The Order of Ashbinders part 2

The Sleeping Mountain

The letter came three nights after the chapel burned. Delivered by a boy I’d never seen before — wide eyes, trembling hands, no return address. All it said was:
“They’ve begun the rite. East of the village, where the old stones breathe. — M.”

No seal. No flourish. Just that single, slanted initial.

I didn’t need more.

The hills east of Greenthorn had always been quiet. Wind and rock and the whisper of grass — a landscape too tired for secrets. But that day, I felt the land breathing again, slow and heavy, like lungs filling beneath the soil.

The path wound upward through broken pillars and ancient stone faces half-buried in moss. Old ruins, the kind even scholars don’t bother naming anymore. But the air was alive with sound — not birds, not wind. Chanting.

By the time I reached the summit, the sun was bleeding behind the clouds. And there, in the hollow of the hill, they gathered — dozens of robed figures encircling a pit of glowing earth, the symbol of the clawed sun scorched deep into the ground.

At its center lay something vast beneath the stone — I could feel it, thrumming through the dirt, like the heartbeat I’d heard once before. The cultists swayed, voices rising as fire seeped from the cracks.

“The world was born in fire… it shall be remade in flame!”

I didn’t wait for the prayer to finish. Steel sang; the chant broke.

The first few fell before they even saw me. But for every one I cut down, two more took their place. And above the noise, the ground began to move.

The hill itself split — smoke and light pouring upward. For a breathless moment I saw it: a colossal, skeletal wing unfurling beneath the earth. A maw of molten stone opening to scream — but the sound never came.

Something went wrong.

The ritual faltered. The light turned white, then gray. The fire twisted inward and collapsed, dragging the cultists’ screams with it. When the dust cleared, only ash remained — a crater of scorched sigils and the faint outline of a dragon’s corpse that was never truly there.

I fell to my knees, lungs burning, sword shaking in my grip.

The walk back felt longer than the climb. I barely made it to the inn before the first shadow fell across the door. They’d followed me — the survivors.

The fight came fast, brutal. Tables overturned, bottles shattered, firelight flashing off steel. I thought Marta would hide. Instead, she moved.

With a speed no innkeeper should have, she drew a black spear from behind the counter and met the first cultist mid-swing. One thrust — clean, efficient. No hesitation. No mercy.

I’d seen soldiers fight like that. Not bartenders.

When the last one fell, the inn was smoke and blood. Marta stood over the bodies, breathing hard but steady.

She looked at me — really looked — and the mask she’d worn since the day I met her finally cracked.
“I suppose you deserve the truth,” she said.

We sat amid the wreckage, the firelight dancing between us. She told me of the wars long forgotten, the dragons that refused to die, the brotherhood that bound their souls to mortal flesh. The Order of Ashbinders — Dragon Slayers.
“I was one of them,” she said quietly. “A watcher. A remnant.”
“And this village?” I asked.
“My cover. My penance. Someone had to keep watch when the world stopped believing.”

She rose, limping slightly — I hadn’t noticed before. From beneath the counter, she retrieved a bundle wrapped in old cloth and pressed it into my hands. Inside lay a silver emblem, the same symbol engraved faintly on the token she’d once given me — a ring of ash encircling flame.

“The artifacts you seek,” she said, “the ones tied to the Demon Lord… they were once guarded by dragons. To face him, you’ll need to walk the same path we did — the path of the Dragon Slayer.”

The words carried a weight that felt older than the stones around us.

Outside, the night burned red along the horizon — not fire, not yet, but the promise of it. Marta stared into it, her expression unreadable.
“The flame returns,” she whispered. “Let us be its ashes.”

I didn’t sleep that night. When dawn came, I left the village behind — the inn still standing, smoke still curling from its chimney. In my hand, the silver emblem gleamed faintly in the morning light.

The path ahead was no longer rumor or chance. It was a summons.

Echoes of Ashes
The Order of Ashbinders. That’s what Marta called it.

But when I stood in her cellar — our headquarters, as she called it — it felt less like an order and more like a collection of mismatched relics and dust. One table. Three chairs. A map nailed to the wall with rusted knives.

A club, really. A ghost of something that once shook kingdoms.

Marta moved through it like a commander who’d forgotten how to command. “We had banners once,” she said, lighting a lantern. “Fortresses. Libraries filled with tomes about dragons and seals. Now…” — she gestured at the shelves of empty bottles and cracked leather — “now we’ve got cider barrels and a handful of fools.”

I smiled faintly. “Then we start with fools.”

That earned the first genuine laugh I’d heard from her in days. “You sound like my captain,” she said softly. “He said the same thing before the siege of Jerrath’s Hollow. He didn’t live to regret it.”

My first assignment as a “Dragon Slayer” wasn’t glamorous. No dragons. No sacred rituals. Just errands — finding the few names Marta still remembered. Survivors from a war no one believed in.

A smith, a priest, and a deserter.

The smith was first — Bren Oltar, a man built like a forge. I found him in a mining town two valleys north, hammering wagon wheels instead of weapons.

When I told him who’d sent me, he froze mid-swing. “Marta’s still alive?” he said. “Damn woman. I thought she’d buried herself with the rest.”

I showed him the emblem. He stared at it a long time before laughing — not with joy, but disbelief. “You think you can bring it back? The Order? Look around, lad. No one fears dragons anymore. They fear hunger. Taxes. Bandits. You can’t eat old legends.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But legends are what’s coming back.”

He didn’t answer. But when I left, I heard the sound of his hammer again — this time striking something heavier than wagon iron.

