Ashfields did not burn the way cities burned.
There were no towers to fall in silhouettes that artists would later try to capture, no banners snapping into flame to announce catastrophe to distant hills. There were no libraries whose loss would be mourned by scholars yet unborn, no monuments worth arguing over once the ash settled. When Ashfields burned, it did so the way dry bone caught fire—quietly, thoroughly, without asking to be remembered.
That was how Kael learned his first real truth about violence.
It did not announce itself.
It arrived already convinced of its necessity.
Dusk crept across the plains slowly, dragged behind Sol Aurex as the heavier sun dipped toward the horizon. Its light thinned and dulled, stretched long and tired across cracked earth and low, crooked shelters. From the opposite side of the sky, Sol Noctis began its rise, bleeding a muted red across the land. Two suns meant the world never agreed with itself. Shadows lay where they should not. Shapes bent, doubled, blurred at the edges.
The eye learned not to trust what it saw.
Kael felt the wrongness before he saw anything at all.
Not magic.
Not instinct.
Rhythm.
Footsteps. Measured. Even. Too careful to be accidental. Too steady to belong to travelers whose legs carried fatigue and hope in equal measure. These steps belonged to men who expected resistance, but not enough to matter—men who had already decided how this would end.
Mercenaries.
Ashfields knew their kind the way prey knew the outline of a predator against the sky. You learned early. You learned fast. And if you survived, you learned to recognize them before they recognized you.
Kael's breath slowed without him meaning it to. His shoulders settled. His hands relaxed at his sides.
Garrin noticed a heartbeat after Kael did, his single good hand tightening around the haft of an old spear polished smooth by years of reuse. Mara noticed a breath later still. Her shoulders stiffened, but her face did not change. She had learned long ago that fear attracted attention.
No one shouted.
Shouting wasted time.
Ashfields had no walls.
Walls suggested permanence, and permanence invited notice. On Aerthyra, anything that claimed it would endure became a target sooner or later.
Instead, Ashfields had habits, passed hand to hand and mouth to ear, shaped by survival rather than planning. Children were moved first, guided gently and silently toward shallow ravines where sound folded in on itself and cries died young. Supplies were scattered rather than stored, hidden in dozens of forgettable places instead of one memorable hoard. Fires were smothered until only cold embers remained, their warmth denied to wandering eyes.
Kael moved with them, not because he was told to, but because he understood the pattern. He carried water skins without spilling a drop. He placed a steady hand on smaller shoulders, guiding without dragging. He listened.
Listening mattered more than speed.
One of the mercenaries laughed as they crossed into the edge of the settlement, the sound sharp and careless, the laughter of someone who had already counted the odds and liked them.
"They look thin," a voice called out. "Easy pickings."
Kael felt something tighten in his chest.
Not fear.
Calculation.
Mercenaries did not negotiate.
They never did.
Their demands came quick and practiced, delivered with the tone of men who had rehearsed this moment many times before. Food. Tools. And three people "for work contracts."
Everyone in Ashfields knew what that meant.
People who left with mercenaries rarely came back. When they did, they were emptied in ways even Mara's hands could not fix. Bodies healed. Something else never did.
Garrin stepped forward, lifting his hand slowly, deliberately, showing he carried no immediate threat.
"We don't have what you want," he said evenly.
The mercenary leader—a broad man with sun-scarred skin and a smile that showed too many teeth—tilted his head as if amused by a child who had misunderstood a simple lesson.
"That's what they always say."
The first blow did not come as an argument.
It came as proof.
Not to Garrin.
To the woman standing beside him.
She fell without a sound, her body folding in on itself as if the ground had simply decided to reclaim her. No scream. No warning. Just impact and stillness.
In that moment, something in Kael's understanding shifted permanently.
Violence did not begin with conflict.
It began with demonstration.
His body moved before his thoughts could argue.
Kael ran.
Not fast enough to seem unnatural. Not slow enough to be stopped. Human speed, honed by gravity, discipline, and a quiet refusal to be weak.
He reached the fallen woman just as the mercenary lifted his blade again, intent on finishing what he had started—not out of cruelty, but efficiency.
Kael hit him.
Not with strength.
With placement.
He drove his shoulder into the mercenary's knee at the precise moment the man's weight shifted forward. The joint bent wrong with a sound like splitting wood. The scream that followed tore through the dusk and echoed against the ravines.
Kael did not stop.
He seized a stone from the ground—smooth, heavy, ordinary—and brought it down on the man's wrist. Bone cracked. The blade slipped free and struck dirt.
For a breath, everything went quiet.
Not shock.
Assessment.
Every mercenary recalculated risk. Every defender understood that something irreversible had happened.
A child had drawn blood.
The mercenary leader reacted instantly.
He did not go for Kael.
He went for Mara.
It was not strategy.
It was instinct.
Kael saw it happen and time stretched—not because of magic, but because consequence had arrived. The distance between them felt impossible. His legs burned. His lungs screamed.
The sword fell.
Mara did not scream.
Kael reached them as the blade descended. He did not block it. He twisted his body, redirected the angle just enough.
The sword cut sideways instead, tearing Kael's arm open to the bone.
Pain exploded.
Kael did not feel it.
He felt only the weight of the moment pressing down on him, demanding action without hesitation.
He drove the stone into the mercenary leader's throat.
Once.
Twice.
The third strike came because he did not yet know how to stop once survival took hold.
When the body fell, it stayed down.
The mercenaries withdrew.
Not routed.
Unsettled.
This was not how it was supposed to go. Ashfields had crossed a line. And so had Kael.
Mara lived. The blade had missed her heart by less than a hand's breadth. She caught Kael as his knees finally gave way, her hands shaking as healer instinct wrestled panic into submission.
"Don't close it," she whispered urgently when she saw the wound. "Don't—"
Kael stared at his arm.
It should have been catastrophic.
It wasn't.
The bleeding slowed. Not instantly. Not miraculously. Just faster than it should have, as if his body had quietly decided it could not afford to fail.
Mara saw it.
Her hands shook harder.
The wound healed badly. Not because Mara lacked skill—she did everything right—but because Kael's flesh resisted correction. It knit unevenly, leaving a pale, jagged scar from elbow to wrist.
It never faded.
Kael traced it often afterward. Not with pride.
With memory.
Because that scar marked the moment childhood stopped protecting him.
They buried the dead before sunrise.
No prayers. No gods. Just dirt and names spoken aloud so silence could not steal them.
Kael did not cry then.
Later, alone, he vomited until his throat burned. He scrubbed his hands raw in a water barrel that turned pink, then red, then brown. The mercenary's eyes—wide, surprised—refused to leave him.
Garrin sat beside him eventually, heavy and quiet.
"You did what adults failed to do," the old soldier said.
Kael shook his head.
"I killed him."
Garrin nodded once.
"Yes."
No comfort followed.
Only truth.
After that night, Ashfields shifted around Kael.
Not reverence.
Distance.
No one forbade him from training anymore. No one encouraged it either. Children watched him with wide eyes. Adults watched him with unease.
Mara said nothing—but she saw everything.
Kael slept poorly. He dreamed of hands reaching from the ground, not to drag him under, but to push him forward, urging him toward something he did not yet understand.
Something inside him had awakened.
Not power.
Permission.
The understanding that action was possible—and sometimes required.
One day, that understanding would shake gods.
For now, it burned quietly in the chest of a boy who had learned, far too early, that saving someone always costs more than you expect.