The Lethwood breathed its damp, green breath onto Kael Thorne's masked face. Rain, relentless and cold once again, slicked the dark iron of his wolf-skull helm, traced icy fingers down his scarred pauldrons, and pooled in the worn grooves of his leather vambraces. He stood as still as the ancient Sentinel Trees themselves, a statue carved from shadow and vigilance, at the edge of a dripping fern-choked ridge. Below, the forest floor churned with unnatural violence.
Through the shifting veils of mist and rain, Kael surveyed the tableau. Knights, perhaps more than fifteen but no more than twenty, in shining plate armor; Vaelorian plate, unmistakable even smeared with mud and leaf-litter, drove four ragged souls deeper into the green maw. The hunted moved with the desperate, stumbling gait of the exhausted and wounded. Three bore the same Vaelorian colors, though tattered and scorched. The fourth, a woman with dark hair plastered to her face, moved with panic, haunted, confused look on her face, her eyes wide with a terror that went beyond physical threat. It was a terror Kael recognized in the hollows of his own memories, in the phantom screams that sometimes echoed in the silence beneath his helm.
Why?
The question was a cold stone in his gut. Knights hunting knights. Vaelorian sigils, the stylized sunburst made famous by Vaelorian Empire troops and weapons that they called armadas, symbols of an empire rumored to be as proud as it was powerful, turned predator upon their own. It made no tactical or any kind of sense. It reeked of madness, of rot festering from within. He'd seen it before, not in Vaelorian Empire, but in the fractured loyalties and whispered betrayals that had birthed his own exile. This felt… worse. Calculated annihilation. surgical. Absolute. A calculated erasure.
His gaze snapped to the woman leading the hunted. Rain streaked the grime on her face like war paint, but beneath it, her eyes held a raw, hollow terror that stopped him cold. It was a look he knew. Ireth's look. The same shattered disbelief he'd seen years ago in the slag-choked shadows of Gorgath Pass, reflected in the eyes of a child the mountain had chewed up and spat out. That resonance cut through the tactical coldness, sharp and unwelcome. Survivor. The recognition was instant, bone-deep. Not a criminal. Prey. Like Ireth had been. Like they all were
Behind Kael, the forest held its breath. Thirty shadows, hardened by ice, mammoth tusks, and exile, melted into the dripping foliage. Their scents, wet leather, cold steel, the faint metallic tang of old blood and Thrygond grit, were swallowed by the petrichor and decay. No jingle of harness, no scrape of boot on stone. Only the drumming rain and the frantic, crashing pursuit below.
Branek shifted his massive weight beside Kael, a low growl rumbling in his chest. His warhammer, a brutal extension of his singed arm, rested lightly on his shoulder. Ireth was a wraith to Kael's left, her twin blades already loose in their sheaths, her pale grey eyes fixed on the unfolding chase with predatory stillness. Fen and the other two archers were specters high in the canopy, crank-bows primed. The shieldmen, Darvik, Lorik, Oren, Garv, and eight others, formed the core, their rectangular, iron-bound shields of darkened yew resting against legs, rain sheeting off the wood. Behind them, the spearmen, Varek, Rusk, and nine more, held their long-hafted weapons low, points gleaming dully.
Kael didn't need to speak. He raised a gauntleted hand, fingers splayed. Hold. Observe. The tension in the air thickened, coiling like a spring. He saw the calculations flicker in Branek's eyes, the silent communication passing between the shieldmen. They saw the Vaelorian formation tightening, the trap about to spring against the steep, vine-choked slope below. They saw the exhaustion in the hunted, the grim efficiency of the hunters. This wasn't their fight. They were battered, depleted, miles from their mountains, deep in a green hell that whispered secrets they didn't understand. Rest had been fleeting; the mammoths' toll and the relentless march still echoed in stiff joints and bandaged wounds.
Yet, reluctance warred with instinct. Kael felt it in the set of Darvik's jaw, the way Lorik's knuckles whitened on his shield grip. They were soldiers forged in defense, protectors of the broken. Watching butchery, even of strangers, went against the grain of the purpose Kael had hammered into them. To turn away was to become the indifferent cruelty they themselves had fled. A low thrum of anticipation, born not of bloodlust but of grim necessity, began to vibrate through the line. The dread of another fight mingled with the cold certainty that inaction here would be a different kind of death.
