Flames reached out to the moon in the night sky. All that was left of the village now was flame and smoke.
Arms crossed, Crow stood before a pyre where the remains of the villagers and invaders alike burned. The flames cast a shadow that danced along his angular face.
He had long grown used to the smell of burning bodies.
His skin was a deep tan, weathered a decade on the battlefield. His straight black hair, shoulder-length and tied back in a simple binding, framed sharp eyes that missed little. Though he lacked the towering height of others in the warband, Crow was a tempered blade forged in motion — lean, fast, and lethal.
Like Nocte, Crow was Noctarii — descended from the bloodline of Noctis Primara. Though not as powerful, the signs were there: the black sclera in his eyes, the strange calm that emanated from his body in the heat of battle.
Some even said he was the shadow of Nocte. Others knew better: Crow moves faster than shadows.
The warriors moved through the rubble like wraiths, stripping the dead and sifting through the shattered homes.
One group placed the bodies on the pyre, while the second began taking what could be salvaged back to their caravan.
"Scavenge what's worth keeping," Crow barked to the warband. "Tools, food, steel. Burn the rest."
Beside the main blaze, another, smaller pyre had been built. Its purpose was not just for burning a body — it was misdirection.
Jackal stepped up onto a broken stone slab and raised his voice.
Once he was sure all the warriors were looking, he began his performance.
"This one fought to her last breath!" he called, gesturing to the body of a woman curled around a bundle of tattered cloth. "I'll give her a warrior's send-off."
All those present had heard the baby wailing and watched as Crow, Jackal, and Lobo brought the bodies and the armor from the building. Putting two and two together, they understood the mother had sacrificed her life to save her child, and the elegant black armor.
.
He made a show of crouching beside her, prying the bundle from her grasp. Putting the bundle down gently, Jackal then lifted the mother's body and placed it ceremoniously onto the pyre. He then leaned over and grabbed a torch, setting the pyre ablaze. The flame laughed and cackled as it ate away at its noble kindling.
The warriors stood in silence.
'Respect.' They all thought in unison.
Lobo loomed behind Jackal, silent. With practiced ease, he took the empty bundle from the ground — once cradled so desperately by the woman — and hurled it into the flame.
It caught quickly, fire licking up the fabric as if it had been waiting for release.
The nearest grunts flinched at the sudden whoosh of fire.
"Gods," one muttered, eyes wide. "Was… was that the babe?"
"Of course it was," another whispered, stepping back. "Did you not hear it earlier? Wailing like the mountain itself cursed it."
They fell into hushed silence, casting wary glances toward Lobo.
Even among killers and mercenaries, the act was too brutal. But Lobo had earned his name long ago — Lobo the Cruel — and no one dared question him to his face.
The bundle burned quickly, as if the spirits themselves wanted it gone. The cries had stopped. The fire had taken it. That was enough truth for the men to believe.
Behind the pyre, Jackal gave a slight nod to Crow, and both turned back toward the ruined building where Nocte waited.
The secret was buried in ash.
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.
.
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.
.
.
In Nocte's arms, the baby stirred.
Tiny. Warm. Alive.
Jackal spat into the dirt. "We should sell it."
Crow turned to him slowly, eyes narrowing. "You'd hawk a child like a blade?"
"That ain't no normal child," Jackal muttered. "You saw the armor. The markings. That parchment. Someone powerful was looking for it—and they're still looking. Might as well trade it before it curses us all."
Lobo snorted, arms crossed over his broad chest. "Sell it? That's cruel. We should kill it. Spare it from what's coming."
Nocte's gaze didn't waver from the bundle in his arms.
Crow leaned forward, voice softer. "Or… we raise it. In secret."
Jackal scoffed. "You're mad."
"Maybe," Crow said. "But Nocte needs a son. And you know why."
The words hung in the air like blades.
Nocte's wife, secondborn of one of the Seven Great Tribes, had nearly died giving birth to their daughter. The healers had whispered she'd never bear another.
"It doesn't have to be blood to be bond," Crow added. "Not in this warband. Not in this world."
Lobo grunted. "You think hiding it changes what it is? What it could become?" He looked at Nocte, eyes shadowed beneath his heavy brow. "You know what I was before you married into the tribes. Before you freed me. I was someone's property. I don't want that for the child. Kill it now—or you doom it to something worse."
The candle lit between them, casting flickering shadows across their faces. The mural of the mountain looming behind them.
All four men were Noctarii, but not equals.
Nocte and Crow were Varnari—the Dark-Blooded—a high caste of elites born with the blackened sclera of power. Varnari held strength, status, and the gift of heightened senses. Some, like the shamans, even wielded mystic abilities. It was through this blood, and marriage to the Matriarch of one of the Seven Great Tribes, that Nocte had risen to command.
Jackal and Lobo, by contrast, were Solnari—the Half-Shadows, or Sun-Touched, as the Varnari scornfully called them. They bore the black sclera in only one eye, a mark of their diluted lineage. Their strength surpassed any commoner's, but it paled next to Nocte's supernatural might or Crow's impossible speed.
To be born Solnari was to be born beneath suspicion. It meant one of your parents—a Noctarii—had broken tribal law and mated with a Lunari,a commoner with no Noctarii blood. The Unshadowed. Such unions were taboo. The child born of them was a stain—never allowed to lead, rarely allowed to thrive.
The only futures offered to a Solnari without tribal protection were slavery or forced conscription into a larger clan's warband.
If they were lucky.
Lobo had been sold at five and pressed into mercenary service at eight and at eighteen, conscripted into Nocte's warband—back when it was still small, just a rogue band of outcasts and blades-for-hire. They shed blood together for a year before Nocte bought out his contract and swore him in as a brother.
A blood bond.
None of it would've been possible without Nocte's status as Varnari—and his marriage into a Great Tribe.
Now, standing in the candlelit room, Lobo wasn't trying to be cruel. He was remembering. And a warning.
Because a child with no name, no kin, and Noctarii blood was a target—and a prize.
And if instead that child wasn't a Solnari, but a Varni, or even greater?
Then what?
One look at the village outside could answer that.
Jackal broke the silence first, his voice low but steady.
"Hard choices, Cap," he muttered, eyes fixed on the bundle in his arms.
"We've made them before and left brothers behind. Slit throats to spare worse ends. But this…" He shook his head.
"This ain't a clean kill. This? This is something else. This is going to stick with ya, and listen close. Whatever you decide, Nocte—it's going to cost you. Maybe all of us."
He looked at Nocte then, not as a subordinate, but as a brother in blood, shouldering the same weight.
"I don't envy you."
Crow stood, brushing ash from his knees.
"You're the leader, Nocte. What's your call?"
Nocte looked down at the child. The infant opened its eyes—dark as the void, with a faint golden gleam in the center, like a sun trapped in midnight.
"It came from death," Nocte said quietly. "But it didn't cry until the killing was done."
He rose.
"Burn the mother's body. Give her a warrior's farewell. Tell the men she died shielding her child—and that the armor was the reason she was hunted."
He turned to Jackal, voice low but firm.
"You'll see to it."
Then to Lobo:
"While the men are watching, throw in a bundle. Make it look like the child burned with her."
The three warriors stared at him.
"We tell no one. Not now. Not ever." Nocte's eyes burned with resolve.
"This child is mine now."
Lobo nodded solemnly.
Jackal muttered a curse. "We better not regret this."
Crow simply smiled.
"Then we make sure we don't."