No map marks the places where the Bastionhelms walk. You find their domain when the trees thin, and the ground stiffens into forgotten cobblestone paths, roads that led to keeps long reduced to ash and rubble. The air grows heavier there, laced with rust and damp stone, and the wind carries the faint clatter of metal, though no hand grips a blade.
That is when you know: you’ve stepped into their sight.
The Bastionhelms are not men, nor ghosts, but the marriage of both. Armored husks fused with the ruins they died defending. Their helmets gape with empty blackness, while the remnants of tower walls and shattered battlements grow from their backs like gravestones. Their limbs creak with the weight of rusted swords and lances embedded in their flesh, relics of battles so old even the crows have forgotten them. Some say the Bastionhelms were once human, the last defenders of strongholds that refused to yield. When their walls fell, so did their bodies, but their duty did not. Now they rise where stone meets sorrow, bound to the places that will never know peace.
They are not quick. They do not need to be.
Bastionhelms are patience made flesh.
They do not hunt trespassers. They wait, for you to tire, to lose your nerve, to step too near. When you do, they move like falling masonry: slow, final, and crushing. Their swords, dulled by centuries, do not need to be sharp. The weight alone is enough.
Those who survive the encounter speak of a sound that haunts them for the rest of their days: the slow scrape of steel over stone, followed by a single, booming strike as the Bastionhelm’s blade meets its shield. It is not a warning, it is a sentence.
But there is a secret, old as the Bastionhelms themselves, passed between the few who navigate these cursed lands.
Yarrow.
The herb grows defiantly in the cracks of broken stone, its white flowers pushing through mortar as though mocking the ruins. Soldiers once pressed yarrow to their wounds to staunch bleeding, but it holds another power, one less spoken. It is said that Bastionhelms cannot abide it. Yarrow’s roots drink from the blood-soaked soil of old battlefields, and in doing so, the plant becomes anathema to those who are bound to stone and war. The scent of crushed yarrow is a reminder of life continuing where they could not. A defiance of their eternal vigil.
Wanderers who know the tales braid yarrow into their boots before crossing the ruins. Some scatter the flowers over crumbling thresholds, whispering,
"Stone has no claim on me." Those who forget or dismiss the old ways often become part of the walls they sought to pass.
Should you find yourself upon a desolate road, with the whispers of swords brushing against stone riding the breeze, tread carefully. And if you see the silhouette of a figure fused with broken towers and rusted lances, do not run.
Pluck yarrow from the earth.
Hold it to your chest.
And walk. Never stop walking, until the sound of stone grinding steel is nothing but a memory.
Because in the lands of the Bastionhelms, to linger is to become brick and bone.
