No one moved.
The beasts ringed the field, breathing hard. The enemy's last circle stood tight around their captains, shields locked, eyes wide. Smoke twisted up from broken wagons. The river whispered. And in the open space between both sides, a scarred bear as big as a cart stopped in front of Brennar.
The berserker was on one knee. His axe stood buried in the earth beside him because his hands had run out. Blood striped his arms to the elbow. Toren hovered half a step behind, sword down, white-gold glow fading thin around his shoulders.
The bear lowered its head until Brennar could feel its breath—hot, rank, wild. It would have taken only a lazy swipe to end him.
Brennar lifted his chin a little higher.
The paw came anyway.
It hit like a mallet. He flew, hit the ground, rolled twice, and ended up on his back with the sky spinning overhead. Pain flashed bright along his ribs. He laughed—short, broken. "That it?"
Toren took a step, fury in his face.
Brennar didn't look at him. "No," he said, flat as an order. "This one's mine."
The bear paced in a slow circle. It wasn't a man. It didn't smirk. It didn't test with words. It tested with weight. It came again.
Brennar pushed to his feet before the paw landed, got both forearms up, and let the blow drive him back three sliding strides. He caught a fistful of coarse fur with his right hand, the bear's shoulder under his palm hot as a forge, and slammed his forehead into the ridge of its brow.
Stars burst in his own eyes. The bear's head rocked. It did not go down.
Good, Brennar thought. Otherwise it wouldn't be mine.
The next hit turned him sideways. Claws raked his shoulder, not deep, but enough to sting and wake every tired fiber. He laughed again, because only two sounds lived at the edge where a man breaks—laughter and a scream—and he wasn't going to give the bear the wrong one.
"Come on then," he growled, spitting blood. "Again."
It obliged. Paw, shoulder, weight, a shove like a collapsing wall. Brennar planted his feet and shoved back with everything left. He knew this language. Every village brawl, every raid, every time he'd stood alone in a door while wolves paced. Strength is not a trick. It is simple, the way a tree is simple. You either stand, or you don't.
The bear twisted, and they went down together in a tangle of limbs and snarls, earth buckling under them. Brennar got an elbow under its throat for a breath, then lost it. The bear's chest pressed his ribs. The world narrowed to hot breath, wet fur, dirt in his teeth. He punched. The bear didn't seem to mind. It pushed harder. Claws found his mail and hammered through links until they bit skin. His vision stuttered at the edges.
"Brennar!" Toren's boots pounded closer.
"Back!" Brennar barked, the word ripping his throat. He didn't say please. He didn't say trust me. He could not say more because the bear's weight had cut his breath to a thin wire. He planted both hands against the beast's chest and pushed. Nothing moved.
Something in him moved.
It started as a spark where breath met heat. Not magic. Not a new thing. The oldest thing he owned. He had carried it across winters and wounds and a thousand dawns when getting up and lifting the axe was the only prayer he had. He had always called it stubbornness. Some men called it rage. Tonight it felt like a banked fire finally given dry wood.
Crimson light bled up through his skin.
It ran his veins in thin lines. It filled his chest. It curled off his forearms in licks and flares that did not burn him. The bear's eyes, black and patient, caught that red and reflected it back. Its weight shifted. It did not climb off him. It did not kill him. It settled deeper, as if to say then show me.
Brennar roared.
It wasn't a word. It wasn't even anger. It was the sound a man makes when he decides his body will do one more impossible thing. The roar met the bear's rumble and for a breath the two sounds were one.
He pushed.
The bear rose an inch. Then another. Brennar got a knee under him, then a foot, then both feet. The world swam red and hot. The bear's claws traced his sides and left fire in four lines. He stood anyway, every tendon in his neck like a bowstring. He was not stronger than a bear. No man is. He did not need to be stronger. He needed to be a man the bear could not put down.
"Is that all?" he rasped. His mouth was copper. His eyes were bright.
The bear's ears flicked forward. It huffed once, a heavy sound that stirred Brennar's hair. Then it stepped back.
The circle of enemies shifted. A spear point dipped. Somewhere a man swore a small, frightened prayer.
The bear lifted one massive paw and set it—slowly, carefully—against Brennar's chest.
Not a blow. A weight.
Brennar did not move.
The weight grew. The paw covered his heart. Claws rested against his ribs without biting. The pressure sank like a stone pressed into mud. Heat ran through cloth, through skin, through bone. The crimson in Brennar's veins answered, brightening, threads of light rising to meet the press like roots reaching for water.
Brennar's breath came easier, not harder.
He could feel it then—not words, not thoughts—just a shape, an old shape, the way mountains have a shape and rivers do. Endurance. Winter sleep. Spring hunger. A promise that did not need saying: I stand. Do you?
He stood.
The paw pressed harder. The red in him flared until it seemed to color the air itself. The bear leaned, not to crush, but to share weight. Brennar's legs shook, then steadied. He set his palm on the thick fur above the creature's wrist.
"Alright," he said softly, like a man talking to a stubborn door. "Alright, old one. Let's carry it together."
The bear drew its paw away.
Light bridged the space for a heartbeat—a spill of motes like ember sparks rising—and then ran down Brennar's arm in a slow flood, into the scar of his shoulder, across his ribs, through him. It did not enter like a blow or a knife. It settled, like a heavy cloak thrown over cold shoulders. It made no sound, and yet the field heard something—a low note, deep as earth.
