"SUKI, PLEASE!!!"
Laura's voice tore me awake.
I jolted upright, clutching my sword, drenched in cold sweat.
A few meters away, Tsukumo slept with his back against a rock.
Closer to the remaining warmth of the fire, Havelyn rested.
Her wings were still immobilized beneath Sahger's tight bandages, and a blanket covered almost her entire body.
"Shit," I muttered, dragging a hand over my face.
"Soon, Laura."
I walked over to Havelyn. Her breathing was slow and steady, a drastic improvement compared to the first night after we escaped the tower.
Sahger wasn't by the fire.
I found him near the entrance to the ravine, sitting outside on a broad rock with his disassembled spear laid across his knees.
The helmet of his armor rested on the ground beside him.
He slowly ran a cloth along the weapon's green blade.
He didn't look up when I approached.
"You still owe me an answer," I said, breaking the silence.
The cloth continued sliding over the metal in a steady, almost hypnotic rhythm.
"I owe you several."
I stopped beside the rock, watching him.
His hand slowed slightly.
"I asked what made you different from those other hunters."
This time, Sahger stopped.
Several seconds passed before he finally raised his eyes to meet mine.
"And I answered."
"You said, 'Motive.'"
"So your memory works."
I sat on a nearby rock, ignoring his usual acidity.
"What's the motive?"
Sahger resumed cleaning the spear, his jaw tense.
"Do you always ask this many questions?"
"When someone only answers half of them, yes."
"Maybe I should start answering even fewer."
"That'll make it worse."
A low sound escaped through his nose.
We sat in silence for several seconds, accompanied only by the wind whistling through the darkness.
When Sahger spoke again, his attention remained fixed on the weapon in his hands.
"My mother taught me how to use a spear."
I looked at him, surprised.
I hadn't expected him to start there.
"The war priestess, right?"
"Yes."
His thumb traced a small mark along the shaft. Only then did I notice an inscription nearly worn away from the metal, buried beneath scratches and countless repairs.
"The priests of her order marched beside the soldiers. They didn't stay behind and wait for the battle to end."
"So they fought and treated the wounded at the same time. A way to keep the warriors going."
"When there were any left to treat."
The dry way he said it silenced me for a moment.
"My mother used to say there was no point learning twenty ways to open someone's body if you didn't know even one way to stop someone else from dying from the same wound," the hunter continued.
I looked back at the spear resting across his knees.
"Was it hers?"
This time, he took longer to answer.
"Part of it."
"What do you mean, part of it?"
"After a few centuries, a weapon stops being the same weapon."
He rotated the shaft, pointing to the place where the older metal joined a visibly darker material.
"I've replaced the shaft three times."
His finger moved farther along.
"The core twice."
Then it stopped at the base of the greenish blade.
"This is still original."
"Did she give it to you?"
His eyes never left the blade.
"No."
The wind blew harder, lifting a thin curtain of red dust.
"She left for a war when I was nine."
I waited for him to continue, but the hunter went completely silent.
He passed the cloth over the blade one more time.
"The spear came back without her."
The image formed in my mind with brutal clarity, heavy and unquestionable.
For the first time, Sahger's flawless control slipped, if only barely.
The spearhead caught what little reddish light reached us and gleamed in the dark.
"What war was it?" I asked.
Sahger gave a short laugh without a trace of humor.
"Depends who you ask. Some call it the War of Varsh."
His thumb brushed the metal again.
"Others call it the Siege of the Seven Moons."
"Some records say it was a rebellion. In others, the conflict doesn't officially exist at all."
I frowned.
"Ever been in a war, kid?" Sahger asked.
The only one that came to mind was the war for Elfhing's throne, when Arthur, Laura, and I had done everything we could to help Sillys.
But did that really compare to the kind of war Sahger was talking about?
"I think so," I said.
Silence swallowed us again until I broke it.
"You were left alone?"
I was trying to piece together his past.
Sahger turned toward me.
"Yes. I was taken in by a temple for war orphans, but I didn't stay long."
"Why?"
"Temples love orphaned children... until they discover what those children are."
He raised one hand.
A pale bluish glow appeared beneath the skin of his fingers, pulsing weakly for less than a second before vanishing completely.