The Vaelorian knights cornered their prey against the slope. Steel flashed, raised for the final blows. The woman with the warrior's bearing braced, defiance warring with despair in her eyes. Her companions, the grizzled knight, the fierce woman, the younger one, formed a desperate, doomed semicircle.
Kael's raised hand snapped into a fist. Engage.
The forest exploded.
"Huu!"
Branek's roar wasn't a sound; it was a physical force, a detonation of mountain fury that ripped through the rain-drenched air. It was the signal, the catalyst. The war cry.
Twelve shieldmen erupted from the mist-shrouded trees flanking the trapped group and their pursuers. Not a charge, but a controlled, terrifying surge. Ash-gray cloaks whipped like battle standards. Boots slammed into the sodden earth with synchronized force. In one fluid, practiced motion, honed on icy passes and against monstrous foes, they drove their rectangular shields, dark, heavy slabs of iron-bound yew, edge-first into the mud. THUD. The impact was a physical shockwave. A living, bristling barricade slammed down, cleaving the chase clean in half mere feet from the hunted fugitives. Vaelorian knights, mid-lunge, recoiled in stunned disbelief, momentum shattered against the sudden, implacable wall of wood and iron. Swords clattered harmlessly against shield rims.
Before the disoriented knights could even register the ambush, a couple of gleaming crossbow bolts hissed through the trees deliberately left behind for tactical reasons. Fen and the other archers, perched like vengeful spirits in the dripping canopy, found their marks with chilling precision. Bolts punched into visor slits, joints, the vulnerable gaps at armpits and thighs. A knight staggered back, clawing at the shaft buried in his eye socket with a wet, choking gasp. Another collapsed silently, a bolt protruding from his neck. Three more cried out, wounded but not felled.
"Huu!"
The second command cracked like a whip. The shield-wall surged forward as one grinding mass. Boots churned mud. Shields smashed into the staggered Vaelorian line with brutal, coordinated force. Knights stumbled, boots slipping. The sheer weight and momentum of the Thrygond advance crumpled the front rank. Metal shrieked against metal; grunts of effort filled the air.
"Huu!"
The third cry snapped the trap shut. The shield-wall breathed. The narrow gaps between shields snapped open, precise slits barely wider than a man's hand. Through these openings, eleven iron spearpoints lanced forward like striking vipers. Not wild jabs, but aimed thrusts, driven with the strength of shoulders hardened by hauling ice and ore. THWACK. CRUNCH. Points punched into visor slits, found the soft leather under armpits, drove deep into thigh gaps above greaves. A knight screamed, high and terrible, as a spear found his face. Another gurgled, blood bubbling from a punctured lung. A third dropped, hamstrung, scrabbling uselessly in the mud.
"Huu!"
The gaps vanished instantly. Shields slammed shut, reforming the seamless wall. Simultaneously, the Thrygond warriors took another grinding, unified step forward, pressing their advantage, driving the disorganized knights back, compressing their formation against the slope and their own fallen. The rhythm was merciless, mechanical repetition of Huu! Huu! Huu! And with it, the soldiers continue to move as a battle unit. It was the pulse of a machine built for slaughter, a brutal symphony conducted by Branek's guttural commands. Rain lashed down, turning the churned earth into a crimson slurry.
Kael remained at the precise center of the shield-wall's origin point, a dark fulcrum. He didn't join the grinding advance. His role wasn't the press; it was the pivot, the unwavering point of command. His masked head turned slowly, constantly assessing. He saw Darvik, teeth bared in a snarl, holding the left flank steady against a determined knight's hammer blows, Lorik seamlessly bracing him. He saw Varek, spear retracting slick with gore before darting forward again through the next gap. He saw Oren take a glancing blow from a mace on his shield rim, grunting but holding firm. A flicker of movement high in the trees, Fen's crank-bow leveled, tracking a knight trying to flank. Kael raised two fingers, a silent signal. Fen shifted his aim. TWANG. A knight crumpled with a bolt in his back.
Half the Vaelorian knights were down, skewered, trampled, or writhing in the mud. The initial shock had worn off, replaced by desperate fury. They were elite warriors, trained for open battle, duels, not this grinding, shield-choked hell. They tried to rally, to break the wall with concentrated force. A knot of three knights slammed their shields against the Thrygond line, heaving with desperate strength.
Kael's hand swept down in a sharp, decisive chop. Break formation. Engage.
"Huu!"
Branek bellowed, but the command held a different timbre now, release.
