They came out of the shadow like a page ripped from the past.
A silhouette resolved on the ridge—purple hair, the same folded navy that had become Shawn's shape. He dropped from the tree with the casual grace of someone who never wasted motion. Jennie followed, landing light as a breath, the mask back in place and the spear ringing against her shoulder. For a second Lucas couldn't find a sensible answer for how they had slipped past the walls. He only knew he hadn't expected them here.
Saws lay where he'd fallen, netted and groaning, the breath rasping in his chest black with dust. Lucas scrambled forward. "Help—" he started, but Shawn's voice cut like ice.
"I'm sorry, Lucas," Shawn said, blunt and formal as if reading from orders. "We were told—if any of you were seen traveling with outsiders, we were to intercept. You can't be trusted right now. We were ordered to neutralize and leave the foreigner behind."
"Leave him to die?" Lucas barked before he could stop himself.
The old man turned weakly and fixed Lucas with a steady look. "Go," he croaked. "Take your friend. Save yourselves." The voice was soft but fierce; he tried to push Lucas toward the path with an exhausted nod.
"No," Lucas said, the word a stone. He snapped his sword free and planted himself between Saws and the two warriors. "I am not leaving you."
Jennie's spear snapped up in a hair's time, a living threat. "Don't make this harder than it already is," she said. Her tone was flat, but there was a tremor that betrayed the cost of the orders she followed.
Shawn's jaw tightened. For the space of a breath he looked like the quiet eye of a storm. Then Jennie blurred forward—too fast—his movements a whisper of steel and wind. Lucas rolled aside with the reflex of training, just missing the spear's needle-quick point. A sharp whistle behind him—an arrow—and pain seared along his side. He didn't have time to curse before everything accelerated.
Saws struggled, groaning, then with fury and some strange, old authority he seemed to summon all at once, he ripped arrows from his body and rose. The old man's voice turned into a shout, a single command bellowed like a struck bell.
"KNEEL BEFORE THE LORD!"
He slammed his hammer down so hard the ground answered. Stone leapt like a living thing, lifting into jagged shields that rose between them and the attackers. For a breath it worked; the arrows that had rained suddenly struck the earthen rampart and sputtered—then one by one they shrieked alive, flaring with unnatural fire that seared through the makeshift shield.
Saws hammered, the ground trembling under the force of the blow. The air split; the earth itself opened in thin, screaming fissures that crawled away from the old man like angry veins. The shock flung everyone outward. Jennie's mask flashed as she was thrown, Shawn's bow clattered from his hands. Dust choked the world into a ragged hush.
For one slotted second Lucas saw everything slow—the mask in Jennie's brow, Shawn's shocked face, Saws' hands rising and falling on a hammer that smoked—then the world tore to black.
A voice like a rope pulling taut wound through the air, close enough to cut: "That would be enough, Saws." It was a voice Lucas had the faintest sense of knowing. The words were a seal. Then darkness took him whole.
When his eyes opened there was a small, steady light—someone sitting close to him, moving with the careful patience of someone who had seen men recover more times than they deserved. For a moment Lucas had no shape for the room beyond the light, just a soft swathe of fabric and the faint smell of herbs.
"Oh, I hate it when this happens," Lucas said automatically, the sentence slipping from him like a bad habit. He ought to have been startled at how easily his voice returned, but the world still felt thick and slow.
He swung his legs over the pallet. Bandages wrapped his side and arm; nothing felt broken, no bones grinding. He pushed himself up. The woman beside him—middle-aged, with the steady hands of someone who mended rather than maimed—watched him with mild reproach and a faint smile.
Outside, the village around the healer's cottage thrummed with life: carts creaked, a dog barked, voices rose and fell. Lucas stepped out into it as if into a picture he half-remembered. The streets smelled of baked bread and river mud. He knew the lines of roofs and the tilt of eaves—home smells—but something small and essential felt off, like a missing freckle on a familiar face.
He walked until the road opened and the great wall of his kingdom rose on the horizon, dark and unreadable, still. Lucas stopped, took it in. A slow smile eased over his face—not the wild grin of victory but the softer, steadier curve of someone who'd made it this far and still had work to do. Lucas had gotten a letter, he pulled it out and opened it.
The letter trembled in Lucas's hand like a thing that didn't quite believe itself. He read it twice, three times, until the formal words stopped feeling like ink and started to look like a ladder. OUTLAW CHARGE REMOVED. APPOINTED: 2-STAR WARRIOR.
He laughed then — a short, startled sound — and the laugh uncorked something that had been tight inside him for months. It felt like coming up for air after being held under water too long. He dressed as fast as bandages allowed and strode for the mission hall with all the little lightning of a boy who suddenly had a reason.
The mission hall was a river of faces. A queue of two-star hopefuls snaked past noticeboards and bronze plaques, past tired clerks and a woman who stamped forms with the patient rhythm of fate itself. Lucas slotted into line, chest thump-thumping with the image of something epic — a raid, a beast, a chance to prove he belonged.
They gave him a cow.
By the time the clerk grinned and handed him the little scrap — RESCUE DOMESTIC LIVESTOCK, REPORT BACK — Lucas felt his stomach drop like a stone. He forced a grin for the woman's practiced smile and stepped aside as someone behind him huffed. The hall smelled of soup and leather and waiting. He did the cow, then a horse, then two more horses, and a crate of misplaced supplies. Days bled into each other with the tedious sameness of chores meant for people who hadn't broken anything yet.
