The blade was a work of art before it was a weapon.
Kilan held it between his fingers, examining it in the daylight filtering through the trees on either side of the road. The scabbard alone was enough to tell you that whoever had made it was no ordinary craftsman — black leather, carefully treated, inlaid with delicate engravings that followed no single pattern but moved as they pleased, as though they had grown from the surface rather than been carved into it. The blade itself measured close to sixty centimeters — shorter than his usual sword — but the metal it was forged from was the kind that neither rusted nor dulled, its edge reflecting light with a clarity that only years of careful smithing could produce.
He drew it slowly.
He activated the flow within his body and sent his faint spiritual wave toward the blade.
The sword lit up blue at once — a calm, even glow from hilt to tip, as though it had been waiting for this moment. At the same time, Kilan felt something drawing from his energy, slowly and without asking permission, the way sand drinks water.
He returned it to its scabbard.
*What a terrifying blade.* He looked at the scabbard in his hand. *What troubles me more is how Diana could lose it so easily.*
He sank into what lay before that question.
He remembered her face. Short black hair that barely reached her shoulders, inclining toward green in daylight and closer to black in shadow. And those crimson eyes that always looked at him with something he had never found a name for — not pity, not patience, but something closer to knowledge, as though she saw in him what he could not see in himself. She was the only one among all who had trained him who had never looked at his weakness with contempt, and had never told him what he already knew. She only pushed him forward, one step at a time, without promising him anything she couldn't guarantee.
And she called him *Little Kil.*
The echo of the name in his memory was clearer than anything else.
*If anything ever happens to you... I swear on my name that I will avenge you.*
He returned the blade to his belt and raised his eyes to the road ahead.
---
When night came, the carriage stopped at the edge of the road beside a massive oak that looked as though it had stood here before the road was opened and would remain after it was forgotten.
Manuel had spread his blanket on the ground and fallen asleep with the speed of a man who had spent his life on the roads and wasted no moment of rest when it was offered. The two horses grazed quietly on the surrounding grass.
Kilan, for his part, sat with his back against the oak's trunk, a small candle burning beside him and casting its dim light over the open book in his left hand and the manuscript spread across his knees. He returned to where he had stopped — the sixth page was still unfinished.
Then the carriage door opened.
He did not look up at first. But he closed the book slowly as he sensed the movement, still tracking it with the edge of his awareness.
The girl stepped out without her cloak.
In the light of the full moon, her features appeared in a way entirely different from what the faint daylight had permitted. Dark brown hair that rippled down to her back, and wide sky-blue eyes that carried a depth inconsistent with the softness of the rest of her face. She was not merely beautiful — her features were the kind that made certain men take decisions they would never take otherwise.
She noticed the light of his candle and took three steps closer, glancing around her in a way that unsettled Kilan more than it should have.
"Where are we now?"
She asked in a calm tone, like someone accustomed to having their questions answered.
"The Silent Bend road. Western border of Kildor."
He answered without raising his eyes from the manuscript. And yet his one eye had not truly left her. Her manner was disorienting — her head had moved with an urgency, like someone searching for a lifeline in the middle of a desert, and then she walked toward the edges of the road as though wandering between the trees without purpose. The road was smooth with large oak trees on either side, and their position on the left edge left the surrounding area open enough.
She stepped out onto the road and stood still, looking at a pendant she had drawn from her pocket.
And in that precise moment, Kilan's senses sharpened.
It was not the sensing of spiritual energy — of which he knew only the bare fundamentals. It was something else: that instinct that had built up over years of situations that gave no time to think. A faint sound. Movement in the air against the direction of the wind.
Kilan leapt from where he sat.
He drove toward her at full speed and pulled her back by her gray cloak. In the same fraction of a second, a massive shadow tore through the air from her right at a speed that would have reduced the distance between them to zero. The displaced air from the creature's movement was strong enough to send her hair flying violently.
The creature stood before them.
It was a deer — but nothing like any deer people saw in open fields. Its horns were long and coiled around themselves in tight spirals, each ending in a sharp point. Its dark brown coat was threaded with gray lines in a pattern that resembled frozen lightning. Its shoulder height was close to six feet, which made it stand before them like a living, breathing wall.
"A wild beast." Kilan said quietly, pushing the girl behind him. "The Kirnebis deer breed. Not a carnivore, but it doesn't hesitate to attack humans."
He began analyzing what was before him, as was his habit before every confrontation.
Unlike Yajugr, whose instincts had been dulled by domestication, this deer knew how to hunt and how to strike. Its natural ability made it far more dangerous than that wolf.
He waited in silence.
"Stay behind me and keep a meter's distance to be safe."
He whispered to the girl without turning to her. She gave a firm nod — her fear was not of the beast alone, but from the belated realization that she had nearly died moments ago.
The deer charged.
