The window in the eastern corridor looked out over the full spread of Firoxy — the posting's rooftops in the foreground, then the tiered descent of the merchant quarter, the civilian district beyond it, and further still the secondary range rising dark against the morning sky, the volcanic stone of its lower slopes catching the early light in deep amber and rust. At the edge of the city's furthest district, where the terrain began its long slope toward the mana border, the faint shimmer of the hot spring water was just visible, pale and still in the pre-morning quiet. The volcanic stone of the city absorbed the morning sun the way it absorbed everything, holding it, giving it back slowly and on its own terms. In the streets below, traders were moving in heavier cloaks. The market stalls had their awnings angled differently — cutting wind rather than shade.
He could see autumn arriving. He couldn't feel it.
Firoxy ran warm regardless of what the calendar said. The heat came up through the stone from whatever sat beneath it, constant and indifferent to season, and after eleven months his body had recalibrated around it so thoroughly that the idea of cold felt abstract. The Internian calendar had turned — fall, then winter, then the slow pull of spring — and he had watched all of it pass through the city's visual language. The angle of the light. The cloaks. The different goods in the market stalls. Not once had he actually felt a season change beneath his feet.
Now the light was lengthening again. The traders were shedding the heavier cloaks. Summer was coming back around.
Where did the time go.
He stood at the window a moment longer. Above the eastern wall the vapor thread from the peak moved in the early air, thin and pale, bending northeast the way it had been bending for months. He had filed three reports about it. Ragven had passed them to Voryn. Nothing had come back yet.
He pushed off the window ledge and went down to the yard.
Ragven came in low.
Not a feint. The greatsword's edge caught the morning light in a long silver line as it swept toward Fathom's guard, the weight of it audible in the air before it arrived — a low displacement hum that Lore had learned to read as clearly as sound. Ragven's boots found the volcanic stone and stayed there, the earth reinforcement locking his stance into the ground itself, the muscles in his calves visibly tightening beneath the plate as the stone took his weight and gave nothing back.
Lore felt the strike's pressure half a second before contact — the air ahead of the blade compressing, pushed forward by the sheer mass moving through it. He shifted his weight off the centerline, let Fathom's crossguard catch the greatsword at an angle rather than meeting it flat, and felt the impact travel sideways through his wrists instead of straight back through his shoulders. The vibration of it ran up his forearms and settled into his elbows, a deep buzzing ache that dissipated as fast as it arrived.
He came back hard.
The swing started low, at his hip, and he felt the fire answer before he asked it to — heat blooming along Fathom's blade in a line that ran from guard to tip, the air around the steel visibly warping, the faint orange glow of it throwing shifted light across the volcanic stone beneath his boots. The fire moved with the swing, building through the rotation of his hips and shoulders, the velocity climbing through the entire arc so that by the time the edge reached the end of its path it was carrying more force than his arm alone had put into it.
Ragven caught it on the flat of the greatsword.
The contact rang through the yard — a sharp metallic crack layered under the deeper resonance of two reinforced bodies absorbing real force. Lore watched the impact travel visibly through Ragven's frame: the greatsword's flat dipping under the strike, Ragven's elbows bending to absorb it, his boots grinding two full inches across the stone with a grinding scrape before the earth reinforcement caught and locked him again, the muscles along his jaw flexing with the effort of holding ground.
He looked at Lore over the crossed blades, his breath audible, a faint curl of vapor where the heat of Lore's fire had warmed the air between them.
Then he grinned. His teeth showed white against the dark of his beard.
"Again," he said.
Lore came again.
They had been going for an hour. The morning light had moved enough that the shadows along the east wall had shortened and sharpened, the heat building into the volcanic stone beneath their boots, radiating up through Lore's soles in a low constant warmth. Sweat ran along his spine under the armor's inner padding, the leather there damp and clinging to his back with every movement. Along the east wall Vrak ran footwork sequences — his bare feet finding the stone in quick precise placements, his blade tracing low arcs through the air with a faint whistling cut, his amber eyes forward. Periodically he looked up.
The exchange reset. Ragven circled left, the greatsword loose in his grip — the muscles in his forearm visibly relaxed, the blade's tip drifting in a small lazy circle — until it wasn't loose at all, the transition happening in the space of a single heartbeat, the blade snapping into a guard position so fast the air cracked faintly around it.
Lore tracked the weight shift in Ragven's hips and felt the lightning settle into place beneath the fire.
