By midday, the rugged hills that bordered the Veil had flattened out into a vast, sprawling expanse of open plains. The grass here was tall, brittle, and the color of old parchment. There was no canopy to break the sun, and no terrain to block the wind that swept across the flatlands—a constant, biting current that carried the chill of distant, unseen mountains.

  It should have been freezing. Alarin had pulled her cloak tight around her shoulders as she limped along, leaning heavily on the rough crutch Tetsu had fashioned for her from a fallen branch.

  But Serenya wasn't cold. She was sweating.

  A thin, persistent layer of moisture slicked her forehead, and her tunic felt stiflingly heavy. The heat wasn't coming from the pale sun overhead; it was radiating from within.

  The Fire was awake.

  It wasn't screaming or trying to take over her body as it had in the clearing. It was simply there, a sullen, heavy coal resting in the center of her chest. It pulsed with a low, resentful frequency. Every time the dry, brittle grass brushed against her shins, the Fire sent a little shock of static along her nerves, a whispered suggestion.

  It is so dry, the heat murmured in her blood. A single spark. Just a thought. Watch how beautifully it would all catch.

  She stumbled, her boot catching on a hidden divot, and clamped her hands into fists, driving her nails into her palms. She forced herself to look away from the endless tinderbox of the plains, focusing instead on the back of Tetsu’s boots ahead of her.

  “You have been quiet,” Alarin said, her voice sharp enough to cut through the whistling wind.

  Serenya glanced sideways. The elf was matching her pace, her face drawn tight with the pain of her injured leg, but her amber eyes were as perceptive as ever. They were fixed on the sheen of sweat on Serenya’s brow.

  “The fire within you,” Alarin continued, not phrasing it as a question. “Is it sleeping, or is it waiting?”

  “I don’t know,” Serenya answered honestly, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. The skin felt fever-hot. “It feels… sullen. It’s angry with me for letting it go, for caging it again.”

  “It is the simplest, most selfish of voices,” Alarin stated, her tone shifting from a fellow traveler to a harsh instructor. “It offers a simple answer to every complex problem: burn it. It answered you in the glade because you were desperate, and it was the easiest to hear. Will you have the strength to listen to the others when it calls again? Because it will call. The next time you are afraid, the next time you are angry, it will offer you its terrible, simple peace.”

  “I have to try,” Serenya said, her voice tight with a frustration that bordered on despair. “But how? It’s easy for you to talk of choices, Alarin. Your soul is not a battlefield. How do you choose to hear a whisper when a dragon is roaring in your head?”

  For the first time since the clearing, Alarin’s stern facade cracked, revealing a flicker of ancient weariness.

  “You do not choose in the moment of the roar,” she said, her voice softening, becoming instructive rather than critical. “The choice is made in the quiet moments before. You build a space for the whisper to exist. You tend to it. You give it strength when you are strong, so that it may lend you its strength when you are weak.”

  Alarin gestured with her free hand toward the endless expanse of grass.

  “The fire is loud now because you fed it your fear. What will you feed the others? What will you feed the Light? The Water? The Earth?”

  From a few paces ahead, where he was scouting the path and breaking down the taller grass, Tetsu spoke without turning.

  “Fire is a poor master.”

  He stopped, shifting his shoulders. He reached over with his good hand and gingerly adjusted the dark, salve-soaked bindings that wrapped his ruined left arm. The acrid smell of the medicinal paste drifted back on the wind, a sharp reminder of the cost of that master.

  “It consumes its own fuel,” Tetsu said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble. “And then it consumes its house. It leaves nothing behind to build upon.”

  The silence stretched for a moment, filled only by the wind and the rhythmic crunch of their boots. The brief, guarded conversation they had shared by the campfire the night before hung between them. It felt like an unfinished book, a door that had been cracked open and then quickly slammed shut.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Serenya, desperate for a distraction from the heat in her own veins, pressed the opening.

  “And what are you the master of, Tetsu?” she asked.

  Tetsu didn't answer immediately. He kept walking.

  “You walk in shadow,” Serenya continued, stepping up her pace slightly to close the distance. “You fight with a blade that hums with the earth. Alarin spoke of the Iron Wars, you mentioned the Great War. You told me Kuroseki was a jewel that was eaten by the dark. What are you? What are you bound by that lets you walk where others cannot?”

  Tetsu stopped.

  He did not turn fully, but his shoulders stiffened. His one good hand rested loosely on the hilt of his sheathed sword. The air around him seemed to grow suddenly heavy, a localized drop in temperature that had nothing to do with the wind.

  “I am bound by my path,” he said. His voice was flat, hard, and utterly final. A wall of stone dropped over the conversation. “That is all you need to know.”

  The rejection was absolute. It wasn't angry, but it was impenetrable.

