Chapter III
✦ ✦ ✦
Moonlight fell cold and silver across the Shattered Wastes, pooling in the vast crater where Hidenheim Laid. What remained was ruin in the most complete sense of the word — jagged towers leaning like broken teeth, cracked stone and twisted metal thrusting upward from the earth at angles that no longer had any relationship with architecture. Thin threads of smoke still drifted lazily from patches of smouldering wreckage, as though the destruction were not yet done considering itself.
Hoofbeats broke the silence. A group of riders in golden cloaks crested the crater's rim, their horses slowing instinctively, snorting pale plumes of steam into the cold air. They had ridden hard to get here. They looked at what was left and said nothing.
The lead rider dismounted first — a man, moving with the practiced ease of someone who had been getting on and off horses for most of his life. He reached up and helped a woman down from her mount. She was dressed finely, though the dress concealed reinforced mage-weave beneath it, and she moved with a quiet, determined grace that had nothing to do with the fineness of her clothes.
They walked through the devastation together. She stopped. Knelt. Pressed her fingers into the scarred earth, and the trembling in her hands was something she couldn't stop, so she stopped trying to stop it.
The tears came silently, as though they had been waiting for a long time and had finally decided the waiting was over.
"Find him," she said. Her voice was sharp and utterly certain in the way that grief sometimes makes voices. "Find him and bring him to me."
The knight beside her spoke gently. "No one could have survived this. Hidenheim is gone — let yourself—"
"Don't." She looked at him, and her eyes were not asking for comfort. They were asking for compliance. "Find him."
— ✦ —
Three Years Later (AF)
The outskirts of Greenwood — a tavern on the road
The tavern was the kind of place that had never been anything other than what it was — rough wooden tables worn smooth by years of elbows, lanterns that flickered more than they lit, and an atmosphere that smelled honestly of ale and sweat and the end of long days. It was not uncomfortable, exactly. It was just entirely without pretension.
At a corner table, a young blind man sat beside a boy who was doing serious work on a plate of roasted meat. The tavern owner's daughter had just set down a mug in front of him, offered a small warm smile, and begun to turn away.
The boy took a sip. Frowned.
"This isn't ale."
"You're too young for that," she said.
"The world is at the edge of ending," the boy said, in the tone of someone who considers this a reasonable point. "Surely that earns me a proper drink."
The blind man beside him laughed quietly into his own mug.
From the central table, one of two grizzled mercenaries looked over. The man had the face of someone who had found his way through life by being louder than the room.
"The world ending?" he called. "Where'd you hear that, boy?"
The boy stood. The blind man's hand moved to his arm.
"Julius. Sit."
Julius did not sit. He drew himself up to his full height, which was not inconsiderable for his age.
"Hidenheim has fallen," he said, clearly, to the whole room. "The mage realm is gone. Demons are growing stronger in its absence. Cities are failing. People are dying." A pause. "These are not rumours. These are facts."
The second mercenary snorted. "You believe in demons, boy?"
"I believe in what I've seen," Julius said. "Yes."
The tavern erupted in laughter. It was the particular laughter of people who find certainty in the young irritating — because certainty in the young has a way of being right.
"Sit down, boy," someone called.
"Let's go," the blind man said, rising. He steered Julius by the shoulder toward the door, pausing at the bar to offer a brief, sincere apology to the owner, and they pushed out into the evening air. As they went, they brushed past two hooded figures waiting just outside who gave no acknowledgement of their passing.
Back inside, the first mercenary raised his tankard.
"Now then." He grinned at the room. "Where were we? Ah — yes. The job." He leaned back with the satisfaction of a man about to say something he's been wanting to say for hours. "Clean off, one stroke. The big-shot's daughter — pretty little thing. A real pity." He shook his head with a theatricality that suggested he didn't find it a pity at all. "Fat bag of coins for a little neck."
The tavern roared its approval. Tankards clashed. Someone shouted something that brought another round of laughter rolling through the room.
"Drinks on us!" the second mercenary announced, standing, and the crowd cheered louder still.
The owner's daughter wove through the celebration with fresh tankards, setting two on their table. As she turned to go, the first mercenary's hand closed around her wrist.
She pulled back immediately. Her face went from professional to afraid in the space of half a second.
"Let go of me. Please."
"Relax." The sneer was already there, comfortable and well-practised. "Just want to get to know you. Come outside."
