NOVPUBNight laid its silver cloak across the war-camp, hemming lantern light into trembling pockets and turning every tree to a charcoal sketch. Mist drifted between the tents like pale serpents, coiling around spear-points and muting the clink of armor. Even the waterfall, ever a thunderous sentinel beyond the ridge, hushed its roar to a stone-deep murmur—as though some instinct warned it to listen.
Princess Vaelira Greenbark stood just beyond the furthest cook-fire, where heat faded and dew gathered. Her moss-iron cuirass seemed forged for moonlight; each leaf-molded scale caught the glow and released it in thin, glimmering veins. She rested a gauntleted hand on the pommel of her leaf-steel sword, feeling the faint throb of ancestral runes beneath her fingertips. They matched the rhythm in her chest—steady, deliberate, but uneasy.
Across the clearing a tall figure detached from deeper shadow. Draven's cloak drank every beam that dared touch it, the rune-threads woven into the fabric showing only when they chose—tiny starbursts that winked out faster than blinking. He moved with a hunter's economy, weight placed so softly the grass bent back the moment he passed.
"Humans?" Vaelira repeated, voice pitched low to prevent the word from traveling. Yet the syllables still felt too loud, as though the very fog might carry them to unfriendly ears.
Draven's head inclined a fraction—acknowledgment without courtesy. His eyes, iron-cold, never found a lantern to glint off of; they seemed to manufacture their own light. "Not traders," he said, each consonant honed to an edge. "Those who trespass when treaties sleep. They harvest what they cannot name."
He sounded like he was reciting numbers, not lives. Vaelira stepped forward, her boot sinking into moss, releasing a scent of crushed pine. "Then we speak to the council," she insisted. "Sound the hollow-horns by dawn."
Draven's lips thinned. "And by the time votes are tallied, another child will be in chains."
A gust spiraled between them, stirring the pendant at her throat—a stylized silver leaf bearing her house crest. The fine chain tinkled, a soft, urgent chime. Mist surged, hiding Draven's outline; when it thinned, he was gone. Only fern fronds quivered where he'd stood.
Vaelira's breath hitched. Irritation flared, hot and immediate, but she smothered it. She touched the pendant again, this time in supplication. Her eyelids lowered, lashes trembling. The world inhaled with her.
Roots far beneath the camp floor shifted—massive, patient limbs that usually slept. She felt them like old teachers rousing at a pupil's request. Sap rushed, leaves murmured, and the hush of a thousand needles brushing together became intelligible speech.
Shadow glides… southward… too swift for fox-track…
Blood-metal scent on night wind…
Chains clatter… young saplings weep…
Vaelira opened her eyes. A single name pulsed against her memory—Drakhar., the Blood-Bound. Her lessons returned with unwelcome clarity: humans who inked soul-pacts into their very marrow, bartering blood for power. Their crest had once been described to her—a crescent of tarnished silver, shaped like a claw clipping the sun.
Moonlight caught such a crescent now, ahead between distant trunks.
She moved.
Every stride was trained precision: weight on the outside of the foot, roll inward, lift. Her braid, threaded with jade and silver rings, tapped a quiet rhythm against her cuirass. Branches recognized a royal step, parting without scrape; ferns flattened, leaving no trace.
A single flare—white-blue, sharp as torn sky—slashed the dark ahead. Draven's blade.
She slowed, pressed against a cedar gnarled with age. Through hanging moss she saw the clearing: trampled leaves, muddied footprints, and a cage of silver links that hummed with foul power. A boy, ears still rounded, huddled inside. His eyes— wide, panicked—caught the moon and tossed it back in splinters.
Twelve humans stood guard. Their cloaks were stitched from some night-soaked fabric, but the crescents at their throats betrayed lineage. At their center paced a captain in crimson plate, helm crowned with barbed filigree—command made manifest.
"The forest grows bold," the captain snarled. His voice bore an accent Vaelira didn't know—harsh consonants, as if every vowel was a wound. "Cut its spirits, weaken its roots. Break their bond."
Draven stepped from shadow like a knife stepping from its sheath. His blades—twin slivers of moon—kissed the air. A muscle jumped along his jaw, and Vaelira saw, with a twist of dread, that it wasn't anticipation. It was recoil.
He moved, and time fell apart.
The first guard barely gasped before steel unstitched his windpipe. A second swung; Draven's off-hand blade parried, the main-hand darted under the ribcage—artery, spine. The man crumpled like cut vine. Draven pivoted, heel gouging mud, letting momentum carry the left sword in a rising arc that clipped another attacker's wrist. Blade reversed—puncture under the chin, exit through crown. Bodies dropped without fanfare.
