Few outsiders linger at the bare stone by Zen’tar’s Southern wall. It carries no inscription, only a wind-torn banner that snaps in the dusk. Locals call the place the Spur. Beneath the black-iron plinth lies Ser Gavriel Val’Tan, once a captain of Vo’Dyn, remembered in every chronicle as the Just Betrayer.
Six centuries ago Vo’Dyn’s armies scrambled underground while the sky fractured overhead. Gavriel’s company held the basalt ridge that would become Zen’Tar Stronghold. When tunnel lines collapsed, a royal courier arrived with orders to withdraw. Gavriel read the parchment, folded it, and sealed the gate behind his men. They held ten long hours, long enough for the columns below to vanish into the caverns. At dawn the relief scouts found armor shattered and stacked like a shrine, a banner thrust through Gavriel’s breastplate, and the unopened pardon still clutched in his gauntlet.
Those who listened from beyond the wall claimed his final breath, the breath of a martyr, carried across the stones:
I see the wound that drinks the names of kings. I will carry it until it sleeps, or I do.
No mason ever carved the warning, yet the ridge still trembles on windless nights.
From the silence that followed rose the Penal Outriders of Zen’tar. Each rider earns a single unread pardon in exchange for an impossible charge.
They paint their helmets bone white and scrape away all rank. Before every mission they recite their oath at the plinth of ash where Gavriel’s empty armor lies. The Spur is left unguarded, but every season someone lays fresh rope and a clean blade at its base. No ledger names a captain. The Outriders ride only when debts outweigh ledgers, and no one agrees whose banner they will follow next. At dusk the wall-watch murmurs a low cadence, a hymn said to have begun on the night Gavriel fell:
To ash and dust we pledge the hour, to dust and ash we pay the cost. The road runs clear for those who see, and love the world enough to be lost.
The closing couplet carries Gavriel’s own belief:
We were not chosen to save the world; we were chosen to see it clearly and still love it enough to die quietly.
Rumor persists that one day the ropes will be taken, the blade will lift, and hoofbeats will thunder across the ridge again. None can say who will summon them. All agree the wound beneath the Spur has never truly slept.