By dawn I was already moving.
Armor secured, sword sheathed at my back. I walked out of my chamber and found Torra in the hallway, leaning against the wall with his head lolling to one side, fighting sleep with everything he had left.
This child. Genuinely afraid I would leave without him.
"Torra."
He snapped upright immediately, eyes blinking wide open.
"Sir Knight. I'm up. I'm up."
He was clutching his clothes to his chest, hugging them like a shield.
"Let's go."
I walked. He ran to keep up.
At the stables I picked him up by the collar and set him on the saddle without slowing down, then mounted behind him and rode out from the Branklore palace before the morning fully settled.
At the gates I turned off the main road and steered into the tree line. Once we were clear of any watching eyes, I teleported us directly to the northern border.
The destination arrived in an instant.
So did the noise.
Screaming.
Steel.
The low, resonant crack of walls giving way under pressure. Beasts swarmed the border's outer line, adding their own chaos to the soldiers already stretched thin against the assault.
The whole northern front was fracturing.
Torra immediately covered his ears. He couldn't see the hounds from where we were, but he could hear the growling beneath everything else, and that was enough.
I tied the horse to a tree and looked at him.
"Stay here."
I moved toward the battle.
My sword cleared a path through beasts and enemy soldiers alike. Every swing landed where it was meant to land.
Clean.
Efficient.
The kind of fighting that had taken years to make automatic.
And hollow.
Every single swing of it, hollow.
I was tired of this. I had been tired of this for longer than I had let myself admit.
Then the masked soldiers appeared.
They came from multiple directions at once, cutting through the chaos with purpose, ignoring every other fighter on the field. Their eyes were fixed entirely on me.
So. There it was.
Patreish.
The Captain.
The glances they had exchanged during the meeting. I had filed it away then and here was what it amounted to.
This battle at the northern border was never about defending Branklore.
It was a stage. Built and arranged for one purpose.
My execution.
Planned by the Kings. Approved by the Emperor. Every ruler in Philantria, deciding in quiet rooms that the Hero had outlived his usefulness.
"Die, Hero of Medalline. You are no longer needed!"
They lunged.
Swords drawn, blades coated with something dark along the edges.
Lethal poison.
No intention of leaving anything to chance.
I let them hit me.
I loosened my grip on my sword. Staggered. Let the strikes land, let the poison do what poison does to a body not defending itself against it.
I vomited blood.
My vision blurred on cue.
And I fell.
They didn't stop when I went down. They kept going, blade after blade, making absolutely certain.
One of them kicked my body to check for a response.
Nothing.
The cheering started immediately.
Around me, fallen soldiers began rising. Every wound, every collapse, every desperate struggle had been performance.
The whole battle had been a theatre built around a single scene, the death of Crescentine Fleur.
"As the Emperor planned. The Hero of Medalline has fallen by our hands. We are no longer bound to that machine in human flesh."
"He was unsettling to be around. Finally."
The King of Winterly himself rode forward on horseback, stopping over the body to confirm it with his own eyes. Satisfied, he straightened up and turned to his men.
"Send word to the Emperor. It is time for a council between Kings."
The soldiers reformed their lines and marched into Branklore, leaving the body on the ground.
The beasts moved in shortly after.
Efficient, unhurried.
Taking apart what was left.
But...
I was watching it all from a tree branch above the battlefield.
"So that is how it is."
My voice came out dry. Not with grief. Not with rage. Something colder than both.
Emperor Karvian had done this with the cooperation of every King in Philantria.
A hero executed by the very people he had spent eight years protecting. The most complete betrayal this world had likely ever produced, and not one of them had lost a moment of sleep arranging it.
What they had buried was a clone.
Magic, illusion, and patience. The body the beasts were consuming had never been mine.
Below me, the cheering continued.
"Crescentine Fleur, the Hero of Medalline, has fallen!"
I smirked. Just slightly.
I was finally dead. And it had cost me nothing.
