Garron came on the third day, while Lore was still flat on his back and hating it.
He heard the man before he saw him — a heavy, uneven tread in the hall outside, the particular gait of someone who spent most of his life standing at an anvil and had the knees to prove it — and then the door opened without a knock, because Garron had never in his life knocked on a door he thought he had business behind.
"Heard you tried to get yourself killed again," Garron said, by way of greeting.
"Good morning to you too."
Garron crossed the room and pulled the single chair up beside the bed, and lowered himself into it with a grunt that had more to do with his own joints than with any sympathy for Lore's. He was a broad, thick-forearmed man, forge-scarred up both hands, soot worked so far into the creases of his knuckles that no amount of scrubbing had ever gotten it fully out. He looked Lore over — the bandaging visible above the collar of his sleep shirt, the careful shallow way he was breathing, the color still not fully back in his face — and something in his weathered expression tightened before he covered it with the gruffness he always covered things with.
"You look like hell."
"I've been told."
"I'll bet you have." Garron reached down beside the chair and hauled up a canvas-wrapped bundle he'd carried in with him, and set it across his knees, and began working the ties loose. "Ragven sent word. Said you'd want this back before you started asking after it."
He drew back the canvas, and there was the drake scale — Lore's armor, the plates that had turned eleven months of Firoxy's border patrols already, laid out now in Garron's lap looking like something that had lost a fight it should have won by a mile. The dent across the chest plate sat deep, a full inward cave that ran nearly the whole breadth of Lore's chest, the metal around it scored raw where knuckles the size of shovel-heads had dragged across it on the way through. The backplate wasn't much better — three long gouges where roots had raked it, the plates beneath scarred pale.
Garron looked at it a long moment before he looked at Lore.
"I'm going to ask you something," he said, "and I want the truth, not the version you gave Ragven."
"That's fair."
"What in the nine hells hit you."
Lore held his eyes. "A minotaur."
Garron's jaw worked. He looked back down at the dent, and put two thick fingers into the curve of it, testing the depth the way he might test a weld, and Lore watched something pass behind the man's eyes that wasn't quite disbelief and wasn't quite fear — something closer to the specific unease of a craftsman confronting proof that his work had been tested right up against its limit.
"This didn't come from something that missed," Garron said. "This came from something that hit you square and meant it."
"It did."
"And it didn't go through."
"No." Lore's hand found its way to his own chest without his quite meaning it to, resting over the place where the bruise still sat black under the wrapping. "It held. Whatever came through — came through the plate anyway. Not the metal itself giving. Just what a fist that size does to a body, plate or no plate."
Garron sat with that a moment, running his thumb along the scored gouge like he was reading a language only he knew. "That's the Drake in it," he said, half to himself. "Mana in the scale hardens under load — the harder something hits it, the harder it gets, near enough. That's why it held. A lesser plate, this would've gone straight through you and taken the fist with it." He looked up. "Doesn't mean it doesn't hurt like every hell there is when it holds. Force has to go somewhere. It went into you instead of through you. Small mercy, but I'll take it over the alternative."
"So will I."
Garron wrapped the armor back up with the same rough care he'd unwrapped it, tying off the canvas, and set it down beside the chair rather than across his knees, like he needed both hands free for what came next.
"I can fix this," he said. "Three weeks, maybe less if I don't sleep much, which I won't. I've still got Drake material left from the original forging — hide enough for the backplate, and enough of the bone-dust for the chest if I'm careful with it. It'll come out of this looking the way it did before. Better, maybe, now that I know where it's weak." He paused. "But I want you to hear the rest of it plainly, because I don't think Ragven's going to say it to you the way I will."
Lore waited.
"That's the last of it," Garron said. "The Drake material. What I use on this repair is what's left of what we took off that hunt, and once it's gone, it's gone. There's no going back to that well. If something this size gets its hands on you again — or something bigger, and the Order finds bigger things than this one every year you're in it — I don't have anything left in my stores that'll hold the way this held. I'd be building you a plate out of lesser material and hoping the mana in it is enough, and hope is not something I like putting between you and a fist that size." His voice had gone flat and hard, the same register he probably used on a weld that had come out wrong. "We'd have to requisition new material from the Order. New hunt, new beast, new everything — and that's not fast, and it's not cheap, and it's not guaranteed. You understand what I'm telling you."
"I understand it."
"I don't think you do, not all the way, not lying there feeling lucky to be breathing." Garron leaned forward, forearms on his knees, and for a moment the gruffness dropped away entirely and there was just a tired, worried man looking at someone he'd apparently decided, at some point over the last year, that he cared what happened to. "The next time you go into a dark forest to fight something the size of a house, I want you to remember that the armor that saved your life this time might not be there to save it the next. Because I made it as good as I know how to make it, and I'm telling you plainly — this time, it was almost not good enough. I don't build armor to lose Knights in. I especially don't build it to lose you in."
