The village of Pribezh did not offer comfort; it offered a temporary reprieve from death. It was a huddle of timber and slate, clinging to the frozen mountainside like a barnacle to a ship’s hull. Inside the largest longhouse, the air was thick—a stagnant soup of roasting mutton, woodsmoke, and the sharp, fermented tang of local ale. For a moment, the war felt a world away, but the flickering firelight cast long, jagged shadows against the soot-stained walls—shadows that seemed to dance to the silent rhythm of the coming conflict.

  Azuma sat at the head of the heavy oak table, the polished black silk of his vest catching the orange glow of the hearth. He looked alien here—a sharp, clinical line of modern precision in a room built of rough-hewn tradition. Across from him, the village elders watched him with a mix of reverence and a quiet, gnawing trepidation. They knew that when men like Azuma arrived, peace was usually the first casualty.

  "We'll leave in the morning," Azuma said. His voice was not loud, yet it cut through the low chatter of the longhouse like a blade through silk. "Chornov is our target. It is the heart of the Queen’s industry, and therefore, it is the center of her slave trade. If we disrupt the supply chain there, we don’t just free a few dozen souls—we starve her forges of the labor they need to function. We aren't just saving people; we are breaking the machine."

  He turned his gaze toward Anneliese and Elowen. Beside them, Kaien sat motionless, his hands resting on his knees. The boy still felt the faint, hummed vibration of his internal "frequency" from the battle on the road—a phantom echo of power that made his muscles sore. Azuma waited for the village elders to leave the room before speaking to his group.

  "Regarding Kaien," Azuma continued, his tone shifting into the analytical register of a master technician. "His Craft seems to be a dual state. It's as if there are two different people trying to occupy the same space at the same time."

  "In this state," Azuma explained, "Kaien’s physical presence occupies two sets of spatial coordinates simultaneously. To an observer, he appears to flicker or blur, but the reality is more potent. He doubles his output. He becomes stronger and faster, his reaction time scaling exponentially because he is essentially processing stimuli through a dual-layered consciousness. He can ignore physical pain because the 'state' of his body is constantly fluctuating. He has also developed a short-range vector shift—a short teleportation ability. It isn't just speed; he is actually disappearing from one location and reappearing at another location without actually moving, if that makes any sense. Unlike my Blitz, where I'm actually moving forward, his body just appears wherever he wants to be. The range of these 'Blinks' haven't been fully tested yet."

  Azuma leaned forward, the firelight reflecting in his dark eyes. "But then there's a downside. This Craft drains his stamina at a terrifying rate."

  He looks at Kaien. "Until you train to increase the necessary stamina to sustain it, you're a weapon that can only be fired once. After that, you could become a liability due to exhaustion."

  Anneliese and Elowen looked at the boy, their expressions softening with a concern they knew better than to voice. "Have you always had this ability, Kaien?" Elowen asked, her voice barely a whisper.

  "No," Kaien replied, his voice small. "I never manifested a Craft. Back in Drakov, I thought I was just like most people who was not born with a gift. I never really thought about it. At the time, i was just wanting to survive."

  Caelum, who had been looming in the corner like a piece of the architecture, let out a low, gravelly rumble. "A late awakener. It’s rare, boy, but not unheard of in the old sagas. The Craft system works in strange ways at times. Sometimes the seed needs the blood of a real fight to finally break its shell. I think that's what happened to you."

  Azuma stood, his movement fluid and final. "Thank the elders for the meal. We'll rest tonight then we'll ride out for Chornov at dawn. The more time we waste, the closer the High Queen gets to completing her goals. Remember, we need to stop her plans from coming to fruition."

  The next morning, the grey world of Zemlyost swallowed them whole. The sun was a pale, sickly ghost behind a ceiling of bruised iron clouds—a sky that looked like a fresh hematoma, swollen and purple-black at the edges. As they rode out of Pribezh, the crisp, pine-scented air of the southern borders was replaced by something foul—the smell of wet coal, sulfur, and the metallic tang of a world being stripped bare for parts.

  The two day travel toward to the city of Chornov was a grueling exercise in tension. The ground beneath the horses' hooves shifted from frozen mud to a jagged, grey limestone that seemed to groan under the weight of the Queen’s ambition. The distant thrum of industry—the rhythmic, mechanical heartbeat of the forges—vibrated through the soles of their boots, a constant reminder of the machine they were heading toward.

  They came upon the site of a caravan at mid-morning. It was a jarring, obscene intrusion of color into the monotonous grey landscape. This caravan didn't seem to be anything from Zemlyost. Caelum recognized it immediately. It was from the kingdom of Al-Zahran. The nobles' personal carriage had been a thing of beauty—a gilded coach draped in sun-spun silks—now it was a shredded wreck in a ditch.

  Ten Fursan (Al-Zahran knights) lay dead in the mud. Azuma dismounted, his movements clinical as he walked among the fallen. He didn't look at the faces; he looked at the physics of the kill. He knelt by a knight whose throat had been opened with surgical, jagged precision.

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  "They weren't killed by soldiers or even bandits," Azuma noted, his voice a cold rasp. "Look at the punctures. No refined edges. These weapons were grown, not forged. Bone or obsidian, serrated to catch on the muscle. They weren't attacked from the front; they were struck from the blind spots simultaneously. These knights never even cleared their scabbards."

  Caelum scanned the limestone ridges, his hand tightening on the rim of his massive shield. "If the attackers are who I think, Azuma, then these guards weren't ready for them. These men trained for desert duels and honorable skirmishes. They weren't ready for things that would suddenly appear from the cracks of the world."

