NOVPUBUp close, the glyphs writhed—tiny iron spiders crawling over stone.
Her instincts recoiled; the script felt wrong, as if it named every forest spirit bound within.
She set her left palm against the stone and pressed Leaf-Steel's flat to the runes.
Jade light poured from the sword, a river of living emerald meeting charred sigils.
Stone hissed.
Heat surged, but she held the contact, channeling years of ritual practice—give the blade, take the taint.
A hairline fissure snaked up the pillar.
Then another, branching like lightning through marble.
Crack.
The obelisk split with a muted bang, shards tumbling into the grass.
A wisp of black smoke spiraled skyward, trailing a dying wail so thin only spirit-senses caught it.
_____
Inside the ragged dome of twilight, Draven's boots skidded on wet leaves as he arrested his advance, the sudden halt so precise it seemed the ground itself had agreed to stop him.
Steel hissed behind him—a warlock rushed with a hooked falchion, eyes fever-bright.
Draven didn't turn.
He shifted half a pace, spine coiling, and let the warlock over-extend. The hooded man's blade carved empty air where Draven's ribs had been.
A flick of the wrist—silver flashed once.
Arterial red sheeted the dome wall in an elegant spray, as if a calligrapher had dashed a single, perfect stroke.
The corpse crumpled, already forgotten.
Draven's gaze snapped to the north-east quadrant, to the jagged stump where the first focus pillar had stood. Recognition sparked there—cold, analytic, but unmistakably relieved. He adjusted both swords, altering stance, recalibrating angles of attack in a heartbeat.
Every movement was an equation resolving in real time.
Outside the ward Vaelira drew a ragged breath. Sweat cooled against the inside of her neck-plates, leaving a prickling chill that spread down her spine. The soul-cage bulged and quivered where the pillar had fallen, its oily surface shivering like a punctured lung.
But it held.
Three pillars pulsed, veins of violet feeding the dark membrane.
She slid into motion, cloak whispering through fern fronds. Wind spiraled at her heels, lifting fallen leaves into a swirling wake that masked her footfalls.
To her right an enemy scout spotted the disturbance, eyes flashing beneath a cowl.
He loosed on instinct.
The arrow's hiss cut through the hush, but Vaelira's upraised palm gathered the surrounding air into a tight spin. Pressure warped the shaft's flight; wood bent as if heat-soft, and the arrow cartwheeled harmlessly into an alder trunk with a flat thunk.
She saluted the startled scout with two fingers—then vanished sideways, striking the next obelisk with fluid momentum.
Leaf-Steel kissed corrupted stone.
Runes crawled like iron spiders over the blade, meeting jade light and recoiling in sparks.
The pillar split from crown to base, disgorging a plume of violet smoke that stank of scorched feathers.
A keening shriek vibrated through soil and sinew; the dome flickered, translucent veins rupturing in mid-air to rain shards of dull purple.
Inside, Draven adjusted again.
The field had changed: fewer variables, wider arcs.
He stepped through a spray of blood so fine it misted on his cheek, bisected a charging axeman, pivoted, and clipped another foe's hamstring with the tip of his left sword.
There was no flourish, no wasted muscle.
Yet Vaelira saw it now, the smallest tell—each time a man fell, the tight draw of Draven's mouth, as if the kill left a splinter lodged inside.
The third obelisk loomed beyond a snarl of brambles, its runes flaring quicker, desperate to compensate.
Vaelira sprinted.
Briars ripped at wool and skin; hot lines scored her calves but she felt only forward momentum.
A warlock lunged in her path, dagger arcing for her throat.
She turned her wrist, catching blade on fuller, rolled under the counter-slash, and drove her sword's point clean through his knee.
He screamed—she silenced him with a hilt strike, letting the body fall away as irrelevant as shed bark.
Leaf-Steel punched into corrupted rock.
For a breath nothing happened. The runes resisted, whining like over-strained wire.
Vaelira forced the wind in her lungs to mingle with the sword's magic.
Green fire erupted along the bevel; cracks spidered, then burst, the stone blooming apart into petals of ember.
The second pulse struck the ward hard enough that the membrane buckled inward, thin spots tearing like damp parchment.
Inside, Draven saw opportunity freeze the battlefield.
His boots left the ground—one quick bound—swords scissoring to reap two defenders where they stood gaping at the destabilised cage.
He landed already running, cloak swirling smoke, darting between lurching shapes.
The last warlock, wide-eyed, inhaled to chant a sigil.
Draven's heel caught the man's knee; bone popped.
A reverse grip plunged steel through sternum and into the final obelisk, nailing corpse and stone together.
