Anadar Book II Pt I

Prologue

Slonda did not find the book where books wish to be found.

It did not lie on a shelf, not in a row, not in a catalogue that claims it knows what the library possesses. It lay below, beneath the lower levels, in a corridor that looked like nothing and was therefore overlooked by almost everyone. A door that was not locked, yet so rarely used that its hinges no longer seemed able to decide whether they should creak. Beyond it, a recess, a stone chest in which parchment and leather had taken on the same smell. Dust that does not fall, but lies, as if it were an archive itself.

Slonda would not have searched there, had he not for days carried the feeling that the library was drawing him to that place. Intuition. He had that restless thing in him, not empty, not alarmed. He did not know whether it ought to calm him or unsettle him.

The book was narrow, old, worn, bound in leather, and precisely for that reason it seemed almost dangerous. No finery, no ornamented edge, no seal that shouted that this mattered. Only a cover, dark and scuffed, like a tool that has passed through too many hands. On the first page, in careful, old script, stood a title that did not sound like a title, but like a threat made polite.

The Codex.

Slonda had read codices. He had known the Codex, studied it, learned it by heart, cited it and used it when masters employed it as an excuse when they did not wish to help, and as a shield when they interfered but did not wish to be held to account. He expected the same language, the same tone, the same order. Yet after the first lines he realized that this book was not merely old. It was different.

Not in the small deviations that arise when scribes are careless. Different in the way a blade is different when its edge has been newly honed and one insists it is still the same knife. Slonda sat at an old table, laid the book upon it, the torch beside him, and opened the Codex.

The parchment was yellowed in places, not evenly, but in blotches, as if damp had found its way into the chest only on certain nights. Some pages were darker at the margins, as though hands had often touched them. Some were so pale that one could read the script only if the lamp was held at a slight angle. And in several places paper was missing. Not torn out in anger, but removed, as though someone had decided it should be so. Slonda ran a finger along an edge where the fibres lay open.

“You do not look like this by accident,” he murmured. Then he began to read from an excerpt of the Codex of the Bound Arts, found in the depths of the Great Library, without seal, without date, without confirmed copy, and yet in a hand that seems older than much that Tandor would call old.

Preamble:Let it be made known and manifest to all who have ears to hear and eyes to read, that the Art which man names Magic was, in the days of Unbinding, scattered over all lands like fire in dry grass. And whereas almost every one who drew breath found in himself a spark thereof, there arose from it not only healing and wonder, but also pride, lust for dominion, and the desire to bend the measure of the world as though it were wax in the fist.

From this sprang war upon war, faction upon faction, master upon master, and the order of things was brought so near the abyss that not only realms and cities, but the very shape of Being itself threatened to be torn asunder. And had not certain mighty ones come together, who in the hour of utmost peril set balance above their own vanity, the light of the world would have been consumed, and all that is would never more have been able to be.

Therefore a bond was set, and from the bond came order, and from order came binding. And the binding is the Codex. Not that the Art should perish, but that it should not again seize at the throat of power and devour the human.

So let it be proclaimed not only to masters and adepts, but also to those who in times to come may find these lines and smile, with the folly of what comes after, at the seriousness of what came before, that the Art called Magic is a thing neither good nor evil, since good and evil do not dwell in the power, but in the one who wields it, and that the time of Unbinding, in which nearly any might bear a spark, is not to be praised as golden, but as perilous, for the wider a fire spreads, the faster it devours forest and world.

Never again shall there be, in a war that threatened to tear the order of things itself apart … here a passage was missing … whereas the Art, once unshackled, does not distinguish between wall and sky, between body and law, between the present and that which should never have been.

Therefore a bond was set, not from gentleness, but from need and despair, and this bond chose what institutions always choose when they mean to prevent power: power. And this power was to impose restraint, and upon this power restraint was to be imposed.

Slonda paused briefly. The sentence made too little sense to him, and that in a Codex. It felt like a hand reaching too far into truth. He turned the page.

First Part:On the measure granted to the Art, and on the prohibition of dominion

Article I: Let it be permitted to none who practises the Art to grasp after worldly rule, be it crown, council, army, court, or trade, since a hand that both casts and commands soon no longer knows which grip is the true one, and he who makes the Art into a sceptre makes slaves of men and a tool of the world …

A section is missing.

… if such a one be found again, then he is to be stopped and by all means removed from the world of men, should he not see that his doing is against this Codex, his seal to be broken, his writings taken, and where no bettering is possible, he is to be bound or brought to nothing, and the traces destroyed, so that through a single one the unbound chaos may not return.

Article II: The affairs of common men, their markets, their houses, their wars and their peace, are to be left without spellwork, so that they may grow by their own will and learn by their own error, since help too often given is no longer help, but habit, and habit is the quiet fore-runner of the chain of dependence and of power. Yet in utmost need, when without aid death would become measureless or calamity spill over many, a hand may be extended, provided that hand does not become a chain.

Slonda nodded despite himself. That sounded familiar. That was the Codex as he knew it. He read on, and then came a place where the familiar tore. Between two paragraphs paper had been removed. Not a sentence, not a word, but an entire block. The edge was smooth, as though someone had taken time to cut cleanly, not rage to rip.

The next paragraph began in the middle of a sentence.

… although it is commanded to avoid the affairs of men, it is yet permitted to send scholars to the houses of kings and princes, not that they may rule, but that they may observe, heal, counsel, and hold the Art within bounds, so that worldly power does not reach for unbound power … again a part was missing … since it does not suffice that a magus wears no crown if he sits in the shadow of a crown and steers the decisions which others speak aloud in public, for power is like water: it finds a way, even when its straight course is forbidden.

Slonda stared at the word “public,” as though by staring he might force the missing paragraph to return. “What stood before that,” he asked into the silence. The library did not answer. He turned the page.

Second Part:On binding, on script, and on renewal

And whereas unbound Art is like a storm that does not ask whom it strikes, so is the Art to be bound to word and sign, to script and ritual, that it may have measure, duration, form, and boundary, for where there is no boundary there is no craft, but only violence.

Therefore it is set down that spells are to be written and kept, examined and renewed, since words age like men, and a word that is old becomes either weak or false, and both are perilous.

All Art is to be bound to signs and words, and he who works without signs works without measure. Therefore spells are to be written, kept, renewed, since words age and their effect is lost if they are not tended. And no spell is eternal, as no man is eternal. He who seeks eternity should seek God, not power. It is ordained that spells whose term has passed are to be examined and renewed, so that from a weakened word no accident may arise. And he who renews a spell shall do so not in haste but in measure, since a new word is a new edge.

And it is forbidden to work spells whose script has not been examined, even in utmost need, since need is no right but a fire in which one does things one cannot later defend.

It is forbidden to practise the wild Art which is not bound to word and sign, not to script and measure, since it readily becomes excess and corrupts the mind.

And he who pursues such Art is to be admonished, bound, and where he does not desist, the possibility is to be taken from him, so that the old time may not be born anew.

Then the paragraph ended again at a place where something had been removed. It was cumbersome, yes, but precise. Slonda liked precision. What he did not like was what came next. In the margin of a page, in different ink, in a hand that was not the hand of the main scribe, stood a short line, almost a note, almost a curse.

“Who works without word, works forbidden.”

Slonda shivered though the cellar had not grown colder. He knew such marginal notes. They were rare. They were dangerous. They were often the proof that someone, in copying, had seen something he should not have seen. Slonda heard the voice in his head that liked to ignore this part of the Codex. Witches, shamans, small villages, harmless rites. Insignificant. And yet Slonda knew that “insignificant” is often only a word one uses when one is too comfortable to look closely. He turned the page into the third part.

Third Part:On the schools, their nearness, and the watch of eye against eye

The schools are set and ordered, each in its own measure, that the Art may not be scattered as before, but gathered in a few places, so that eye may watch eye. The schools are not set far one from another, but in such nearness that no path is too long for a messenger and no error too distant to grow unnoticed, and the exchange of students is commanded, since dialect is to be tested against dialect, for the Art divides into tongues as a river into arms, and he who hears only his own words soon holds them to be the only ones.

The schools are … a word illegible, struck through, and the number 9 written above it … nine. Slonda thought, or 6 upside down. He turned the book. Then more places yellowed, the script barely legible, further words scratched to illegibility … gathered, that power may not be scattered but concentrated, for scattering breeds opportunity and opportunity breeds war.

Slonda leaned closer to the page, held the lamp so that the light ran flat across the parchment. A few words became visible, but not enough to make a map of it.

He read what he could, and many sections he already knew.

… Fiery Fortress, remote, on the road to … (break, the line ends in nothing)

He cursed softly. Further on:

… the Water School on the Isles of Wind … (break, an entire sentence is missing)

And then, in a passage that suddenly sounded different, less like administration and more like warning:

… and that the school of images and illusions should form a house of its own, since illusion deceives not only the eye but the judgment of the mind, and where judgment wavers and the mind grows uncertain, there law wavers … the following paragraph had been cut out, the edge clean, as though one had not wished to keep precisely that reasoning.

Slonda turned the pages more slowly. He felt reading become gathering. Not of knowledge, but of fragments.

Another place, deeper in the section, was only half preserved.

… Necromancer School … (the ink smeared, as though someone had tried to blur the word, not to erase it but to make it unreadable) … and the Art that calls upon the dead be … (break)

Slonda stared at the word necromancers as though it stared back. The Art of speaking with the dead, few could do it, it was arduous. He had tried it, and shuddered as he remembered. The language, the script, the dialect were so unfamiliar.

“That does not exist,” he murmured, and he meant not the possibility but the official knowledge. In the present Codex such things were not written. Not even as history. As though they had never been part of the order, never part of the tongue, never part of the world.

Slonda held the page up to the light. The fibre structure showed through, and where the paragraph was missing the edge was paler, as though the parchment had never been allowed to age there. It was a cut, not an accident. He read the sentence once more, slower, as though he might force the ending to appear.

“… and yet,” he whispered. And yet what.

