The Crossing
The Blackwood swallowed sound, a living entity.
Renn pushed through the underbrush, his breathing shallow, knife clutched so hard his knuckles were white. The twelve volunteers fanned out around him in loose order—Jarek at point, scar-browed Finn covering their rear, Sera with bow already strung, ready for anything but what was heading their way.
They'd walked three hours, and the forest had become increasingly dark. Not from lack of sunlight—it was still afternoon—but from something else. Something that raised the hairs on Renn's neck, a tingling feeling that shouted danger.
"This doesn't feel right," Sera breathed, her jaw clenched. "It's too quiet. Where are the birds?"
Jarek halted with a fist. Everyone stayed frozen.
The gray beard of the old scout shook as he inhaled the air with a sniffing dog's sense of scent. His weathered, scarred face of decades of survival twisted with something akin to confusion and primal, instinctive terror.
"Blood," he whispered, his words hardly audible. "Old blood. Days old. Plenty of it."
Renn's gut grew cold. The world seemed to lean to one side. "The prisoners?"
"Forward. By the river crossing." Jarek's gaze had narrowed, focusing on the darkness between stands of ancient oaks. "But something else as well. Metal. Oil. Horses that have just gone through."
"An ambush," Finn whispered, and in the two words, Renn felt the whisper of death coming.
Before anyone could speak—before anyone could even comprehend what it meant—the forest blew up.
Arrows hissed through the canopy with the hiss of a thousand serpents, not mad shots screaming in terror but controlled volleys from concealed archers who had taken position with military discipline. Two volunteers fell at once, one with an arrow through the throat that silenced his scream before it was uttered, the other screaming as metal punched into his thigh, snapping bone.
The others fled, but there was no place to flee to.
Out of the darkness rode armored knights—twenty at least, perhaps more, their full plate blindingly white in the forest shadows, swords already bloody with blood that could not possibly be their own. The soldiers advanced with disciplined speed, creating a cordon, severing all avenues of escape with deliberate precision.
He led them, Ser Kaelen, his white-feathered helm visible even from afar, his sword singing its way free of its scabbard with the clarity of a death knell.
"Run!" Jarek shouted, but there was no place to go. The knights had pinioned them with the skill of a master tracker baiting a trap. Forest on either side too dense to get through, river rapids at their backs foaming white and deadly, steel in front with no place to go.
A trap. A flawless, perfectly crafted trap.
They'd walked into it like idiots behind their own executioners.
....
The Slaughter
Kaelen moved as if death itself, a creature of nature that could not be contained—only endured.
His blade removed Jarek's head before the old scout even had time to draw his own. The corpse fell like a cut puppet, blood spurting in a red arc that stained the forest floor bright red, and the volunteers' training dissolved entirely, becoming raw primal fear.
Some attempted to resist. Finn charged forward with a scream that desperation had ripped from his throat, knife glinting in the fading light—Kaelen dodged aside with a relaxed ease, his movements economical and precise through centuries of training. He allowed Finn to stumble past him, then struck his blade into the boy's back with the offhand confidence of a man brushing an insect away. Finn collapsed face-first onto the earth and didn't shift again.
Others bolted for the river. Arrows intercepted them before they hit the water, cutting with awful precision. Bodies plunged into the current, staining the rapids pink, then red, then rust-color.
Renn was paralyzed, his eyes on his friends—men and women who'd believed in him, followed him, trusted him—dying in an instant. The screams were far away, muted, as if he were underwater, as if any of this was happening but not really.
And then Sera reached out and caught his arm. "Move!" she spat, her words slicing through his shock like a razor. "Move, or we die here!"
They moved.
The forest was a hell of darkness and blood, branches slapping at their faces, leaving crimson lines. Sera moved ahead with the senses of one born to the wild, cutting through paths Renn couldn't see, moving between trees like smoke, her feet hardly disturbing the ground.
But the knights did pursue. Disciplined. Patient. Wolves hunting certain of their prey.
"They're herding us," Sera panted as they climbed up a rocky incline, her lungs raw. "Driving us somewhere. This isn't random—they're deciding where this goes."