It drove forward with its horns aimed directly at Kilan, who had already drawn his sword. He barely deflected the blow, and the impact was strong enough to send tremors through his arm all the way to the shoulder, even with the flow activated.
His eye narrowed.
*Prolonging the fight with this beast will work against me. And the lack of room to maneuver because of the one behind me narrows the options further.*
He pushed against the deer's shoulder with his foot, sending it stumbling back several steps.
"On the next charge, move three steps to the right or left."
He murmured to the girl behind him as he steadied his trembling hands.
The deer stepped back once, its body coiling for a strike. But Kilan did not wait — he lunged first and closed the distance. The deer struck with a speed that could not have been avoided in open space, and Kilan slid beneath it, using the creature's own bulk against it and driving his blade into its belly.
The deer released a sound like a hoarse roar that startled every bird in the surrounding trees into the sky at once.
Kilan returned his sword to its scabbard and began to whistle as loudly as he could.
The wounded deer turned toward him and gave chase. Kilan left the road and entered the trees, running with deliberate weaving, avoiding straight lines.
He knew that the Kirnebis's true weapon was its direct charge and the speed of its thrust — which meant the trees were his allies, not his obstacles.
He stopped before the largest tree he could find.
He turned.
The deer came at him with full speed. At the last moment Kilan threw himself sideways, hurling his body clear. The deer's horns drove into the trunk with a sound like a muffled explosion. The creature beat its forelegs against the ground trying to pull itself free, succeeding only in shaking the tree.
Kilan drew the Wind Cutter blade.
He activated the flow. The blade glowed deep blue.
In a single strike, a cutting blue wave ended the battle.
Kilan sat down on the ground beside the massive body, breathing hard. His fingers were trembling. He looked at the blade in his hand with quiet, dry amusement.
*It consumed all my spiritual energy in a single strike? Even that road bandit managed to swing it twice without any spiritual energy.*
He knew well enough where he stood among fighters. But to be emptied completely by a single blow was enough to make him laugh — with the particular self-directed irony that was the only kind he ever had.
He looked at the deer's head wedged in the tree.
*It would be a waste to leave the horns.*
He cut the embedded portion free, wrapped what remained in his cloak, and carried it. And as he dragged his feet back toward the carriage, something gleamed on the surface of the road at the spot where the deer had first appeared.
He crouched.
A silver pendant on a black cord, no larger than a finger, engraved with a serpent coiling around an obelisk.
Kilan closed his hand around it and held it in a long, silent moment. Then he closed his palm.
---
With the sunrise and the carriage back on its way, Manuel let out a long yawn and asked without fully opening his eyes:
"Did anything happen last night? I thought I heard something."
Kilan gave a quiet laugh.
"Remarkable that you slept through all of it. We were attacked by a wild beast."
Manuel went silent. Then he looked at Kilan with the look of a man who despises himself in silence.
"Glad you made it, son."
He said nothing more, and Kilan asked for nothing more.
---
Hours later, the outlines of Kildor appeared on the horizon.
It was different from Airtheim in a way that needed no lengthy description. Its walls were tall and draped in a green layer of trees that had climbed the stones and grown past them — the whole city looked as though the forest had decided one day to swallow it slowly, and Kildor had decided to let that happen.
But before the gate, the congestion was unlike any ordinary crowd.
Long lines of carriages of every shape and size crawled toward the single entrance, one step at a time.
"What's happening? Do you have any idea, Uncle Manuel?"
Manuel scratched his chin with the expression of a man who had no patience for crowded roads:
"An inspection patrol. In place for a while now, by the king's order."
Kilan nodded, but something in his chest did not settle.
When the carriage finally advanced and stopped before the gate, he saw who was standing there.
A group of men in black uniforms marked with golden lines and engravings, over which they wore a crimson sash bearing on its left side a shield engraved with a set of scales, a sword at its center, beneath a crown.
Kilan narrowed his eye.
*The Crimson Sash Legion.* He said it to himself in a voice barely above silence. *Their operations are usually confined to the capital.*
Manuel answered as though he had heard him:
"Kildor is one of the cities most saturated with criminals and fugitives. The king issued a decree weeks ago to tighten security here."
Kilan did not ask why. He already knew. Kildor was among the most profitable cities for the throne — its forests producing the prized luxury timber favored by the nobility — and anything that threatened the king's source of gold demanded a response that could not be delayed.
One of the Legion's men approached them.
His features were sharp, his hair and eyes a dusty yellow that made him look as though the road itself had produced him. A sparse black beard, eyebrows the same earthy color. At his hip, a sword with a gold-inlaid hilt adorned by an ornate ring. He placed his hands behind his back with a steadiness that needed no effort to maintain, and spoke in a tone whose edge resembled a frozen night:
"Hand me your identification pendants. And if any of you is carrying something in your pockets or bags, produce it willingly — you will be searched regardless."