Icariel ran.
Snow burst beneath his boots in white sprays as he forced himself forward toward the village, toward the stone building with the black-maw flag, toward whatever razor-thin chance at survival still remained between him and the thing now hunting him.
Faster.
His breath tore in and out of him, ragged and sharp, each inhale scraping his lungs raw, each exhale vanishing instantly into the winter air.
Faster.
He did not look back.
Looking back wasted time.
Time was breath.
Breath was life.
Life was everything.
The forest behind him had gone quiet again.
That silence followed him like something patient. Hungry. Not an absence of sound, but a presence wearing silence as a skin. Only his own movement broke it now the pounding of boots, the hiss of disturbed snow, the harsh rhythm of a body running because stopping meant death.
They were coming.
He knew it.
Neo and Meron could not hold them for long.
He hoped they were alive. That hope changed nothing. What mattered was simpler than hope. His enemy was coming.
Death was coming.
The first rooftops of Mjull began to emerge ahead through the pale glare reflected from the snow.
Then something moved.
No something appeared.
One moment the path ahead was empty. The next, she was standing there.
Too close.
Black hair. Orange eyes. White armor so pale it seemed cut from the snow itself, the etched little dragon on its side catching the light like a second, watchful creature. She stood in the center of the path as though she had always belonged there.
Her voice was calm. Almost amused.
"I didn't expect to lose two of my pets to a hole in the snow…"
She tilted her head slightly. Her ponytail shifted with controlled grace, every line of her body composed in a way that made violence feel inevitable rather than possible. Her gaze slid over him, measuring. Enjoying.
"Not bad it feels like you prepared it beforehand yourself. As if expecting someone would chase you…"
A pause.
"Cunning."
It was true. Or true enough.
He had prepared several small things on the way down. Not a grand plan nothing so dramatic. Adjustments. Possibilities. A rope strung low between two trees where an ordinary pursuer might lose a stride. A broken branch marking terrain that could be weaponized later. He had seen the covered pit and used it.
He had scanned everything.
Still he had not thought far enough.
His body moved before his mind caught up. The bow was already in his hand. An arrow snapped against the string. Released. The shot went for her stomach.
It shattered.
Not on armor.
Not on flesh.
In the air before touching either.
Another arrow followed instantly.
This time her eye.
Shattered.
Another—mouth.
Another—knee.
Another—throat.
Another—wrist.
Another—ear.
Again and again he fired with the cold, relentless precision of someone no longer attacking in hope of victory but in search of information. Each shot tested a different point. Vital areas. Joints. Sensory organs. Unarmored skin. Weak places any living body should respect.
Every arrow met the same end. Black wood broke. Steel tips fractured. Fragments scattered into the snow like dead insects.
The air itself seemed to deny him, turning solid a hair's breadth from her body and reducing everything he launched into dust.
He kept firing.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Not from panic.
From method.
'Damn it all this is the only thing i can do now'
Running is gone. The last arrow left his fingers. Then there was nothing. His hand came away empty from the quiver. His chest heaved. Every breath was too loud inside his skull.
She had not moved.
Not really.
She had watched him with an almost patient politeness, as though waiting for a child to finish throwing pebbles into a lake that would never ripple.
Eventually, he stopped. And in the stillness that followed, Icariel understood too clearly what remained.
Nothing.
Not in his hands.
Not in range.
Not in reason.
His enemy was close enough now that he could feel it at the nape of his neck, cold as breath on skin. This woman had brought death within arm's reach of him, and something hot and vicious rose in him at the thought something more cutting than fear.
Hatred.
He looked at her with open defiance.
She noticed.
And smiled.
Almost impressed.
Thoughts crashed through him all at once.
Meron. Neo. Grin. Ariela.
Grin was dead.
That much was fixed and absolute. The others he did not know but doubted they were. The bears. The shattered arrows. The impossible women. Nothing obeyed the rules anymore.
Nothing held.
Every part of this morning had become a first encounter with something beyond what he knew, and the unknown the thing he hated nearly as much as death itself had finally overpowered him completely.
He needed time.
Just a little.
Enough to think. To recalculate. To find one angle still hidden somewhere in all this. To beg, if he had to. Pride had no value beside survival.
But somehow hatred interfered.