There the Conclave was described, in an old-fashioned, over precise language, and Slonda felt a bitter smile rise in him, because he had seen the Conclave, not only read of it.

Fourth Part:On the Conclave, the staff, and the turnus

A gathering is to be held at regular intervals, in which three from each school sit, no more and no less, so that no choir becomes a crowd and no crowd an army, since armies tend to decide before they understand.

The chair passes in turn from school to school, and the handing over of the staff is to be performed with solemnity, not to feed vanity but to create remembrance that even the chair is only a borrowed burden.

Twice in the year, or more often in pressing need, a gathering called Conclave is to be held, in which chair and staff change in order, so that none keeps the staff and believes himself the measure.

In this gathering names are to be read, roles exchanged, script given, death and succession reported, and all that concerns the bond is to be set in order, since disorder is the first fissure.

Slonda paused. He knew this room. The white marble. The round table. The black statues. And he knew how easily, in so pure a room, one can forget that outside men freeze. He turned back once more to the torn places, as if the parchment might take pity on the second reading. It did not. Instead, on one of the last pages he found another marginal note, again in a different hand.

“The nearness is not control. It is the seal.”

Slonda felt his back tighten of its own accord. A seal.

He saw again the cut out paragraphs. The yellowed lines. The sentences that ended mid thought. The words smeared instead of crossed out. This was no forgotten Codex. It was an edited Codex. An old version, altered.

He turned again to the number, to the broken sentence, and held his finger exactly on the place where the paragraph was missing. Then he thought, without speaking it aloud, because the library hears words even when they are not uttered:

If once there were more, and if today only six are named, then the question is not whether the others were lost, but when they ceased to exist. The question is who wanted them forgotten, and why, and what they had done.

And while Slonda sat in the depths reading the new old Codex, unaware that outside something already cries for blood, he felt for the first time in a long time that knowledge is not only light. Knowledge is also a trail. And trails draw things that do not wish to be found.

I

Ashambrat was a city not built to be beautiful, but to survive, and for that very reason it possessed a beauty that did not fawn.

It lay like a pale stone in a sea of sand, ringed by walls that could not stop the wind, but could at least force it to choose where it wanted to enter. From the outside you saw the edges first, the clear lines, the flat roofs, the low domes that looked like held breaths, and above them the towers of the Wind School in the west, slender and watchful, as if they had deliberately placed themselves to the side in order to observe the city, not dominate it. In the center, by contrast, the palace rose broader and heavier, surrounded by gardens that from afar looked like a contradiction. Green in the desert. Shade in the dust. Coolness where there should have been none.

The air was already hot in the morning, not burning, but hard, the way heat becomes hard when it does not stop. The desert wind did not come like wind in other lands, not as something you can ignore. It came like a presence. It pushed sand into every seam, it settled on lips, it made every breath a reminder that this city did not belong to the land, but had been wrested from it.

Gudi was awake early.

Not because she was disciplined. Because Ashambrat wakes you whether you want it to or not. The city began to live long before the sun reached its highest point. Merchants were already calling while shadows were still long. Animals stamped through the alleys. Water was carried as if it were a treasure that must not be looked at too closely.

Gudi drew aside the curtain of her small chamber and looked down at the bazaar, which spread like a carpet of voices. The stalls were already set up. Fabrics in colors you would not expect in sand. Spices that smelled so sharp you could taste them before you saw them. Baskets of dried fruit, clay jugs, metal, leather, glass, and between them people whose languages mixed like smoke. Some spoke quickly, as if afraid time would be stolen from them. Others spoke slowly, as if they had learned that in heat every word costs twice.

The bazaar had wells.

Not many, and none of them large, but each one a center. Around the wells people stood and waited, filled vessels, traded news, shoved, argued, laughed. Water here was not just liquid. Water was order. Water was politics. Water was the reason this city had rules everyone knew even if no one liked them.

Outside the walls, where the sand swallowed all shapes again, nomads camped. You could see their tents like dark dots at the edge of the horizon, and sometimes, when the wind was right, it carried the distant sound of drums or animals. They came, traded, vanished. Some brought salt and meat. Others brought stories. Some brought both, and those were the dangerous ones, because stories in Ashambrat were like wind. You cannot hold them, and yet they change everything.

In the west lay the Wind School.

It was not as splendid as a palace, but it looked older, as if it had not been built but cut out of air. High towers, open courtyards, arches that did not block the wind but guided it. There the students learned not only to speak words, but to listen. Not only to draw signs, but to understand why a hook can be the end of a spell.

Gudi did not go there at once. She went first to her book. It lay on the floor, because her table was too small and because she needed sand to practice the signs. Ink was laborious, sand was everywhere. Sand was her paper. Sand was also her enemy, because it smudged the lines as soon as the smallest slip in concentration let the wind into her hand.

She sat down with her legs tucked in, the parchment beside her, and stared at the intertwined flourishes that looked like a dance to other people and like mockery to her.

The Dervish.

A simple wind whirl, the masters said. A beginner’s spell. A game, the other children said, the ones who could already do it and loved to show it. Mouse sized, then man sized if you wanted, and if you were truly good you could make it grow until it was as tall as a camel and lifted sand in a circle as if the ground had suddenly become light.

Gudi could not manage even a breeze.

She looked at the parchment. Then at the book again. Then back at the parchment. Her brow tightened as if she could press the signs into her head by sheer frowning.

“This isn’t hard,” she muttered stubbornly, though she had long known that was exactly a lie.

She drew the signs into the sand.

Slowly. Carefully. A stroke. A curve. A hook.

She spoke the words.

Not loudly, because she was ashamed when someone heard her and then nothing happened again. Only halfway, like a whisper hoping the world would be merciful.

Then she blew on the sand.

Nothing.

Not even a grain of dust lifted.

Gudi stared at her hand as if the hand had betrayed her. She clenched her fist. Not because she wanted to hit something, but because she did not know where to put the anger.

“Why,” she hissed.

She yanked the parchment up, crumpled it with both hands so hard her fingers hurt, and threw it into the corner of her chamber.

It was childish.

She knew it.

That made it worse.

She sat on the floor with her arms around her knees and sulked as if sulking could summon wind. Her lower lip trembled. She bit it until it hurt. The pain did not help. It only made it clearer that she was real and her magic was not.

Outside, merchants went on with their business. Outside, water was sold like gold. Outside, children laughed because they did not yet know that talent is sometimes distributed unfairly.

Gudi stared at the corner where the parchment lay.

She thought of Morgut.

Morgut, her brother, who could do everything she could not. The magician who, to her, was not just a student but a measure. She adored him, and that was beautiful and painful at once, because you never see someone you idolize at eye level. Morgut had practiced with her, had shown her how to breathe, how to still the gaze, how not to want, but to guide. He had never made her feel stupid.

That was handled by the other siblings.

Not maliciously. Not really. But with that casual cruelty children have when they notice they are better at something and enjoy showing it.

“Gudi can’t do wind,” they had laughed once, when she did not hear it and still heard it.

She pressed her forehead to her knees.

Then she got up.

Chagrined, furious, feeling as if she would rather scream at the wall, she went to the corner, picked up the crumpled parchment, and unfolded it. Now it was full of creases, as if it had had more life than she had.

She sat down again with the book.

Read the lines once more.

Compared.

Again.

And again.

And then she saw it.

Here she had forgotten a hook.

Just one hook.

A tiny sign, a tiny grip that turns the whole word, that makes the spell go from nothing to something.

Gudi stared at it, and what rose in her first was not relief but anger. Anger at herself. Anger at her inability to stay focused. Anger at the fact that her mind always slips away too fast, that the signs hide from her like animals that dislike their names.

“Of course,” she growled.

She checked the parchment again.

Another mistake.

And another.

The anger in her grew hotter than the city.

She slammed her fist into the sand so small grains sprang up and fell again, as if they had been free for an instant and then caught once more.

“I can’t do this,” she burst out.

The words were terrible because they sounded true.

She clenched both fists, rubbed her eyes as if she could push the tears away before they came. She felt ridiculous. That made her angrier. And then what happens to children happened, when anger and shame meet inside a small body.

She sobbed.

Not prettily. Not quietly. Not with dignity.

She buried her face in her hands and cried because she could not help herself any other way. Her shoulders shook. Her nose ran. She hated it. She hated herself for it. She hated the signs standing so calmly on the parchment as if they were not the reason she felt like a failure.

When the tears eased, she sat there, face red, sniffling, and stared at the parchment again.

And then, stubborn as the wind itself, which never asks whether you want it, she took her finger and drew the missing hook into the sand.

Again.

More careful.

Slower.

She spoke the words.

She blew.

Nothing.

She growled, wiped the sand away, drew again.

She spoke the words.

She blew.

Still nothing.

The sun moved. The bazaar grew louder. The wells became more contested. Outside, camels passed by, laden with cloth and metal. From the palace gardens a breath of cooler air drifted, and it felt like an insult, because it proved coolness is possible if you have enough power to force it.

In the palace, students tended the gardens.

That was one of their tasks. Not glamorous. Not heroic. But necessary. They had to bring water, sometimes laboriously from the wells, sometimes by magic, if the masters allowed it and supplies permitted. They divided the gardens into sections. Everyone knew which palm, which fig tree, which strip of shade belonged to them. They learned that magic is not only wind whirlwinds. Magic is also care. Magic is also responsibility. Magic is also holding a small piece of green against an entire desert.

Gudi sometimes saw those students when she walked with Morgut toward the school.

Morgut beside her, large in her perception, calm, strong, with that gaze that never becomes frantic. He was kind to her even when he was strict. When he explained something, he did it as if it were self evident that she would one day be able to do it. That certainty was his greatest gift.

In the evening Gudi sat again in her chamber.

She had eaten because you must eat. She had drunk water because thirst in Ashambrat is not negotiable. She had survived the day, and survival here is an achievement even without spells.

She took the parchment.

She drew the signs again.

She spoke the words.

She blew on the sand.

And this time something stirred.

Not much.

No dervish, no dance, no whirl you could show proudly.

Only a breath.

