Commander Avel Teren held Greywatch Keep during the civil war in Iskandar. The keep guarded the eastern road and the shortest march to the capital. Teren was a garrison officer rather than a courtier, a man who counted the enemy’s fires from his battlements every morning, and the most consequential order of the war was given by him, alone, at the end of a winter siege.
The separatists never stormed Greywatch. They surrounded it, cut its roads and waited for hunger to open the gates. When the rebels offered terms that would have sent his officers to trial for serving the throne, he judged it a slower execution and refused.
King Varyon had forbidden the raising of the dead, and Teren knew it. But High Mortarch Selkos, chief priest of the royal cult, had placed a disciple inside the keep, a man Teren had taken for a healer. With the rebels at the wall, Teren asked him the questions a soldier would ask — how long the dead could stand, whether they could hold a shield — and then told him to do it. His own fallen men rose beneath the chapel and held the wall. The king, told afterwards, let them stand until living troops could relieve them. No relief came.
He told himself the dead felt nothing and that he had ordered only the first of them raised, and he was not a stupid enough man to be spared knowing what those excuses added up to. When the priest began dragging enemy dead in from the field, Teren finally drew his sword on him, and was seized from behind by one of his own raised soldiers, a sergeant who had once saved his life.
He did not come up from beneath the chapel alive. When the Justicar’s Legion marched on Greywatch the following spring, he had been dead for months, and he stood above the gate declaring the keep loyal to the Veinwright throne in a voice that came from every corpse on the walls. The Legion burned Greywatch to the ground, and to the rest of Ashkar the keep became the proof that intervention had been necessary.
The dispatch that went to the capital after that first night praised a heroic defence against overwhelming numbers, and asked for supplies.