The shadow of the mountain had grown longer since morning. Or maybe it always looked that way at this hour — the light going flat and grey, the valley losing its warmth degree by degree as evening came in. Ard had noticed it without remarking on it, the way you noticed things you had no use for.
Marth sat along the lake's edge ahead of them, its reflection broken across the water in long fractured stripes. Lanterns were coming on one by one in the early dusk, the city assembling itself into something that looked almost significant from this distance. Modest towers. Clustered rooftops. The smell of livestock and timber that reached you half a mile out if the wind was right.
For people like them, Marth was large. A place where crops moved and coins changed hands and travellers passed through without caring what they left behind. Ard knew better than to be impressed by it. Past Marth were cities that made this look like a waystation — capitals built around the great gates, where entire districts existed to manage what came through from the branch worlds. Places where power wasn't something people quietly hoped for.
It was expected.
"Never gets old," Chubs said beside him, letting out a low whistle.
Ard didn't answer. His gaze was already somewhere else.
Child of the First and the Fallen.
The voice from the dream sat in the back of his mind the way a stone sits in a boot — not debilitating, just present enough to be annoying. He didn't know what it meant. Didn't know what she was. But it had the particular quality of things that refused to be forgotten, that kept surfacing without invitation at the worst possible moments.
"You're doing it again," Chubs said.
Ard blinked. "Doing what?"
"The staring. The brooding."
"I'm thinking."
"Same thing. Yours just looks more depressing."
Ard exhaled through his nose and kept walking. The path ahead was familiar in the way all worn paths were — not comforting, just inevitable. Same dirt. Same ruts. Same distance between here and the place they had left and the place they were going back to.
Then—
"Oi. Drunk-ard."
Not Chubs this time.
Both of them stopped.
Ard didn't need to look to know who it was. He felt it first — the particular shift in the air that came with Jack's presence, the way everything around him seemed to arrange itself into an audience.
Jack stepped into the path ahead of them, unhurried, completely at ease. Tall. Well-built in the way of someone who had never had to worry about eating enough. His gaze moved over Ard with the slow, assessing quality of someone taking inventory — the bruises, the posture, the fact that Ard was still upright.
"Thought I hit you harder than that," he said.
Silence.
His attention drifted to Chubs. "Still following him around?"
Chubs said nothing. Gave him nothing.
Jack stepped forward, one measured pace, then another. "Some people just don't learn." His eyes came back to Ard. "Son of an absent drunkard." He said it cleanly. No humour behind it. Just the word, placed with precision, like a thumb pressed into a bruise. "You start thinking you've got a choice—"
Ard's hand moved.
He didn't decide to. The stick was just there — half-buried in the dirt at the edge of the path — and then it was in his hand, and then it was in the air, and the thought came after, not before.
The crack was immediate and total.
Wood against skull. Sharp. Final. The kind of sound that didn't echo so much as end.
The stick spun off into the dirt. Jack didn't move for a moment — nobody did — and the world held itself very still, as if it understood that whatever happened next was going to be different from whatever had come before.
Then the blood came.
Thin at first. A single line tracing down the side of Jack's face, crossing his cheek, dripping from his jaw into the dirt. He didn't raise a hand to it. He just stood there, head slightly bowed, while the blood fell.
When he looked up, something behind his eyes had gone.
"You—" The word came through clenched teeth, wet with blood and saliva. "—are dead. Rat."
His head jerked sideways. That was all it took.
They came from behind him — three of them, maybe four, boots already moving before the signal was done. Ard didn't wait. His body was already turning, already pushing, instinct ahead of thought.
He ran.