The shield-wall didn't retreat; it detonated. Twelve shieldmen didn't just step back; they dropped their shields with a synchronized crash, freeing their right hands. In the same motion, they drew the light, sturdy swords strapped across their backs, blades designed for brutal efficiency in close quarters, not finesse. The sudden absence of the wall was almost as shocking as its appearance. The compressed space between the forces vanished.
Chaos, beautiful and terrible to the Thrygond way of war, erupted.
Branek was the first storm. A guttural roar tore from his throat, raw and primal. He didn't sidestep the knight surging towards him; he met the charge head-on. His warhammer, a blur of dark iron, swept upwards in a brutal arc. It caught the knight's raised sword arm just below the elbow guard. CRACK-SHATTER. Bone and plate exploded. The knight screamed, arm hanging useless. Branek's momentum carried him through. He pivoted, the hammer's spiked back swinging down like a meteor. It connected with the knight's helm. CRUNCH. The scream cut off. The body dropped like a sack of rocks. Before the first body hit the mud, Branek was already turning, hammer whirling in a low sweep that shattered a second knight's knee. As the man fell, Branek reversed his grip and drove the hammer's pointed tip down through the knight's gut with a sickening punch. Two kills in as many heartbeats, executed with terrifying, economical brutality.
Kael moved like shadow given purpose. He flowed into the gap left by the shields, reaching over his shoulder for the long, straight greatsword strapped across his back. It came free with a soft, deadly whisper, unadorned, brutally functional, but wielded in his hands like a blade half its weight. The steel should have dragged with gravity, required space to swing, but in Kael's grip it moved as if gravity deferred to him. There was no strain in the motion, no hesitation in the draw. His body knew the sword the way a predator knows its claws.
He didn't announce himself; he simply was death. A knight, turning to face the new threat, found Kael already inside his guard. The Thrygond commander's blade licked out, a viper-strike, slipping beneath the rim of the knight's breastplate, angling upwards with bone-piercing force. A sharp gasp, cut short. The knight staggered, clutching his side, dark blood welling between his fingers. Kael was already gone, a dark ripple through the melee.
He engaged a second knight, this one wary, shield up. Kael's greatsword flickered, not lumbering or telegraphed, but swift and deceptive, guided with precision rather than brute force. A feint high, then a blindingly fast low cut that severed the tendons behind the knight's ankle. The sword hissed as it swept through the gap like a scalpel through flesh. As the knight collapsed, howling, Kael stepped over him, his boot coming down hard on the fallen man's sword hand, crushing fingers against the pommel with a crunch of bone and metal. The knight's cry turned to a shriek. Kael's blade descended in a short, precise arc, piercing the knight's throat just above the collar. He moved on before the body settled, motion continuous, uninterrupted.
His third opponent was larger, wielding a heavy two-handed axe, the kind that demanded brute strength just to lift. The knight saw Kael coming and swung with bone-crushing force. Kael didn't block; he flowed with the swing, stepping inside its arc, impossibly close. The axe whistled past his back as he entered the knight's blind zone. His left gauntlet slammed into the knight's visor, not to hurt, but to blind, to disorient, to own the next breath. At the same moment, his greatsword drove straight forward, point aimed with lethal precision at the narrow gap between breastplate and fauld. The tempered steel punched through mail and padded jack with almost casual finality, like a pin through parchment.
The axe-man froze, a look of profound surprise visible even through the slit in his helm. He coughed, a gout of blood spraying the inside of his visor. Kael withdrew the blade with a twist, shoving the dying man aside as if he weighed nothing, already scanning for the next threat. There was no strain in his shoulders, no pause to reset his stance. He handled the greatsword as others might a longsword, his speed and control at odds with the blade's brutal size.
Three knights down, extinguished with chilling efficiency. He was the sword itself made flesh, the inevitable consequence of crossing his path. The sword wasn't his burden; it was his sentence.
The dual-sword wielders were whirlwinds of steel. Riven darted through the fray, her blades weaving a shimmering net of death. She parried a clumsy overhead chop from one knight, spun low, and hamstrung him with one blade while driving the other up under his arm into his ribs. She pirouetted away as he fell, already engaging another. The third swordsman, a taciturn veteran named Jor, fought with economical savagery, using one blade to bind an opponent's weapon while the other sought the kill stroke, throat, armpit, back of the knee.
