Chapter Twenty Two: The Piper’s Warning
Word of Talon O’Coyle’s vengeance traveled faster than the Red Fist expected.
From glens and moors, from windswept crofts and hunting paths, whispers spread: “The last laird walks.” He walks with five, then ten, then twenty. He walks not to survive, but to make the usurper bleed.
So he gathered them—rebels, orphans, and exiled sons of broken banners. They came to him, hungry not for gold or glory, but justice served raw. Yet when he came before the other lairds, their reaction was cold.
They stood in a stone circle in the shadow of the Cairn of Kings, arms folded, blades at their belts. The wind howled but no one spoke, not at first. Finally, the eldest stepped forward, a great grey-bearded chieftain with a long scar across his jaw.
“You come with vengeance, boy,” he said. “But not a plan. The Red Fist is endless, and you’re a candle in a storm.”
Talon looked them all in the eyes—one by one.
“They took my keep. They took my kin. They burned my home, and I buried my second father in the ice.” “They can’t hurt me anymore.” “I am not here to survive. I am here to end them.”
The lairds murmured. Disappointed, perhaps even afraid, they turned their backs and walked into the mist.
Talon did not follow.
That night, under the cover of heather and starlight, Talon and his band of twenty rebels circled a Red Fist patrol—a hundred foot soldiers, slow-moving, weary, weighed down with spears, armor, and plunder.
Talon’s men herded them like wolves shadowing cattle—cutting off trails with rockslides, disturbing paths, using birdcalls to signal each other across ridgelines. Always silent. Always pressing them into the one place no soldier of the lowlands ever wanted to tread:
The Throat Bog.
Soggy. Black. Bottomless in places. It had swallowed cattle, carts, even men in full armor. And now, a Red Fist detachment marched straight into it.
Then, without warning, a lone bagpiper stood on a boulder just above the mist, framed in silhouette. He played a mournful, defiant tune—notes that cut through fog and fear.
The soldiers froze. Some turned to shout. And that’s when the Highlanders pounced.
From every direction—screaming, howling, mud-slicked and wild—they fell on the footmen like shadows cast by lightning.
The lowlanders fought back, but their weapons moved slow in the mire. Every step was a trap. Boots sank. Shields slipped. Arrows vanished into the fog.
Talon’s warriors—light-footed, feral, fueled by O'Coyle's own fungus brew of courage and clarity—moved like wind and fire through the bog.
Blades slashed. Fists broke bone. Teeth tore at exposed flesh.
One Red Fist soldier tried to beg. A highland boy—barely sixteen, eyes wide with inherited rage—cut his tongue out before burying a blade in his gut.
Another tried to flee. He didn’t make it ten paces before a slingstone caved in his skull.
Talon himself tore through the center line, sword roaring in his hands. He took down four men in the span of ten heartbeats—one cleaved at the neck, another crushed beneath his heel in the mud, two more dragged into the deep black where the bog sucked them under.
It was not war. It was slaughter. A baptism in vengeance.
When the last scream faded, only the slow patter of drizzling rain remained.
Talon stood at the edge of the carnage, chest heaving. His men—caked in mud and blood—stood beside him, bruised but smiling. Lads who had never seen battle now stood like beasts, transformed by fury and swamplight.
The bagpiper still played, softer now, a lament for the dead. The sound curled across the moor as the red-fisted dead lay strewn like broken dolls.
No mercy. No survivors. Just a message.
The Highlands had remembered how to bite.
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Chapter Twenty Three: The Loch Gate Massacre
Far ahead, rising out of the mist like antlers from a stag’s brow, loomed the Timber Gates of Loch Gaothach — vast, bark-darkened walls, weather-warped and ancient. Curved like the hulls of beached ships, they framed the southern entry to the Fàradh na Còinneach, the Barrier of Moss, where the lowlands ended and the Highlands began.
Just beyond the walls sat Baileclach, the Stone Town — oldest of the loch settlements, once a stronghold of unity between hillfolk and lowland kin. But now it sat heavy with tension. The loch lapped at its docks like a waiting tongue. Its watchtowers looked north with fear in their bones.
News of the massacre in the bog had reached Baileclach not by raven or rider, but by rumor. A merchant’s apprentice spoke of a cousin who’d served with the Red Fist patrol — a hundred men who had marched into the mist and never returned.
Whispers of "Talon O’Coyle", the last laird, were passed in taverns like contraband wine. The people were afraid… but some dared to hope.
The king’s foot soldiers — the usurper’s red-fisted garrison — paced the walls like wolves on cracked ice. Patrols doubled. Bows strung tighter. Helmets shined, not for ceremony, but fear.
In the shadow of the keep outside town, soldiers drilled all day and drank all night, unsure of what they might face beyond the treeline. They’d seen the aftermath in the bog. They knew the kind of vengeance that walked the high paths now.
In the grand timber-beamed hall of Baileclach, the townsfolk gathered for a meeting meant to quell unrest.
The local druid, an elder with white braids and silver rings on every finger, called for peace. “Let us not let fear shape our fate,” he said. “We are still neighbors. We are still people.” He raised a carved staff and led the crowd in a chant of unity — something older than kings or blood-feuds.
The hall stirred with cautious hope.
That hope turned into action.
A march. Peaceful. Through the main road, under banners of the loch and stone. No weapons. No anger. Just a procession of voices — mothers, fishermen, old soldiers who had seen too many wars — walking shoulder to shoulder through the heart of Baileclach.
They carried no flags, only oaths to peace.
But peace was not what the Red Fist saw.
From the guard tower, a bowman squinted down. He saw movement, bodies in rows, voices rising. His captain, drunk on nerves and command, barked an order: “If they break the line, fire.”
Another voice shouted, “They’re armed!” It wasn’t true, but fear doesn’t ask questions.
The first arrow flew before the captain could finish cursing.
It struck a girl in the throat — no more than thirteen. She fell with a wet sound and a silence louder than any war horn.
Then chaos.
Screams. Panic. The second volley came by instinct. Then the charge.
Red Fist soldiers — armored and bristling — poured into the square, swords drawn. The peaceful march became a massacre.
Bodies piled by the baker’s lane. Elders trampled under iron boots. Mothers thrown from the stone steps of the well. The druid, staff raised in protest, was cut down mid-chant. A father carrying his crippled son was the last to fall in front of the temple gates.
By dusk, the square was washed with blood.
The garrison covered it up with haste. The captain ordered the dead hauled to the docks, where boats silently dumped the bodies into Loch Gaothach — the black water swallowing innocence without a ripple.
They blamed “rebels.” Said the townspeople had tried to storm the gate. That they had seen weapons. That it was justified.
But not all were silenced.
Seven witnesses escaped — children who had hidden under carts, a limping potter’s apprentice, a midwife who had slipped into the shadows. They fled north, into the dark beyond the loch, carrying the truth like a torch.
That night, a curfew was declared.
No light after sundown. No gatherings. No singing in the streets.
Fear reigned. The Red Fist withdrew behind stone and gate, not in control, but in dread.
The captain who ordered the first shot drank himself into a stupor that night. He was found two days later, having thrown himself into the loch. He left no note.
Baileclach was no longer a town of peace.
It was now a wound — raw, open, and bleeding north into the highlands.
Talon O’Coyle did not know what had happened. Not yet. But the pain was on its way to him. And once he learned, the Red Fist would wish they'd drowned with the innocents.
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