Captain Bren Ashwall was the fourth generation of his family to stand on the wall that bore their name, and the first to wonder if the wall mattered.
The Ashwall — thirty-four kilometers of fortified stone and iron running from the Pale Coast headlands to the Cinderlands' eastern slopes — was the Sovereign Dominion's primary southern defense. It had held for two centuries. Two Demeterra wars, three border skirmishes, a raid season that lasted forty years, and the kind of low-intensity frontier violence that didn't make it into the history books but filled the medical wards. The wall held. That was its purpose. That was its legacy. That was the Ashwall family's entire identity, compressed into a strip of stone four meters high and twelve meters wide at the crown.
