Darkness.
Then—
"Navi. Get down from that tree."
"But I can see the whole island from up here, Grandpa—"
"Down. Now."
A sigh. Footsteps. Then a hand on his forehead, warm and heavy.
"When will you ever listen to me, kid…"
"Again."
"Grandpa I've done it fifty times—"
"Again."
The sword felt heavier every time. His arms burned. His legs gave out and he hit the dirt — face down, full weight, tasting soil and sweat.
Seraphiel laughed. Low and warm.
"Ha. Ha ha… you're exactly like your father."
Navi's eyes didn't open but something in him shifted. Reached.
"He was stubborn like you. Hated training. The only thing that boy ever wanted was to travel — see every island, every continent, every corner of the world."
Navi pushed himself up from the dirt in the memory, fast, eyes wide.
"Wait — can you tell me more? About him — please, Grandpa, you never—"
Seraphiel looked at him.
That look. Patient. A little sad. The one he only wore when he was deciding how much to give.
"…After training."
"Come on—"
"You've mastered the second style, Navi. But not the first."
"That doesn't make any sense and you KNOW it doesn't make any sense—"
"After. Training."
"Ugh—!"
The memory stretched. Blurred at the edges the way dreams do. Hours collapsed into a single image — the two of them moving through forms until the sky went orange and the shadows grew long and the sword finally felt like an extension of his arm instead of dead weight.
They sat together watching the sun sink into the sea.
Seraphiel was quiet for a while.
Then—
"I want you to be strong, Navi."
Not a command. Not a lesson.
Just that. Soft. Almost to himself.
"…I want you to be strong."
The memory shifted.
Darker now. The air wrong.
"Wait here."
"But Grandpa — I can help, just let me—"
"Wait. Here."
Seraphiel's voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It landed like a hand on the chest — firm, final.
"Please." A beat. "Listen to me. Just this once."
He was already turning toward the town. Below them, smoke was rising. Something massive moved between the buildings — something that made the ground shudder with each step.
Two men came running up the path. Breathless. Desperate.
"Maestro! We don't know where it came from — please — lend us the swords, we can help you fight—"
Seraphiel slowed for just a moment.
Then kept walking.
Three hours.
Navi sat at the edge of the trees and watched the smoke thicken and listened to sounds he couldn't name and told himself his grandfather was fine, his grandfather was always fine, his grandfather had killed fifty Likha at once and barely breathed hard—
I can't wait anymore.
He ran.
The closer he got the worse it was. Trees uprooted and snapped like kindling. Walls collapsed inward. Rooftops caved. The road was unrecognizable — rubble and splinters and things he didn't let his eyes rest on too long. A child crying over someone who wasn't moving. A woman sitting in the ash with her hands in her lap just staring. Survivors who looked up as he passed and their expressions weren't relief —
They were something colder.
He ran anyway.
Grandpa. Where are you. Grandpa.
He saw him from a distance and his legs almost stopped working.
Seraphiel was on one knee.
His sword was driven into the ground in front of him — point first, both hands wrapped around the hilt, using it to hold himself upright. His left arm was gone below the shoulder. His face was dark with blood. Around him, the largest Likha Navi had ever seen lay destroyed — pieces of it scattered across what used to be the town square — but the cost of it was written all over what remained of his grandfather.
"Grandpa—!!"
He hit the ground beside him. Both knees. Hands grabbing, searching, not knowing what to do with them.
"No — no no no — Grandpa — please—"
Seraphiel's eyes opened slowly.
He looked at Navi.
And he smiled.
That same smile. Warm. Unhurried. Like they were sitting under a sunset somewhere and everything was fine.
His mouth moved.
"…Don't look sad, kid."
His hands slipped from the sword.
He fell — and Navi caught him — and held him there in the middle of the ruined square while the smoke curled upward and the survivors watched from a distance and nobody came closer.
He stayed like that for a long time.
The darkness came back.
Then—
Huff.
He woke up reaching for something.
His arm was extended upward, fingers open, grasping at nothing. He stared at his own hand for a moment — the way you do when your body has done something your mind hasn't caught up to yet — then slowly let it fall.