The bear did not vanish. It stepped aside and stood at his back, close enough that he could feel the heat of it through the wash of air. The two shapes—man and beast—threw one shadow.
Brennar lifted his head.
He was not taller by much. Not at all, perhaps. But he felt too big for the skin he had worn an hour ago. Muscle swelled hard under cuts that no longer bled. The ache in his elbows and shoulders faded to a working burn. His fingers closed on the axe haft without effort. It came free of the earth with a sound like a root tearing loose.
The crimson in him no longer flickered. It ran steady, a low fire that lit the backs of his eyes. When he breathed out, the steam of it seemed darker than the air.
Rowan stared, mud drying on his cheek. "By the Hollow," he whispered.
Nyx's mouth was open and for once no words came out. Pan sat very still, ears forward.
Ari folded her empty bow across her chest and could only breathe. Lyra, far back, felt the sound of it hit her ribs like a drum and pressed a shaking hand there as if to hold the beat inside.
The enemy circle swayed.
A young raider near the edge dropped his sword. It hit his boot and he kicked at it twice like a man trying to free his foot from a snare, panic blinding him. Another man beside him sank to one knee without seeming to decide to, mouth moving around a prayer that had no god left in it. The captain in the dented helm snarled and cuffed him hard enough to rock his head. "Up! UP!" he shouted, voice cracking thin.
No one attacked. No one dared turn and run. Around the circle, wolves paced and did not blink.
Brennar rolled his shoulders once. The cut there should have made him groan. It did not. He looked down at his arms. His skin was his, scarred and dirty and lined with years—but beneath it, something else lay, a second weight, a second steadiness. He felt as if he could carry a door on his back for a mile and still have breath to argue about the hinge.
Toren stepped up beside him, blade lifted, white-gold now a clean ring around his forearms. He glanced at Brennar's face and grinned the grin of a young man seeing the world tilt in his favor for the first time. "What do we call him?" he whispered, eyes flicking to the bear at Brennar's back.
Brennar kept his gaze on the enemy captain. "We don't," he said. "He'll say it when he wants to be called."
The bear rumbled low. Brennar felt it in his sternum.
The Firebound took a step backward. One of them touched the amulet at his throat without seeming to know he was doing it. Heat still licked his hands, but it licked around fear now, leaving gaps. The other licked cracked lips and forced his chin up, face hard with pride that had no place to sit.
"Look at me," Brennar said, and he did not raise his voice. The captain's eyes came to him anyway, pulled like a nail to a magnet. The bear's breath washed across his shoulder, hot as a forge. "You marched people in chains through these trees. You burned the face off the land. You came to sell boys and girls for coin."
The captain set his jaw. "We came for order," he said, the words empty of anything but habit.
"Then this is your order," Brennar said.
The red brightened. It did not blaze. It did not need to. It deepened, the way a firebed deepens when you stir it with a stick and it shows you its heart.
Across the ring, men swallowed. One let his spear tip sink until it kissed the dirt.
Brennar lifted the axe.
It felt light. Not because it had changed, but because the thing holding it had. He swung once—not at a throat, not at a man—down into the earth in front of him. The ground jumped. A shallow crack ran forward like a line drawn with a knife.
No one missed what the line meant.
He stepped across it.
The enemy circle tightened, shields lifting with a clatter. The captain barked for courage with a voice that held none. Brennar walked until he stood close enough that he could see the sweat behind the captain's ears.
"Last chance," he said.
A few swords clattered down. A few knees bent. The captain's did not. He raised his shield and shoved forward with a shout. He had been brave all his life. It had kept him alive this long.
Brennar's axe took the shield in the center and ripped it open like wet bark. The man behind it staggered as if a horse had kicked him. Brennar did not press. He let the captain see him, see the eyes and the steadiness, see that this was not a trick of beasts or shadows or the river. This was a man who had decided to be too heavy to move.
Around the circle, doubt spilled like water through cracks.
"Rowan," Brennar said without turning. "Hold the river on their backs. If they try to run, they swim."
"Aye," Rowan said, voice hoarse.
"Ari," Brennar said. "If any lift a bow, make them think twice."
A dry, almost broken laugh. "I'm out," Ari said. Then, softer but with steel, "But I have stones."
"Good," Brennar said. "Stones hurt just fine."
"Nyx—"
"Already gone," came her whisper from somewhere that was not where it had been, shadow brushing the edges of men's feet like a cat.
"Toren," Brennar said last.
"Yes," the swordsman said, blade steady now, glow clean and bright.
"Stay on my right," Brennar told him. "When I push, you cut."
The bear's rumble filled the space behind those words. It said nothing that could be written, but everybody heard it.
Across the circle, a kneeling raider laid his sword down flat on both hands and slid it toward the mud as if giving it to the ground. Two more followed him. The Firebound on the left swallowed and took another half-step back. The one on the right straightened his spine until it creaked.
Brennar bared his teeth, all the kindness gone from his face now. The red under his skin pulsed once, slow.
"Now," he said softly, to no one and to everyone.
He took the first step forward. The bear moved with him. The ground seemed to brace itself.
Even the enemy who did not kneel felt it then—something old and heavy pressing down, not to crush, but to say enough.
A single sword clinked against the dirt. Then another.
The captain shouted, high and harsh, trying to hold a tide with his throat.
Brennar smiled, small and mean.
"Let's finish this."