The room was quiet a moment. Outside the window the lava channel ran its slow orange line, indifferent to all of it, the way it always was.
"I'll remember," Lore said.
"See that you do." Garron stood, his knees complaining audibly about it, and hefted the wrapped armor up under one arm. "Three weeks. Maybe less. You focus on healing that chest of yours and let me worry about the rest of it." He was almost to the door when he stopped, and looked back, and some of the gruffness came back into his voice like it was easier to leave on than take off. "And don't you dare thank me. I'll take it out of your hide in extra fittings when I'm done. Every strap, every buckle, until it sits exactly right. That's thanks enough for both of us."
He left before Lore could argue, which was, Lore suspected, entirely the point.
The next six months passed Lore like a held breath, all at once and hardly felt at all.
The healing came first, and it came slower than he wanted it to. For the better part of three weeks he wasn't cleared for anything past walking the length of the barracks hall and back, and he spent most of that time hating the stillness of it more than he'd ever hated an actual fight. The ribs knitted slow and stubborn. He marked the healing not by what the healers told him but by small unremarkable mornings — waking one day to find he could roll onto his side without the white flash behind his eyes, another day realizing a full breath had come easy without him bracing first, until one morning he simply forgot to check.
It was near the end of those same three weeks that Garron sent word the armor was done, and Lore walked to the forge on a quiet evening to collect it. The drake scale lay finished on the bench under lamplight, plates gleaming new where the dent had been, the join so clean he couldn't find the seam without Garron pointing it out to him, plainly proud of the work and refusing, exactly as promised, to hear a single word of thanks for it. Garron fussed over the fit of every strap and buckle himself, exactly as he'd threatened, and sent Lore off with a grunt and no goodbye worth the name — which was, Lore had come to understand, as close to affection as the man let himself get.
Then the yard again. Ragven held back the first week, more careful than Lore had ever known him to be, testing the ground the way you test ice after a thaw — and Lore hated that more than the stillness had been. It took him needling Ragven for the better part of a session, taking a light glancing hit on purpose just to prove the ribs would hold, before Ragven stopped holding back. After that it built the way it always had, session by session, until one grey morning three months in Ragven caught him with a strike that should have ended it clean and Lore came up out of it laughing, and Ragven laughed too, and neither of them said anything about the three weeks that had come before, because there was nothing that needed saying.
The patrols changed under him without anyone announcing it. Routes that had once been a single Knight's walk became two-man routes, then two-man routes with a standing order to check in by lantern-signal every hour after dark. He remembered the night word came down about a watch post on the northern ridge — not the one from before, a different one, three weeks after he'd cleared for duty again — found a day late, the two Knights posted there gone without a mark of struggle on the ground around it, as if whatever took them had simply lifted them out of the world. Ragven didn't sleep that week. Neither, much, did Lore.
The Shadowborn sightings came in a slow, uneven tide that never quite crested into anything nameable. A patrol out of Telvash reported three riders in Order-adjacent black moving fast through territory that should have been empty. A merchant convoy two weeks later swore they'd been watched from a ridgeline the whole second day of their crossing and never once approached. None of it added into an attack Lore could point to. All of it added into a feeling that settled over the posting like weather — the sense of a great many small things happening just past the edge of what anyone could see clearly, and every month bringing a few more of them than the month before.
And there was the volcano, which was patient in a way nothing else that autumn was.
Twice more the ground moved under Firoxy. The first time Lore was in the training yard when it hit, and he watched the surface of the sparring water-trough shudder in rings before he felt it in his own feet, a rolling groundswell that passed under the city and left half the yard staggering and every dog in the district barking at once. The second time was smaller, barely a shiver, and somehow that one unsettled him more, because Voryn's earth-mages came back from the fault lines afterward with the same report both times — surface cracking a few degrees off true, movement tracing to somewhere it shouldn't. Nobody said the word disaster in the reports Lore was shown. Nobody needed to say it for the shape of it to sit in the room anyway.
The vapor thread off the peak thickened without anyone marking the exact day it happened. It stopped bending northeast and thinning out by evening the way it always had. It simply rose now, day and night both, a permanent grey line laid against the sky, and the city that had watched it for months eventually stopped watching, the way people stop hearing a sound that never changes.
Lore trained. He patrolled.
And then, almost without his noticing the exact morning it happened, the season turned.
He was standing in the yard at first light when he felt it — the air different against his skin, a cold that hadn't been there the week before, the first true bite of Ashvarn settling over Firoxy the way it did every year, the long slide toward winter beginning again. He stood there a moment with his breath fogging in front of him, and thought, with the mild surprise of a man realizing a great deal of time has gotten past him while he wasn't looking, that it had been very close to a year since he'd first walked through this city not knowing a single face in it.
He didn't have long to hold the thought. Ragven was crossing the yard toward him already, and there was nothing easy in the way he was walking.