Chapter 3 · free to read
Nine knots to bind a road. She tied the ninth with an army forty steps below her.
Four hundred men, halfway up a mountain, holding a step they had already begun.
The rite binds the road. It does not ask who is standing on it.
Hold the line and lose the only person left who loved her. Cut one knot and let a war onto the mountain. She was seventeen. She had four seconds.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.