A tiny, quiet circle, as if the sand had considered moving and then twitched. A shimmer. A barely visible twist. Perhaps imagined. Perhaps wind from outside. Perhaps a mistake.

Gudi froze.

She held her breath as if her breath might frighten the small thing away.

She stared at the sand.

There was stillness again.

Had it really been there.

Or had she wanted it so badly that her mind had invented a victory.

She did not know.

But her heart was beating faster, and that was proof that something in her was responding.

That night the sky was clear with stars.

Ashambrat had nights so beautiful you almost forget how merciless the day is. The heat sank, the wind softened, and above the city stood a sky that does not flicker like in humid lands, but is hard and deep, as if you could touch it.

Gudi went to a tower.

Not one of the great towers of the school, but a smaller one, set apart, where an older man watched the stars. He was not a master who barks orders in the courtyard. He was one of those who prefer to look upward rather than inward.

He greeted her as if he had expected her, and perhaps he had.

“You are late,” he said.

“I am slow,” Gudi replied stubbornly.

The old man laughed softly. “Slow is sometimes wiser than fast,” he said. Then he led her to the parapet.

He showed her constellations.

Not just lines between points, but stories. He explained how to orient yourself by them, how to find direction from the positions of the stars when sandstorms erase all roads. He spoke of old names for the same lights, of languages no longer spoken, of peoples who see the stars differently because they consider different things important.

Then, when Gudi had grown used to that quiet voice, he began to tell of things no longer taught in class.

Of the time before time.

Of days when magic was unbridled, free, and the world was therefore both larger and more dangerous. He showed her images on the tower wall, not painted, but set into stone, and when he spoke the images seemed to move, as if the stars themselves were falling into the wall.

He told of magicians who lived on clouds and drifted over the world, not as travelers, but as lords of their own height. Some studied, some sought power, some sought recognition, some sought the stars, and none believed there could be an end as long as he himself still breathed.

He told a love story.

Trke and Ofisa.

Two magicians who found each other not because it was useful, but because they recognized each other. And Lonsch, the jealous one, who begrudged their love and intrigued, not because he wanted to be loved himself, but because he could not bear that others had something he could not control.

A child was expected in secret.

Ofisa died in childbirth.

The old man did not say it dramatically. He said it like a fact you are not allowed to prettify. And he told how Lonsch took the child and raised him, not out of kindness, but out of hatred.

He told Gudi that children born of magicians can be far more powerful than magicians themselves, that there is something in them that is not only talent, but another density of the world. That such children can be almost godlike if no one binds them.

Trke, who knew nothing of the child, learned of Ofisa’s death and nearly broke under despair. The old man described it so that Gudi swallowed without meaning to, because she suddenly saw Trke before her not as a legend, but as a man who no longer knew where to put himself.

Lonsch told the child that Trke had killed the mother.

He said that he, Lonsch, had only just saved the boy.

The boy grew up in hatred.

And when he was grown, he hunted Trke.

He found him.

He almost killed him.

And then, the old man said, something intervened from beyond. Not because rules allowed it, but because love was large enough to ignore rules. Ofisa, powerful even in death, stepped between them and unraveled what Lonsch had poisoned.

Father and child saw each other.

The truth stood there like a star you cannot unthink once you have seen it.

The child, very powerful, erased Lonsch. Not out of rage, but out of necessity. And then, because it understood what it was, it chose to leave the world and travel through the universe, to where power has no court and no one wears crowns.

The old man showed her the constellations.

Trke.

Ofisa.

The child.

And Lonsch, the jealous one, as a dark point at the edge that still belongs, because even jealousy becomes a constellation if you look at it long enough.

Gudi loved these stories. She loved how the images on the wall came alive, how the stars were suddenly not only lights but memory. To her they were fairy tales, and fairy tales in the desert are like water. They make the world larger.

When she left, the old man smiled after her.

“Fairy tales,” he said, as if tasting the word.

Then he laughed softly and added, enigmatic, almost casual, as if it were merely a remark about the weather.

“Some call it fairy tale, child, only so they do not have to learn it is history.”

And Gudi went down into the night of Ashambrat, the stars above her, the sand beneath her, and in her head a small, barely visible whirl was turning.

Perhaps imagined.

Perhaps the beginning.

II

Nigk and Xian went farther north, because at some point it becomes easier to keep moving forward than to admit you have found nothing.

Behind them, Chreck and the Grond Pass lay like a boundary they had crossed in thought before their feet truly did. Ahead of them lay land that no longer felt like land, but like a silence that had found itself a surface. The snow did not fall all the time, but it was never really gone. It lay in ruts, clung to branches, settled in shadows as if it had decided it lived here.

At first they still found traces. A wheel frozen in mud. A scrap of cloth caught on a thorn. A forgotten bundle packed so carefully it felt like a mistake to open it. But the farther they went, the less the traces became signs and the more they became questions.

Then they found the first village.

It was not destroyed, not burned, not looted. It simply lay there as if it had briefly held its breath. The houses were dark but intact. The fences stood, only a few slats crooked, like after an ordinary winter. Snow lay on the roofs like on resting animals. No smoke rose. No voice. No dog. Only the wind slipping through the lanes and not even pretending to be searching.

Nigk reined in his horse for a moment, and Xian did the same without needing to say it. They looked at each other. In their gaze was what they had not said aloud for days: this feels wrong.

They dismounted. Their steps sounded too loud on the frozen ground, as if the village did not want to be woken. Xian took out the glasses Anadar had given her, put them on, and studied the dark windows. In that glass the shadows did not become kinder. Only clearer.

“No watch,” she murmured.

Nigk went to the first house, not out of curiosity, but because someone has to decide whether you touch the door. He set his hand on the latch.

The door was closed.

He pushed. It yielded without resistance. Not because it had been forced, but because no one had locked it.

Inside it was not cold like outside. It was cold like a room that has not been lived in for a long time but has not yet understood it is empty. A table stood in the middle. On the table lay a knife. Beside it a wooden board, half cut, as if someone had stood up in the middle of a task and never returned. In one corner jars were lined up neatly. A chair lay overturned, not violently, more as if someone had nudged it carelessly with a knee.

Xian touched nothing. She moved slowly through the room, letting her gaze slide over objects as if reading what people had not written down.

“They left,” she said at last, softly, not as a conclusion so much as an incredulous description.

Nigk opened a chest. Inside were dried berries wrapped in cloth, salted meat, a small bundle of herbs. Stores. Preserved goods. Winter things. The things you do not leave behind if you flee in panic.

“This isn’t flight,” Nigk said.

Xian nodded, and in that nod was something only the two of them could share in that way. That kind of closeness that does not depend on sharing blood, but on having survived the same nights. She was his sister, and she knew his voice so well that she could tell when he was forcing himself to stay calm.

They went from house to house. Always the same picture with slight variations. A pot on the hearth, empty and clean, as if someone had rinsed it that morning. A blanket on a bed, smoothed out. In one house the door was even carefully bolted from the inside, as if locking up were a habit you do not forget even when you leave.

“Door shut,” Nigk muttered when he saw it the third time.

Xian gave a short snort. “As if they’ll come back tomorrow.”

They found no signs of struggle. No smashed furniture, no smell of blood, no arrow, no knife buried in wood. They found no frantic tracks in the snow either, no footprints running wild in all directions. Only old steps, softened, snowed over, as if time itself had decided to smooth everything.

They took what they needed, and took it with the feeling that every piece of bread lifted from a chest was one more question. Xian spoke a brief word of thanks, more out of respect for the absent than out of faith. Nigk pretended he had not heard.

The village became their first base.

Not because it felt good, but because you have to stand somewhere or you go blind. They chose a house with an intact roof and a chimney that still drew. They made a fire with wood dry enough to burn, and the smoke climbed into the gray sky as if it were the only sign that humans still breathed here.

From there they rode out by day, sometimes only a few hours, sometimes longer. They searched the surroundings, followed paths that could now only be guessed at under the snow. They found more small settlements, these too empty. In some the animals still existed, not alive, but as traces: a stable full of hay untouched, a water bucket tipped over and frozen as if someone had clipped it with an elbow while leaving.

They hunted rabbits when they saw them. The bows helped, and yet it was not magic that fed them, but patience. Xian could be still longer than anyone Nigk knew. Nigk could wait without his body trembling because he had learned it when waiting was a profession.

They saw wolves in the distance, yellow eyes in white. They did not follow, but they were there, a reminder that land without people is not automatically harmless.

Once, at night, they heard a bear far away, a deep rumble as if the earth itself were answering. Xian laid a hand on Nigk’s arm, not afraid, only connecting. They did not have to speak to coordinate. They did anyway, whispering, because words sometimes help keep the mind together.

“Tomorrow we go farther north,” Nigk said as they sat by the fire.

Xian stared into the flames. “Tomorrow we’ll see whether tomorrow exists,” she replied, and it was not cynicism but experience.

Days passed that way. Then weeks.

They shifted their base step by step farther north, not out of compulsion, but because the pattern stayed the same: empty villages, empty roads, empty nights. Ever colder. Ever less light. Day became a gray strip between darkness and darkness. Sometimes the sun looked like a pale coin behind clouds that no longer moved on.

The horses grew slower, not from fatigue, but because snow is an opponent that does not fight, it simply is. The farther they went, the more often hooves sank, the heavier each step became. The pack horses, patient as they were, snorted as if to say even patience ends.

Eventually they found a village so close to the forest the trees almost swallowed it. Beyond it began frozen lakes lying like flat mirrors under snow. Even in summer, old maps said, they barely thawed. Nigk remembered that line and felt it suddenly gain weight. Summer was no longer a promise here. Only a theory.

They took a hut at the edge of the village, deeper and more solid, as if its walls had been built to survive storms. Wood was stacked carefully, as if someone had prepared it in autumn. Furs hung from a beam, thick, smelling of animal and smoke. In one corner stood jars filled with dried beans, flour, salt.

“This is absurd,” Nigk said when he saw the supplies.