Hatred that this woman was dragging death so close to him. Hatred that she stood there unbothered while every law he understood broke itself around her.
Then she spoke again.
"Can I ask you a question?"
Her tone was soft. Polite. The softness made less sense than the violence had.
Icariel answered without lowering his gaze.
"I don't have much of a choice, do I?"
She smiled faintly.
"I was trying to ask politely. But that is true."
He cut in before she could enjoy the civility of the exchange.
"I don't know what 'polite' means. We're mountain people." His black eyes stayed on hers. "Can't you see that?"
Her smile widened instead of faltering. That irritated him more.
"Im curious about something" she said.
She stepped closer.
The snow did not protest beneath her feet. It barely shifted at all, as though she weighed nothing or as though the world had decided resistance was unnecessary.
"Did you expect something was wrong and prepare beforehand? Or was it luck that you found that snow covered hole?"
Icariel nodded once.
'If she wants words, let her have them'
Words buy time.
"I always prepare."
"Why?"
"I never go unprepared. Not when hunting. Not anymore."
His voice did not shake.
Even now.
"After I heard that scream the one from the person you killed, I assume. I knew something was wrong. I didn't know if I would face a beast or a person. And I'm not stupid enough to leave my life to luck."
She studied him for a long moment.
Then smiled again.
"I see. Not bad."
A pause.
"But you are lucky, you know. Too lucky, perhaps."
Icariel stared at her.
Lucky?
The word hit wrong enough to feel insulting on a level deeper than simple mockery. His mother had died when he was barely old enough to become a memory. His father had gone down the mountain when Icariel was seven and never returned.
He had built his own life alone inside a village too small for loneliness to become invisible but too practical for anyone to call it tragedy.
Even if he preferred distance. Even if he had earned every scrap of independence himself. Even if he told himself it didn't matter.
It still hurt.
So how was he lucky?
'Who does this bitch think she is?'
She continued, her voice carrying a strange wistfulness that made him want to spit.
"Where I come from, we would give everything to have this normal life."
Her gaze slid briefly past him toward the village.
"If this place were easier to reach… we would give everything to be here. This mountain is almost paradise."
Icariel did not understand what she meant. Not fully.
"You have no risk here," she said. "A mundane life. No real danger. No desperate struggle."
She exhaled softly.
"I envy you for that."
Then her eyes returned to him.
"And that is why I'm impressed."
"Impressed?" he repeated.
"Yes."
Her smile sharpened.
"Impressed by you, rat"
She said the insult as though it were almost affectionate.
"The moment I taunted you when I said I killed that foolish boy for fun I found an arrow a breath from my eye."
Her eyes glittered.
"I sent the bears after you, and you outran them. Trapped them. That's difficult, considering my pets are intelligent.'
She tilted her head.
"But more than that, I'm impressed by how you prepared. By how cold your head stayed. By how you observed while running for your life."
A pause.
"Oh. And by how you attacked every part of my body in sequence just to see whether an arrow would find a gap."
Her exhale came soft and almost regretful.
"It's a pity I have to end you."
Then, quieter:
"You would have gone far below."
Below.
The word caught in him. The world below the mountain.
The world the chief had spoken of in fragments. The world he had come from. The vastness beneath the clouds that Icariel had never seen and never touched and never wanted enough to descend into.
That was not his world.
His world was this mountain. This snow. These thirteen houses. The stone building with the black maw on its flag.
He looked into her orange eyes. Like staring into sunlight through blood.
She whispered, "You grew up above everything. Safe. Hidden. Untouched by what waits below. If people had what you have here…"
A faint smile touched her mouth.
"They would never leave."
Snow shifted under his boots. The village was in sight. Close enough to see. Impossible to reach.
His voice remained steady.
"You keep saying I'm lucky."
He met her gaze.
"And safe."
A beat.
"But you're standing here."
The smile vanished. Not gradually. Instantly.
It was as if his words had struck someplace real inside her, some place she had not expected him to reach. For the first time, the perfection of her composure looked thinner.
Because he was not seeing her as a person. Only as a monster.
How could he not?
Humans bled. Humans broke. Humans did not stand untouched while arrows died in front of their skin.
"I wasted enough time here with you," she said at last.
Her tone cooled.
"If I linger, our surprise may lose its edge."