It arrived the way it always arrived now — not a surge, not a jolt, just a settling. He felt it move through his chest first, a current running down through his shoulders and into his forearms and out through his wrists into Fathom's grip, the steel of the hilt suddenly alive under his palm, faint and humming. His vision sharpened at the edges. The yard's individual stones became distinct under his boots. His own heartbeat slowed in his ears even as his pulse climbed.
Equilibrium.
His muscles didn't feel stronger. They felt correct.
Ragven drove forward with a sequence — three strikes, the first a draw to test the guard. Lore felt the air shift as the greatsword's edge passed eight inches from his collarbone, close enough that the heat of his own fire reflected faintly off the steel. The second strike came inside, aimed at the gap beneath his ribs, and Lore felt his body answer before his mind finished reading the angle — his hips rotating, Fathom dropping low and to the left, the blade's fire trailing behind it in a thin orange smear against the morning light. He slipped inside the strike close enough to feel the wind of the greatsword's passage stir the hair at his temple, and put Fathom across Ragven's ribs from three inches away, the fire still accelerating through the final inches of the swing.
The impact landed with a sound like a hammer on stone — a deep flat crack that Lore felt through his own palm even as the blade made contact, Fathom's edge biting into the plate and the heat of it scorching a black line across the metal in the half-second of contact.
Ragven staggered sideways.
Not down. The earth reinforcement caught him, his planted foot finding new purchase mid-stagger, his whole body torquing to absorb what should have folded him at the waist. But sideways — two full steps, his free hand coming out briefly before he caught himself, the dent in his plate visibly steaming where Lore's fire had kissed the metal.
He looked down at his own ribs. Touched the warped plate with two fingers. Then he looked at Lore and laughed — a full sound that came from somewhere low in his chest, his head tipping back with it, the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes deepening.
"There it is," he said, still grinning, still breathing through the laugh. "That's what I've been waiting for." He rolled his shoulder, testing the impact site, his armor creaking faintly at the joint. "Again. And don't stop there — you stopped there. Don't do that."
"I thought—"
"You thought you'd gotten something and you wanted to see if you'd gotten it." Ragven settled back into his guard, both hands finding the greatsword's grip, his boots resetting into the stone with two distinct scraping sounds. "You've gotten it. Now use it. Again."
Lore reset.
The lightning was already there, humming low under his sternum. He let it run. Fathom's weight in his hand was exactly its weight — three pounds, four ounces, the balance point two inches forward of the guard, a fact his hand had known for months. The yard's heat pressed against his exposed forearms. The volcanic stone under his boots radiated warmth up through the leather soles.
He looked at Ragven across the distance.
Ragven's grin was still there, wider now.
He came.
He felt Ragven's response sharpen in the first exchange — the greatsword moving with a speed that hadn't been present before, more weight behind it, fire now visible along its edge in faint heat-shimmer lines where before the blade had been clean steel. The air around them had changed — the ambient mana pressing against his skin with a thickness he could feel in his sinuses, both of their elemental outputs rising and displacing the air, the volcanic baseline of the district stirring in response.
Fifty-five percent. Maybe sixty.
The thought arrived and was gone. His body kept fighting without him.
Fire ran the length of Fathom's arc on every swing, building from the first inch of motion, the blade's edge trailing a faint orange afterimage that scorched the air it passed through with a smell like a forge. Lightning sat clean in his chest and limbs, his reactions a half-step ahead of his own conscious decisions. He pressed Ragven's left side — felt the greatsword's guard rotate to cover it, the air between them compressing — and went right immediately, Fathom's tip finding the gap at Ragven's hip before the guard could fully correct.
Ragven caught it anyway. Barely. The greatsword's pommel snapped down and across, deflecting the blow a hair's width from the joint, the contact close enough that Lore felt the heat of his own fire bounce back off the steel and warm his knuckles through his gauntlet. The impact traveled through the greatsword, through Ragven's wrists, visibly up into his shoulders, his whole upper body absorbing the shock with a full-body flex that rippled the plates of his pauldrons.
Ragven drove back.
The greatsword came in a wide horizontal arc, fire trailing it now in a thick orange band that hissed faintly as it cut the air, the force behind it enormous — Lore felt it in the half-second before contact, the air itself shoving against him. He caught it on Fathom's flat, angled to redirect rather than absorb, and the impact still drove him back three full steps, his boots skidding across the volcanic stone with a grinding shriek, the muscles along his forearms screaming with the strain of holding the angle. He recovered and closed the distance again before it could fully open, Fathom dropping low and inside, the fire along its edge hissing against the suddenly cooler air at ground level.