  “Some shadows are best left undisturbed, breach-born,” Alarin said, her voice carrying a clear warning. But the warning, strangely, felt protective—not of Serenya, but of Tetsu. “He walks a path you cannot comprehend, and your questions weigh on him like chains he has already broken once. He is not our enemy.”

  Serenya felt a flush of shame heat her cheeks, competing with the magical fire within. She was so lost in her own storm, so desperate for answers, that she had forgotten they had histories that ran deeper and colder than her own. Tetsu had pulled her from the ash. He had stood between her and a god. And she had paid him by melting his armor to his skin.

  “I’m sorry,” Serenya said, directing the words to Tetsu’s broad back. “I shouldn't have pried. I just… I need to understand what is real. What I can trust.”

  Tetsu turned his head slightly, peering at her over his uninjured shoulder. His steel-gray eyes were intense, analyzing her for a moment.

  Before he could answer, the tall grass ten feet ahead of them exploded.

  Two men lunged onto the path, rising from where they had been lying in wait. They were a wretched, desperate-looking pair, wrapped in filthy furs and boiled leather, their faces smeared with mud for camouflage. Bandits, surviving on the fringes of the Shikato Realms by picking the bones of whatever wandered too far from civilization.

  The first man, a hulking brute with a rusted, jagged-edged battleaxe, leveled a cruel grin at Tetsu.

  “Drop the silver!” the bandit barked, his voice grating and thick with spit. He cast a hungry, appraising glance past Tetsu to Serenya and Alarin. “And leave the women. The limping elf might fetch a coin, and the other one looks soft enough to—”

  The bandit didn't finish the sentence.

  Tetsu didn't shout a battle cry. He didn't drop into a defensive stance. He didn't even fully turn his body.

  He looked at Serenya.

  “Trust this,” Tetsu said quietly. “My blade is yours. That is a promise forged in iron. It will not break.”

  He stepped forward.

  The movement was so smooth, so impossibly fast, it looked like a glitch in reality. He didn't draw the sword from his hip; he seemed to materialize it in the air.

  Sching!

  The silver blade hummed, a single, clear note that cut through the wind.

  Tetsu stepped past the first bandit. As he moved, his arm blurred in a tight, upward arc.

  The hulking man froze, his axe still raised in threat. He stood there for a full second, his mouth open to finish his taunt.

  Then, his head slid off his shoulders and hit the dirt with a wet thud.

  The second bandit, a wiry man holding a pair of rusted daggers, stared at the decapitated body of his companion. His brain took a moment to process the geometry of the violence. He looked up at Tetsu, his eyes widening in pure terror.

  He dropped the daggers and spun to run.

  Tetsu didn't chase him. He simply pivoted on his heel and flicked his wrist, throwing the blade out in a sweeping, horizontal cut that didn't seem aimed at anything at all.

  But as the blade swung, a localized shockwave of pure, heavy air—a focused pulse of his aura—shot from the steel. It crossed the distance instantly, striking the fleeing man in the back of the knees.

  The bandit’s legs buckled backward with a sickening double-crack. He hit the ground, screaming in agony, clutching at his shattered joints.

  Tetsu walked over to him, his boots crunching on the dry grass. He looked down at the screaming man with the dispassionate efficiency of a butcher inspecting meat.

  He raised the sword and drove it straight down, pinning the bandit through the chest to the earth. The scream was cut off instantly.

  Tetsu wrenched the blade free, flicked the blood from the steel with a sharp snap of his wrist, and slid it back into the scabbard with a soft clack.

  The entire encounter had lasted less than five seconds.

  Tetsu turned back to face them. He didn't look winded. He didn't even look angry. He looked exactly the same as he had before the grass parted.

  The silence that followed was thick, heavy, and incredibly awkward.

  Serenya stared at the two fresh corpses bleeding out into the dry grass. She looked at Tetsu, who was standing there as if he had just swatted a particularly annoying fly.

  Alarin leaned on her crutch, looking down at the severed head resting near her boot. She nudged it slightly with her toe, inspecting the clean cut.

  “Well,” Alarin said dryly, her voice deadpan. “I suppose that answers the question of whether he can still swing it with one hand.”

  The sheer absurdity of the comment, delivered in the wake of such brutal, casual violence, hit Serenya in the chest. A bubble of tension broke loose.

  She let out a short, sudden laugh. It was a slightly hysterical sound, sharp and breathless, but it was genuine.

  Tetsu looked at them both, his expression unchanging, though a muscle feathered in his jaw.

  “The path is clear,” he said simply.

  He turned and continued walking.

  Alarin hobbled after him, shaking her head. Serenya followed, stepping carefully over the bodies, the sullen heat of the Fire inside her feeling suddenly, comically small compared to the cold, efficient reality of the man walking ahead of her.

  They had a long way to go to reach Rosvara, but for the first time since the clearing, the road didn't seem quite so terrifying.