He sat up.
His head swam. The world took a second to settle. He pressed a hand against his ribs, his chest, his side — checking without thinking about it — and found raised skin where the wounds had been. Scars. Still tender at the edges but closed.
He should be dead.
He didn't think about that yet.
He turned his head.
Ulap was there. On his side in the dirt, exactly where he'd fallen, exactly as Cameron's men had left him. The moonlight hadn't moved much. Eyes still open. Face still carrying that last confused expression — the one that hadn't had time to become anything else.
Navi looked at him for a long time.
The weight in his chest was enormous and shapeless. He pressed his hand against it like that would help. His eyes burned but nothing came — his body pulling in two directions at once, one half reaching toward grief and the other half holding firm out of something older than thought.
His jaw tightened.
He looked down at the dirt.
"I'll avenge you," he said quietly. "I don't care how long it takes." His voice was low. Even. Like he was stating something that had already been decided. "I don't care if he's already dead by the time I catch up to him."
A pause.
"I'll root out his grave. And I'll dissect whatever remains he still has."
He sat with that for a moment.
Then he got up.
He crouched beside Ulap and closed his eyes gently — both of them this time, the way you'd close a book you weren't finished reading — and then gathered him up slowly, both arms, and lifted.
He stood.
And something was wrong.
Or not wrong — different. Ulap should have felt heavy. He'd carried Likha twice this size and felt every pound of it. But the weight in his arms was almost nothing. He stood straight without effort.
More than that — the forest was loud. Not with sound he could hear before, but with sound he hadn't noticed. The drag of a beetle across bark twenty feet away. The specific weight of wind moving through individual leaves. His own heartbeat, steady and slow, like a drum in a very quiet room.
He stood still for a moment, listening to the world breathe.
Then he started walking.
It's the blood loss, he told himself. Or the healing. Something temporary.
He brushed it off.
He fell twice on the way up the mountain.
The first time he caught himself on one knee, Ulap still held carefully against his chest. The second time he went down harder — one hand on the ground, head bowed, breathing through it — then got back up and kept moving.
By the time the old tree came into view the sky had gone the deep blue that comes just before the dark gives up entirely. His grandfather's grave sat beneath it, unmarked except for the stones Navi had arranged himself two years ago.
He set Ulap down beside it. Gently.
Then he started digging.
The soil gave more easily than expected — soft, almost cooperative — and for a while his hands moved fast. The strange strength from before still running through him like current. He dug without stopping, without thinking, until somewhere past the first hour it faded out like a tide going back and his arms became just arms again. Heavy. Aching.
He kept digging anyway.
The sky was pale grey by the time he finished.
He lowered Ulap in carefully. Straightened his collar the way Ulap always had it — slightly crooked, always slightly crooked. Then he started filling it in.
When it was done he stood there.
Just stood. Looking at the fresh earth between his grandfather's grave and the old tree. Two mounds now where there used to be one.
A tear ran down his face.
Left side only. He noticed it the way you notice a leak in a roof — distantly, almost academically. He wiped it away with the back of his wrist.
Then turned and walked back down the mountain.
The door was already open when he got home.
Wide open. The way people leave doors when they're not planning to come back.
He stood in the doorway and looked at the wreckage of it. Shelves pulled from walls. Floorboards disturbed. His grandfather's cases — all six of them — gone. Just the outlines left in the dust where they'd sat for two years.
He'd expected that.
His eyes moved to the corner.
Sigil was there.
He crossed the room and crouched down slowly. The dog was still — fully still, the kind that was different from sleep. He sat on the floor and pulled Sigil against his chest and held him there for a while with his chin down and his eyes open and empty.
He couldn't cry.
He tried. Somewhere underneath everything he was trying.
Nothing came.
He buried Sigil beneath the window where the dog used to sleep in the afternoon sun. Then he washed his hands in the basin, what little water remained, and walked to the forest.
He didn't sleep.
He didn't count. He didn't track. He just moved through the trees and found them and killed them — every nest, every trail, every shadow that moved wrong between the trunks. Day bled into night and night back into day and he kept going, methodical and silent, the same flat expression on his face from the moment he'd entered the treeline.
