The wife circled with her fists still loose, voice sharpening through the feathered mask. She threw a few sharp shadow-boxing jabs, fast and clean, like muscle memory possessed by something worse. "How could you dance to those chimes? Do you even know what they're made of? What they cost?"
As I stepped forward to answer with my axe, she slipped to the side with the grace of a stage illusion — all dodge, no weight, mocking the swing like it was choreography gone stale.
I snorted and rolled my shoulders. "Lady, I'm not about to talk shop with a death cult in owl land."
Then I started moving.
Not just circling — dancing. The kind of rhythmic footwork Kaito drilled into me during rehearsals, disguised as showmanship but built like training. My body remembered. My hips shifted just so. My weight pivoted with breath. I
Kaito once told me about his Thai roots — how dancers had once learned to fight under the nose of power. At the time, I figured he was just romanticizing his years of dance lessons, trying to make the bruises and pirouettes sound cool. But now? Now I wasn't so sure.
He'd said warriors moved like ghosts, slipping through rhythm so fluid no one saw the blade until it was already too late. That it wasn't just art — it was survival in silk shoes. And with every step I took, every pivot and feint my body remembered without thinking, I realized he might've been telling the truth the whole time in front of me. I just too focus on the places we went to see it.
We locked legs, a push and pull of sweat and muscle, like a tug of war with pride hanging in the balance. Her strength wasn't showy — it was seasoned, like someone who knew how to break ribs without leaving bruises. I gritted my teeth and held.
"How the hell did you get a Sonter on your trail?" I panted, tightening my grip.
She laughed through the mask — sharp, smug. "This happens every few years. Solas tests us. Always has. He never stops testing. You think you're the first to make it this far?"
Her foot slipped slightly, but she recovered. "They don't tell you about the books, do they? The real ones. The ones made from people."
I blinked. The air behind her seemed to hum.
"You're not hunted because you're wrong," I said, breath catching between swings. "You're hunted because you're counterfeit. You took souls and turned them into stories, bound in skin and pride — and stamped Solas' name across it."
I circled, eyes narrowing. "But Solas ain't even the demon of that trade. That's Ose. The one who teaches false knowledge, wraps truth in tricks. You insulted them both. And now you're wondering why everything's coming for your throat."
I dropped low, twisted, and launched upward — grabbing her neck with my thighs. Her grunt of surprise barely left her lips before I twisted my core, spinning us both in the air like a violent ballet. My weight shifted hard, and we slammed down to the ground with a sick crunch.
Before she could recover, I brought one axe down — not fatal, not yet — right into her thigh.
"You like stories?" I hissed, leaning close. "Then bleed one out for me."
And suddenly, it all clicked. Why Kaito looked so sick at that first inn. Why the dream felt like a warning, not a vision.
I let out a slow, shaking sigh. Damn. That dream was a warning. All that cryptic talk from Solas, the creeping dread in the air, the way my skin crawled before we even checked in — it hadn't been nerves. It was a heads-up, a flicker of truth wrapped in sleep.
They weren't honoring Solas.
They were selling lies in his name. And no one liked that — not spirits, not demons, not even desperate mortals. Because taking a god's name in vain always came with a price. And that price didn't wait for justice. It hunted you down, slow and deliberate, like interest on a debt that should never have been borrowed in the first place.