(Narrator Pov)
Dyion had once believed that healing was enough.
That if his hands were steady and his knowledge deep, then death could always be delayed, if not defeated. He had spent years proving that belief—saving strangers, easing pain, holding lives together with skill and quiet patience.
Until the day it failed him.
The illness had not been rare. Not mysterious. It was something he had treated before, something he had studied, something he had sworn he understood. That made it worse. He knew exactly what was happening as it unfolded, knew every stage of it, every moment where it could turn—and still, he could not stop it.
He had been there the entire time.
Watched the breathing weaken. Watched the body fight and lose. Watched life slip away from someone he should have been able to save.
And when it was over, there was nothing left in him that resembled certainty.
He did not stay in Kolin after that. There were no words worth saying, no explanations that mattered. He left without farewell, carrying only what he could use and abandoning everything else—including the version of himself who believed he could fix things.
He walked until the land changed.
The forest rose slowly around him, ancient and dense, swallowing light and sound alike. The Web Forest. A place where five kingdoms met but none claimed control. A place large enough to erase direction, to dissolve identity, to take a man apart quietly.
It felt fitting.
By the time he reached the cliff, he was no longer thinking about where he had come from.
Only where he would end.
The river below was violent, crashing against stone with enough force to erase anything that fell into it. There would be no recovery. No body. No burial.
Just absence.
Dyion stepped forward.
And then—
steel rang through the trees.
The sound cut clean through the silence, sharp and deliberate. Not the chaos of beasts. Not random violence.
Combat.
He turned.
Not far from the cliff, figures moved between the trees—black cloaks closing in around a single opponent. Their formation was controlled. Efficient.
Trained.
And at the center—
a girl.
She was young. Too young.
No more than sixteen.
But the way she moved was wrong for her age. There was no hesitation in her blade, no wasted motion in her steps. She did not retreat. She advanced. Every strike she made was precise, measured, final.
One of the cloaked men lunged.
She cut him down.
Another followed—faster.
She turned, steel flashing once, clean.
The last one hesitated.
It cost him his life.
When the fighting ended, the forest fell silent again. The girl stood there for a moment, her grip still firm around her weapon.
Then—
her body gave out.
The sword slipped from her hand.
She collapsed.
Dyion moved before he realized he had chosen to.
By the time he reached her, the blood was already too much. It soaked through her clothes, dark and spreading, the kind of loss that left little room for delay. She should not have been standing. She should not have survived the fight.
If he walked away—
she would die.
The cliff still waited behind him.
The choice was simple.
End his life.
Or save hers.
His hand reached for his satchel.
"Don't die," he said, the words automatic, familiar.
He worked quickly, the way he always had. Cleaning. Binding. Pressing. His hands did not hesitate, even when the rest of him had long since given up on the world. The girl did not wake, but her breathing held—weak, uneven, but there.
That was enough.
He dragged her toward shelter, a large rock formation that broke the wind and hid them from view. He stayed with her through the night, refusing to let her slip away. By the time morning came, she was still alive.
And he was still there.
He did not return to the cliff.
Days passed before she spoke.
When her eyes opened, there was no confusion in them. No fear. Only awareness—sharp and immediate, as if she had never truly been unconscious.
"You treated me," she said.
Not a question.
"You were dying," he answered.
She seemed to accept that easily.
"Eri."
That was all she gave him.
No title.
No explanation.
She left once she could stand.
He thought that would be the end of it.
It wasn't.
She came back.
Not regularly. Not predictably. But often enough that her presence became something familiar. Sometimes she arrived uninjured. More often, she did not. Blood at her side. Cuts along her arms. Bruises that spoke of fights no one else had witnessed.
She never asked for help.
She never called for him.
She simply went to the falls.
And waited.
Dyion learned the pattern quickly.
If Eri was in the forest—
she would be at the falls.
And if she was there—
she was hurt.
He would find her standing or sitting near the water, already steadying herself, already controlling her breathing as if pain were something that could be managed through will alone. She never explained where the injuries came from.
He stopped asking.
He treated her instead.
Over time, the work became routine. Clean the wounds. Close what could be closed. Leave what needed time. She would sit in silence while he worked, her body still, her reactions minimal even when the pain should have forced a response.
She endured everything.
Without complaint.
Without hesitation.
It unsettled him more than anything else.
She brought tasks with her sometimes—herbs to gather, items to retrieve, messages to deliver across dangerous paths. Work that did not belong to a child. Work that required skill, speed, and the willingness to die if something went wrong.
"What kind of people send you to do this?" he asked once.
She had been cleaning her blade at the time, her movements calm.
"It needs to be done," she said.
No anger.
No resistance.
Just truth.
He understood then.
She was not being sent.
She was being used.
And she accepted it.
So he did the only thing he could.
He made sure she survived it.
He built a shelter near the falls, something stronger than the rock where he had first treated her. It gave him purpose—something to maintain, something to return to.
Something to stay alive for.
Eri never questioned it.
She simply came back.
There were days when her injuries were worse than usual. On those days, she stayed longer, sitting near the entrance of his shelter, watching the forest in silence. Sometimes she spoke—small things, fragments, never full stories. Enough to show that beyond the trees, there was a world that demanded more from her than it should have.
One afternoon, he found her by the falls.
Her clothes were set aside neatly on a rock. Her body—marked.
Scars layered over scars. Some old. Some recent. All real.
She did not hide them.
To her, they were nothing.
To him—
they were everything.
These were not marks of training.
These were survival.
He memorized them without meaning to. Not out of curiosity, but out of necessity. Every scar told him something—where her body would fail, how she had endured, what she had survived before reaching him.
By the time she became queen, nothing between them changed.
Titles shifted.
Power moved.
The world learned her name.
But when she bled—
she still came to the falls.
And Dyion was still there.
Not as a servant.
Not as a subject.
Not as someone who bowed.
He was the man who kept her alive.
The only one who had seen her at her weakest—
and never once treated her as anything less than strong.
And somewhere between saving her life—
and watching her return again and again—
Dyion realized something he had not expected.
He no longer wanted to die.
Because for the first time since he had lost everything—
he still had something to keep alive.