"Your divine side," I said.
"My father was a god. I only found that out much later," he added as casually as if discussing the weather.
"Who was he?"
The hunter shrugged, utterly indifferent.
"On some planets, they called him the God of Bonds."
"Called him?"
"I never met the man. He's probably dead by now."
"When they discovered I was divine, they tried to kill me at the temple. I had to run."
"Where I was born, gods were always seen as tyrants. The main source of our suffering."
Sahger picked his helmet up from the ground and lightly tapped it to shake sand from the joints of the armor.
"And where do you run in a universe where you're seen as money and merchandise?"
"Divine children are worth a lot," I said, a bitter taste filling my mouth as the weight of that reality settled in.
His hand stopped over the helmet.
"You were sold?" I asked.
"A few times."
I stared at his hardened features, trying to reconcile the relentless warrior in front of me with the image of a child in chains.
"They captured you that many times?"
Sahger gave a dry sound through his nose and went back to scraping sand from the armor's metal joints.
"At first, yes. Later, I learned that in certain situations, it was easier to simply let myself be sold."
I frowned, confused.
"You gave yourself up on purpose?"
"When I had to."
The answer came with deeply unsettling ease.
"A slave caravan had food, water, and a fixed route."
"For a tired child alone, sometimes that was a better option than crossing an entire planet without knowing where the next meal would come from."
The cold pragmatism of it left me speechless for a moment.
"And then?"
Sahger clicked one of the armor plates back into place.
The metallic sound rang loudly through the silence of the night.
"Then I waited."
"Until I found out who had the keys."
My gaze remained fixed on him.
The bluntness with which he described his own survival was disturbing.
"Then I killed them."
"I stole food, documents, money... anything that could keep me alive for a few more weeks, and I freed the others."
"Then I disappeared."
"Changed your name," I guessed.
"Always."
The hunter looked back toward the vast darkness of the desert, as though he could see centuries of running hidden inside the dust carried by the wind.
"Sometimes I stayed free for months. Other times, years. But eventually someone always discovered what I was."
"Or I took the wrong job, or ended up captured again through sheer bad luck."
"And everything started over."
I clenched my jaw, feeling the weight of that miserable eternity settle over my own shoulders.
"How long did that last?"
"Four centuries."
"Four centuries surviving."
"I was a slave. Soldier. Smuggler. Prisoner. Guard. Thief."
There was no regret in his voice.
He was simply listing the facts of a life that had never given him much choice.
"The only thing that never changed was the absolute need to stay alive. That lasted until I'd gathered enough experience to stop running from hunters."
"And become one of them."
Sahger gave a short, dry laugh completely devoid of humor.
"Life enjoys that kind of joke."
"From hunted to hunter."
"It's harder to put a collar on someone," he said, his calloused hand settling calmly back over the spear shaft, "once they learn how to find the one holding the chain."
It sounded exactly like something he would say.
The corner of my mouth lifted.
"So you started hunting for money?"
"I started for food."
"And after that?"
"Money."
I glanced toward Havelyn, still asleep inside the ravine, oblivious to everything as she lay wrapped in blankets.
"And that's how you ended up learning about towers like the one in this desert."
"That wasn't the first prison of its kind I'd entered."
I waited patiently.
He knew I would.
"A long time ago," he began, his rough voice carrying an unusual softness, "I took a contract in another sector."
"Who was the target?"
"A man worth an extreme amount of money. Possibly a candidate for Messenger."
He rested his forearms on his knees and leaned forward.
"The pay was good. The facility was worse than that damned tower we found."
"Did you kill the target?"
"Yes."
Sahger looked back toward the empty camp.
"But what I found inside changed my life."
"I found someone who wasn't part of the contract."
I let the sentence hang in the cold predawn air while I considered the possibilities.
"A woman was imprisoned beneath the facility's drainage system."
"She tried to cave my head in with an iron bar."
A smile escaped me before I could stop it.
"Good first impression."
"She broke two of my fingers."
"She thought you were one of the guards."
"With that oppressive armor of yours, I can't blame her."
"I didn't wear this armor back then."
"I opened her cell."
He stared at his heavy hand for several seconds, opening and closing his fingers as though he could still feel the iron bar striking them.