Xian pulled off a glove and ran her fingers along the rim of a jar. “It’s a gift,” she said.

“From people who aren’t here anymore.”

Xian looked at him. “And still it’s here.”

They settled in as best you can in a hut that is not yours. They laid sleeping places close to the fire. They hung furs over the worst cracks. They placed their weapons where they could find them in the dark. Xian fixed the amulet under her clothes and checked it as if she were soothing it, not the other way around.

Outside, snowstorms came.

Not every day, but often enough that you could never truly be sure you could ride tomorrow. The wind howled as if it had a voice and resented having no listeners. Snow pressed against the wood as if it wanted to get in. Sometimes the white stayed for days, and then the world was so uniform you could no longer recognize the horizon.

On such days Nigk and Xian sat by the fire and spoke quietly, not because they were afraid, but because loud voices sound wrong in an empty world.

“There’s no reason,” Nigk said at some point, and the sentence sounded tired.

“There is a reason,” Xian replied, rubbing her hands. “We just can’t find it.”

Nigk looked at her. “We’re finding nothing. No traces. No screams. No battle sites. Nothing.”

Xian held his gaze. “That, exactly, is a trace.”

He wanted to argue and did not. Because he knew she might be right, and that was worse than being wrong.

They considered whether to go on.

Still farther north, into forest, lakes, and darkness. But the horses would not make it. They were sinking already. And every kilometer farther north was a kilometer farther from any return.

They considered turning back.

But that too became harder, not only because snow erases paths, but because winter had turned its back on them. Behind them lay weeks of travel, and every week was a storm that could decide you no longer get through.

In the end it was not a decision like yes or no. It was a decision like survival or pride.

“We overwinter,” Nigk said one evening, and he spoke it as if pronouncing a verdict.

Xian was silent a long time, then nodded. “We overwinter,” she confirmed, and in her tone was what she always had when she accepted something she did not like: clarity.

They had food. They had wood. They had furs. They had their gear. They had each other. And they had the silence, so immense that sometimes it felt like a sound.

They were trapped, and yet they lived.

And somewhere, not far, but not visible, there were eyes that saw it.

Not human eyes. Not the eyes of refugees walking south. Other eyes: wary, suspicious, undecided whether these two strangers were a threat or only another mistake of the world.

Xiodri had been watching them for days.

Sometimes from a branch, so still that even snow did not realize it lay on her. Sometimes from higher up, not with wings, not with visible magic, but with patience. She knew the forest. She knew paths that are not paths. She knew the sound a human makes when he believes he is alone.

These two were not alone.

They did not belong to the groups that had marched through the snow. They did not belong to the long silence that had begun a year ago. Back then the first had come, at first only a few, then more. People who said little, because up here in the cold words freeze quickly into ice. They had gone south as if obeying a command they did not want to hear. Xiodri had watched them, not out of pity, but with the sober eye of a being that has lived long enough to know humans often drive themselves away.

Then they became streams, and with the streams came death. Some did not make it. They froze, starved, sat down and did not stand up again. Silently. Not dramatically. Not heroically. Just like that, as if the body had decided it would not go any farther.

Xiodri had seen it and still had not moved.

She lived in the forest, alone, for decades or longer. What are years when you have learned not to count them. She was a witch, and the word had always been easier for humans than the reality. Humans avoided her. Humans hated her. Humans sought her when they were in pain, and cursed her when the pain was gone and they could be proud again.

Xiodri could handle that.

More dangerous than humans were the mages.

Not all of them, she knew that. There were some who saw that witchcraft is not automatically unbridled magic, that another path can have rules too, just different ones. But there were enough who saw in witchcraft what the Code refuses to see: wild growth, disorder, danger. And if the schools ever remembered the old word—purge—then it is an ugly thing to try to explain you are not fire when you are already standing on the wood.

Xiodri understood very well how hard it is to explain things when you are burning.

That was why it was better to be invisible. Not by spell, but by habit. By a life so far aside that for most it did not exist.

And she had arranged her life well.

An arrangement with her neighbors before those neighbors vanished. She healed when someone came, not from kindness, but because it was useful. Rotten teeth, broken bones, fever that would not leave. People brought her food, gifts, sometimes only wood, sometimes salt. They left quickly again. They spoke little. They pretended it was not a witch helping them, but a coincidence in the forest.

That was how it had been for a long time.

Then everything changed.

The aversion came. Not like an animal, not like an enemy, more like a feeling that settles in the ribcage and says: go. Go away. Go south. Go before you cannot. Xiodri was not immune. She felt it too, that pull, that illogical urging that did not come from fear but felt like a foreign hand. Yet her ties were stronger: to her hut, to her trees, to her animals, to her forest, and yes, to her fear of the stake that still burns in southern stories.

She did not feel the aversion all the time. It came in waves. It went. And for some time now it had vanished, as if something had withdrawn. Perhaps the foreign thing that had driven people away was not nearby at the moment. Perhaps it was sated. Perhaps it was waiting. Xiodri did not know. She only knew the silence had been different for weeks. Less urging, more lurking.

And then these two arrived.

Strangers. Armed. Alert. They did not move like refugees. They did not march stubbornly south. They searched. They stayed. They made a fire as if fire up here were a statement.

Xiodri watched them and came to no clear opinion.

They were not the threat that had driven people away; she could feel that. But they were close to magic, and close to magic always means danger to a witch, even when that magic smiles kindly.

She watched Xian step out of the hut at night, briefly, checking the sky as if questioning the stars. She watched Nigk sometimes simply sit and listen, as if trying to hear what was no longer there.

Xiodri wondered why they were here.

And she wondered what would happen if the foreign thing returned while these two were still here.

She stayed on her branch, still, holding her breath so long that even the wind forgot her.

Curiously she followed what the two of them were doing, unsure what to make of it.

But certain of one thing.

When something in this world begins again, it rarely begins where you are looking.

And these two were looking in the wrong direction.

III

Kral stood on deck as if the wind belonged to him.

Not because he commanded it, but because he had learned not to oppose it. The bow cut through dark water that felt like oil at night, and above them the sky rushed past in fast, ragged streaks. Tonight had been rough. The wind had pushed, hard and impatient, had laid the ship over and made the rigging sing, and precisely because of that they had made good distance. Kral watched his crew reef the sails as if that sound, that flapping of canvas and the creak of blocks, was the only reliable thing left in the world.

Now it was time to put in.

Time to enter that damned harbor, to deal with those cursed mages.

They had sailed out from Gontar, as so often. Gontar, the city of life by the sea, always smelling of herbs, salt, and warm wood, a city that lived even in winter because something there was always healing, growing, or rotting. Kral had loaded consumables: dried foods, salt, oil, bolts of cloth, timber, clay jars, nails, rope, tools. Things islands need, because islands cannot provide themselves with everything, no matter how much they pretend they are self-sufficient and pure.

And every time he made this run, he marveled at the same absurdity, as if it were the first time.

Water mages on the islands of wind.

It made no sense. Water belongs to the sea, yes. But wind islands, water school. It sounded like a joke only mages would find funny. Perhaps that was exactly what it was: one of those decisions people call tradition so no one has to admit it was once made out of spite or fear.

Alongside the cargo, he had taken students aboard again this time. Mage students. Young boys and girls, mostly from the desert, from that damned Ashambrat, as every year. Children raised in sand whose eyes always grew the same size on their first day at sea, as if they had believed the world ended behind the dunes.

Every year they saw an ocean for the first time.

Every year they got sick.

Every year they vomited their souls out.

Kral laughed when he saw the first one at the rail, pale as a fish belly, clinging, retching, while the ship was barely doing more than breathing. He did not laugh out of cruelty, more out of that seaward schadenfreude that says: welcome to a world that does not ask after you.

What was different this year was the escort.

Not only young students. Not only nervous adepts who gathered in groups and whispered as if lying courage into each other. This time older masters of the Water School had sailed with them. Two, maybe three. Kral had not cared, as long as they paid or carried a letter heavy enough to prevent arguments.

Their behavior was strange.

One of them was almost always on deck.

Not like someone enjoying the sea. Like someone standing watch. His eyes were not on the waves, but on the horizon, as if he had to see something before the others did. Kral caught himself sometimes looking that way too, without knowing what he was actually searching for.

Now the islands lay ahead.

He saw them first as dark fragments in the gray, as if gods had broken them out of the mainland and carelessly thrown them into the sea. Jagged boulders with white rings of spray that looked like teeth. Between the islands the water was treacherous, with currents breaking on rock and then running back as if changing their mind.

He could dock at only one island.

Only one had a harbor, a proper entrance, a basin deep enough, and even that was luck you did not praise too loudly. The other islands were dangerous: reefs under water you only know if you have rammed them once, or if you have the chart of a man who rammed them and lived.

They passed the first islands slowly, as if the ship itself grew respectful. On some stood towers. On others there was only bare rock and a few crooked shrubs crouching in the wind. Here and there he saw walls, terraces, bridges of stone so narrow Kral wondered whether they had been built out of spite.

Kral spat over the rail, more out of habit than contempt.

They went in slowly, sails half taken, the helm heavy in his steersman’s hands. Gulls screamed as if complaining about every arrival. The wind whistled between the rocks so it made tones that sounded like voices, and that was the worst thing about these islands: you could never be sure whether you were hearing only wind, or something using the wind.

As they slipped past one of the islands, Kral saw a tower that looked odd.

Its top was charred.

Not like old soot from torches. Not like ordinary weathering. It looked as if something had burned up there, as if fire had eaten into stone and then stopped because there was nothing left to eat. Kral blinked, and for a moment he wondered whether the tower had always looked that way and he was only noticing it now.

He looked at the master on deck.

The man was still standing there, his gaze fixed on the islands as if he had already carried that tower in his mind before.

Kral swallowed the thought. Mage stories. Mage nonsense. Not his business. His business was the ship, the wind, the wood that must not break.

They moored.

Lines flew. Hands caught. Knots drew tight. The ship rocked once, twice, then lay still, as still as a ship can lie here.

And as every year, the moment the students had solid ground under their feet, they knelt.