The shieldmen, freed from the wall, fought with the ferocity of cornered wolves, their lighter swords flashing in brutal, hacking arcs, exploiting the weaknesses in plate armor they'd learned through the shield gaps. Spearmen used their longer weapons to keep multiple enemies at bay or finished off the wounded with swift, merciless thrusts. The air filled with the cacophony of battle, the clash of steel, the wet thuds of impacts, the grunts of effort, the screams of the dying, the drumming rain, and Branek's periodic, guttural roars.
Amidst this controlled frenzy, Ireth moved. Not towards the thickest fighting, but with lethal grace towards the four survivors pressed against the muddy slope. Her path was direct; a silent arrow loosed towards its target. She flowed around clashes, a shadow slipping between the rain and violence. She had sheathed her weapons, but her hands hovered near the hilts, ready.
As she moved, the screams, the scent of blood and mud, the cold rain on her face… it triggered the ghosts. The past, the history, the pain, the horror.
The darkness wasn't absolute. Flickering lamplight danced on wet, striated rock. The air tasted thick with dust, sweat, and the metallic tang of fear. Ten years old, barefoot on sharp shale, Ireth clutched the frayed hem of her father's tunic. He was arguing with the Overseer, voice strained, pointing at the timber braces overhead. "...cracks widening, Ser Kaelen! Listen! The mountain groans! We need more timber, stronger! The vein isn't worth… "
The Overseer, face pinched with disdain beneath his clean helm, backhanded her father. "You dig, miner. Or you starve. The quota stands."
Her father stumbled back, hand to his bleeding lip. His eyes met Ireth's, filled with a despair that chilled her more than the mine's cold. He picked up his pickaxe. The groaning intensified, a deep bass note vibrating through the stone beneath their feet. Then came the sound, a splintering crack, louder than thunder, directly above them. Her father screamed one word: "RUN!" He shoved her violently backwards, towards the tunnel mouth.
She ran, small legs pumping, terror lending wings. Behind her, the world collapsed. A roaring, grinding avalanche of rock and timber. A final, choked cry from her father swallowed by the tumult. She was hurled forward by the concussion, skidding across the rough stone into blessed daylight. She scrambled up, coughing dust, turning back towards the mine entrance just as the dust cloud billowed out, thick and choking. The entrance was gone. Sealed. The Overseer stood nearby, dusting off his tunic, his face impassive. He saw her. Saw the recognition, the raw accusation in her eyes.
"Little rat survived," he muttered. He gestured to two guards. "Silence it. Can't have scavengers spreading panic."
They grabbed her. She fought, biting, scratching, a wild thing. One backhand sent stars across her vision. The other grabbed her thin arm. She heard the sickening crack before she felt the white-hot agony. Her scream was cut short by a fist to her mouth. They dragged her away from the mine entrance, past the gathered, stunned miners who looked away. They threw her into a slag gully, a pit filled with sharp, discarded rock and the acrid smell of chemical runoff. "Let the mountain have its due," the Overseer said, peering down at her. She cradled her shattered arm, whimpering, the world a blur of pain and despair. Darkness crept in.
Cold. So cold. And pain, a white-hot fire in her arm, radiating through her small body. Hunger gnawed like a rat. Thirst parched her throat. How long? Days? She drifted in and out, the line between waking nightmare and fevered sleep blurred. The slag gully was her tomb. She heard scavenger birds circling. Smelled her own festering wound. She wanted the darkness to take her, to end it.
Then, a shadow blocked the weak sun. Not a bird. A figure, tall and lean, wrapped in worn leathers, standing on the gully's edge. A face hidden beneath a hood, but eyes… grey, sunless, intense. He didn't speak. He simply climbed down, boots crunching on the slag. He knelt beside her, his movements deliberate, unhurried. From a pouch, he pulled a small, hard biscuit. He broke off a piece, held it to her cracked lips. She was too weak to refuse, too desperate. It was stale, gritty, but it was life. He gave her water from his skin, carefully trickling it into her mouth. Then, with surprising gentleness, he examined her broken arm, his touch light but firm. He fashioned a crude splint from a piece of timber and strips torn from his own cloak. The pain was excruciating, but he worked with a quiet competence that instilled a fragile sense of safety. He lifted her, cradling her broken body against his chest, and climbed out of the gully. He carried her to the outskirts of the nearest village, to a healer known for discretion. He placed silver coins he could ill afford into the healer's hand. "Fix her." Two words, graveled and final. Then he was gone.
