They'd been walking hours under the press of green—leaves so thick the sun fell in scattered coins. Lucas fussed with the bag at his shoulder as they moved; the old woman's gift felt weighty, more than cloth and leather. He drew out the cloak, shrugged into it and felt, briefly, like someone hiding in plain sight.
Saws picked his way up onto a flat rock and sat. He took a long pull from a skin and offered it. "Water?" he asked, voice rough from habit.
Lucas reached, fingers closing on the bottle—
—and a sharp tick cracked the air. The bottle exploded in his hand, a fine spray of water and glass. A dart had found it dead center.
Lucas's hand went cold. He drew steel without thinking. Saws' head turned; his face tightened.
At first it was only one dart, then a trickle—then a rain. Tiny projectiles stitched through the canopy and clattered into bark and soil. Saws and Lucas moved at once, backs to each other, scanning the underbrush.
Something moved—a shadow stepping light as a thought. A masked man, painted and small as a viper, came at them with a stone axe in both hands. Lucas didn't want a fight; he didn't want to start a war in a place that wasn't his. Still, the man came for them, and instinct answered.
Lucas kicked. The tribe man hit the dirt hard, and for a blessed half-second it might've ended there. Lucas lunged forward, voice sharp. "We want no harm. Let us pass."
The fallen man bit like a cornered rat, teeth into Lucas's leg. Pain flared, hot and immediate. Lucas shoved him free—only to see ten more figures slip from the ferns, darts already humming. Saws struck a short axe into the loam, eyes wild. "Run!" he barked.
They moved. Lucas ran like the forest had been waiting for him—dodging, springing between trunks, the darts a hundred tiny horns whistling past. He could hear Saws behind him, the old man's breathing ragged like a bell. Then—an animal sound, a groan.
Lucas cut his path sharp and doubled back, boots slipping on the leaf litter. He found Saws where the undergrowth opened: the old man wrapped and tangled in a net, his hammer gone from his grip. The hunters crouched back, smiling with the cruel patience of people certain of their kill.
"Go!" Saws rasped. "Go, boy!"
Lucas didn't move.
Steel took to the air in a dozen points. Knives arced. Darts rained like a swarm. Lucas moved, a blur of cloak and sword. He parried and rolled, each breath timed. He should have been overwhelmed—he knew he couldn't hold forever—but something in him changed as the nearest knife found the old man's shoulder. It was a cut like a bell.
Lucas's eyes went bright.
The world narrowed to a line of flame under glass. He didn't think of fire; he thought of the anger that had lived in him for years and how it had nothing to do with warmth or show. He screamed.
A wind answered.
It poured from his blade as if he'd unlatched a door: a great, ripping gust that struck the hunters and the net alike. Men and darts were thrown as if the air itself had hands—then they skidded and rolled and were gone into the trees. The net whipped like a flag and spun free of Saws; Lucas sliced it clean with a single, neat sweep.
Saws coughed, pulled himself up, and winced as he touched the bite on his arm, then looked at Lucas, bewildered and half-laughing. "I thought you were fire," he said, voice rough with relief.
Lucas wiped blood from his lip and sheathed his sword slowly. He met Saws' eyes and said, without further explanation, "I have three."
Saws blinked, then huffed out a laugh that might have been a sob. "Three, eh? You never told me you were a full set." He shrugged free the last vines and pointed at the trail. "Move. We haven't got the day to be polite."
They ran. The jungle closed at their backs like a mouth. Behind them, in the green, the masked hunters stood and watched with the still patience of those who'd take a name now and a life later. Lucas kept the cloak tight at his throat and the small bag against his ribs. He couldn't feel the fire he'd once expected inside him, but the wind in his blade hummed like a promise—one that might be enough.
They ran until their lungs spoke in hoarse syllables and the world narrowed to the rhythm of their boots. By the time they climbed clear of the last scrubby ridge the sun had folded its light thin and long; dusk poured across the valley like a bruise. Both of them sagged against the wind for support, breaths puffing white in the cooling air.
"Do you even know where we're going?" Lucas asked, voice small against the mountains. He squinted at the horizon. "Because I can't see anything for miles."
Saws didn't look surprised at the question. He only shifted the weight of the hammer on his shoulder and said, "Where we're headed is very far, my boy." His voice carried the slow certainty of someone who had walked a road until it felt like a map folded inside his bones.
Lucas glanced down at his left hand. The cut along his wrist had darkened, a smear of sick red seeping into the bandage; a spreading fever had made the skin tight and hot. The little of him that still knew worry pulled at that sight. Saws's gaze flicked to it and he moved without ceremony—hands quick and practiced. From somewhere in his pack he produced a small bundle of dried leaves and a strip of cloth, crushed the herbs between his palms until a green steam lifted, and pressed the paste to Lucas's skin. He wrapped the wound again with the same spare hands that had swung a hammer all his life.
They sat in silence while the herbs steamed faintly in the evening air. After a slow, steadying breath, they pushed on. Conversation became a two-way plod—short sentences, long stretches of quiet. Lucas kept asking the same questions in different words: How come we haven't seen another traveler? Are we even going the right way? Saws answered the first with a grunt and the second with no answer at all; the old man's patience for questions seemed worn thin, like leather rubbed raw by constant use.