For an instant Draven froze, swords a cross of silver in silent prayer.
A cold power flowed from him into the pillar—no flash, only an intense absence of light.
Stone groaned, caving inward.
Then it imploded, sucking the warlock's body into a fist-sized void before both vanished in a hiss of ash.
The dome shattered.
Night air whooshed through the clearing, blowing lanterns wild.
The imprisoned spirits howled a single note of relief that raced up every trunk.
Mist shuddered; droplets shook loose and glittered like small, jubilant stars.
Draven stood at the eye of stillness, blades dripping, breath ragged.
A tremor, slight as the flutter of a moth's wing, ran through his shoulders.
Vaelira read it—guilt's grimace, turned inward.
Heathed blood on the dying grass was partly his own story, and the story hurt.
She stepped into the open, arc-lightning dancing across Leaf-Steel's fuller.
One surviving guard—panic wide in his whites—made a doomed rush.
Vaelira parried, twisted wrist, cut through chain and collarbone.
As the man collapsed, her sword hummed down to a low, sympathetic vibration.
Draven didn't flinch.
Moonlight washed his features clean—empty, disciplined.
"You should have stayed back," he said, voice flat stone on water.
Vaelira flicked crimson from her blade, jaw set. "And leave you alone?"
She tilted her chin, eyes bright flint.
"Do I look like one who abandons her own?"
A hush lingered between them, held together by breath made visible in the cool night air. Vaelira's pulse thrummed in her ears—steady but urgent, like a war-drum muffled beneath layers of cloth. Moonlight pooled across the churned clearing, washing faces in pallid glow and turning every spatter of blood to black ink.
Draven stood three strides to her right, cloak settling about his frame with unnatural stillness, the fabric heavy as midnight itself. His twin blades angled outward, points just brushing earth. The stance looked almost relaxed—until one noticed the tension rippling beneath his shoulders, a coiled precision that made conversation feel like a brittle thing.
"Do I look like an elf to you?" he murmured, words clipped, faintly mocking. It was not a jest; it was a scalpel slid under the skin of the moment, testing its thickness.
Before Vaelira could answer, a warlock staggered from the treeline, black flame spiraling across his palms. He spat an incantation that crackled with tar-thick malice.
Vaelira reacted first. Her left hand rose, fingers splayed. Runes along her vambrace flared a bright jade and the wind obeyed, roaring into existence like an indrawn breath made tangible. The conjured gale smashed into the spiraling fire, snuffing it with a wet hiss and blasting the warlock off balance. Leaves and embers whipped around her, trailing green fireflies along the circumference of the ruined barrier.
An instant later Draven moved. No wasted motion, only velocity: heel pivot, torso twist, twin blades splitting the mist with a shhkt of shearing air. One sword found the notch beneath the warlock's chin, pushed up, and out—spine severed in a single, economical thrust. The second sword drove diagonally across the chest, opening him like a letter. Blood leapt in an arc, dimming to black droplets before striking the sodden earth.
Vaelira felt rather than heard the wet impact. It roused in her an old training hall reflex—count enemies, chart escapes, guard flanks—but she also tasted iron on the back of her tongue, an echo of a kill she had not committed. Draven's jaw tightened. He stepped back, swords realigning to neutral guard without conscious thought. She saw a flicker of something along the ridges of his mouth. Guilt. Yet his gaze never softened.
They fought then, side by side, as if the forest had rehearsed them for this duet.
Draven advanced in precise lines. Every footfall landed on a point that granted leverage; every slash traced geometry. He targeted tendons, arteries, the narrow grieves behind knee plates. Where he struck, opponents fell silent and permanent.
Vaelira moved in arcs. Her sword was a ribbon of storm-fed silver, humming with the breath of leaves. She spun through gaps Draven created, finishing foes he only crippled, or distracting long enough for his ripostes. Roots burrowed from the soil at her call, looping around ankles with a soft krck of splitting dirt, jerking humans off balance. She pivoted, blade singing a low whumm as it cut through exposed throats.
They needed no verbal coordination. A shift of Draven's shoulder told Vaelira when to duck; a flare of her runes guided his follow-through. Time became segmented into pulses: inhale, step, parry, exhale, kill. In that rhythm, the clearing shrank to fifty heartbeats and a hundred splashes of red.
Yet Vaelira sensed it each time Draven's steel found a human heart—the rigid twitch in his jaw, the fractional hitch in his breathing, the way his eyes slid away from the corpse the moment life fled it. Not revulsion at them, but at himself. She recognized that cost; it was a coin warriors paid in marrow.