Some at once. Others only after two steps, as if their bodies had to remember that land exists. They knelt on the quay with their hands on the stones, murmuring words or prayers or formulas. Kral did not know and did not want to know. He only knew they always behaved as if they had just survived death, and he could not even truly contradict them.

The crew unloaded.

Fast. Efficient. Without affection. They stacked goods on the quay: bales, crates, sacks. Someone would deal with it once they were gone. Someone in robes who pretended nails and rope were beneath him until he remembered his tower without nails and rope is only a pile of stones.

Kral was already thinking about casting off.

Unmoor. Away. Out of this harbor before the islands gave him that feeling again, that something in the wind is standing there and listening.

Then a group of three approached him.

The first figure was small and broad, squat like a barrel, but not fat, more compact, as if it had chosen its mass deliberately so it would not be blown away. Behind it two very tall, very slender figures, both with their hoods pulled low so you saw only shadow and the suggestion of eyes.

The small one stepped closer and began to speak.

“Captain,” he said, and his voice was calm, as if he knew no one in this harbor needs to be loud to be heard. “My name is Master Grot.”

Kral kept his face neutral. In moments like these you did not show uncertainty. You did not show dislike either. Both smelled like blood to mages.

“What do you want,” Kral asked, making it sound like a purely commercial question.

“Passage,” Grot replied. “Back to the mainland.”

“To Gontar,” Kral said, already halfway into no.

Grot shook his head. “It makes no difference to us where you land. A harbor is enough. A market is enough. A river is enough.”

A pouch changed hands.

Heavy. Full. Gold.

Kral weighed it as if he needed to test whether it was real, and because the ritual helped him not to smile too quickly. Empty return voyages were bad. Voyages with gold were good. Voyages with mages were unpleasant. But gold made many things easier to bear.

“Fine,” Kral grunted.

Grot nodded as if that were a form you respect because it is old, not because it is important. The two tall figures behind him said nothing.

They put out to sea again.

The harbor vanished behind them, the citadel shrank, the stairs became a line, and Kral felt his neck relax, though he did not want it to. It was absurd that an island could unsettle him this much, but he had learned you cannot always think feelings away at sea. You can only ignore them until they kill you.

The passage was uneventful.

And yet one of them was always on deck.

Day and night.

They did not even relieve each other in any obvious way. There was simply always someone up there, as if sleep were only for people who are not waiting.

Kral did not ask.

He did not dare, and he was proud enough to sell it to himself as professionalism. You do not ask mages why they keep watch. You do not ask them what they fear. You only make sure they are not in the way.

They reached the great river.

The wind weakened. The sea became current. Kral had the sails taken in and readied his crew for what came next. Upstream travel was no longer seamanship. It was work.

At the landing he organized horses.

Draft animals to pull the ship along the bank, step by step, day by day, while men with poles and oars only corrected, not drove. A routine as old as trade itself.

When the horses were ready, the mages also went ashore.

They did not truly take leave. No bow, no thanks. Only a brief nod, and then they were gone, quickly, as if afraid someone might notice their route if they walked it too long.

Kral watched them and shook his head.

Strange people.

The ship was hauled.

Two days to the Great Market. The river was sluggish, the bank muddy, the horses worked, the crew barely helped with oars. River travel was patience and filth. Not heroic. Not romantic. But reliable.

When the Great Market came into view, Kral could see from far off what he had heard.

It had grown.

Not in walls. In people.

Tents everywhere, camps, smoke. Refugees, so many that the market no longer smelled of spices, but of wet cloth, soup, fear. Voices in a thousand pitches, not the loud haggling of a normal market, but the subdued talk of people who do not know whether they will still be here tomorrow.

Kral docked, spoke with the harbor master, dismissed his crew. Only the skeleton crew and a few officers remained aboard. The others vanished as fast as if you could shake fear off by running quickly enough.

Kral headed to the nearest tavern.

Not to drink.

To organize cargo, learn demand, check routes, and because taverns always talk faster than authorities.

He was piled with rumors.

Ships were said to have gone down at sea. Sailed out under contract, never arrived. Debris had been found, planks that looked as if something had bitten them, corpses on beaches and no one knew which ship they belonged to.

“A monster,” said a man with salt in his hair as if salt were proof. “Whale-big.”

“Bigger,” contradicted another who stank of spirits. “Like a tower. It lifts the ship and just tips it over.”

“No,” said a third, deadly serious. “It drags them down. Not with a whirlpool. With arms. Arms like ropes. And eyes that glow under the water.”

Kral listened and pretended to be interested. In truth, he was checking who would pay, who could still work, who did not start trembling too much when the word sea was spoken.

In a corner someone told how a friend of a friend had been hit. He had barely made it, washed ashore half dead, and had only said “teeth,” again and again, “teeth,” as if that was all the world had left him.

Three days later Kral met that supposed “survivor” in another tavern.

The man was alive. The man was drunk. The man was laughing.

“You’re alive,” Kral said dryly.

“Of course,” the man slurred. “I talked the monster out of it.”

Kral laughed once, briefly. That was the problem with sea monsters. They were useful. They scared people. But they were rarely precise.

He dismissed it as sailor’s yarn.

Or rather, he acted as if he dismissed it. A captain who believes in sea monsters gets no crew. A captain who acts as if he does not believe gets at least a chance.

Eventually Kral had what he needed.

Cargo for the south: cloth, tools, salt, oil. And a heap of passengers paying very well to get as far away from the north as possible. People who did not ask how the sea was. People who only asked when they would cast off.

Then came the real problem.

Crew.

The rumors had done their work. Men were suddenly sick when the word islands was spoken. Others suddenly had “family” they could not leave, though they had not mentioned any family last week. Still others demanded double pay because they had abruptly decided their lives were worth more.

Kral cursed inwardly, then laughed outwardly.

“You’ve gone soft,” he said to a circle of half-grown toughs who liked the idea of being sailors as long as it cost no fear.

No one laughed.

So he did what captains do when they have no choice.

He hired men from the north.

Men who could not afford passage. Men with cold eyes and jackets too thin. Men ready to do anything as long as it got them away. Kral looked into their eyes and knew: with a few beatings he could turn them into workable sailors. Not good ones. But workable. And workable is sometimes all you need at sea.

He signed names he would forget tomorrow.

He had the passengers listed.

He arranged his cargo.

And while outside the Great Market overflowed with people, Kral thought the sea-monster rumors were garnish.

Let them talk.

As long as they pay.

And as long as the sea does what it always does.

Because Kral was captain enough to know that the worst things are not the ones everyone talks about.

The worst things are the ones for which no one has the same story.

IV

Anadar sat on the edge of his bed, the sword laid crosswise over his knees, as if it were an animal you must not lock away because you do not know what it will do then. The chamber was small and functional, like almost everything in the Fiery Fortress, but now it felt tighter, as if the smoke from the previous night had drawn the walls closer to him.

A low hearth in the corner, rekindled only out of necessity, cast an uneasy reddish light. The flame did not burn cleanly. It still smelled of soot and of wet wood hauled in from the rain too early. Above the hearth hung a dark stain, fresh, as if the ceiling had only understood yesterday that it had been attacked. The stones in the floor were cracked in places. A fissure ran like a thin scar from the doorframe to beneath the table. The table itself was half charred because someone, in haste, had shoved it too close to the fire just to get any warmth into the room at all. On it stood an inkwell and a quill, beside them two parchment rolls Anadar had not opened, and a cup of water that tasted of smoke, as if even water no longer had innocence here.

The air was cold despite the fire. Not winter cold. Exhaustion cold.

And then there was the sound.

Not a noise in the room. More a sound in his head. The sword sang. It had no voice you could actually hear. It was a presence that pressed like a tone against the inside of his skull. Sometimes loud, sometimes quiet. Sometimes greedy, sometimes questioning. Sometimes like knocking, sometimes like a whisper that was already command before it found words.

Blood.

Anadar had not slept. He had only lain there, sometimes with eyes open, sometimes with eyes closed, and every time he thought he might drift away, the singing pulled him back as if something were tugging at him. Not hard. Persistent. Like a hunger that does not stop because it has no stomach.

He stared at the blade. In the hearth light it no longer looked like steel. It looked like something that swallowed light and imprinted something into itself while doing so. Warmth came off it, not as heat but as closeness. And the longer he held it, the more it felt as if it was holding him.

Blood, it whispered again, and this time it was not even a request anymore.

There was a knock.

Once. Then again, a little firmer. Not hesitant. Not polite. Shara never knocked as if asking permission. She knocked as if confirming she was here now.

Anadar said nothing.

The door opened anyway, because she knew he was awake. Shara stepped in without a cloak, only in the travel gear she had hardly taken off for days. Her hair was tied back tight, but a few strands had come loose. Her eyes were clear, too clear for this hour.

She stopped, and her gaze went straight to the sword.

A tiny moment in which her pupils narrowed. Then she looked at him. Not at the sword. At him.

“They want to hold council,” she said.

Anadar made only a sound, half breath, half assent. “Mmm.”

Shara did not come closer, as if she first had to test how close she was allowed to get to him right now. “They need leadership.”

“Mmm.”

She pressed her lips together briefly, and when she spoke again it was less factual. “You look terrible. Did you sleep.”

Anadar lifted his eyes. For a moment the word Blood was already on his tongue, as if it would be the most honest answer he could give. He even felt the sword in his hands become a fraction heavier, as if it were looking forward to the word.

He swallowed it.

“A little,” he lied, and he could hear himself how bad the lie was.

Shara did not comment. She took one step closer, and her voice lowered, but did not soften. “Come.”

Anadar straightened. The sword sang as if it were protesting, and he had to focus to loosen his fingers from the grip. It cost him more inner effort than standing up. He put the blade away slowly, the way you push an animal into a cage and hope the cage holds.

Then he went out with Shara.

The corridor was darker than usual because many torch brackets were empty. Where light still hung, it flickered. Where stone should have been smooth, it was broken. The fortress was alive, but it lived like someone who has only just understood they are injured.

