The elders had once called the jungle of Abonia the embrace of the gods — those great Dipterocarps spreading their vast green palms, holding all the malice of the outside world at bay in the shadows beneath. But now, the forest path Rohan had walked a thousand times felt like a scorched throat, the air rolling with a suffocating, searing heat.

  Rohan tore through the undergrowth. Thorns raked across the side of his face, drawing thin lines of blood, but he felt nothing. The clean smell of earth had been swallowed whole by something thick and oily and burnt. When he finally burst through the last wall of towering ferns and stumbled onto the gravel bank of the Abonia River, what he saw drove into him like a blunt blade — slow, and absolute.

  The Longhouse.

  That great wooden dragon lying along the riverbank, hundreds of feet long, built across generations by the hands of Ezan craftsmen — it was wrapped in countless tongues of red flame. The ironwood pillars groaned beneath the weight of the fire. Each crack and burst sent a shower of red sparks raining down onto the surface of the river, hissing as they died.

  This was no act of heaven.

  Rohan's pupils shrank to points. Through the billowing black smoke and collapsing timber, figures were screaming. Their bodies moved with a serpentine, sinister quality, their skin painted in dark blue-black markings mixed from snake oil and charcoal. They carried heavy parang blades, and their movements had the cold, coiling menace of snakes. The Odsu — the tribe from downriver. The same neighbours who had traded salt with them on the riverbank, who had danced with them in the monsoon winds — were now tearing his people's throats open with wild abandon.

  "Die!"

  An Odsu warrior lunged from the shadows on his flank, a stone axe swinging with a bloody whistle. Rohan did not think. Instinct honed by years of hunting seized his body — he wrenched to a dead stop on the gravel, drove his weight through his hips, and swept his hunting knife upward from below.

  Clang.

  Iron met stone axe in midair. The Odsu warrior's strength was staggering. Rohan felt the web of his hand tear open as the impact screamed up the blade and into his shoulder, and a jagged notch split along the edge of his knife. His grip went half-numb, but in the instant the warrior's momentum stalled, Rohan turned the knife and drove it into the man's ribs.

  "Rohan! Move!"

  A voice like rolling thunder detonated so close it nearly split his eardrums. On pure reflex, Rohan hurled himself sideways — and in almost the same heartbeat, a heavy spear shrieked through the air where he had been standing, pinning another Odsu warrior who had been closing in from behind hard into the rubble-strewn earth.

  "Brother!"

  Rohan came up out of the mud and found him.

  His brother — the tribe's greatest warrior — was holding the entrance to the Longhouse alone. He stood bare-chested, the dark red ceremonial ochre on his skin, marks of the ancestor spirits, long since stained into deep purple by the blood splashed across him. The heavy blade in his hands swept in wide arcs, and every blow sent a shockwave of wind rolling outward.

  The two brothers pressed back-to-back, carving out a small and defiant island in the ruins.

  "Why—" Rohan gasped, his blood dripping from his fingertips and sizzling where it hit the scorched earth below. "Brother, why are they doing this?"

  "They've lost their minds, Rohan." His brother's voice was low, and carrying something Rohan had never heard in it before — a bone-deep exhaustion. "They're no longer taking heads for atonement. They're looking for something… something that can burn a soul away."

  "What is it?"

  "Eyes open, you little rat!"

  His brother suddenly burst out laughing — the same broad, easy laugh Rohan had known all his life. In that moment, he even freed one hand to grind his palm roughly over the back of Rohan's sweat-soaked head, the way he always had, trying to scrub the fear out of his eyes with that blunt and familiar tenderness.

  "These snakes thought they could swallow us whole while we were praying. We're going to show them that Ezan bones are harder than iron. Hold your ground — while we still stand, home still stands!"

  The laughter hit Rohan like a shot of something strong, pulling his fracturing mind back together.

