Oath of the King-Chapter 36: The Blood Oath

The air outside the tavern was thick with smoke and whispers.

News traveled faster than blood in this city — and already the rumors were running wild:

A knight trainee, beaten within an inch of his life.

A man with haunted eyes and a blade still nameless.

Alden stood at the edge of the city wall, overlooking the fields stretching into a bruised sunset.

His hand rested lightly on Bedringer, the doll hanging at his belt like a reminder of all he carried — and all he had lost.

Behind him, Sylvie approached softly, wrapping a shawl tighter around her shoulders against the creeping cold.

"You’re leaving, aren’t you?" she asked, voice low.

Alden didn't turn immediately.

He watched the dying light a moment longer, as if memorizing it.

Then he spoke.

"I have to," he said. "If I stay, they'll come for you too."

Sylvie stepped closer until their shoulders brushed.

"You think I'll be safer without you?" she whispered. "After everything?"

A bitter smile flickered across his mouth.

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"I think you’re safer without the storm that follows me."

He meant it.

But gods, it hurt to say.

Sylvie didn't argue.

She simply reached into her pocket and pulled something out.

A strip of red cloth — old, faded, worn at the edges.

A memory.

She tied it around Alden’s wrist with steady fingers, the knot firm, unyielding.

"For luck," she said.

"For loyalty."

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Alden stared at it, throat tight.

He had no words.

None that could touch what she had given him.

Instead, he took her hand and pressed it to his heart.

And Sylvie, fierce and trembling, let him.

"You come back to me," she said, voice breaking. "No matter what you have to do. You come back."

He nodded once.

No promises.

Just the silent, burning vow that lived behind his ribs now.

Without another word, he turned and walked into the falling night.

The road out of the city was empty.

The only sound was the scuff of his boots and the whisper of wind across the fields.

At the first crossroads, he stopped.

There, nailed to a post, was a tattered parchment.

A symbol burned into it — the mark of the knights who had betrayed him.

They weren’t hiding anymore.

They were waiting.

Alden stared at it a long moment.

Then he drew his sword — the unnamed blade gleaming cold in the twilight — and without hesitation, slashed the parchment clean in two.

The sword sang through the air — clean, final.

At last, it had tasted blood.

At last, it had earned a name.

Alden lowered the blade, speaking the name aloud, binding it in oath.

"Vyrnbane," he said.

Bane of betrayal.

Bane of guilt.

Bane of the past that refused to die.

The blade shimmered in the last light of the sun, a promise forged in pain and tempered in mercy.

And Alden, broken and burning and more alive than he had ever been, walked onward —

toward war, toward reckoning, toward the ashes of his old life.

He was no longer running.

He was coming for them.

And this time, he would not show mercy.