He was finishing the last one — a small cluster near the northern ridge — when he heard it.
Ser, did you know that Likha organs are worth triple on the—
He turned around fast.
Trees. Bodies. Nothing else.
He stood there for a second, breathing.
Then turned back.
And killed the last one.
The shop owner stepped outside and immediately stepped back again.
The street in front of his shop was covered. Stacked and arranged with the particular efficiency of someone who had stopped caring about appearances. Likha of every size. Every type on the island.
Every single one.
Navi stood in the middle of it.
"What— what is this—" The shop owner's voice came out smaller than intended. "Navi, what—"
"I'll sell them all."
"I— yes— but—" The man looked at the sheer volume of it, doing rapid calculations behind his eyes. "I want to, I do, but I cannot buy all of this at once. The coin alone — maybe half, right now, but all of them—"
"Then pay it week by week."
Navi stepped forward.
The shop owner stepped back.
The counter between them suddenly felt very thin.
"The remaining payments," Navi said quietly, "go to a family. I'll give you the address." He leaned forward slightly — not aggressive, just close enough to make the distance feel personal. "And if I find out you kept a single coin for yourself—"
The shop owner had stopped breathing.
"—I'll find wherever you've hidden yourself." A pause. "And I'll skin you alive."
Same voice he'd use to discuss the weather.
The shop owner nodded. Several times. Quickly.
Navi straightened up.
"Five hundred," the man said, hands already moving, already counting. "For the half. Yes. Here. Take it."
Navi took the coin and walked out.
Behind him he heard the shop owner exhale like a man who'd just survived something.
He walked through town and people looked.
Not with the usual annoyance or cold disgust he'd navigated for two years. Something different this time. Something uncertain. He'd always been the Sandata they tolerated — the one who smiled too easily and argued about silver coins and shouted back at people who yelled at him in the street.
This person walking through their market with hollow eyes and no expression was someone else wearing the same face.
The food vendor — the one he bought from every other morning — stepped out from behind his stall.
"Hey. Kid." A pause. "You alright?"
Navi walked past him without turning his head.
He heard them before he saw them.
The tavern spilled noise into the street — laughter, the knock of cups, someone telling a story badly. He pushed the door open and scanned the room once.
There. Same table. Same posture.
He crossed the floor and put his hand on one man's shoulder.
The man turned around already grinning. "What, that little thief steal from you too? Ha—"
He stopped.
Navi looked at him.
The tavern didn't go quiet. Nobody else noticed. But at that table the temperature dropped several degrees.
The man felt the grip on his shoulder tighten — not crushing, just present — like a reminder.
He gave the address.
Navi let go and walked out.
He found the house without trouble.
Small. Modest fence. A window with the shutter propped open with rope.
Ulap's brother was on the front step. Knees pulled to his chest. Watching the end of the lane with the careful patience of someone who had been doing it for a while and was trying not to think about what it meant that they were still waiting.
Navi stopped at the corner.
He looked at the boy for a long moment.
Then he walked to the shop — the food vendor, the one he'd walked past without answering — and stopped in front of him.
The man looked up, cautious.
Navi set four hundred gold on the counter.
"There's a family on Calle Street," he said. "Small house. Broken fence post." He slid a folded piece of paper across. "Give this to them. All of it."
The vendor looked at the money. At the paper. At Navi's face.
"…I'll make sure they get it," he said quietly.
Navi nodded once.
Then turned toward the docks.
He watched from the far end of the street.
The vendor knocked. The brother answered — that same hopeful snap of movement, the door swinging open fast — and then the stillness when it wasn't who he'd expected. The vendor speaking quietly. The boy looking down at the gold in his hands.
Going back inside.
The window stayed lit.
Navi watched it for a while.
Then he picked up his bag and walked toward the harbor.
The harbor smelled like salt and old rope and fish that had been sitting in the sun too long.
Navi walked along the dock slowly, looking at each boat. Most were small. Weathered. The kind that went island to island and never thought about going further.
He stopped in front of an old fisherman untangling a net.
"…Can you bring me to the mainland?"
The man didn't look up. "We're not going to the mainland, kid."
