
Aldric expected resistance—arrows, catapults, the desperate fury of cornered demons making their last stand.
Instead, he found silence.
The gates hung open. The walls were manned but quiet, the defenders absence was an odd stillness. No horns blew. No war cries answered their approach.
The Radiant Empire's army slowed, formation tightening, shields raised.
Aldric's instincts screamed at him. This was wrong. This was—
"Sir!" A scout galloped from the front line, his face pale. "The central courtyard. There's... there's someone."
"Demons?"
"No, sir." The scout swallowed hard. "A human."
---
The Radiant Empire's three hundred paladins poured through the gates like a flood of blessed light, their formation perfect, their weapons ready.
They found the courtyard empty except for a single figure.
A man sat on a rough stone outcropping near the center of the space, his posture relaxed, almost bored.
Dark hair, grey eyes, human features unmarked by horn or scale. He wore simple black clothing, and across his lap rested a longsword—utterly black, non-reflective, drinking the morning light.
He was sharpening it.
The scrape of whetstone on metal echoed in the silence, steady and unhurried, as if an army of holy warriors surrounding him were merely an interruption to his morning routine.
The paladins halted, their formation wavering. Confusion rippled through the ranks.
"Is that...?"
"A human? That can't be—"