"Yes!" Ragven said. Loud, the word breaking out of him mid-motion, completely unguarded. "Don't let the ground open — keep the distance closed, keep it closed—"
Lore kept it closed.
He pressed and Ragven matched it and the exchange dissolved into something continuous — no individual strikes anymore, just sustained motion, the fire building in Fathom's every arc and the greatsword answering it stroke for stroke, the impacts landing on both sides now, each contact ringing through the yard in a different pitch depending on the angle. The air had gone thick and shimmering with heat, the mana density pressing against the inside of his skull, a pressure headache building behind his eyes that the lightning burned away as fast as it formed. Sweat ran freely down his back, evaporating almost instantly off his heated forearms. His boots found the stone in new places with every step.
Ragven caught a full-acceleration strike on his guard and the impact threw a visible shockwave of displaced heat into the air around them — and he laughed again, louder, the grin pulling his whole face into something almost feral with delight. He shoved back hard enough to open three feet of space, his chest heaving, sweat darkening the collar of his under-armor padding.
"That," he said, breathing hard enough that the word came out in two pieces. "That is what I told Koba I was going to do with you." He shook his head, grin still in place, a fresh bead of sweat tracking down his temple. "Push harder. You're holding something back — I can feel it in your footwork. Stop holding it back."
"If I stop holding it back I'm going to actually hit you," Lore said.
"Yes," Ragven said. "That's what I said. Do that."
He stopped holding it back.
He came in fully committed, no reserve held back, fire driving Fathom's arc from the very first inch of motion. Ragven met it with the full weight of the greatsword and the collision was loud enough that several watching Knights along the wall flinched — a deep ringing crack that Lore felt in his teeth, the shockwave traveling up his arms and rattling his shoulder joints in their sockets. He didn't slow. He redirected the force down through his hips and came back immediately, the lightning running clean through every fiber of muscle.
And somewhere in the middle of a sequence he couldn't have named afterward, he started laughing.
Not at anything specific. He didn't decide to laugh — it simply arrived, pulled out of him by something he had no name for yet, his mouth splitting into a grin so wide it pulled at the muscles of his jaw, his whole face open in a way it almost never was. He had spent his entire life learning the discipline of holding back — in the alleys of Lumina where too much of anything got noticed, in every spar where the other person couldn't take what he actually had, in every real fight where holding back meant the difference between someone going home and someone not. He had never once gotten to give everything he had to another living person and watch them take it, shrug it off, and ask for more.
Ragven was not going to break.
It set something loose in his chest that had been locked there since before he could remember, a door he hadn't known was a door swinging open all at once. He could put everything into this — the fire and the lightning and the years of training and the full weight of what his body had become — and the man across from him would take it on a dented breastplate and laugh and ask for more. He pressed harder, the grin still pulling at his face, a sound coming out of him between strikes he didn't recognize as his own voice until the third or fourth time it happened — full, unguarded, helpless laughter, the kind that came from somewhere below thought.
This was one of the best feelings he had ever had.
Ragven heard the laugh and his own grin somehow widened further.
"There it is," Ragven said, driving forward, the greatsword whistling through the heated air. "Took you long enough to stop holding it back."
Lore caught the strike on Fathom's crossguard, felt the impact travel sideways through his wrists, redirected and came back in laughing, the sound mixing with the ring of steel and the hiss of fire meeting open air. The exchange ran on. The yard had become a furnace of displaced heat and crackling ozone, the volcanic stone beneath them radiating warmth back up into the soles of their boots, the ambient mana thick enough now that it caught faintly in the back of Lore's throat with every breath.
Vrak had stopped his footwork sequence.
He stood at the east wall with his blade hanging loose at his side, sweat darkening the leather across his shoulders, his amber eyes fixed on the center of the yard. He didn't move. The wind didn't stir his mane.
Ragven ended it cleanly — a disengagement, stepping back out of measure, the greatsword's tip lowering to rest against the stone. He was breathing hard now, his chest rising and falling visibly beneath the dented plate, sweat tracking freely down the sides of his face into his beard. He rolled his shoulder where the earlier strike had landed, wincing faintly at the motion, and looked at the scorched dent in his armor.
"How does that feel," he said.
