The journey, for the most part, was unsettlingly uneventful.
The guards, faces etched with a perpetual alertness, remained vigilant, speaking little and sleeping in wary shifts. They traveled steadily by day, pushing the carriage through the sun-dappled and then increasingly shadowed roads, making camp each evening with a cautious efficiency. No one was eager to tempt the beasts that stirred in the deeper woods, nor the opportunistic bandits, or, worse still, the truly magical things that twisted and whispered into being after dark.
By the third day, the initial tension, thick as unchurned butter, had begun to thin, dissipating slightly with the monotony of the road. The men, their faces now streaked with road dust and growing stubble, had grown more relaxed, their rough banter returning in cautious, hushed bursts.
Then came the rain.
It began as a soft, hesitant drizzle, then swelled into a steady, persistent downpour—unexpected, perhaps, but not unheard of in the strange, liminal cusp between late summer's lingering warmth and early autumn's creeping chill. The world blurred into shades of grey and damp green. The road, once merely dusty, dissolved into thick, cloying sludge, swallowing boots with a sickening suction. With a sharp crack, a wheel snapped clean off the carriage, its spokes splintering like dry bones. Travel halted abruptly. Tempers flared, sharp as flint, oaths escaping cursed lips as mud caked their boots and stained their worn cloaks.
Lux, meanwhile, sat quietly beneath the generous shelter of an old, gnarled pine, its needles a fragrant canopy, her attention elsewhere. She was fumbling at the very edges of mana again—grasping at invisible threads of energy like a child reaching for elusive light through murky water. She could feel it… a faint, almost intangible presence, but barely. Elusive. Slippery. Always just out of reach, dancing at the periphery of her senses. She chased it, a silent, internal struggle, utterly absorbed.
Then they came.
Robbers.
Or so they appeared at first glance, emerging from the rain-swept trees like phantoms.
But the captain of Lux's escort—a broad-shouldered man with coarse, dirt-brown hair and a face stitched with a jagged scar like a punctuation mark across his cheek—read them instantly, his eyes narrowing with a grim comprehension. These were not common thieves, driven by desperation or mere greed. Their gear was too fine, too well-maintained, gleaming faintly even in the dim light; their formation too clean, too practiced. They didn't move with the hungry, ragged desperation of men seeking a quick score. They moved with the chilling, coordinated precision of killers, driven by a deadline, by a motive far colder than coin.
"The gods must be with us today," one of the assailants drawled, dismounting with a casual grace. He had hair the color of bright straw, eyes of an unsettlingly vivid blue, and a smirk that curled his lips like he'd heard the punchline to a cruel joke long before the setup had even begun. His gaze flickered towards Lux, a predatory glint in its depths.
What followed wasn't a fight. It was an execution.
Steel clashed, a brief, brutal symphony of scraping metal. Screams rose, sharp and desperate, abruptly cut short. The air filled with the coppery tang of fresh blood, quickly diluted by the rain.
And when the stormclouds, both literal and metaphorical, cleared moments later, Lux stood alone, utterly untouched amidst the torn remnants of her escort. Guts, blood, and scattered pieces of armor soaked into the muck like grim, unholy offerings, the rain washing them into swirling patterns of dark crimson and brown. The silence that fell was thick and heavy, broken only by the steady patter of rain and Lux's own shallow breaths.
The assailants had taken a few sacks of coin. Some easy-to-carry valuables. Enough to make it convincingly look like a highway robbery. But not enough to truly weigh them down. Not enough to matter, not for their true objective.
The blond man, his blue eyes unsettlingly bright, looked at her once more, his gaze unreadable, a fleeting, dangerous flicker of something she couldn't quite decipher.
He didn't speak.
Just scoffed—a low, contemptuous sound, as if her very existence, standing there unharmed in the wreckage, somehow offended him on a deeply personal level—and turned away with a sharp flick of his reins. His mount, a powerful warhorse, plunged into the rain-thick trees, its hooves churning the mud.
He wasn't hungry. He wasn't greedy.
He knew who she was. That much was chillingly clear.
But unlike the others—the Duke, the Baron, the ones who saw her as a coin purse with scales, a prize to be traded or exploited—this one saw her as something else entirely.
A threat.
Then he was gone, his low, mocking laughter fading into the oppressive silence of the rain-thick trees, swallowed by the forest's ancient breath.
Lux stood amidst the chilling wreckage. The mud clung like a shroud to her boots, the metallic taste of iron bitter on her tongue, and the very air seemed to coalesce around her, thick with the scent of damp soil, fresh blood, the acrid tang of bile, and the subtle, cloying stench of conspiracy and political intrigue. A feeling rose in her chest, like thunder gathering in her lungs, a storm of fury ready to break.