The bar owner stepped forward. "Leave her alone."
"Shut your mouth, old man." The mercenary didn't look at him. "I took a nobleman's head this week. Yours wouldn't even be an inconvenience."
"Leave the girl," the second mercenary said, quietly uncomfortable.
"Don't tell me what to do."
He yanked her forward. She struggled — and then the tavern door opened.
It opened with a particular deliberateness — Cold air moved through the room in the moment before the two figures stepped inside. The lanterns guttered. Several went out.
The room went quiet .
The first figure reached up and pulled back his hood.
A scarred face. Hard, patient eyes. A short beard . And behind his shoulder, visible even under the cloak, the handle of a large blade.
Somewhere at the bar, a drunk set down his mug with exaggerated care.
"That's..." he said. "That's the Drought."
The second figure lowered his hood. Dot— seventeen, perhaps, with a face that was calm.
Dren Chaster walked to the mercenaries' table with the unhurried stride of a man who has never once needed to announce his arrival.
The second mercenary felt sweat on the back of his neck. The Drought. Here. Are they here for us? They're here for us.
The first mercenary still had the girl. Dren looked at her.
"Go," he said. One word, low and even.
She started to move. The mercenary's grip tightened.
"And who are you to—"
The blade came out and went back in its sheath in what appeared to be a single motion. Between those two moments, the mercenary's hand opened. Blood hit the floor. The girl ran.
The mercenary's scream filled the tavern.
Dren looked at the sword in his hand with the mild expression of someone who has been slightly inconvenienced. "Didn't plan to draw this early," he said. "You made me." He sheathed it, seized the man by the hair, and dragged him across the floorboards with the casual ease of someone moving a sack of grain. With his free hand, he lifted the nearest full tankard and drained it.
The second mercenary bolted for the door — and walked directly into Dot, who absorbed the impact without taking a single step backward. The man staggered, registered what was in front of him, and changed direction toward the horses outside. He threw himself onto the nearest one — Dren's, as it happened — and drove his heels into its flanks.
"My horse—!"
Dot was already at the door. He picked up a loose stone from the ground by the step without breaking stride, turned, measured the distance to the retreating rider, and threw. The stone caught the mercenary across the back of the skull. The horse reared. The man went over its neck and hit the road.
Dren's expression, watching this, was quietly approving.
Behind him, the remaining patrons had found their feet and their weapons — slowly, with the cautious energy of people doing a risk calculation in real time. The first mercenary, blood-soaked and desperate, made his contribution to the atmosphere.
"Five million quibes!" he shouted, voice cracking. "Five million to whoever takes his head — right now — five million quibes—"
That settled the calculation.
The room moved.
Dren didn't draw his blade immediately. He kicked a table into the first man reaching him, spun without looking, and cracked his tankard into the temple of whoever was behind him. That man went down like his legs had been removed.
Another swing came — Dren ducked under it, closed his hand around the wrist, and turned his body. The sound that followed was a wrist twisting, and then a scream.
He drew the big sword finally — a long, smooth pull — and one stroke opened two men's chests simultaneously. They fell in different directions.
Dren stood over the last one still standing, blade resting against the man's throat with a pressure that was less than a shave and more than a touch.
"You were celebrating a beheading earlier," he said pleasantly. "Funny how an evening turns."
The door opened again. Dot came back in, dragging the second mercenary by the collar, and deposited him at Dren's feet with the unceremonious efficiency of someone returning a borrowed item.
Dren looked down at them both. "Which one do I need?"
"Not that one," Dot said, nodding at the man on the floor.
The first mercenary looked up at Dren from the floorboards. His hand gone, what's left bleeding badly enough to start pleading. "Please — I'll pay you anything. Everything. Just — please—"
Dren raised the sword.
One stroke. Clean.
The head rolled.
The bar owner and his daughter stood in the corner, frozen. The surviving patrons had developed a collective interest in the walls and the floor and anywhere that wasn't Dren.
The girl said, very quietly, "Thank you."
Dren sheathed his blade. He reached into his belt, produced two silver coins, and set them on the bar with a sound that was smaller than everything that had just preceded it.
"A room. if you have it."
The owner pointed upstairs with a hand that had not entirely stopped shaking. "Take — take the whole floor. Please."