Renn glanced over his shoulder. Through the trees, he saw armored men advancing in formation, blocking off escape paths with geometrical precision, driving them north to a destination decided upon.
They crested the rise and halted. His breath seized in his throat.
.....
The Hanging Fields
Down there, in a glade along the river, were the prisoners.
Or what remained of them.
Corpses swayed from every tree like obscene fruit. Dozens of them, deliberately arrayed. Men and women and children—the villagers the duke had vowed to slay at sunset. They'd died days before, flesh already bloating, crows pecking at exposed bone, stench of rot so thick Renn retched.
Some of the bodies were identifiable. An elderly woman from the village bazaar, her graying hair still braided. A blacksmith Renn had known, his huge body now shriveled and destroyed. Children. Too many children, their bodies too short for the ropes.
Renn dropped to the ground, bile churning in his stomach, the world reeling. His eyes went white around the edges.
They'd never once had a chance to save anyone. This whole mission had been an act from the start, a play written on their deaths.
"Gods," Sera breathed, her bow slipping from numb hands. "Gods, we were fools. We walked right into it."
Behind them, the sound of footsteps crunching over dead leaves. Slow. Deliberate. The footsteps of a hunter collecting his kill.
Kaelen stepped out of the forest, his armor splattered with blood, moving like a man whose life's aim was to kill others. Four knights accompanied him, swords bared, moving with coordinated precision. The others, Renn figured with cold horror creeping up his limbs, were likely killing off the survivors in the woods, ensuring that no one escaped to warn Lioran.
"You see now," Kaelen told her. Not mocking. Not cruel. Almost with sympathy, as if he actually felt remorse for what had to be done. "Your Dragon Lord sent you to save dead men. He exercised mercy instead of sense, and this is the cost of mercy. This is what occurs when emotion trumped strategy."
"You killed them," Renn hissed, discovering his voice somewhere in the rubble of his temper. "Children. Innocent children. You killed them in cold blood."
"The duke killed them," Kaelen replied, his voice practical. "I merely. didn't intervene. There is a distinction, though I suppose it's hard to see." He stopped, regarding Renn with white eyes that contained no hostility, only calculation. "But you have to get something, boy. Your master isn't some moral savior battling oppression. He's fire in flesh form, and fire burns everything it touches. Even—especially—those who care for it most. That's not cruelty. That's just the nature of fire."
Sera had slipped out her bow, her actions fluid and conditioned. She drew in one single motion, as quick as lightning, and let go of the arrow.
It knocked one knight out of the eye slit with the sound of shattering glass. He fell gurgling, blood streaming from the slit.
And then Kaelen moved.
Sera had only a moment to scream before his sword slit her throat from ear to ear. She fell, blood pumping between her fingers as she strained desperately, horribly to keep herself intact. Her bow dropped beside her, the arrow still in the string.
"No!" Renn flung himself, pure emotion trumping sense, pure instinct trumping reason—but Kaelen seized him by the throat and heaved him up from the ground with one hand as if he were no heavier than a feather.
"I could kill you," the knight whispered, his voice nearly sorrowful. "Should kill you, in fact. But I won't."
He hurled Renn to the earth at the foot of one of the suspended trees, the blow forcing the air out of his body.
"Return to your Dragon Lord. Report what you discovered here. Report that his mercy murdered all of these people." Kaelen's voice was soft but it held a tone of unshakeable certainty. "And report that I am on my way. When the boy and I next meet, only one of us will leave. No tricks. No magic. No dragons. Steel and fire, and we'll see which of those prevails. Tell him that."
He started to turn away, then stopped, looking back.
"One more thing. Look up."
Renn looked upwards, though every part of him wanted to turn and run the other way.
Among the bodies swaying in the trees, one face was familiar. Younger than he recalled. Starved-down thinner. But unmistakable.
His sister.
The sister he'd promised himself was safe, far to the south, in a cottage with kind people, living a quiet life. The sister he'd abandoned when he'd gone off to fight for the Flamebound, adventure and purpose over his kin. The sister who'd been right here all along, among the duke's hostages, something he'd never even realized he held as bargaining power.