Lore looked down at Fathom in his hand. The blade had cooled slightly, the fire receding back into the steel, leaving only a faint residual warmth against his palm. He flexed his fingers around the grip and felt the lightning settle deeper, retreating into the channels where it waited.
"Right," he said.
Ragven nodded once, slow. The wild grin had settled into something quieter — still present at the corners of his mouth. He looked across the yard at Vrak, who still hadn't moved.
"Your friend over there looks like he's deciding something."
Lore looked at Vrak. Vrak looked back, the amber eyes holding his for a long moment, saying nothing. Then he bent, retrieved his blade from where it had settled point-down in the dirt, and resumed his footwork sequence as though he had never stopped.
Ragven made a sound that was almost another laugh.
"Told Koba this would happen," he said, mostly to himself, rolling his shoulder one more time. "He'll want to know how long it took." He turned and walked off the yard, his boots leaving faint scorch marks in the volcanic stone where the heat of the session had baked into it.
Lore stood in the morning heat for a moment, breathing.
His arms ached deep in the muscle, the kind that settled in rather than faded. Sweat cooled rapidly on his exposed skin where the breeze found it, then was gone. The volcanic stone radiated warmth up through his boots even as the lightning fully withdrew, settling back into its place in the channels.
He looked at the vapor thread above the eastern wall.
It was still bending northeast.
The Dragon's Bane at midday smelled different from its evening self — the kitchen's woodsmoke more present without the crowd to dilute it, the air inside carrying the particular layered warmth of a room that had been cooking since before dawn. Lore's armor held the outdoor heat against his skin as they came in, the transition from the street's direct sun to the tavern's interior warmth barely registering after eleven months in Firoxy. The stone floor was cool underfoot through his boots relative to the yard. The light through the open front gate fell in a long pale rectangle across the near tables, catching the dust in the air above them.
Ragven moved through it with the ease of someone the room arranged itself around. The front of house woman appeared, changed direction toward the kitchen without being asked, and was gone.
They sat.
The Vorn braise arrived. Ragven had already begun eating when Lore noticed the man near the door.
He was standing just inside the entrance, turning a worn leather cap in his hands, the brim of it creased from the specific repeated motion of someone who had been doing that for a while. Civilian clothes, road dust worked deep into the fabric at the knees and elbows from days of travel. His boots were the boots of someone who walked more than they rode — resoled at least twice, the leather at the heel worn down and not yet replaced. He was looking around the room with the expression of someone who had already been told no several times and was preparing to hear it again.
He approached a table of off-duty Knights near the window. Lore watched one of them look up, listen for perhaps four seconds, and shake his head before turning back to his bowl. The man moved to the next table. Same result, faster this time. He tried the bar — the server there listened longer, nodded once with the specific nod of someone filing a thing away to be forgotten, and moved on.
Ragven was eating without looking up. "You've stopped eating," he said.
"There's a man near the door," Lore said.
Ragven glanced up briefly. "Civilian. Border settlement, by the boots. Looks like he's been trying to get someone to listen to him." He picked up his spoon again. "He'll make his way to us eventually."
"Why us."
"Because he's running out of tables. And because you're already watching him."
The man had worked his way through most of the room. When he reached their table his eyes moved to Ragven first — the armor, the rank — and then to Lore, and something in the way Lore was looking at him made him stop differently than he'd stopped at the other tables.
"Sit down," Lore said.
The man sat. He set the cap on the table between his hands and looked at it. Lore caught the server's eye and held up two fingers, then pointed at the man's empty hands and the bowl in front of him. She nodded and went.
Up close the road dust was deeper than it had appeared — ground into the lines of his face, the creases at the corners of his eyes, the knuckles of his hands. He had been walking for days. Maybe more. Lore glanced down at the man's boots — the heel worn down to almost nothing on the right, the left resoled at least twice with leather that didn't match the original.
A glass of water arrived. The man's hands came off the cap and wrapped around the glass before he seemed to decide to reach for it, his fingers pressing white against it briefly before he drank. A bowl of Vorn braise followed. He wrapped both hands around it without eating yet.
"Where are you from," Lore said.
"Dorhn." The word came out flat, worn down from repetition. "South border settlement. Week's walk from here, maybe a little more on the way back — the road gets worse past the third marker."
"What's happened."
The man looked up. Something in his shoulders released — not all the way, but enough, the tension of a man who had been carrying not being believed dropping one notch at being asked a direct question.