They went to Rotar’s tower. No, to the Dean’s tower, Anadar corrected himself in his thoughts, and the correction alone tasted bitter. Rotar was no longer a man. Rotar was a hole in the order.

The tower still stood, but up above a huge gap gaped in the roof. Wind whistled through it, and it sounded as if the tower itself were breathing, irregularly, like a lung after smoke. That was why they did not meet upstairs. They met in a chamber lower down, large enough, somewhere in the middle, where the walls still carried.

When they entered, everyone was already there.

Masters who normally would not stand together in one room unless protocol forced them to. Faces that were tired and eyes that were too awake. The smell of healing salves clung to cloaks, soot to hair, blood under fingernails.

Manador stood at the end of the table, not because he wanted to, but because rooms organize themselves that way when they need someone in front. His coat sat neat, too neat, as if he wore order because he did not feel it inside. He had been chosen as the new Dean after Anadar had refused even to exist as an option. Manador wore the role like armor that did not fit yet.

And yet it was Anadar who held authority in the room.

Not because he wanted it. Because everyone knew it. Because they had seen who stood in the courtyard when the fortress burned.

Morgut was there, standing with arms folded the way he did when he had to listen and keep everything in view at once. Siendra and Miene were with him. Shara did not sit at once; she stayed beside Anadar at first, as if she were his anchor. Miene and Siendra were there as well, paler than before, more awake than was good for them. They sat close together, not out of fear, but out of a new habit that closeness means safety.

The discussion was already in motion when Anadar entered.

Rebuilding, of course. Who starts where. Which walls first. Which workshops. Which supplies. Who delegates to whom. Long sentences, many caution words, much hedging. A conversation pretending structure equals solution.

Manador tried to lead, and you could tell he could, but that he was watching himself while doing it. He asked instead of deciding. He waited for agreement instead of setting it. Especially when Anadar’s gaze touched him briefly, he grew a shade stiffer.

Anadar stayed silent for a long time.

Not out of respect. Out of fatigue. And out of a growing impatience that burned in him like a second fire. The sword sang quietly in his head, as if it were mocking the entire discussion.

Blood, it whispered, and Anadar felt his hand twitch.

Then he had had enough.

He stood up without making a great noise, but the room still became quieter, as if his rising were a signal.

“The fortress was built to be destroyed,” Anadar said. His voice was not loud. Only clear. “These walls have endured more already. They will stand again. But there is something more important than arguing about what gets rebuilt first.”

A few wanted to object. No one did immediately.

Anadar let his gaze pass over faces. “What we defeated together did not come from nothing. And if we lose ourselves in stone while the cause keeps working outside, then we are only building a prettier ruin.”

Manador opened his mouth. Closed it again. He did not look offended. He looked relieved that someone had briefly taken the load off him.

Anadar continued, and the word Blood lay like a shadow behind every sentence. “Fantor came here from Sontor. Sontor is a deserted city now. Refugees. Empty villages. Expulsions. This is not coincidence. If we want to start searching anywhere, we start there.”

He breathed once. “I want to go to my brother. To Tandor. I want causes. I want connections.”

Shara moved at once. “You’re not going alone.”

“Yes,” Anadar said, and he meant it as efficiency, and as flight. “Alone I’m faster.”

Morgut shook his head. “Faster isn’t always smarter.”

Manador lifted a hand, too late. Shara was already attacking. “You want to go alone because since the battle you aren’t you anymore,” she said, and you could hear she was provoking him and trying to save him at the same time. “You’re closed off. You’re surly. You hardly listen to us. I barely recognize you.”

Anadar looked at her with narrowed eyes, and for a moment there was nothing but the pounding in his head.

Blood.

He forced himself to stay calm. “Someone has to stay. The ten daughters need training. They need structure. They need protection.”

“Then I’ll take it,” Manador said, faster than expected. It sounded as if he had been holding onto that sentence just to finally do something unmistakable. “I’ll take the training of all ten. The fortress needs more than walls. It needs answers.”

Anadar wanted to object, and he felt he would almost have succeeded if only he had been harder.

Then the air changed.

Not dramatic. Not visible. But the room became a fraction larger, as if someone had opened a door that was not made of wood.

The Mother was there.

Not like an apparition, not splendid. Rather unobtrusive, almost too quiet, as if invisibility were a habit she did not drop even in a room of masters. Dark cloak, eyes awake, as if she had heard the discussion long before she crossed the threshold.

“Anadar,” she said, and her tone was neither request nor command and yet it was both.

Everyone went still. Even those who never go still.

“I urgently ask you to come,” she continued, and the word urgently was an alarm in her mouth. “And I ask you to take my two daughters with you. Miene. Siendra and Shara.”

Miene lowered her gaze briefly. Siendra did not grin. That was the striking part. Anadar knew it was not a request. Anadar started to answer, but the Mother looked at him in a way that made him understand: debate here is not only resistance, it is wasted time. “Fine.”

And time was currency they did not have.

They talked for a long time after that. Arguments. Responsibility. Duties. Risks. The fortress. Tandor. Zoordak. The north. Words like nails driven into something still wobbling.

In the end Anadar yielded to the majority.

Reluctantly.

Shara and Morgut would come with him; it was better to take the young man with them, it simply felt right. Miene and Siendra as well. Manador would take over the training of the other eight, and he said it as if proving to himself he was not only a stopgap.

Before dawn they rode out.

Five riders. Cold air smelling of wet stone. Autumn, clearly there, mornings hard. The horses steamed, the saddles creaked, and the sky had that dull gray that says: the day will not be kind.

They spoke little.

Anadar rode in front because he wanted it that way and because no one wanted to stop him. He rode hard, too hard, as if speed could outrun his thoughts. Under his cloak, close to his body, the sword sang. Not loud. Persistent.

Blood.

Morgut stayed beside him, a little back, so he could watch Anadar without pressing him. Shara rode on the other side, her gaze turned more inward than outward, as if she were watching every muscle in Anadar.

Miene and Siendra struggled to keep up. Not because they were weak, but because the route was brutal. The horses were kept running with small spells, and every spell had a price. You could hear it in the snorting, see it in the tension in the flanks, in the way even animals eventually begin to protest against magic.

Anadar did not want to ride through the Great Market. Too many eyes, too many questions, too many rivers of people. He chose side roads, more direct, harsher, quieter.

Even so they met refugee groups: small camps in hollows, families at fire pits too small, wagons sunk in mud as if they had given up. Again and again soldier patrols searching the area. Bandits, they said. Highwaymen who preyed on refugees and small groups.

One patrol stopped them, a sergeant with a weathered face and eyes that had seen too much. He assessed the five riders, their weapons, their posture, and decided it was better to warn them than to control them.

“Between here and around Fronti,” he said, “there are robbers. Mostly refugees. Small groups. Unarmed. Ride only by day. Stay in inns. Not out in the open.”

They thanked him, brief, correct. A knighthood of reality.

When they rode on, Anadar said later without turning: “We don’t have time for that.”

Shara clenched her teeth. “Time isn’t the only thing that can kill us.”

“Ordinary robbers aren’t our problem,” Anadar growled.

“And arrogance is yours,” Shara snapped back.

Morgut cut in, calm but hard. “We renew the protective spells. All of them. And we keep the formation tighter. That costs no time.”

Anadar said nothing. He allowed it. But his jaw was set.

Hours ate distance. Cold crept in. Miene slipped once in the saddle and caught herself, but Anadar did not see it, or pretended not to. Siendra breathed heavier, said nothing, and that alone showed how hard she was fighting.

Eventually Shara could not take it anymore.

“Slow down,” she said.

Anadar did not answer at once. The word Blood echoed in his skull, greedy, and he had to fight that inner pull just to be present with her at all. “No,” he said at last. “We’ll lose…”

“We’ll lose them,” Shara cut in, jerking her chin backward. “And we’ll lose the horses. And you’ll lose yourself.”

Anadar stared at her, narrow eyed. “You talk as if I were…”

“Different,” Shara said. “You are different. Since the battle. I barely recognize you.”

Morgut nodded once, as if that nod weighed more than any speech. “A little rest won’t hurt anyone. Not even you.”

Anadar wanted to object. He wanted to push through. He wanted to win against time.

Then he felt his horse stumble under him, just slightly. A small misstep. But it was physical proof that magic cannot be used like a whip forever.

He breathed out.

“Fronti,” he said. “One extra night. But then we ride hard.”

Shara nodded, not satisfied, but relieved. “Good.”

They reached Fronti at evening.

The city lay on the western sea, still before the mountains, and it felt like a place that had been a passage too often to remain untouched. The guards were nervous. The inns were full. Refugees in the alleys. Soldiers too tired to look strict. Fronti smelled of wet wood, soup, horse, the breath of a region that no longer knows how long it can stay safe.

And as they rode through the gate, Anadar heard in his head, very quietly, satisfied like an animal scenting prey, that one word again.

Blood.

V

Slonda had not been himself since that one attack in the library.

It was not that he had grown weaker. Not in body, not in craft. It was something else, something that had laid itself like a thin film over certain thoughts. The moment he tried to remember particular places, words, lines, sequences, a barrier slid in front of his inner eye, so clean and smooth it did not feel like forgetting, but like something made.

He noticed it first in small things.

He would stand in a corridor he knew he had walked a hundred times, and still need a heartbeat too long to decide whether to turn left or right. He would read a sentence, understand it, even nod, and two pages later he would have to flip back, as if someone had taken the connection out of his hands. It was a disquiet that was not loud, but constant, and it made him more closed off than he would have thought possible. Slonda had always been restless, a man whose thoughts ran while the world was still walking. But this was different. Restlessness with an edge of suspicion, even toward himself.

The catacombs became his place.

Not out of romance. Not out of defiance. Because below lived the knowledge that was not meant to be needed anymore. Down where the library did not shine, but breathed. Where the air was damp, where stone took on the smell of old water, where parchment and leather eventually acquired the same taste, that dry, bitter dust taste that settles on the tongue when you read too long.