She hung like meat, rope digging into her neck, three arrows stuck in her back. Crows had already begun on her eyes.
Something within Renn snapped. Not figuratively. Literally snapped, like a bridge giving way, like a dam bursting apart.
His scream boomed through the Blackwood, raw and animal and absolutely shattered, a noise that didn't seem capable of emerging from a human throat. Even Kaelen winced at it, breaking stride.
.....
The Long Walk Home
Renn walked back to Blackspire alone.
He'd covered Sera's body with his cloak, had carried her for an hour before his energy failed him and his sorrow became too much for even his body to support. He'd abandoned her under an ancient oak, marked the tree so he could come back and bury her properly. Assuming he lived. Assuming any of them lived. Assuming the world still existed.
The forest around him was still. No birds sang. No insects buzzed. Only his footsteps and the rough sound of his breathing, the sound of a boy moving away from everything he had been.
He'd covered Sera's body with his cloak, walked for an hour before his energy failed and his sorrow became too much for even his body to carry. He'd left her under an ancient oak, tagged the tree so he could find her and bury her properly.
The rest were gone. All of them. Twelve had entered the Blackwood as his friends. One left as a husk, as a specter, as something in the form of Renn.
His hands were still trembling. His mind continued to relive the moment—his sister's face, puffy and destroyed, eyes hollow and vacant. He hadn't even realized she was in trouble. Hadn't thought to inquire. Had been too caught up playing soldier, chasing fire, believing legends rather than guarding family.
As the sun dipped into the setting horizon, he spotted smoke in the distance. Not campfires. Too intense. Too dark. The type of smoke that indicated burning corpses.
Blackspire was aflame.
Renn started to run.
....
Lioran's Descent
The gates of Blackspire had been open for three hours now, a scar on the fortress that would never heal.
Lioran had gone out first, cloak flowing behind him, Kyrris hobbling alongside him though his face twisted in pain that seemed to emanate from the dragon's shattered wing, the ember searing so fiercely in his breast that he could hardly breathe, hardly think. The rest of the Flamebound—fewer than twenty warriors, most injured, all desperate—had straggled after, shame and fear and something nastier compelling them onward.
The army of the duke had seen them arrive. Thousands of soldiers in formation, siege engines whining and lurching under their own weight, priests reciting their white-fire prayers in tongues older than human empires.
And Lioran smiled. A cold smile. A merciless smile.
"Roast them," he'd whispered to Kyrris. "Burn them all. Teach them what fire is."
What ensued was no battle. It was an slaughter.
Flames burst from Lioran's palms in deluges—not channels of controlled flame but raging, unbridled tides of fire that reduced the first three ranks to cinders before they could even bring up their shields. Kyrris, broken wing shattered and good for nothing but flying, still contrived to fly once more—low, swooping over the formations of the army, breath burning men into torches where they stood in formation.
The Flamebound slammed into the chaos, axes and swords glinting, and for an instant of glorious, ghastly triumph—a heartbeat of eterny—it seemed they might truly conquer against hopeless odds.
And the priests lifted their staves.
White fire fell from the heavens, pillars of divine ire that fell like stars, burning everything they touched. Men cried out, their bodies ignited not by flame but by light itself, burning from the inside out. The charge of the Flamebound wavered, shattered, dispersed like leaves before a hurricane.
Lioran was at the midst of it all, gray eyes burning red now like molten metal, the ember fully unleashed and clamoring for more blood, more death, more fire. He threw up both hands and yanked, drawing all the fire on the battlefield—cooking fires, torches, burning corpses of dying men—toward him like a lodestone to iron. The flames converge, enlarge, become a churning vortex of heat and killing.
"You desire fire?" Lioran's voice was no longer human. It vibrated, resonated, as if the voices of a thousand Dragon Lords before him spoke simultaneously from his throat, each of them speaking as one. "I will show you fire."
He pushed out both hands.
The world ignited.