"Victory is not the feast. It is what comes when the feast ends." – From the Warrior's Elegy, author unknown
The storm passed in the night, leaving the mountain pass dusted with blood-streaked snow.
Huai Shan stood on a cliff, arms crossed, watching his men sleep below like scattered shadows. The fire had burned down to coals. Even in sleep, they shivered.
Thirty-three men had become forty-nine — survivors from other rebel bands had heard of the raid on Lang Ridge and joined them. But they were still just wolves in rags. No armor. No standards. Barely trained.
"You're the one they follow now," said Xu Liang quietly, appearing beside him.
Huai didn't answer right away.
"I'm no general," he muttered.
"You led them through the snows. You fed them. You kept them alive. That's more than most lords ever did."
"They'll die when the next army comes."
Xu Liang tilted his head. "Then let's give them more than snow and steel."
A week later, with scouts reporting Imperial reinforcements sweeping westward, Huai made a decision that would carve his name into stone.
"We take Fortress Moquan."
Silence followed.
"You're mad," someone said. "That place hasn't been touched in twenty years."
"Exactly," Huai said. "The Empire left it to rot. But if we take it… we have walls. We have a name. And we'll make them bleed to take it back."
Fortress Moquan sat on a ridge above the Shallow Vale — half-crumbling, overgrown, but still a fortress. Once a border outpost during the Jingtai Rebellions, it had been abandoned after peace was declared.
Huai knew of it from old maps, and from tales his father once told while drunk.
"You want to build a kingdom," Xu Liang said, eyes gleaming. "You'll need a crown first."
"I don't need a crown," Huai replied. "I need stone, and fire, and men who won't run."
The journey to Moquan took five days. They passed through forests where the trees bent like dying monks, through ruins swallowed by moss, and past villages too afraid to open their doors.
But something strange happened along the way.
People began to follow.
Farmers with pitchforks. Runaway slaves. Refugees from razed towns. Children with dead fathers. They had heard rumors — of a peasant commander who defied the Empire, who stole their grain, who fought like the old warlords of legend.
By the time they reached the shadow of Fortress Moquan, Huai's force had grown to eighty-six.
"We'll need more than numbers," Xu Liang said, eyeing the cracked gates.
"Then we turn them into soldiers," Huai said.
Moquan was a ruin. Ivy-choked towers. Collapsed barracks. A cracked cistern. But its walls still stood — tall, thick, defiant.
They worked for three days straight.
Men who had never held a hammer now built defenses. Women patched arrow slits and boiled tar. Huai split them into crews, posted watches, had patrols comb the forests.
Then he sent a message.
"Ride south," he told a scout. "Go to the Black Sickle Band. Tell them we hold Moquan now. If they want a home — if they want vengeance — they come here."
Xu Liang raised an eyebrow. "You want bandits now?"
"I want anyone who'll bleed for a flag. Even if we haven't stitched it yet."
On the fourth day, it came.
A vanguard force — fifty Imperial soldiers under Captain Zheng Rui — reached the fortress gates.
They laughed when they saw the rebel banner: a hand-drawn wolf on a tattered curtain.
They didn't laugh long.
Huai waited until they approached the wall, then lit the tar trenches. Flames roared up like a dragon's breath. Arrows rained. Stones dropped. The rebels fought like men who had nothing left but teeth.
Zheng Rui died to a thrown spear — Huai's spear.
By dusk, the Imperials lay scattered in the snow, blood turning the melted slush red.
They buried the dead in the southern field and raised the wolf banner higher.
That night, Huai walked the walls alone.
Below, the fires burned.
Above, stars pierced the dark sky like spearheads.
"You're building something," Xu Liang said, appearing beside him.
"I'm starting something," Huai answered.
"What are you going to call it?"
"Not yet," he said. "Let them name it after we survive."
But in his heart, a name stirred. A name for what they were. A name for what would come.