The priest, Father Halem, was half-blind and entirely drunk. He lived alone in the ruins of a roadside chapel, feeding crows with one hand and turning prayer beads with the other.

“The Ashbinders?” he murmured when I asked. “A curse more than a creed. We bound the dragons, aye. But we bound ourselves too.”

He pointed to the west. “You want to find the rest of your ghosts, go to Jerrath’s Hollow. The Order’s sanctum is buried there — under stone and memory.”

“Why tell me?”

“Because I’m tired,” he said. “And maybe you’re fool enough to finish what we started.”

The deserter came last. A woman named Tira Vale, once of the Imperial Guard. I found her sharpening a dagger in a bandit camp — her camp. She listened in silence, eyes like broken glass.

“Dragons, cults, secret orders,” she said finally. “You’re serious.”
“Deadly.”
She laughed. “Then you’ll fit right in. I’ve been waiting for something worth dying for again.”

When I returned, Marta was mending her spear by candlelight. The cellar smelled of oil and rain-soaked leather. I laid three names before her.
“Good,” she said, her voice quiet but steady. “The ashes still breathe.”

Outside, thunder rolled across the horizon — the same hollow rumble I’d learned not to mistake for weather.

Marta looked toward the sound and spoke more to the shadows than to me. “The old Order is gone — no banners, no fortresses, no knights. Just us, and whatever scraps of their fire we can still find.”

She handed me a worn emblem — a fragment of dragonbone carved into the shape of a burning ring. “Wear it,” she said. “Not for pride. For memory.”

I fastened it to my belt. It was heavy for something so small.

That night, I dreamed again of the dragon beneath the earth — but this time, it was not angry. It watched. Waiting.

And when I woke, the emblem was warm to the touch.

Maybe the Order was a club. Maybe it was a ghost. But for the first time, I felt it stir — faint, fragile, like embers beneath ash.

The beginning of something that might, one day, burn again.

The Ash Vaults
The journey to Jerrath’s Hollow took three days, and every one of them felt colder than the last. The path was old Imperial Road once, now broken by roots and rain. Bren, Tira, and I followed it in silence — the kind of silence only shared by people too proud to admit they were afraid.

Marta stayed behind, claiming she had “other contacts to reach.” But I knew the truth: her limp had worsened, and she didn’t want us to see it. Father Halem was too senile for active duty, s he could only support us from his chapel.

Before we left, she’d pressed her hand to my shoulder and said, “You’ll know the Hollow when it breathes.” At the time, I didn’t understand.

Now I do.

Jerrath’s Hollow was less a valley and more a wound — a gouge in the mountain where the earth had melted and hardened again centuries ago. The air stank of iron and ash. When we entered, our torches flickered blue, as if the light itself was choking.

We found the first carving after an hour: a mural half-buried in soot. Men and dragons, bound by chains of light. Beneath it, words so worn I could only read a fragment:
Ash binds flame eternal.

Bren ran his fingers over the inscription. “This was no monastery,” he muttered. “It was a tomb.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Deeper in, we found the remains of the sanctum — the old Order’s base. The stone halls were half-collapsed, filled with black sand and bones turned to dust. But there was order in the ruin: collapsed stone bookshelves, altars lined with cracked urns, runes carved into every surface like the dead had been desperate to keep something sealed.

Tira knelt beside one. “These runes are containment wards,” she said, tracing them. “But they’re… inverted. Whatever was trapped here, someone tried to undo the seal from within.”

As if answering her words, the ground shuddered. Our torches dimmed. The air grew heavy — thick, breathing.

Then we heard it.

A whisper. Not from one voice, but many — overlapping, echoing through stone and memory. The language was old, but the pain in it was clear.

“We burned their wings... and chained their souls to ours. The curse still burns.”

A shadow rose from the far wall — the outline of a man in armor, translucent, wreathed in pale cinders. His eyes glowed faintly, and when he spoke, the words carried centuries of exhaustion.
“Who binds the flame now?”
I stepped forward. “We do,” I said. “The fire stirs again.”

The spirit tilted its head, as if weighing the truth of my words. Then it raised one spectral hand, revealing an object half-buried in the ash: a circular relic of blackened metal etched with draconic runes — the Ashbrand Seal.
“Take it,” the spirit said. “Our oath has outlived us. Perhaps it will burn cleaner in new hands.”

When I touched the Seal, it pulsed once, faintly warm — then went still. The spirit’s form scattered like dust in a breeze.

We left before dawn. None of us spoke for a while. The torches burned too bright once we stepped outside, as if eager to forget what they’d seen.
Bren finally broke the silence. “You think that was one of them? A Dragon Slayer?”
“No,” I said. “I think that was all of them.”
He nodded once, said nothing more.

Back at the camp, I studied the Seal. It glowed faintly whenever I held it near flame, humming like a heartbeat. Marta’s words echoed in my head: If the flame returns, let us be its ashes.

I finally understood what she meant. The old Order hadn’t died fighting dragons. They’d died becoming their prisons.

When we returned to the village, Marta waited by the fire, eyes tired but bright. “You found something,” she said.

I set the Ashbrand Seal on the table. Its faint glow painted her face in gold.

Her breath caught — not surprise, but reverence. “So, it still exists,” she whispered. “The heart of the old sanctum.”

She looked at me then, something fierce flickering in her gaze. “Then it begins, truly. The ashes still remember.”

That night, as I drifted to sleep, the Seal pulsed again beside my bed — soft, rhythmic, alive.

And from far beneath the mountains, I thought I heard a voice whisper back:

“Ash to flame… flame to flesh…”

I didn’t answer. Not yet.