"I have gold."
The fisherman stopped untangling.
He looked up at Navi. Then at the sword on his back. Then at his face — the hollow eyes, the set jaw, the expression of someone who had already decided this conversation was going to end with yes.
"…Two gold."
"Fine."
The man blinked. Clearly expected negotiation.
"It's a long journey—"
"Fine."
A pause.
The old man sighed the sigh of someone who had stopped trying to understand young people a long time ago.
"Get in."
Navi sat at the bow as the island shrank behind them.
He didn't watch it go. He faced forward — toward the open water, toward the horizon, toward wherever Cameron had gone after walking out of his house that night.
He only looked back once.
Just once.
The dark outline of the forest. The mountain he couldn't see but knew was there. The harbor getting smaller.
Then he faced forward again.
And didn't look back after that.
They were halfway across when his stomach decided it had strong opinions about the ocean.
He leaned over the side of the boat, one hand gripping the edge, and the old man watched him from the stern with the patient expression of someone who had seen this many times.
"First time on the sea, kid?"
Navi didn't answer.
The man reached into a cloth bag and pulled out a small wrapped piece of food. He held it out.
Navi looked at it. Then at the man.
The fisherman read the look correctly.
"Oh — no no. Not trying to poison you." He unwrapped it and took a slow deliberate bite. Chewed. Swallowed. Held the rest back out. "See? Just something to settle your stomach. Old sailor's remedy."
Navi stared at him for another moment.
Then took it.
It helped. Marginally. But it helped.
"Lito," the man said.
Navi glanced at him.
"My name. You can call me Lito." He adjusted the sail rope. "And yours?"
"…Navi."
Lito nodded like he was filing it away. He was quiet for a moment — the comfortable quiet of someone used to long stretches of nothing but water and wind.
Then—
"Haven't been to the mainland myself in a good while," he said, not really to Navi, more to the horizon. "Just island to island these days. Fish don't care about politics." He paused. "But I hear things. From other fishermen passing through."
Navi looked at him.
"Rebellion in the north. Tondo, they say. And the south—" Lito shook his head slowly. "Mindanao broke free from Maharlika completely. Just like that. Years of being held together and then—" He snapped his fingers. "Gone."
He glanced at Navi.
"So. What's your business on the mainland, kid? Going to join a Sandata guild? Or just sell that sword to whoever's paying?"
Navi stared at the water.
"…Looking for someone."
Lito was quiet for a moment.
"On a mainland that's falling apart." He exhaled through his nose. "You'll have a hard time finding anyone in that chaos."
Navi said nothing.
Lito looked at him for a long moment — at the hollow eyes, the set jaw, the complete absence of doubt in his expression — and seemed to decide that further commentary wasn't going to be useful.
He turned back to the sail.
They rode the rest of the way in silence.
Navi had just started to feel like a human being again when the boat lurched on a wave and his stomach immediately reconsidered.
He leaned over the side.
Lito watched him.
Said nothing.
Respectfully.
"Here's your stop, kid."
Navi straightened up — pale, slightly unsteady — and looked ahead.
The coast of Baguio stretched out before them. Rocky shore. Pine trees climbing up into grey sky. And snow.
Snow.
Navi stared at it.
"Off you go," Lito said. "There should be traders near the village heading south. Pay them to take you along. I've got fish to move."
Navi stepped off the boat onto the dock. He turned back.
"…Thank you."
Lito waved it off with one hand, already turning the boat.
"You paid well enough. Besides—" He glanced back once, something almost like concern crossing his weathered face. "Be careful out there. Mainland's not like your island, whatever island that was."
He didn't wait for a response.
The boat turned.
Navi watched it go.
Then he felt it.
The cold.
It hit him like a wall — sharp, immediate, completely different from anything the island had ever produced. He pulled his cloak tighter and it did almost nothing.
He started walking.
The village was alive with noise and movement. Market stalls lining both sides of a packed dirt road. The smell of food and woodsmoke and animal fur. People bundled in thick layers moving between stalls with the practiced efficiency of people who had been cold their entire lives and stopped thinking about it.