  For the minutes that followed, the world collapsed into nothing but the endless rhythm of cut and block. Rohan moved like a clouded leopard threading through thorns, tight against his brother's flank, exploiting the blind spots created by his brother's massive frame to dart in and strike. His knife was notched and battered, but in his hand it was still lethal — each low, driving lunge finding an ankle or a throat, each pass leaving a bright arc of blood.

  His brother owned the storm at the front. That heavy blade wheeled through the firelight, and every impact shattered the snake-hide-covered wooden shields into clouds of splinters.

  The tide was beginning to shift.

  The fire still raged — but the Odsu warriors daubed in blue-black were starting to flinch. They looked at this blood-drenched mountain of a man, and at the shadow flickering like a ghost in the darkness beside him, and the hands wrapped around their parang hilts began, without their owners quite realising, to tremble. The circle was widening. In those cunning Odsu eyes, something like genuine fear of death was beginning to show.

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  Rohan felt something he had never felt before — not on any hunt, not in any moment of his life so far. This feeling of fighting shoulder to shoulder with his brother. Of being someone who could shape the course of a battle. These Odsu warriors had become prey in his eyes. Just a little longer, just one more wave to drive back, and through the smoke he could almost already smell the sweet sharp scent of victory Tuak.

  Then a figure appeared from deep within the fire.

  He was standing on the half-collapsed ridge of the Longhouse roof, with his back to the wall of flame. In the warping columns of heat, his silhouette seemed stretched impossibly tall — like an ancient stone figure remade from ash. Rohan could not make out his face, but his eyes locked immediately onto the thing hanging at the man's chest, swaying in the heat.

  A necklace of tiger claws.

  Dry, yellowed, and razored — a full circlet of them.

  In Abonia, that necklace belonged to only one kind of person: the kind mad enough to hunt a fully-grown tiger alone in the dark of the jungle. In the Ezan tongue, it was another word for god of war.

  The man simply watched from above, his gaze carrying the flat disregard of someone watching insects scrambling in the mud over a few grains of rice.

  Something slammed hard inside Rohan's chest. Not fear — something wilder. A surge of adrenaline mixed with something he couldn't name and couldn't stop.

  Kill him.

  The voice screamed inside him. He had just taken the moon bear alone. He had just held the line with his brother against wave after wave. He was not the child who hid behind his brother's back anymore — he was sure of it. Take that necklace of claws, and this hell would end in an instant. He would be the tribe's saviour. He would become a legend, like his brother.

  That overwhelming sense of purpose, that desperate hunger to make the suffering stop — it blinded him entirely to the lethal weight radiating off that figure above. In his eyes, The Tiger’s Claw was not an undefeatable enemy. He was the last stepping stone of his coming-of-age.

  "I'm taking his head!"

  Rohan's snarl was barely out before his body was already in the air — a black bolt of lightning, launching off a charred beam, blade arcing upward with everything he had.

  "Rohan! Come back!"

  His brother's cry cracked with something that was almost desperation. But Rohan was already gone. His eyes were fixed on the necklace, his blood was boiling, and his ruined blade carried every ounce of his fury and his want.

  The man didn't even draw a weapon.

  He turned his head slightly. Those eyes — still as deep water, not a single ripple of feeling in them — passed over Rohan with a brief, incurious glance. No contempt. Only the same blankness he might give a rock or a patch of grass.

  He simply raised his left hand and caught Rohan's wrist at the peak of the strike.

  Rohan felt as if he had run full-force into a mountain cast from iron.

  Before the pain could even register, the man's right fist came around like a cannonball and drove into his chest.

  Crack.

  The sound of ribs breaking was clean enough to make the air shudder. Rohan came apart like a kite with its string cut, slamming into a burning pillar. Every breath was driven out of him at once, his vision fracturing into violent, overlapping doubles.

  "Rohan!"

  His brother's roar tore out of him like a cornered animal's. He came lurching, stumbling forward, throwing himself in front of Rohan.