Eight years of waiting.
Eight years of being their weapon, their symbol, their necessity.
And in the end, their greed had handed me exactly the exit I needed. I hadn't even had to ask for it.
Crescentine Fleur was gone.
I dropped from the branch, walked back to Torra, and teleported us out of there before the celebrations had finished echoing.
We arrived in Amlada.
Dense forest.
No roads.
No one watching.
I was no longer wearing armor. Just a simple tunic, the same one I had packed from the palace chamber back in Medalline.
"We are in Amlada, Torra. You said your hometown is in this kingdom. Do you recognize anything?"
Torra looked around slowly, then shook his head.
"I don't know this forest. My hometown is surrounded by mountains."
Mountains. I scanned the treeline and activated my search magic, pushing it outward in a steady radius.
Ten miles of terrain mapped itself clearly in my mind and there, nestled deep within a ring of mountain ranges, was a village.
Small. And hidden.
"Is that where you are from? The settlement inside the mountains?"
"I don't know the name. Father never mentioned one."
How a village survives that deep in that kind of terrain was its own question. I nudged the horse forward and let it find its pace through the forest.
The path grew worse the further we went. Narrow, uneven, barely passable in places.
At one point I had to guide the horse carefully around a gap in the trail that had no business being on any route a merchant's carriage would have taken.
My grip on the reins tightened without me deciding to tighten it.
A family loaded their goods, packed their children, and traveled through this just to be pointed toward their deaths by someone they had trusted.
The effort they put in.
The hope behind all of it.
Gone. Because of someone else's greed wearing the face of advice.
"Sir Knight..."
"Leigh." I said it before he finished. "Call me Leigh from now on."
A pause.
"Leigh." He repeated it quietly. Then giggled. Like the name was something small and funny and good all at once.
I said nothing.
Then...
The village, when we reached it, barely deserved the word.
Fields of crops stretched across the open ground between the mountains.
Orchards.
A few livestock pens.
Houses that looked like they had been repaired so many times the repairs had become the structure.
And the people... fewer than twenty, from what I could count.
"TORRA!"
Voices rang out from the fields. Elderly, middle-aged, children, all of them moving toward us at once.
"Granny!"
Torra was bouncing on the saddle, waving both arms.
I dismounted and helped him down. The moment his feet touched the ground he was gone, running straight into the arms of an old woman who caught him like she had been waiting for exactly that.
"Granny. Father, Mother, Brother, Sister... they all became food for the hounds."
He said it into her stomach, sobbing hard, face buried in her clothes.
"Food for the hounds?" The old woman's breath caught. She held him tighter and looked up at me over his head.
Then past me.
Looking for a family that wasn't there.
"He is telling the truth," I said. "They did not survive. I found him in the Doom Forest and brought him here."
"Leigh saved me," Torra managed between sobs, pointing back at me without letting go of her.
The villagers looked at me.
A cold-faced stranger with no readable expression, meeting every stare without blinking. Most people found that unsettling.
These ones just looked at me with quiet, careful eyes.
Sad. Curious. Not afraid. At all.
A large man stepped forward. Broad-shouldered, calm.
"Come. Let's take this conversation somewhere else. We would like to hear what happened."
He said it without judgment. Just an open door.
I followed them.
The warmth of this village was something I had no framework for. Not the performed warmth of palace servants, not the manufactured gratitude of citizens cheering for a hero they needed.
Something genuine and unhurried, coming from people who had nothing to gain from it.
I had never been looked at like this before. Not once in twenty years.
And standing there, at the edge of a nameless village in the middle of nowhere, it struck me clearly for the first time. The betrayal at the northern border had not destroyed anything. It had opened something.
"Farming," I said quietly. To no one in particular. To myself.
Torra heard it. He looked up at me and smiled, copying the expression on my face without knowing what it meant or where it had come from.
Neither did I.
But for the first time, I didn't feel the need to push it away.