By late morning the land began to rise slightly, the low valleys giving way to firmer ground where the undergrowth thickened and the trees stood taller. The path narrowed, winding between gnarled trunks and faded stone markers half-swallowed by ivy, their runes worn to nothing. He passed a shrine – little more than a crooked stump with a strip of red cloth tied to its branch – and though he did not slow, he found himself muttering the old phrase beneath his breath, not out of belief, but out of habit.
“Step light where old things sleep.”
The wind stirred as he spoke, curling back over his shoulder, and a faint unease settled in his chest—subtle and insistent, like the air before a storm.
It was then, just as the light began to shift again – just as the rhythm of hoofbeats began to lull him into that old, half-waking state that sometimes passed for calm – that the Sight took him again. Not with the slow bleeding at the edge of the world that he had come to dread, but all at once, like the crack of something splitting deep inside his chest, a fracture so sudden and complete it felt as though the air had been driven from his lungs by a hand he could not see. The plains vanished. The trees, the trail, the silver light of morning – all torn away in the space between one heartbeat and the next, until there was only the dark, and he was no longer astride his horse but standing once more in that harrowing, unhallowed chamber.
They rose around him like a sickness remembered – the same walls, the same terrible stillness, the same scent of old iron and burning stone clinging to the back of his throat. The floor was slick with blood, dark and heavy, seeping into the cracks between the flagstones. The fire moved along the walls in slow, deliberate coils, not dancing but pulsing, as if the room itself were holding its breath. Heat gathered low, not against the skin but beneath it, like a fever just beginning to take root.
The woman lay curled on her side, her limbs twisted by pain, her gown soaked through in the middle and plastered to her skin, her hair clinging to her cheeks in wet strands— just as he had seen her before. Her blood had spread further now, or perhaps he simply saw more of it this time, painting the stone beneath her in wide, ragged arcs as though she had tried to claw her way back into life and found the way barred. Her hand was pressed to her belly, fingers trembling slightly where they rested, not in death, but in something worse – something that would not yet release her.
And towering above her, formidable and unmovable, was the Queen.
Mowgara stood at the centre of it all, as if the chamber itself had been built to frame her, her hands slick to her wrists with blood that did not drip, her crown catching the firelight with a hard, unyielding gleam, and she neither turned nor spoke, her presence a gravity that seemed to hold the room in place. But the air around her had changed – thickened, darkened – and when Mathias looked beyond her, into the long hollow of shadow that stretched along the wall behind him, he saw them.
Figures. Five, he thought, but couldn’t be sure. Women, but only just – shapes cut from smoke, their faces blurred as if the room itself refused to recall them clearly. They stood in silence, shoulder to shoulder, their presence a pressure rather than a sight, a weight that pressed down against the air and made it difficultto draw breath. They neither moved nor spoke, but the space they filled was alive with fury – old and endless, wound tight and burning slow beneath the surface.
The chamber seemed to draw in on itself, the walls pressing closer as though the space had been waiting for this. And then, without sound or warning, the woman stirred – her head lifting slowly, as if pulled by some unseen thread, hair falling back to bare a face pale with agony and streaked dark with drying blood. Her eyes found him at once, unerring and absolute, locking to his with a clarity that cut through time and distance, through everything that should have kept them apart. She saw him – as if he were there, not in a vision or dream, but standing over her, too late to stop any of it.
In her eyes, a raw, blazing anger that seemed to ignite the air between them, a fire in the depths of her gaze that burned with an unquenchable rage. Her lips parted, slowly and deliberately, and he saw the shape of words, but he could not hear them. But the impact of her gaze, the scorching fury in her eyes, shook him to his very core.
And then the world broke open, and the vision gave way, not gently, but suddenly and mercilessly, leaving him gasping in the saddle, the reins slack in his hands, and the valley around him impossibly still.
He crumpled then, not from the saddle, but inward, as if the force of the vision had compressed his spirit, leaving him hollowed and trembling. The steed, sensing his abrupt loss of grip, snorted nervously, shifting beneath him, but he barely registered the mount’s unease. His lungs clawed for air, the phantom stench of blood and burning stone still thick in his throat, and he coughed, a dry, ragged sound that tore at his chest. Sweat, cold and clammy, beaded on his brow, and his hands, still clenched to the point of pain around the slack leather, felt numb.
The woman’s eyes, blazing with that impossible, searing rage, burned into him, and he knew she had seen him – not as one sees a shadow cast against a wall, but wholly, as if something in her hadreached through the veil between this world and wherever it was his visions came from.
And though her lips had moved – slowly, purposefully, with a precision that left no doubt the words were meant for him – the meaning never reached him. Whether it had been a name, a command, or a curse, he could not tell. All that remained was the weight of it, lodged in him like a splinter, a certainty that whatever she had spoken mattered, and he had failed to understand it.