He found texts that still survived, but they rarely made sense. Not because they were badly written, but because they lacked their context.

In earlier times, it seemed, people did not write spells into books, at least not the way spells are understood today. They did not write the words, not the signs, not the exact grip. They wrote effects. Reports. Warnings. Stories that pretended to be lessons but were really only traces.

He read of beings that dwelled under the earth, dark figures not bound to places but to conditions. He read of dragons that lived in the sky, not as animals but as something between storm and will. He read of mages who ruled the world, and of wars that did not merely devour countries but almost the shape of the world itself. Even the universe, one passage said, as if the writer had not dared to write the word out and yet had done it anyway.

Everything was loose.

He could not place it in time. Some texts felt like fairy tales, too rounded, too beautiful, too definite. Some carried a spark of truth so cold it did not smell of imagination. Some he simply did not understand because they were written in a language that did not like being touched by the present. He deciphered line after line with effort, cursed softly when a word eluded him, and in doing so realized that not only the language was old. His own memory was no longer reliable.

Some books had decayed, parchment crumbly, ink faded. Others had yellowed, blotched, as if damp had chosen only certain sentences. Still others had been censored. Not crudely, not angrily, but neatly. Pages removed. Paragraphs cut out. Edges smooth, as if someone had taken time to erase exactly the place that would later become a question.

And the deeper Slonda sank into these layers, the clearer it became that he had only touched the tip, that he was not reading in an archive but in a field of fragments someone had intentionally left that way.

He made slow progress.

Not only because of the texts. Also because he often could not remember what he had read the moment he stood up. It was as if the cellar itself pulled things out of him as soon as he had taken them in. At some point he began to compile catalogues: lists, notes, index cards, as far as Tandor even knew such things. He tried to order by time, by importance, by recurring motifs. He wrote the same names again and again because they returned like a song you do not understand but that still stays in your head.

For the first time, he thought once, someone is making this effort, and the thought was bitter and proud at the same time.

He dug deeper and deeper.

Parchments no one had touched for centuries. Rolls bound so tightly you had to break them open with patience. Now and then he did indeed discover a written spell: of more recent times, yes, but far from the present. Words that felt different, as if the language of the art had had different teeth back then.

And amid all of it he found things that were useful.

Not merely interesting. Useful.

A roll that described a spell to heal joints so precisely that Slonda involuntarily thought of Aldemar’s knee, and then cursed himself for it because his mind had already veered back into the world. Another roll, a charm for summoning house spirits not for power but for order. A transcription describing how to transfer written signs so they do not lose their form. A charm that made flowers bloom even in dry soil. A parchment describing translation. And another he did not yet understand because its signs were so intertwined they seemed to swallow each other.

He skimmed them, tested what might be workable, and set aside everything that looked good. Some would need restoration, yellowed script, pocked parchment. Others did not; they were preserved well, very well, as if they had been lifted out of time. He did not put the documents into his bag. Not yet. He laid the rolls by the stairs, as if the stairs were a promise that he would take them up when he climbed back up.

Up.

He stopped and suddenly listened to his stomach.

How long had it been since he had eaten.

The thought struck him as something foreign. Hunger as a reminder that he was not only a mind. He blinked, looked into the depth of corridors where his lamp drew only a small circle of light, and forced himself to turn around. Out of the damp cellars. Up into air that did not taste of stone.

He gathered the rolls, took them with him, and when he reached the upper halls, the library suddenly felt loud, though no one was shouting. Footsteps on stone. The rustle of pages. The low murmur of someone on watch.

At the desk sat Drinda.

A youth, not quite child, not quite man. One of those people you take for granted in Tandor until they are missing. He sat there as always, as if his task were unimportant, though it was exactly what prevented knowledge from being carried off because someone was too lazy to copy, or because someone believed a book could be owned.

Slonda hesitated.

Something held him back. An instinct that said you should not bring everything from depth into light without testing it first. Then the second voice inside him, sober and mocking, spoke.

They are trained. They are careful. They trigger nothing because they copy.

He placed the rolls on the desk.

“Ah, Drinda,” Slonda began, keeping his tone as if this were an everyday matter, not a step that might later matter. “Here. I’ve found something. Would you make copies for me. Copy them cleanly. It isn’t urgent.”

Drinda raised his eyes, about to say something—perhaps to ask, perhaps to warn, perhaps only to nod.

Slonda did not wait.

He was already turning and walking toward the kitchen, as if food had suddenly become more urgent than control. He got bread, something warm, something that tasted of spices and fat, and he ate too quickly, as if trying to reclaim time he had lost below.

After that he sank into his chamber and fell asleep, tired like someone who has not only worked, but fought against something he cannot name.

He dreamed of the library.

Of the cellars. And yet it was not the cellar he knew. Or it was, but not like that.

He walked through corridors, and if he went one way, he was in the damp, cold cellar he knew. If he turned around, he walked through a cellar that looked very orderly. All torches burned, but the light was blue. The books stood flawless on the shelves. Everything looked fresh and new. The bindings shone as if they had just been made. And the strangest thing was that in this orderly cellar he felt no fear. It was as if order there was not merely order, but a promise.

Then he turned again.

And was back below, in cold and damp and age, in the cellar that does not polish truth.

He woke with a jolt.

Not slowly. Not the way you come out of sleep. More like being yanked upright by an alarm.

Without putting on anything else, without shoes, he marched back to the library. The hall was darker—night, or early morning light—Slonda did not know, and his mind did not want to know. He went straight to the desk.

Someone else sat there.

A man, older, broader, with a look that did not ask but warded off.

“Where is Drinda,” Slonda demanded, and the impatience in his voice was too exposed.

The man at the desk lifted a hand, as if to calm Slonda without truly giving him anything. “Drinda is in the writing room,” he explained. “He is doing what you asked.”

Slonda went.

The writing room was empty.

No Drinda. No rustle. No scratch of quill on parchment. Only silence and the smell of ink that had stood open too long. On one of the desks lay a stack, the parchments together exactly as Slonda had delivered them. Beside it a few copies, already begun—clean, orderly—as if someone had worked here and then simply stopped.

Slonda stepped closer.

On the desk lay another parchment, small, with small writing, cramped, not readable to Slonda. He picked it up, turned it, tilted it, held it sideways, held it upside down. He was not even sure which way it was meant to be read. That unfamiliar the script was to him.

“Where in all curses is that damned Drinda,” he muttered, and in the mutter was something that was not only irritation.

He gathered everything.

The originals. The finished copies. And that small parchment that lay like a stab in the order.

He carried it to his chamber.

On the way doubt crept in. He should not have handed them over for copying without checking. That can be dangerous. Another voice inside him, the sober one, answered at once, almost soothing.

The acolytes are trained. They are careful. They trigger nothing because they only write.

Slonda clung to that explanation because it was simple and because he could not carry more questions right now.

In his chamber he set the rolls aside. Then, with a movement too rough for him, he swept the parchments off his writing table, as if needing to make space not only on wood, but in his mind. He laid the newly old rolls down without ordering them. He could not. Not now.

“Where has the boy gone,” he asked the room.

“Probably sleeping,” the second voice answered, and Slonda hated it for always sounding as if everything can be explained.

Again he fished out the small parchment.

This time he held it longer.

He turned it slowly, testing every orientation. Nothing made sense. The signs were not signs he knew. No handwriting that belonged to Tandor. It was as if he were seeing a language not written for his eyes.

He set it on the desk, picked it up again, held it closer to the lamp.

Still nothing.

And then that thought came, so cold it did not feel like a thought but like a foreign weight.

If Drinda truly had been in the writing room, why was the room empty.

If someone had begun the copies, why had they stopped.

And why was this parchment lying there, as if it were not part of the stack, but an addition that had slipped itself in.

Slonda stared at it until his eyes burned.

Then he went utterly still and realized his heart was beating faster than it should, only because he could not read a piece of script.

He turned the parchment again.

And again.

It made no sense, no matter which way he held it.

VI

Fronti was a coastal town, with a harbor, with unpaved streets, with the smell of fish that was larger than any importance this place had ever held. When the wind came in from the sea it smelled of nets, of old salt, of kelp, of things pulled out of water and best sold quickly before they start to talk. The houses stood close and crooked, built of wood that had been wet too often and stone that felt too soft for grand stories. Fronti was a passageway. And passageways always have too many eyes and too little sleep.

Anadar had given up looking for shelter in simple inns. He knew the answer before he asked the question. Taken. Full. No bed, at most a patch of floor, and even that would be shared with someone who did not know whether they would walk again tomorrow or stay where they fell. So he headed straight for the best house in the town, dismounted, and tossed the reins to the stable boy without asking whether the boy even had space.

“Two nights,” Morgut said before Anadar could open his mouth, and his tone was that of a man who had learned that in towns like this you do not bargain, you buy.

Anadar was irritated. More than irritated. The murmuring in his head, that unceasing word that no longer sounded like a whisper but like a hand hammering at a door, was wearing him down.

Blood.

Sometimes he could suppress it by fleeing into another room in his mind, into that inner chamber he had learned to build as a child so nothing could touch him. But the moment he did, the world around him dulled. Colors lost their edge. Sounds came from farther away. And he could not afford that. Not now, not on roads where the wrong second is enough.

He felt cramped. Robbed of freedom. This damned sword, and whatever lived inside it, was no longer an object but a second weight on his body.

He had tried to leave it behind. Just once. He had left the blade in his room and stepped into the corridor only to prove to himself he could. It had hurt him as if someone were pulling a rib out of him, not in flesh, but in something deeper, where you are not usually touched. He had gone back at once, angry at himself and even angrier that he now carried something that owned him, even though it hung at his hip.

Morgut negotiated the price as if he had been born to force people into reason. In the end they had an entire floor to themselves, more a small apartment than a room, divided into separate cabins, with a common room, a hearth that actually drew, and windows that smelled of harbor.

They freshened up, as far as you can freshen up when you taste of smoke, sweat, and road, then went downstairs to eat.

