"A wall defends, but hunger conquers." – Old saying among frontier fortresses
The wind shrieked through the crags like the cry of ghosts.
From the south, they came.
First the scouts saw the dust — a brown serpent winding across the valley road. Then, the glint of helms beneath banners stitched in golden thread. General Han Yu's army — disciplined, brutal, relentless.
They came with siege ladders, oxen-pulled rams, a blacksmith cart, and most importantly — time.
Huai Shan stood on the crumbling parapet of Moquan Fortress, the wind tearing at his cloak. Snow mixed with ash. His fingers clenched the cold stone of the wall as he watched them pour into formation, row upon row of soldiers in grey-and-black lamellar, shields glinting like scales of an iron beast.
"So this is how it begins," he murmured.
Moquan wasn't a fortress by design — it had once been a lord's mountain villa. But after three decades of conflict, it became a last redoubt. Broken walls. A crooked watchtower. Cisterns that froze solid at night. Barely defensible. But it stood, and sometimes, that was enough.
Inside the walls, eighty-seven defenders prepared to die.
Farmers with pitchforks.
Miners with pickaxes.
One old imperial archer with shaking hands and two dozen arrows.
Yi Fen, the former butcher, organized weapons distribution with grim efficiency. Xu Liang, stoic and sharp-eyed, coordinated watch rotations and escape contingencies—though there were few ways out.
The townsfolk — those who hadn't fled when the black banners appeared — were kept in the inner courtyard. Mothers cradled crying infants. Old men muttered prayers. Boys no older than thirteen sharpened sticks as spears.
There was no priest. No gods. Just stone and will.
At dusk, Huai met with his closest few in the broken dining hall.
"They won't try to starve us," Xu Liang said, "not Han Yu. He'll bleed us dry before frost sets in."
Yi Fen snorted. "He'll send skirmishers first. Burn the outer walls, throw fire, test our line."
"Then we use fire back," Huai said, pointing at the pitch barrels. "The moment they climb, we light them."
"And if they send the ram?" asked one of the younger rebels, a boy called Jun.
"We shoot the oxen," Xu Liang said without pause.
Silence. Then a nod from Huai.
"We make them regret walking into the cold."
It began with horns — deep and throaty, rising over the mountainside.
Then drums.
Then the scream of arrows.
The first Imperial charge came fast, cruel, and confident — lightly armored footmen with round shields and short spears, hoping to overwhelm the rebels by sheer numbers.
But they hadn't expected oil and fire.
Yi Fen's team drenched the base of the wall with pitch just as the ladders hit stone. A single torch sent a wall of flame roaring upward, catching men mid-climb, lighting their shrieks like candles in the wind.
Archers rained fire from above — not accurate, but panicked enough to find flesh. Rocks and boiling water followed. A child hurled stones from the tower. One found a sergeant's skull. The man died gurgling.
In the chaos, Jun — the boy from the council — was speared in the belly.
He died in Huai Shan's arms, wide-eyed and whispering his mother's name.
They buried Jun in the frozen courtyard, wrapped in linen. The grave was shallow — the ground too hard.
Xu Liang said nothing. Yi Fen wept. Huai Shan didn't move until the last stone was set.
"He wanted to be remembered," Huai said finally. "We will build him a statue. One day."
Day three, cracks appear.
Water ran out first.
Then the grain stores spoiled — rat-eaten and damp.
Two fighters fought over dried radish and broke a bench in the process.
A woman miscarried in the smokehouse. No midwife. No light. No time.
And one man — a blacksmith's apprentice — tried to scale the back wall to flee. He made it halfway down the cliff before his grip gave. His body was never recovered.
"Let them go mad," Han Yu's lieutenant reportedly said, laughing in his tent. "The cold does my work."
On the fourth night, a fire broke out in the armory.
Sabotage.
The flames consumed two barrels of pitch and three bows before the blaze was smothered. The culprit — a youth named Ren — confessed under pressure.
"My sister… she's out there. In the Imperial camp. I thought they'd spare her…"
Huai said nothing. No trial. No performance.
He drew his dagger. Clean and quick.
The others watched in silence.
From that night forward, no one spoke of surrender again.
Han Yu, tired of attrition, launched a full assault on the sixth night.
Fifteen ladders.
One ram.
War drums so loud they shook the mortar loose.
But Moquan was ready.
Boiling oil fell in torrents. Fire arrows painted the night. Xu Liang, bleeding from the shoulder, shot two captains before falling from the tower. Yi Fen swung his cleaver through the neck of a warhorse. A child named Lin, no older than ten, crawled beneath a siege ladder with a jar of flame-oil — and didn't crawl out.
It was not war.
It was slaughter on both sides.
Huai Shan fought at the gate. His axe split helms and flesh. His cloak caught fire. His hands blistered. But he held.
And at dawn—
the army retreated.
At the gates, a cart waited.
On it: seven heads.
Villagers. Sympathizers. Children.
A note pinned by dagger:
You won nothing. We will return. And there will be no walls left to hide behind.
Huai didn't burn it this time. He showed it to the people.
Then threw it into the fire.
They raised a new banner that morning.
Torn from the hem of a widow's skirt, painted in soot and blood:
A wolf standing before fire.
Huai stood beneath it, clothes torn, arms raw, eyes deadened.
"We lived," he said. "Now we learn how to win."
And the rebels knelt.
Not because they had to.
But because now — finally — they believed.