Ireth drifted in a haze of pain and herbs for days. When she finally woke clear, the healer told her the hooded man had paid for her care but vanished. Hope, a fragile seedling, withered. She was alone again. Broken. An orphan marked by the mountain's cruelty. She stayed at the healer's, helping with chores, learning the names of herbs, her arm healing stiff and weak. The memory of the hooded man's eyes, the unexpected mercy, was an ember in the cold ash of her world.
Two days later, as dusk painted the peaks in blood-red, he returned. He stood in the healer's doorway, the hood thrown back now. His face was younger than she remembered, but etched with a hardness that belied his years. Scars mapped his jawline and forehead. His grey eyes found hers, held them. He didn't ask how she was. He simply said, his voice the same low gravel, "The mountain takes. It breaks. It discards. It thinks it wins." He paused, his gaze unwavering. "I am building something else. A place for the broken. A shield against the mountain's indifference. A purpose forged in fire, not futility. Will you hold a sword for it?"
He held out his hand. Not offering pity. Offering a blade. Offering belonging. Offering vengeance against a world that discarded the weak. Ireth, ten years old, her arm still bound, her heart a scarred battlefield, looked at his hand. She saw not just salvation, but a path. A way to turn her brokenness into a weapon. She placed her small, good hand in his. It was cold, rough, strong. She didn't speak. She nodded.
Kael Thorne's grip tightened. He pulled her to her feet. "Then learn to fight."
*****
The memory, sharp as her blades, faded as Ireth reached the base of the muddy slope. The four survivors, the young woman, the grizzled knight, the fierce woman, and the younger one were huddled together, weapons raised, eyes wide with shock, exhaustion, and the dawning horror of their own people's betrayal. They were ringed by the bodies of knights Ireth's comrades had cut down before the shield-wall formed, a grim testament to their desperate fight.
Ireth stopped a few paces away, rain plastering strands of dark hair to the savage scar running from her lip to her chin. Her pale grey eyes, devoid of warmth but sharp with assessment, swept over them. She didn't draw her blades. She simply stood, a silent, lethal barrier between them and the remnants of the battle still raging a dozen yards away, where Branek's hammer rose and fell with wet, final thuds, and Kael's dark form moved like death incarnate. The message was clear; You are safe. For now. By our will.
Elira met Ireth's gaze, the terror in her eyes slowly hardening into something else, a desperate, haunted recognition. She saw not just a rescuer, but a reflection. Another survivor pulled from the slag heap of someone else's war. Her knuckles were white on her sword hilt; the blade still stained with Vaelorian blood. Her breath came in ragged gasps, each one a silent scream echoing the destruction of her world and the terrible choice she'd just made on this rain-lashed slope. The nightmare wasn't over. It had just found new players on a darker, greener stage. And Kael Thorne's soldiers, forged in ice and fire, had just irrevocably stepped onto the board.
*****
The final, wet thud of Branek's hammer silencing the last struggling knight echoed unnervingly loud in the sudden quiet. The relentless drumming of rain on leaves, on mud, on cooling plate armor, rushed in to fill the void left by screams and clashing steel. The unnatural violence below the ridge was over, replaced by the heavy, heaving breathlessness of the victors.
Kael Thorne stood for a moment longer amidst the carnage, a dark statue slicked with rain and other men's blood. Then, with deliberate, unhurried movements, he walked towards a small, moss-covered boulder near the base of the slope, away from the worst of the churned, crimson mud. He reversed his grip on the greatsword, its blade gleaming dully even under the grey sky, and drove the point deep into the soft earth beside the rock with a soft, final shunk. He lowered himself onto the boulder, the dark iron of his wolf-skull helm turning slowly as he surveyed the tableau.
His soldiers moved like ghosts emerging from a nightmare. The disciplined ferocity that had made them a single, terrifying organism dissolved, replaced by individual exhaustion and the dawning awareness of pain. The air filled with the ragged symphony of their breathing, harsh gasps, low groans, the wet rattle of lungs clearing blood or rain.
Branek leaned heavily on his warhammer, its head buried in the mud beside a shattered helm. His massive chest heaved, steam rising faintly from his singed arm and shoulders in the cold rain. A deep gash, unnoticed in the fury, wept crimson down his left bicep, staining his leather vambrace dark. He stared at it, then spat a glob of phlegm and blood onto the ground, his expression unreadable beneath his beard.