Navi walked through it looking like someone who had been personally betrayed by the weather.
"Hey!"
He turned.
A girl leaning out from behind a clothing stall, waving at him with the enthusiastic energy of someone who genuinely enjoyed their job.
"We have better cloaks here! Come look!"
From the opposite side —
"Fill your stomach first! Hot soup! Best in Baguio!"
Navi looked at both stalls.
Then looked down at his cloak, which was doing absolutely nothing.
He walked toward the clothing stall.
The girl was somewhere around his age — maybe slightly older — with bright curious eyes and the kind of smile that didn't require a reason.
"Welcome! First time in Baguio?"
"…Yeah."
"I could tell! Your cloak is completely wrong for this weather—" She was already moving, pulling things off the rack with practiced hands. "Here, try this one. Much thicker. Good for mountain cold."
She held it out.
Navi took it. Put it on.
It was warmer. Significantly warmer. He didn't say anything but something in his posture shifted slightly — the involuntary relief of a body that had been cold for too long.
"Oh that's a good fit!" the girl said. "It suits you actually. Very—" she tilted her head, studying him, "—serious looking."
Navi looked at her.
"I mean that as a compliment," she added quickly.
"…Okay."
"Although—" She turned back to the rack. "If you're going further south the temperature changes. You might want layers. Here—" She pulled out a dark inner jacket. "Put this under the cloak. It traps warmth better."
She held it out.
Navi took it. Looked at it. Then looked at her.
"I just need something warm."
"This is something warm! It's the warmest thing we have actually. Well—" She pulled out something considerably larger and considerably more complicated looking. "This one is warmer but it's a bit—"
"I'll take the first two."
"Are you sure? Because—"
"How much."
She blinked. Then laughed — not unkindly, just surprised.
"You're very decisive."
"How much."
"Three silver for both." She paused. "That's a fair price. I'm not overcharging you just because you're new here."
Navi looked at her for a moment.
Then paid her.
She took the coins and smiled again — that same uncomplicated smile.
"You should eat something before you go. Mang Berto's soup across the road is actually really good. Tell him Daya sent you and he'll give you extra."
Navi had already turned to go.
He paused.
"…Daya."
"That's me!"
He looked back at her once — just briefly — and something that wasn't quite a smile but was in the general neighborhood of one crossed his face.
Then he walked away.
Daya watched him go with her head tilted slightly.
Weird, she thought. But not bad weird.
He was eating soup — which was in fact very good — when he heard hooves on the road.
A knight rode through the market on a grey horse, armor catching what little light the overcast sky offered. People moved out of the way automatically, the practiced deference of people used to making room for armored men.
Navi looked up from his soup.
He stared.
Ulap's voice came back to him without warning —
"Ser, did you know there are knights on the mainland? The book says they cover themselves completely in iron—"
"What? Why would they cover themselves completely? How would they avoid attacks if they can't move freely?"
"I don't know, the book doesn't say—"
"That sounds impractical."
"I thought so too but apparently—"
He was already standing.
He approached the knight without fully deciding to.
The knight looked down at him from the horse with the expression of someone who had very little patience for people standing in front of horses.
"What are you looking at?"
Navi stepped back slightly.
"…Uh." He looked at the armor. Then at the knight's face. Then at the armor again. "Is there any trader going to the mainland from here?"
The knight stared at him.
"Trader." He said it like the word was slightly ridiculous. "No trader is coming up here. Tondo is in open rebellion. Why would any trader cross that border right now?"
"…How do I get to the mainland then?"
"Go south." The knight's tone had the flat efficiency of someone repeating information they'd given too many times. "Follow that road it will lead you to mainland road but you'll hit the Tondo border eventually. avoid it. there will be a different road, just follow the signs. He looked Navi up and down once. "Try not to get killed."
"…Thank you."
The knight didn't respond. He clicked his horse forward and the crowd filled the space behind him like water.
Navi stood there for a moment.
South.
Cameron had always said he came from the mainland. Every visit. Every polite offer over coffee.
I have other matters to attend to. I cannot keep a noble buyer waiting.
South.
He adjusted his new cloak, finished the last of his soup, and started walking.