The Screaming Gate is a narrow route and a thin hope. Draegon has defended it for weeks with stolen arrows and stone traps. Then the orcs bring something new: a Void Eater, a weapon that melts stone and flesh with the touch of green fire. What should have been a skirmish becomes a grinding war of attrition.
As the drums rise and bodies pile in the snow, Draegon’s task is simple: delay the advance, wound what he can, and leave no witness behind. But the Void Eaters change everything. Each blast scars the world and marks it for death. Draegon begins hunting the weapons as much as the warriors who carry them, smashing tubes, burying parts, and burning what cannot be carried. His wounds deepen. The nights grow colder. The line grows thinner.
A brutal duel, a near‑death encounter with a machine that devours life, and enemies who shout his hidden name to draw him out force Draegon to face the question he fears most. Can a single guardian stop an engineered terror aimed at every pass on the map, or will the frontier become a graveyard.
This tale is part of a fifteen‑year chronicle of Draegon Norvash’s hidden life, years spent as a masked guardian and forest ranger, half orc by blood and forced to conceal it from everyone he protects. From the night of his foster father’s death to battles in the orc wastelands, he walks the path of the lone wolf and wages war against the darkness both inside and out. These short reads reveal the scars, choices, and secrets that forged the Ghost of Shadowwood long before the events of The Legend of the Half‑Blood Guardian.