— ✦ —
The room was simple: one bed, one chair, a window that looked out over the dark road. Dot set down the bound prisoner, dropped the sack with its contents against the wall, and sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor.
Dren leaned against the wall opposite, arms crossed. "Pickup gets the message tomorrow morning. We take them to the crossroad at first light and collect."
"I know how it works," Dot said.
Dren grinned. "Right. Floor's yours, then."
Dot didn't answer. He was somewhere else already — The memory surfaced the way it always did: without warning, without invitation.
Dren's voice: Still breathing. His own hands, barely his. Days dissolving into each other. Flesh knitting. Bones finding their way back. Dren sitting in a chair by the bed saying nothing, which was, in its own way, the right thing to say.
And then, one morning, a name rising out of whatever was left. Liora.
The memory folded back on itself and was gone.
Dren watched him from across the room for a moment. Then he crossed to the bed, lifted Dot with the practiced ease of someone who had done this before, and laid him down properly. He draped the blanket over him and returned to his chair.
Dot dreamed. Fragments of fire and silver hair and a mark on a forehead going dark. Then nothing. Then he jolted awake into the dark of the room, breathing hard, the dream already dissolving the way dreams do — present and then gone, leaving only the feeling behind.
He lay still and waited for morning.
— ✦ —
The Next Morning
He smelled the food before he was fully awake — something rich and savoury drifting up from the floor below, the kind of smell that makes a body decide to be conscious before the mind has caught up. Dot padded downstairs in yesterday's clothes.
Dren was already at a table, deep into a bowl of something and a conversation with the owner and his daughter, laughing at something one of them had said with the ease of a man who had never burned this building's common room to near-ruin the previous evening.
"Boy — come and eat. They cook well here."
The daughter smiled at the compliment, colour rising in her cheeks.
Dot sat down, pulled the bowl toward him, and took a careful first spoonful. Tasted it. Then he ate the rest of it quickly and without ceremony, in the manner of someone who is doing this entirely for functional reasons and not because it happens to be excellent.
"Hungry," the owner observed, with some satisfaction.
"My name is Dot," Dot said.
The owner blinked. "Apologies".
"I know." Dot glanced at Dren. "It's very good," he added, meaning the soup, his voice about half a degree warmer than it had been for the rest of the sentence.
They settled up, said their farewells — the daughter's eyes following Dren to the door with an expression she probably thought was less obvious than it was — and walked out into the cool morning.
A rider met them at the road. The exchange was efficient and wordless: prisoner and sack changed hands, a heavy purse and a sealed letter came back. The rider turned without pleasantries and was gone.
Dren broke the seal and read. A slow smile appeared.
"Looks like we'll be sleeping in a castle soon." He held up the letter. The heading read: Call to Greenwood.
Dot looked at it, looked at Dren, and said nothing.
— ✦ —
They had been riding perhaps half an hour when a voice from above called out:
"Help me!"
Dot looked up. A woman sat perched on a branch of a large roadside tree with the relaxed posture of someone who had been waiting comfortably and was now ready to be acknowledged. She wore close-fitted travelling clothes that were practical in design and, in practice, also rather good at being everything else. She dropped from the branch with a fluid ease and landed behind Dot on his horse before he had fully registered that she was coming.
"Long time, Dot," she said, close to his ear. Her hands found his cheeks and squeezed them in the manner of an affectionate aunt who has not yet accepted that the child in question is no longer five years old.
"Ysmay," Dren said, from his horse.
"Coming," she said cheerfully, not moving.
"Ysmay."
She released Dot — whose expression had maintained the admirable dignity of someone enduring something — and moved her horse alongside Dren's. He passed her a folded note. She read it, and her face did something complicated.
"Seriously?"
"Yes."
A moment of silent negotiation that Dren won by the simple method of looking at the road ahead and offering no further commentary. Ysmay read the note again, folded it precisely, tucked it away, and wheeled her horse onto a side path that diverged from the main road into the trees.
Dot watched her go. He looked at Dren.
Dren looked at the road ahead.
They rode on toward Greenwood, whose great trees were already visible above the horizon — vast and dark and patient, indifferent to whatever was coming. The job was still unclear to Dot. It usually was, at this stage. He had learned to wait for Dren to tell him things in Dren's own time, and to be ready when he did.
The trees grew larger as they rode, and the road ahead curved once and then disappeared into the shade beneath them.
To Be Continued