  The Tiger’s Claw dropped from the roof without a sound, landing light as smoke. A grey-white stone blade appeared in his hand.

  This time, he gave Rohan's brother no opening at all. The stone blade traced a long, graceful arc through the firelight — the unhurried, fluid motion of someone parting a hanging vine in the forest. His brother was shielding Rohan's crumpled body, and in that narrow angle, there was no room to dodge anything.

  "Brother… run…" Rohan opened his mouth uselessly. What came out was a mouthful of hot, thick blood.

  The stone blade opened the side of his brother's neck.

  In that instant, Rohan's world went slow.

  He watched his brother's blood come apart in the air like a string of broken rubies, spattering across the bridge of his nose and the edges of his eyelids. It was so hot. Hot enough to make his eyes burn.

  His brother did not fall.

  Like a machine that had lost all life but not its will, he closed his arms around The Tiger’s Claw's waist and drove the last reserves of his strength forward, slamming the man toward the roiling wall of fire.

  "Run… Rohan… run…"

  Those were the last words his brother left in this world. His voice had come apart at the edges — but it still carried that warmth. The warmth that always told Rohan everything was going to be all right.

  The Tiger’s Claw wrenched free and shoved the already-lifeless body away. His brother fell like a collapsing mountain — and in that same instant, the Odsu warriors who had been waiting for their moment let out a single unified cry.

  Spears came from every direction at once — a sudden dense forest of grey shafts — driving through his brother's ruined body from all sides.

  Rohan sat in the mud. His mind simply stopped.

  He watched his brother held upright by a dozen spears, like a flag that would not fall, standing at the centre of the ruins. The flames were already licking at the soles of his feet. Everything was going soft and wrong and far away.

  A cold unlike anything he had ever known.

  He could not feel the heat of the fires raging around him. He sat where he was, face covered in blood, eyes wide and empty and fixed on the spear-punctured chest of his brother. The weight of the regret was like a great ancient bell dropped over him, sealing him inside a silence so complete it had no edges. He did not know where he was. He did not know where the fire had come from. He forgot to breathe. His soul felt as if something had reached into his body and was pulling it loose, hand over hand.

  The Tiger’s Claw walked out of the smoke and fire. He did not look at the Odsu warriors around him. He looked briefly at the folds his brother's grip had left in his skin skirt. He seemed to lose all interest in the boy sitting hollow-eyed in the mud — finishing him off hardly seemed worth the effort. He turned away, cold and wordless, and disappeared into the burning depths of the Longhouse.

  "The chief's gone."

  An Odsu squad leader stepped over the scattered bodies, cleaver-blade swinging at his side, a slow grin spreading across his face as he closed the distance.

  "This head's mine."

  The cleaver cut a low, dull arc through the air.

  Rohan did not look at it. His gaze was still nailed to the place where the spear-points had come through his brother's body. He had lost all sense of danger. He had lost all sense of owning a body at all. Time felt as though it had stopped completely.

  And yet — just as his consciousness began to slide toward the absolute edge of nothing, a sound detonated deep inside his eardrums. A frequency so high it felt like a split.

  "Accept me…"

  The voice did not belong to any human being. It did not belong to any living thing. It was a vibration pressed directly into the bone of his soul.

  "Accept me… and I will give you… everything you want…"

  Rohan did not answer. He did not even think to wonder where it came from. But the voice carried something like a slow-acting poison — it forced itself through the cracks in what remained of his mind. A feeling stirred up from the soles of his feet, something he had never felt before: a rage that smelled of blood, urging him forward, wild and relentless.

  Slowly, his field of vision began to narrow.

  The fire fell away. The screaming fell away. Even his brother's body fell away.

  At the very end of his sight, there was only one thing left:

  A worn leather pouch hanging from the Odsu squad leader's waist.

  It was heaving. Rising and falling with violent, irregular rhythm — as though something inside it had a heart, and that heart was beating itself to pieces.