On the twenty-third morning he finally saw Shawn again: a line of action posted on the board and a scoff he didn't try to hide. Lucas abandoned the queue, barreled up to him, and grabbed his sleeve.
"Shawn," he said, breathless with the hurry of a boy who'd been practicing patience and found it wasted, "what have you been getting? What do you—what do you even do?"
Shawn looked up from a parchment like a man who measured words before releasing them. For a moment the bored mask slid; something like amusement warmed his eyes. "Actual missions," he answered simply. "Escorts, skirmishes, hunting a bandit king last week. Enough that I see blood and not paperwork."
Lucas's face fell into that old, familiar petty ache. "How do you get those? I keep asking and they give me—" he gestured at the mission slip now in his pocket, "—paddocks and cows."
Shawn shrugged. "You want better missions, you train under a senior. Supervisors put names forward. You'll learn faster, get recommended. You want a rank, not just tasks for coin."
"A trainee?" Lucas asked, the words a hope he didn't want to sound too eager about.
"Yes." Shawn's tone was flat but not unkind. "Ask the head yourself. Don't go whining; tell them you want instruction, that you'll follow orders. Be firm. They respect resolve."
Lucas didn't need more than that. He stormed back to the mission office with the kind of persistent, slightly desperate energy that comes from being tired of useless work. The clerk at the counter knew him now — the orphan with the patched sleeve and the stubborn jaw — and waved him through with the indifferent courtesy of someone who managed thousands of similar requests.
The head of assignments sat behind a high desk like a smaller mountain of authority. When Lucas stepped forward he felt suddenly like a child again, only this time he had a star on his chest and a name that did not smell like old shame.
"State your business," the head said without looking up at first. Her voice folded into the room like a rule. She was a woman in her middle years, hair pulled into a tight knot, and a presence that made waiting men straighten.
Lucas squared his shoulders. "I want a supervisor. I want to train under someone who will make me better. I don't want errands anymore. I want missions that matter."
She studied him — not the scars, not the bandages, but the line of his mouth. "Many ask. Few mean it." Her pen paused on a list. "Why should I approve you? Training demands obedience, time, and you'll be placed under a senior who will be judged by your performance."
Lucas's hands curled. He could have offered excuses, pleaded, played the brave orphan card. Instead he said, honest and blunt: "Because I can learn and I will not waste your senior's time. I want to be useful. I want to be stronger."
For a breath she watched him. Then, as if deciding he was one kind of trouble she could use, she tapped a sealed envelope with a short, sharp command.
"You'll start as an assistant under Senior Viv," she said. "She's gruff, expects discipline, and She's currently away on a long hunt. You'll travel to her lodgings at the north end of town. Be presentable. Fail, and you go back to the line."
Lucas's grin ripped across his face so fast a stranger might think he'd gone mad. He bowed the smallest, most grateful bow he could manage in the public eye and took the envelope like it was made of gold. Inside: an address, a time, and a small note in the clerk's looping hand: Make no mistakes.
He spent the rest of that morning thrumming with a nervous, coiled excitement. He went to the gear stalls and replaced a strap, bought a roll of cured meat for the road, and re-tightened the bandages until they felt like armor. The mission hall's bustle blurred as he walked out, a single thought looping: a senior, someone to teach him how not to be only rage and reflex.
The address led him down a lane that smelled of laundry and river water, past a crooked bakery where a woman gave him a warning look and a slice of stale bread for the road. The house at the end of the lane was nothing like the great, gilded houses of the city's wealthier watchers. It was squat and solid, with a low porch and a roof that had clearly been repaired more times than its owner could count. Smoke curled from the chimney in a lazy gray.
Lucas's hand hovered over the latch. He felt his heart like a trapped bird. He stepped up, pushed the door — and froze.
Because there on the step, leaning back against the post with the easy hazard of someone who'd survived more than their share of scuffles, stood a face he did not expect.
(Senior 'Viv' Vivian's appearance : A young woman stood. A sleeveless tunic of crimson draped over her form, split slightly at the sides for movement, while steel-gray guards wrapped around her arms and legs, hinting at both agility and discipline. She looked less like a wanderer and more like a warrior who had seen more battles than her youthful face would ever admit.)
Familiar and impossible. Not an instructor at all.
He knew those eyes, the cold tilt when someone measured you at once — but he thought he'd only ever seen that look in the distance, in moments that had hurt too much to remember clearly.
Lucas's mouth opened and closed. He had come for a senior and found a memory.
He swallowed and stepped forward.
"Senior Viv?" he managed.
The figure pushed off the post and smiled—a small, sharp thing that did not quite reach his eyes. "Welcome, young boy" the lady said.
Lucas realized, suddenly, that his breath had gone entirely still. He clutched the envelope in both hands and felt like the world might tilt again.
He was not prepared for what the next words would be — and he didn't have to be. He only had to stand there, at the threshold of something that felt like a different kind of lesson.
The door creaked wider behind him, and the woman—Vivian?—signaled for Lucas to enter.
Lucas stepped over the sill, the envelope crackling in his grip, and the house seemed to close around him like the mouth of a place where fortunes were turned.