"It started two months ago," he said. "Noises from the south tree line — past the border, in the Wildlands. We hear things sometimes, that's not unusual, the forest makes noise. But these were different. Screaming, like — not an animal, or not any animal I've heard in twenty years on that border. And crashing, like trees coming down, but more than the wind would do." He turned the cap over on the table. "A month ago we started finding them. Trees on our side of the border. Pushed over, not cut — the roots torn up from underneath, the trunks snapped at the base. Something with enough force to just—" He made a motion with his hands. "Push through them."
"Missing people," Lore said.
The man looked at him steadily. "Two children. Sev's boy, eight years old, went to the south field and didn't come back. We found his shoes." He paused. "Maret's daughter, eleven. She was with her mother — her mother looked away for a moment and she was gone. We searched for three days." He stopped. "We didn't find anything."
The room continued around them. The kitchen sounds. Someone laughing at a table near the front.
"The sounds are getting closer," the man said. "They were in the deep Wildlands when they started. Now they're on the border. Sometimes at night we hear them from inside the settlement." He looked at the cap on the table. "I've been to two other postings before this one. They took reports. Wrote things down." He looked up. "Nobody's come."
Lore looked at Ragven.
Ragven set his spoon down. He looked at the man from Dorhn for a long moment — the road dust, the worn boots, the cap sitting still on the table now. Then he looked at Lore.
"The Order can't sanction a deployment on this," he said. "A border settlement reporting noises and missing children — that's a formal report filed and assessed. It doesn't produce a response by morning." He held Lore's eyes. "That's the reality of how this works."
"I know," Lore said.
"Whatever is done about this, it gets done by a Knight who decides on his own time that it's worth doing." A pause. "That Knight answers to himself on this one. Not to me, not to the Order. To himself and to Dorhn."
"I understand," Lore said.
Ragven picked up his spoon again. He looked at the man from Dorhn. "You walked a week to get here. Finish that bowl before you go back."
The man looked down at the Vorn braise in front of him as though he had briefly forgotten it was there. He picked up the spoon and ate — the bowl dropping steadily, his eyes on the table, his elbow moving in a rhythm that had nothing considered in it. Ragven watched for a moment without comment. Then he raised a hand toward the kitchen.
A second bowl arrived.
The man looked up when it was set in front of him. Ragven was already looking elsewhere.
"Eat," Ragven said, to no one in particular.
Lore looked at the man across the table. "Tell me everything. Start from the beginning."
The man from Dorhn straightened slightly. He set his spoon down and started talking.
Lore listened to all of it.
When the man finished Lore reached into the pouch at his belt and set a small stack of coin on the table beside the empty bowl. The coins caught the light from the gate, dull bronze, the lowest denomination he carried. Not a large amount. Enough.
The man looked at it. His mouth opened and then closed. Then: "Sir, I — goodness, I can't — I don't deserve anything like this, I only came to ask for—"
"Your boots," Lore said. "Get them properly repaired before the walk back."
The man looked at the coin, then at Lore, something working in his face. "Thank you," he said finally, the words coming out with the weight of someone who meant them completely and had nothing larger to put around them. "Truly. Thank you, sir." He picked the coin up carefully and closed his hand around it. He looked at Lore for a moment longer, then nodded once, deeply, and that was all.
Lore found Vrak at the east wall of the yard an hour later. He was mid-sequence — blade sweeping low through a returning arc, his back foot planted, the leather of his armor dark with sweat across the shoulders and down the spine. He held the final position for a count of three before letting it go.
He looked at Lore.
"Something happened," he said.
"A man came from Dorhn," Lore said. "South border settlement. Week's walk. Something in the Wildlands border has been getting closer for two months. Two children missing."
Vrak was quiet for a moment. "How big."
"Big enough to push old-growth trees over from the root." Lore looked at him. "I'm going alone."
Vrak looked back at him with the amber eyes. A beat passed.
"You are," Vrak said. "And I'm coming."
"I said—"
"I heard what you said." He picked up his blade from where it rested against the wall. "You're going alone. I'm going separately. We happen to be going to the same place." The corner of his mouth moved. "I want to see what you do with something that size."
Lore looked at him for a moment.
"Don't interfere," he said.
"I won't. I'll find my own work down there." He rolled his shoulder, settling the leather across his back. "But I'm not missing this."
Lore looked at the secondary range rising above the posting's eastern wall, the vapor thread above the peak still bending northeast in the long summer light.
"We leave at dawn," he said.
"I'll be at the gate," Vrak said, and went back to his sequences.