She stepped closer again.
Barely a sound. Close enough now that he could see the tiny reflection of himself in her eyes dark, small, trembling only inside.
Icariel did not move.
He watched her the way he watched wolves deciding whether to lunge.
Carefully.
Patiently.
Waiting to understand if he still had one more second to live.
And because the question had hollowed him out from the moment he first saw the arrow shatter before her face, he finally asked it.
"What are you?"
His voice was direct.
Low.
Calm because calm was all he had left.
"How are you like this? Are all people from below like you?"
She studied him for several seconds. Then asked, instead of answering:
"Have you ever left this mountain?"
The question landed strangely inside him.
"No."
She exhaled.
"Then I understand. You know nothing."
That much was true.
He knew only fragments. Betrayal. War. Cruelty. Things the chief had mentioned in pieces and then left hanging without context, as though the world below had too many edges to hand to a child all at once.
"Then I'll explain it simply," she said.
Her orange eyes held his without blinking.
"I am something common there."
A pause.
"But also special, in a way."
Common and special. The words turned in his mind pointlessly.
What is the world the chief came from?
A flicker of curiosity rose in him. Genuine. Wrong-timed.
But curiosity did not matter now. He did not need the shape of the world below. He needed a way to live through this breath and the next one and the next.
Still one last question remained. The one that had mattered from the first shattered arrow onward.
He looked into her eyes and asked.
"Do you bleed?"
He did not care, in that instant, about her motives. Or the world below. Or why they had come here. Or what "common" meant in a world where people like her existed.
He wanted to know one thing.
If she could bleed.
And if she could he wanted to be the one who made it happen.
Because his heart was beating so hard from fear it felt close to failure, and he was dragging every piece of composure he possessed into place by force alone.
'Because of this bitch.'
She smiled. Then blurred. One moment she stood before him. The next her hand had closed around his throat.
One hand.
Only one.
He was lifted cleanly from the ground. His boots dangled above the snow. His fingers clawed reflexively at her wrist even before he could stop them.
"You ask many questions," she whispered.
Her face was close enough now that he could smell something faintly floral beneath the cold, absurdly delicate against the violence of her grip.
"Maybe you're buying time."
Her fingers tightened.
"Maybe you're hoping something will come save you."
His airway narrowed. The world sharpened and dimmed at once.
"But that last question…"
A pause.
"It was meaningless."
Meaningless.
No.
Icariel had one thing left. One final desperate gamble.
He had hidden a knife in his clothes years ago and never stopped carrying one since. Small. Sharp. Dark-handled. Strapped flat against his spine under the coat where a careless search might miss it and even a rough search would have to know to look.
For exactly this. For when every visible option failed.
He had waited for closeness. She was close enough now. His hand moved.
Slowly. Carefully.
Hidden by the angle of his own body and by her certainty that he was already finished.
His fingers found the handle.
Drew.
The knife came free.
He drove it forward at her throat. With everything left in him.
The blade reached her skin and...shattered.
Like the arrows. Like the spear. Like all the rest.
Fragments burst outward and fell into the snow. But it had not been meaningless.
Not at all.
Because in that instant when the knife came for her throat, when the point aligned with a killing line even if the world refused to let it finish her body moved.
Not much.
Barely.
A small recoil. A slight shift. An involuntary retreat so subtle another person might have missed it entirely. But not him.
She had tried to get away from the blade. Instinct. Fear. It didn't matter which. They were the same in the end.
It meant she could be hurt.
His voice came out shredded and choked, barely more than a whisper.
"You do bleed… after all…"
His lips curled. Not a smile. Something meaner. Colder.
"You just tried to pretend you don't…"
She looked at him.
His vision was already beginning to blur at the edges, blackness creeping inward as her grip crushed breath and blood and thought into smaller and smaller spaces.
But he heard her answer clearly.
"You can never make me bleed." A pause. "It takes special kinds of humans to do that."
Then, quieter:
"But still… until the end…"
A flicker of something unreadable crossed her face.
"You kept trying."
His vision darkened further.
His chest convulsed.
Fear flooded him then absolute, cold, final.
'Please.'
'It's too soon.'
The thought did not become words.
'Help me.'
The voice did not answer.
Her grip tightened.
And the world began to fade.