Vaelira's stomach twisted. None of his motions were wasted—every strike essential, calibrated. Yet for a heartbeat after each kill, his gaze stuck to the corpse, as if verifying identity—or mourning possibility.
Steel hissed again; a cloak flapped free of its owner, gliding to the dirt like a burst crow. Blood splattered chains, the contact sizzling, filling the air with a vicious hiss. The elven boy flinched, but the cage's runes held.
Draven advanced on the captain. The man raised a barbed scimitar, but Draven's right blade slid around it, hooking, locking. Left sword stabbed, but the captain's gauntlet flared—rune-steel deflecting the thrust. They grappled in micro-movements: wrists twisting, elbows darting, shoulders angling for leverage. Vaelira caught the faint grimace on Draven's face—pain? No, memory.
She stepped from cover, heart hurling itself against her ribs. She wanted to shout a warning, or perhaps a plea. Yet her voice snagged when she realized: Draven's pace slowed, not because the captain matched him, but because he was measuring, dissecting every nuance, learning the man's breathing.
A slip. Draven found it—twisted inside the captain's guard, pommel striking sternum. The human staggered, helm clanging against chain. Draven's sword kissed the throat. No flourish. A single push—clean, surgical. The captain's blood sprayed in a thin line across silver links; the hiss of contact sounded almost relieved.
Vaelira pressed a hand to her own throat, feeling her pulse hammer. He hates this, she realized, not them.
The ground juddered beneath Vaelira's boots— a sick, rolling tremor that rattled bark, jarred teeth, and sent loose leaves dancing.
A bruise-colored light blossomed outward in a perfect circle, the glow greasy and cold, as if twilight itself had been distilled and poured onto the moss.
Where the light touched, night thickened.
A wall of humming darkness rose from the ring's rim, rippling up into a dome that swallowed torch-glow and starlight alike. It was silent for a heartbeat, eerily beautiful.
Then the shrieking began.
Not human cries—spirits.
Thousands of wood-whispers clawed at Vaelira's mind, a storm of voices only a Greenbark royal could hear.
Chains!
Cage!
Despair!
Pain speared behind her eyes. She flinched, clutching her temple as the ward completed its circle and snapped shut with an audible thrumm.
Inside the barrier—now little more than a swirling silhouette—stood Draven, blades poised, every muscle honed for violence. He was sealed in with the Soul-Reapers.
Air that had smelled of wet cedar seconds earlier turned stale, metallic.
Vaelira tasted iron at the back of her tongue and knew the barrier drank life from the clearing itself.
_____
A memory uncoiled, quick and vivid:
Her tenth spring, standing small beneath the vaulted oak dome of Leafwatch Palace while Elder Ossandor recited war-lore.
"The Drak'harn weave walls from stolen essence, child.
A prison of grief—blood to forge it, blood to break it."
She'd imagined it then as a story.
Now the story breathed, pulsing black fifteen paces away, and Draven—who fought as though death were arithmetic—was alone behind its veil.
Vaelira's first instinct screamed Wind!
She drew a sharp breath, swung Leaf-Steel high, and beckoned the gale that lived in her family line.
Green-silver sigils flared along the blade.
But the summoned gust hit the dome and curled back, rebuffed as though the air itself had been reversed.
Leaves tumbled away from the ward in a mournful scatter.
She cursed under her breath—soft, old Elharn words that tasted of sap and smoke.
Soul-Reaper cages devoured living mana.
Strike it blindly, and the ward would drink the force, grow thicker, hungrier.
If she pushed harder, the barrier could siphon power straight from her core—turning her own gift into shackles.
She ducked behind a moss-slick root the width of a wagon.
Moonlight sheared across her helm; even the faint glint felt reckless.
Think, Vaelira. Think as your tutors drilled you.
Beneath her glove, the silver-leaf pendant warmed, guiding memory.
Drak'harn wards always hinged on focus stones—four obelisks sunk at the compass points, each a fang of smelted corruption.
Crack one, and the current faltered; crack two, and the current reversed.
Destroy three, the cage unraveled.
Destroy four and the backlash would scour the ground clean, friend and foe alike.
She peered around the root.
Where the unnatural light lapped at earth, she spotted a jagged column, waist-high, obsidian dark and veined with ember runes. The first focus.
Between the barrier's churn and the woods' gloom it flickered like a coal at dusk.
Breathing shallow, she slipped low, boots barely kissing the loam.
Fern fronds bowed away from her passage; roots softened under her soles—an unspoken homage to the royal line that could still hear their sighs.
Mist parted like a stage curtain, revealing the obelisk.