At last, he urged the steed forward with a numb gesture, driven less by thought than by the simple instinct to keep moving. They moved slowly now, through the raw haze left in the vision’s wake, the kind that made the world feel altered, as though nothing would ever sit quite where it had before. The trail returned beneath them in fragments, pine needles breaking softly beneath hooves, the fissle of damp leaves shifting overhead.
It was some time before he saw the horse.
It stood some distance ahead, half-hidden beneath the bend of an overgrown branch, its reins snagged in a knot of bramble. Steam still rose faintly from its flanks in the cold air, and though it turned its head at his approach, it made no sound, only watched him with the wide, dark eyes of an animal trained to wait. The saddle was worn but well-kept, the bags tied with a soldier’s efficiency, and the blanket roll had slipped halfway loose, trailing damp against the forest floor. There was something about the way it stood – alert, not panicked – that unsettled him more than panic might have. This was a warhorse. Waiting for its rider.
He dismounted carefully, boots sinking slightly into the soft riverbank, and moved forward with caution, one hand extended. He didn’t say anything, only touched the animal’s neck lightly, as if to confirm it was real. And then he saw the marks – the scuffed edge of the leather, the faint embroidery at the saddle’s edge, the way one stirrup still helda sliver of dried mud, not yet washed away by dew.
There were signs in the dirt – subtle, half-effaced by wind and water, but clear enough to the eyes of someone who had spent much of his life watching for the traces people left behind. A scuffed print, the sharp break of undergrowth, and a shallow groove where something heavy had struck and slid before coming to rest. He let the reins fall slack in his hand and followed on foot, weaving through the low branches heavy with damp, the scent of bruised pine rising with each step. The ground sloped gently downward, and the weight of the forest seemed to press closer until—below the roots of an old oak sprawling and half-sunk into the earth— he saw her.
She lay folded in on herself, one arm drawn across her ribs, the other lost in the tangle of her cloak, her body stilled as if cut off mid-motion. Her head rested against the moss, her cheek pale beneath a streak of dried blood, and her hair – matted and streaked with soil – clung damp to her brow. The wound had bled freely; its stain marked her collar, her sleeve, and the curve of her jaw. When he crouched close enough to hear it, her breath was shallow and uneven, drawn through lips that had gone blue at the corners. She had been here for hours, perhaps longer.
He did not need to push back the hood to know who she was.
Even unconscious, she carried the kind of presence that refused to diminish – the stubborn set of her shoulders, the faint furrow between her brows. And now she lay here, the Unbroken Blade of the Sorcerer Queen, stripped of ceremony. Just a figure beneath the tree, wounded and still. And something about that – about seeing her like this, so still, so entirely human – unsettled him in a way he hadn’t expected.
He knelt beside her slowly, his hand hovering above her shoulder, close enough to feel the faint warmth of her body still trapped beneath the cold. She was smaller than she had seemed in the square. Or perhaps it was simply the absence of all that had clothed her in power –no blade at her back, no soldiers at her flanks, no sorcery clinging to the air like a threat.
There was nothing here but her. Flesh and blood and breath, and the slow, steady bleeding of someone who should not have been alone.
A tide of thoughts, swift and chaotic, crashed over him. They came not with cruelty but with a strange, quiet appeal – born of weariness and the lingering fog of the vision that still clung to the edges of his sight. He could leave her. Let the elements claim her. Let the chill of the earth draw the last traces of warmth from her skin. Let the Queen wonder. Let the armies march blind. Let the world unfold without his interference. It would be simple. Clean. A wound left undisturbed. His people might be safe – safer – from this particular, crushing wave. And no one would ever know his hand in it.
The silence stretched, filled only by the ragged rhythm of his breath and the faint, unsteady rustle of leaves.
He looked at her – not the legend, not the blade that had carved a warpath through the northern provinces, but the woman lying unconscious at the base of an old oak, blood streaking her temple, her limbs slack, her breath faint but steady. And even now, there was something in her posture that resisted surrender, an echo of defiance that refused to let her vanish into the moss. She looked impossibly young and impossibly old, her face slack with exhaustion and marked by the weight of decisions that had not released her, even in sleep.
He tried to imagine what would follow if he left her. Whether the Queen’s army, finding their General gone, would press forward in vengeance or pause in confusion. Whether news of her loss would rally them to greater violence or unmake the cohesion that held them together. He could not be sure. War did not always follow reason, and grief was a poor strategist. But if there was even the smallest chance that her presence might alter the shape of what came next – delay it, divert it, crack it open long enough for something other than fire anddestruction to pass through – then he could not afford to look away.
And still, that was not all. He had seen her at the pyre – not surrounded by her army or cloaked in ceremony, but alone, unwatched, kneeling before the dead. It had not been for show; there had been no audience, and whatever it was – if it was anything at all – it lingered in him now, stubborn and unresolved.