At last Saws stopped and looked over his shoulder. "Should we get some sleep?" he asked.
"YES, PLEASE," Lucas said with the kind of relief that allowed him to laugh softly despite the ache. They set a small tent under a pinched, open sky and sank into the shelter like two things willing to stop moving.
Lucas fell asleep as if the dark itself pulled him under. When he woke sometime later it was still nearly night. He poked his head out and found Saws sitting on a smooth rock, the man's silhouette folded against the sky. He didn't speak at first; just watched the old man, who had not turned.
"Hard time falling asleep?" Saws asked without looking back.
"Not really," Lucas lied, and sat beside him. He turned his wrist at Saws's prompting—where the infection had been, the skin was less angry, the swelling receded. The herbs had done their work overnight.
Curiosity slipped out in the spaces between breaths. "Old man—how did you know about Oakridge if you're not from the Kingdom of Dragons?"
Saws made a small laugh, the sound rough as gravel. "Did I ever say I'm not from the Kingdom of Dragons?" he asked, and the sentence landed with a weight Lucas hadn't expected.
Lucas's eyebrows shot up. "Why did you leave?" he asked, quieter this time.
Saws's face went flat for a breath, like wind smoothed over a stone. "I never wanted to," he said finally. "But the kingdom's name became a brand you couldn't erase. People stopped going out. They feared what they didn't understand. They tied us to outlaws and called the whole place dirty. Strength don't fix shame. It just sits there and grows if no one breathes on it."
"WOAH," Lucas said, the naïveté bleeding out of him in a single breath. "I always thought our kingdom was… elite."
"It is strong," Saws agreed, voice low. "Probably the strongest. But the mark—what people whisper when they hear your home—stained it. It changes the way men meet one another."
Lucas let that settle with him for a long moment, then, with the stubborn hope of someone who had only ever wanted a path forward, he picked up a rock and threw it up into the fainting sky. The pebble vanished against the dim light like a promise.
"I'm ready to go," he said, standing, a new eagerness in his tone. The journey had carved something fiercer in him; the sight of the open road was a needle that pulled.
They packed quickly as the first gray of morning touched the ridgeline. Hours later, the water-skins were light, and their lips were rough with thirst.
"I'm so thirsty," Lucas admitted, breath thin.
"We'll find a river at some point," Saws said, steady as ever.
Then the old man's eyes twitched. Without warning Saws darted to his feet and ran. Lucas followed, heart jamming against his ribs. From the top of the next hill they could see it—far off and stubborn as fate: a wall, rising into the sky like a spine of some enormous beast. Flags snapped at its highest parapet; the gate marked the place where all roads converged.
Lucas staggered, then dropped to his haunches and sat down hard, the sight of it hollow and whole at once. Home, at last, spread beneath them like a promise — and with it a thousand questions he could no longer hold back.
They tore down the slope like men with urgent debts to pay. Dust billowed at their heels; breath came ragged and hot. At the bottom, a smaller rise loomed—a last hump before the plain—and they sprinted for it.
An arrow stabbed the air where Lucas's shoulder had been. He flung himself sideways and felt the feathered shaft whistle past so close it seemed to shave the skin. More followed, sudden and precise: a hail of cold points from every direction. Lucas met them with steel and reflex, parrying two with the flat of his sword, slashing one away with a clean arc. Each deflected missile rang like a warning.
A gust of wind hit them then, brutal and wrong—an invisible hand that yanked them from their feet. Saws planted his boots and rode the blast, hammer clutched like an anchor. Lucas wasn't so lucky; the wind slammed him down hard into the grit. He tasted metal and sand. Above, a new volley of arrows blotted the sky.
Saws slammed the hammer to earth. The ground answered—heaved and rose under his palm like a living thing—forming a ragged earthen rampart between them and the falling storm. Arrows struck the mound with dull thunks, splintering into dirt. For half a breath they were safe.
Then the arrows flared.
Flame licked the shafts as if some hungry spirit had breathed into them. Heat pushed at the air; sparks skittered across the soil. Saws swung his hammer in a wide, desperate arc, smashing the closest burning arrows to ash, but there were too many. The light of the flames painted his face in frantic orange.
Lucas hauled himself up, a hot sting tearing along his forearm where a missed deflection had cut him. He spit grit, fingers trembling, and drew his sword with a motion that felt like a prayer. The blade flashed—cold and certain.
Another wind came—shallow, slicing, alive. It staggered them both. From somewhere beyond the rockline a voice slid through the air, thin as a wire and cruel as frost.
"Still a fool."
Arrows found their mark this time, slamming into backs and shoulders with punctured thuds. Pain flared white-hot; Saws grunted and rocked where he stood, but his hammer arm did not drop. Lucas felt the world tilt—sound muffled, breath shallow—blood hot on his palm where it clutched at the sword hilt.
A shape moved behind a jagged outcrop of stone—a single silhouette stepping from shadow into the last of the failing light. The figure was small against the sky and impossibly familiar.
Lucas's eyes went wide. Recognition struck him like a thrown blade; his heart lurched as something he had thought gone forever stood framed against the dusk.
He knew that silhouette.... It was