"Maybe I looked at her and saw myself."
"She was divine too?"
"Yes. A lesser goddess, but pure-blooded."
"She tried to run from me after I got her out."
"She tried so many times I lost count, and I didn't even know why I kept looking after that woman."
"Eventually... she stayed."
I studied his hardened profile, feeling as though an enormous stretch of history was missing between those events.
"How long did that take?"
"Eleven years."
My eyes widened.
He rubbed his rough beard.
"Eventually, we stopped running in opposite directions, and I finally understood why I hadn't wanted to let her go."
The pieces began falling into place, from his age to the way he calculated the group's supplies.
"Your wife," I concluded.
He gave a slow nod.
"Now, yes. We have two daughters."
Without another word, Sahger slipped a hand beneath the thick breastplate of his armor.
He felt around against his chest and pulled something free.
It was a small, rough metal plate about the length of two fingers.
He held it out to me.
I took it, feeling the grooves carved into its surface.
Childish scratches crossed the metal, forming four crude stick figures: two larger ones and two much smaller figures in the middle.
One of the larger figures held a line that vaguely resembled an absurdly long spear.
"So that's what keeps you fighting. That's your motive."
"Yes."
The silence that settled between us carried none of the tension or the usual frozen wall Sahger kept around himself.
It was a strange kind of camaraderie.
Something genuinely new.
I took advantage of the lighter atmosphere to ask what really mattered.
"So they're safe now?" I asked, lowering my voice.
"They're hidden while I find a way out of this hell."
"Someone with my reputation isn't welcome anywhere outside the Obscure Galaxies."
His gaze returned to the unreachable line of the desert horizon.
"So that's why you're after the Messenger," I said, finally understanding the whole game.
"The money would be enough to disappear completely. Even in here."
Sahger nodded slowly.
"Yes."
"Buy documents that can never be traced. Pay for a clean route from one end to the other."
"Buy enough protection and anonymity that no governor, guard, or street rat decides in the middle of the night that one of my daughters is worth more sold to a brothel than breathing free."
"I just want to find a door my daughters can close at night without having to drag a blade or a piece of furniture behind it before they can sleep in peace."
I had no answer.
That confession crushed every assumption I'd made about him.
He didn't want wealth, gold, or power.
He wanted distance.
The greatest, most unreachable distance from everything we were willingly crossing in our hunt for the Messengers.
"And killing a Messenger can buy that kind of peace?" I asked.
"Maybe."
I looked toward Havelyn's motionless form.
Then toward Tsukumo, still resting perfectly still near the rocks of the ravine.
Finally, toward the darkness.
An idea began to take shape.
One that could change everything.
"What if you don't have to buy it?" I asked, straightening on the rock.
Sahger frowned beneath the unruly strands of hair.
"Explain."
"Lavinsk."
"When this search is over," I suggested, "take your family there."
The hunter studied me with his usual cold, assessing gaze.
"Do you rule Lavinsk?"
"No. Not even close."
"Then you can't offer me territory."
"But I can take you directly to the people who have the authority to decide that," I replied, meeting his critical stare without flinching.
"And I can put my name right beside yours when you ask them."
"Does your name mean anything there?"
I thought of Silver and Kânia.
Of the battles I'd fought beside Tsukumo.
Of the Queen.
I thought about everything I'd broken and repaired since leaving my village without understanding anything about the world beyond it.
"Today? Maybe not enough."
"But if we come back alive with Karana's daughter and Laura..."
I looked at him.
"My name will mean a lot more."
"And why would you do that for me?"
"Because you know more about this part of the universe than Tsukumo and I do, Sahger, and I know you're hiding something."
"Yesterday, during all that time over the map, you were far too quiet."
"I'm not going to pressure you."
"But think about it, Sahger. If there's something you know that can bring us closer to her, help me finish this."
"And afterward, we'll try to open that door for your daughters."
I touched his shoulder and stood.
Then I headed back toward the ravine.
Sahger didn't answer.
When I looked back one last time, he was no longer cleaning the spear.
The small metal plate was back in his hand.
Four badly drawn figures beneath the red light of the sky.
Sahger stared at them for a long time.