Only a few guests sat below. Not a cheerful crowd. More people who wanted to hide something and therefore acted as if they had nothing to say. One group caught Anadar’s attention, not because they were loud, but because of the way they held themselves.

He recognized one person.

He went over, and as soon as he was close enough the man lifted his head as if he had not merely seen Anadar but known him before the steps could be heard.

“Master Anadar,” he said, and in his voice was the kind of respect you do not practice, only have, when you have once stood under the same discipline.

Anadar stopped, eyes narrowed, and part of him was relieved that there was something familiar here that did not sound like blood.

“Tro´gra,” he replied. “What are you doing here.”

Tro´gra was of the Wind School, Anadar still remembered that. One of those who did not only call wind but could listen to it. Then he had gone to the Fire School, one of those rare combinations that either make you wiser or make you dangerous. Later he had begun Earth as well. Rarer still. More stubborn. Tro´gra had always been a man who wanted to learn things that did not fit together just to prove the world was not as neat as a code.

“I could ask you the same,” Tro´gra said and allowed himself a brief crooked smile. “But I see you are not traveling out of curiosity.”

Anadar sat opposite him, and Shara remained standing at first, too alert to sit down at once. Morgut took a chair as if he belonged there. Miene and Siendra stayed slightly back, eyes open, attention stretched taut.

“I am no longer a student,” Tro´gra said as if reading Anadars gaze. “I am at the court of Flund.”

“Flund,” Anadar repeated, and the name was familiar to him, but how many names did you know without ever seeing them. “The small kingdom between Sontor and Tandor.”

Tro´gra nodded. “Between roads. Between what everyone wants to pass through and what everyone avoids. We live on tolls and mines. Gold and silver. Not enough to be great. But enough to be wanted.”

“King Krant the Second,” Morgut added dryly, as if ticking a list.

Tro´gra glanced at him and nodded again. “The king sent me. Observe. Advise. Help. What the code allows, as long as you pretend you are not steering.”

Shara sat down now. “And why are you not there anymore.”

Tro´gra lifted his shoulders. A small sign that was more fatigue than indifference.

“First came barbarians,” he said. “Or what people call barbarians when they do not want to know their names. There were wars. Real ones. No rumors. No shadows. Arrows. Steel. Blood. We drove them back again and again until it stopped being about winning and became about holding.”

Anadar felt the word Blood in his head flare briefly as if it were listening. He shoved it down.

“And then,” Tro´gra continued, his voice lower, “then came refugees. Not like waves, more like a current that does not stop. They were not overrun the way Sontor was. There was no moment you could point to and say, there, that is when it happened. It was…” He searched for the word and did not like finding it. “It was a feeling. Collective. As if someone had placed a fear into every body, not as a thought, but as compulsion. Having to go.”

“An aversion,” Siendra murmured, and she did not sound clever, she sounded as if her stomach still remembered what her mind was trying to bury.

Tro´gra looked at her. His eyes narrowed for a moment as if deciding whether he was being asked or whether he had just heard something he did not want to hear.

“Call it what you want,” he said at last. “The whole city packed and left. Not in panic. Not screaming. Ordered, if you can call it that. As if everyone had received the same command, only without a voice. The king went with them and I went with him. And now I sit here and wonder whether this is even still a plan or only movement.”

“And the cause,” Anadar asked. He forced his voice to stay calm. “What triggered it.”

Tro´gra shook his head slowly, almost ashamed. “I cannot give a precise answer. It was only that everyone wanted to leave. And the more left, the more wanted to leave. Like a wind feeding itself.”

Anadar sat very still, and inside him a decision settled, not like a thought, more like something that had always been there and only now finally found a name.

He would go north. Not later. Not someday. To Zoordak, yes. To his brother, yes. But after that, or perhaps even before, he would ride into the north until he could not. He wanted to know. He wanted to see. He had been fed fragments for too long.

He only noticed how silent he had become when Tro´gra looked at him.

“You are far away,” Tro´gra said.

Anadar blinked. “I am tired,” he replied, and it was true, even if it was not the whole truth.

Tro´gra wanted to say more, but Anadar only half heard him. The blood murmur had become quieter for a while, as if it had leaned back, satisfied that he was not looking. In that gap he later fell asleep, calmer than he had been in days, because his mind held on to something that was not the sword.

In the morning they set out again. The horses had received healing spells during the night, careful and sparing, not enough to make them new, but enough to remind muscle that it can carry. Their flanks shone, their eyes were clearer. The stable boy had brushed them, and for a moment it looked as if order might be possible.

Anadar set a less grim pace. Not friendly. Not comfortable. Only less like a man fleeing himself. He rode in silence because he knew every word risked giving that other word in his head control.

Blood.

It was no longer only a whisper. It was a craving that slipped into pauses, into the moments between breath and breath. He pushed it back with discipline, with technique, with the mute hatred of his own weakness. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it did not.

They made camp at forest edges and in hollows, places not immediately visible from a distance. Because of the warning they kept watch in shifts, and Anadar stayed awake most of the time even when it was not his turn, because sleep in his head no longer felt safe.

On the morning of the third day it happened.

Siendra had taken the last watch. No one said it aloud, but everyone knew she had fallen asleep. Not from laziness. From exhaustion. From the human mistake you cannot afford when the world is full of knives.

They woke to noise.

Footsteps. Too many. Too close.

Tent walls were ripped open. Cold air cut in. Suddenly armed men stood around them, bows drawn, spears aimed at bodies, blades close enough that you could smell the bandits’ breath. A knife rested at Siendra’s throat, and she was awake, but not fast enough to pretend she had not been surprised.

The leader stepped forward. Unwashed. Coarse. Greasy black hair hanging in strands. A man who did not believe the world owed him anything, only that he would take what he could, because otherwise he was nothing.

“Well,” he said with a grin. “Money. Horses. And the girls.”

Loud laughter behind him. That filthy laughter of men who think fear makes them big.

Shara did not move. Morgut did not move either. Miene kept her gaze on the leader, calm, too calm, as if she was already counting how many minds in this group could be broken if you cut the right one.

Anadar stepped forward.

“You picked the wrong group,” he said, and his voice was frighteningly quiet.

“I’ll give you time to disappear,” Anadar went on. “I count to three.”

The laughter grew louder. Someone pressed the knife harder against Siendra’s throat, just a hint, enough to show he could.

“One,” Anadar said.

No one moved.

“Two.”

An arrow was nocked. Not as threat. As decision.

“Three.”

They laughed.

The man with the knife drew it across Siendra’s throat.

Nothing.

No blood. No cut. The metal slid as if skin had turned to glass. A thin resistance, barely visible, but real. Siendra’s eyes went wide, not from pain, but from disbelief, and in her gaze was the thought that for a moment she did not know whether she was alive or already should have been dead.

An arrow flew at Anadar.

It bounced off.

Not dramatically. Not with light. It bounced off as if the arrow had struck stone and fell into the snow, crooked, ridiculous, as if it were ashamed of itself.

Confusion.

And inside that confusion it was already too late.

Anadar had his sword in his hand.

Not because he had drawn it. Because it was already there. As if the blade had known this was its moment. Shara and Morgut were already moving, precise and cold, bodies faster than any discussion. Shara tore a bow from a man’s hands and broke his arm before he understood he had been touched. Morgut kicked another man’s knees out and drove the hilt of his blade into the man’s throat hard enough that breath became a sound that did not sound human.

And then the sword sang.

Not quietly. Not in the background. It screamed through Anadar’s head like a siren.

Blood.

Anadar shouted it out as if the word was not only in his mind, but in his throat.

“Blood.”

The sound was not Anadar’s voice. Or it was, only twisted so badly he did not recognize himself.

He butchered.

It was not a fight. It was a passage. He moved like a man who had held himself back too long and now no longer decided, only followed. The sword drank, and it drank fast. He cut through bodies, through armor, through screams. One man fell, then the next, and when they tried to flee Anadar went after them because the word in his head did not fade, it grew louder, greedier, jubilant.

Blood.

He no longer heard the others. He did not see them. He saw only movement. Flight. Targets.

He caught them.

One after another.

Until the last bandit stumbled, turned, tried to say something, perhaps to beg, perhaps to curse, and Anadar drove the sword into his belly as if it were the only language that still mattered.

The man fell.

And in that moment it went quiet in Anadar’s head.

Not the quiet of peace. The quiet of satiety.

He stood there, panting, and he grinned, and the grin was not happy, it was empty.

“Blood,” he murmured once more, and it sounded as if he were tasting the word because it no longer had resistance.

Behind him the four others stood in the camp.

Pale as death.

Shara held her blade, but it no longer aimed at an enemy. It aimed at Anadar without her wanting it. Morgut stood like a wall that did not know whether it must protect or stop. Miene had her hand half raised, as if holding a thought that would otherwise run away. Siendra touched her throat, then stared at her fingers as if she had expected to see blood.

Anadar looked at them as if only now recognizing them again.

He sheathed the sword.

The motion was calm. Too calm. And the blade vanished without a single drop visible on it, as if it had never touched blood.

The four stepped back a pace on instinct, not from cowardice, but from the knowledge that they had seen something that could not be undone.

And then Anadar saw it himself.

The corpses.

All of them.

Bloodless.

Like Sonda. Like the dead man in Salbeen. Like what had been hunting them for weeks, except this time it had come from his hand.

A cold point in his stomach.

Not nausea. Understanding.

They packed their gear and no one spoke, because words were too small. They rode on, but no longer as one group. Four at a distance from each other, and Anadar in front, like a spear point the others no longer wanted to touch.

Silence.

Then, without any of the four opening their mouths, a foreign voice arrived.

Not from outside. Not from behind. Not from the forest.

In his head.

“Anadar.”

He froze in the saddle so abruptly his horse snorted.

“Anadar, my brother.”

The voice was close. Too close. Warm and cold at once, like a smile you cannot see.

Anadar swallowed.

“Who,” he asked, and his own voice sounded strange, as if he had only just found it again.

A thin satisfied giggle.

“I am Naaarstr,” the voice said. “Thank you for feeding my hunger.”