  Inside the coach, Azuma and Anneleise found two nobles, husband and wife, Hamad and Ramia huddled in the coach. Hamad’s fine silk robes were torn, and his eyes were glazed with a mixture of terror and aristocratic fury that had nowhere to go.

  "Who are you?" Hamad rasped, clutching a blood-stained ledger to his chest as if it were a shield. "Are you with the High Queen? If you seek ransom—"

  "We are not with the Queen. I seek nothing from you. My group and I just happened upon this scene." Azuma interrupted, his voice like cracking ice. "Elowen, Medicinal herbs and water. Stabilize the woman. Caelum, check the perimeter."

  As Elowen worked, Hamad grabbed Azuma’s sleeve with trembling fingers. "My children... they took them. The monsters from the earth. They dragged Muni and Suda toward the ridges." He choked back a sob, his pride finally fracturing. "We were heading to our winter sanctuary. We purchased... Frost-Heave Estate, which is about five leagues from here. We now call it Qasr al-Shita... the Winter Palace. It is fortified. It is safe... if we can reach it."

  Azuma looked at the man, then at the horizon where the limestone ridges rose like jagged teeth. "Qasr al-Shita," Azuma repeated, committing the name to his mental map. "Is it prepared for a siege?"

  "It has stone walls and deep cellars," Hamad whispered. "But the guards... they are all here. Dead in the dirt."

  Nearby, Caelum knelt beside the one surviving Faris, the guard captain. The captain's hand was a mess of gore, but his eyes were clear with a terror that transcended physical pain. "The blind ones..." he wheezed, the sound like dry leaves skittering on stone. "They came from the fissures. The light... it didn't stop them. They took the children. Muni... Suda... we tried to stop them... but there were too many..."

  As the guard's breathing became a ragged, wet whistle, Elowen moved in.

  "Move aside, Caelum," Elowen said, her voice steady despite the carnage. She knelt in the mud, her fingers already flying to the leather satchels at her belt. She didn't reach for a staff; she reached for a series of glass vials and a bundle of dried, silver-tipped moss.

  "Kaien, get me the water. Caelum, hold his shoulder. This is going to be messy."

  She worked with the mechanical precision of an apothecary on a battlefield. She crushed a handful of Iron-weed root—a plant known for its high tannin content and its ability to constrict blood vessels on contact—and mixed it with a thick, viscous sap she had harvested back in Pribezh—creating the resin into a pungent, sticky paste.

  As she applied the mixture to the Faris’s mangled side, the guard hissed, his body jerking in pain. "Hold him!" she snapped at Caelum. She then layered the silver-tipped moss over the wound. Under her influence, the moss didn't just sit there; it seemed to react to her presence, its fibers weaving together into a natural, sterile bandage that pulled the edges of the skin tight.

  "It’s a natural coagulant," she explained to no one in particular, her eyes focused entirely on the task. "The sap will prevent the 'grave-rot' from these bone weapons from setting in, and the moss will keep the pressure constant until we can get him to a proper bed."

  The Faris’s breathing hitched, then evened out as the intense herbal sedative she’d added to the mix took hold. He fell into a deep, restorative sleep. Elowen wiped a smudge of blood and mud from her brow, her hands slightly shaking from the adrenaline. "He’s stable. He’ll live to hold a blade again, eventually."

  Caelum stood slowly, his face ashen—a rare sight for a man who had faced the Queen’s legions without blinking. "The Blind-born," he whispered, the name carrying a weight of ancient superstition. "In the old songs of Norveg, they call them 'The Betrayed.' They were the First Men, the ones who lived in these mountains before my ancestors arrived with fire and steel. We drove them into the deep places. They didn't die out; they just... adapted. They traded their eyes for ears and their hearts for stone."

  Caelum pointed toward a dark fissure in the base of a nearby cliff. "They don't see you with eyes, Azuma. They feel the heat of your skin. They map the world through the thumping of your pulse. To them, we aren't neighbors or nobles—we’re just warm, noisy meat that wandered into their hunting grounds."

  "They’ve taken the kids to the limestone fissures," Caelum continued, pointing to a jagged tear in the cliffside. "If we don't go now, there won't be anything left to save. They don't kill for sport; they kill for the larder."

  Azuma’s mind immediately shifted to logistics. He looked at Anneliese and Elowen, then at the shivering nobles. "Okay, change of plans. Anneliese, Elowen—take the remaining staff, the injured guard, and the working carriages. Escort Hamad and Ramia to their estate, the one they call Qasr al-Shita. It’s high ground and stone-walled. Fortify it. If the Blind-born follow the scent of blood there, make sure they find nothing but a closed gate and bared steel."

  Anneliese nodded, her hand already moving to the hilt of her blade. "We'll keep them safe, Azuma. The estate will be ready for your return. And you?"

  Azuma looked at the dark maw of a nearby fissure. "Caelum, Kaien, and I are going into the larder. We aren't leaving those children to the dark."

  "Okay," Anneleise responded, "Don't make us wait too long."

  He nodded to Anneliese then turned to Hamad. "We'll get your children back, Lord Hamad, and whoever else was taken from your caravan, if they're still alive."

  As the carriages were righted and the survivors loaded, Anneliese and Elowen began making preparations to escort the remaining wagons and carriages away from the carnage and toward Frost-Heave Estate.

  Azuma looked at the darkening sky then at the dark maw of nearby caverns. The air emanating from it smelled of wet copper and ancient earth. The bruised sky above seemed to press down on them, a silent witness to the rescue that was about to begin. He looked at Caelum and Kaien. "Let's get moving."