Darvik sat abruptly on a fallen log, dropping his dented yew shield with a thud. He pulled off his iron-bound glove, revealing knuckles split and bleeding from the relentless press of the shield-wall and the frantic close-quarters fighting that followed. He prodded at the raw flesh, his face grimacing. Beside him, Lorik leaned against a tree trunk, pressing a hand to his ribs where a sword slipped past his shield rim, denting his brigandine and leaving a deep, painful bruise. He breathed shallowly.
Varek, the spearman, leaned on his long-hafted weapon like a staff, head bowed, rain streaming off his helm. He coughed, a wet, raw sound. Oren checked the rim of his shield, where a sword blow had bitten deep into the iron binding, his expression one of weary assessment. Garv helped Rusk bind a shallow cut on his forearm, their movements slow, practiced, devoid of chatter.
They moved through the aftermath, these ice-hardened exiles, not with jubilation, but with a profound, bone-deep weariness. They salvaged arrows from corpses, checked their comrades and avoided looking too long at the Vaelorian dead. There was no understanding here, only the heavy, shared feeling that had propelled them down the ridge; the recognition of prey, the stench of betrayal, the cold certainty that turning away would have been a death of their own making. The massacre they had caused lay heavy on the sodden ground, a question mark written in blood and mud.
Kael remained on the boulder, a dark fulcrum in the grey rain. His masked face was tilted slightly down, gaze fixed on nothing, or perhaps everything, the churned earth, the cooling steel, the exhausted postures of his men, the haunted eyes of the survivors Ireth guarded. He saw the cost, the risk, the undeniable step into a conflict they didn't comprehend. He saw the echo of Gorgath Pass in the woman's terror, the reflection of Ireth's past. Minutes stretched, filled only by the rain and the ragged breaths of his soldiers.
Finally, Kael stirred. He lifted his head, the movement deliberate. His voice, when it came, cut through the rain and exhaustion, low, graveled, carrying the weight of command without needing volume.
"Salvage."
Heads turned towards him.
"Plate. Undamaged. Helmets. Gauntlets. Take what we can carry, what we can use." A practical order, born of harsh necessity. Scavenging was survival. Then came the modification, the symbolic act. "The crests. Remove them. Every sunburst. Scrape them clean."
He paused, his gaze sweeping over his weary pack. "Mark them with our sigil. Use the sword." He gestured towards the greatsword buried tip-first beside him. The wolf, their sigil, their identity, forged in exile and ice, now claimed on Vaelorian steel.
His attention shifted to the immediate needs. "Wounded. See to them. Use the healing items given by Sylvaran." He named them, acknowledging their hurts, however minor. "The rest. Shelter. This ridge offers some lee. Use the Sentinel boughs, the ferns. Make it dry. Firewood. Hunt. Traps. We need meat. Warm food."
His masked face turned towards the huddled group under Ireth's watchful gaze. "For them too. Porridge. Meat broth if you get it. Something hot. They look half-drowned and starved. Ireth."
Ireth's head snapped up.
"Check them. Injuries. Hidden wounds. See they get dry cloaks if we have spares." His orders were concise, covering survival, recovery, and the fragile safety of the rescued. The pragmatic care of a commander who understood shock and exposure as well as blade wounds.
The soldiers moved, the inertia of exhaustion slowly overcome by ingrained discipline and the familiar rhythm of post-battle tasks. The clang of gauntlets being pried off dead knights, the scrape of dagger points meticulously defacing the Vaelorian sunbursts on breastplates, the softer thunk of a sword tip etching a crude, angular wolf symbol in its place, began to punctuate the rain. Shieldmen gathered fallen branches, spearmen checked snares, Branek grumbled but began directing the construction of a rough lean-to against the ridge face, using giant fern fronds and thick, waxy Sentinel leaves.
Kael watched the activity for another long moment, the greatsword a silent sentinel beside him. Then, he pushed himself off the boulder. He didn't retrieve the sword yet. He walked across the churned, blood-streaked mud, his steps steady, purposeful, ignoring the carnage he stepped over or around. He approached the small group sheltered near the slope, where Ireth stood guard and the four survivors, Elira, the grizzled knight, the fierce woman, the younger one, watched him with a mixture of residual terror, dazed exhaustion, and wary disbelief.
He stopped a few paces away, the rain sheeting off his wolf-skull helm and scarred pauldrons. His masked face regarded them, unreadable. The silence stretched, filled only by the drumming rain and the distant sounds of his soldiers working.
Then, Kael Thorne spoke, his voice a low rumble that cut through the downpour and the echoes of violence, carrying a simple, profound assurance:
"You are safe now."
*****