Chapter 20: Bells and Crystals

I could see the first arrows fall.

Burning points of light, each one tracing a shallow arc against the dark sky before plunging into Grezheim’s rooftops. They came in waves, dozens at a time, and wherever they struck, fire bloomed.

Soon the figures followed.

They materialized on top of the wall itself, dark shapes rising against the stars. Black cloaks billowed around their bodies, hoods pulled over their faces.

One by one, they dropped from the battlements into the streets below.

They landed silently. The moment their boots hit cobblestone they were already moving and spreading outward through the lanes and alleys.

The fire answered them.

One of them lifted a hand, palm open, fingers spread. The nearest blaze, a roof fire that had been burning shuddered. The flames bent toward the figure’s hand as if drawn by an invisible rope. With a flick of the wrist, the fire surged outward.

It leapt across the gap between buildings. It climbed walls that shouldn’t have been combustible.

They weren’t just setting fires.

They were commanding them.

The flames danced at their will. Expanded when directed. Contracted when called back.

I pulled the sword from my hip.

Not yet, I told myself. Not the fire-casters.

I had one target.

The elf with the dagger.

My scream had torn through the night before the first figure had dropped from the wall. The word “ATTACK” had ripped out of my lungs with everything I had.

It barely mattered.

The chaos swallowed the warning. People who had been sleeping moments ago stumbled into the streets and saw fire eating the city. Panic hit them before they could think. They ran in every direction at once trampling each other in a blind stampede.

Still, the soldiers heard.

Not all of them and not fast enough to matter.

A handful of garrison troops who had been in their barracks when my voice reached them emerged seconds earlier than they would have otherwise. They came out with staves already in hand, eyes scanning the smoke, and they saw the hooded figures descending before they reached the ground.

The first spells crackled outward. Bolts of light. Shards of ice. A wall of compressed earth erupting from the cobblestones.

Seconds. That was all I’d bought.

I turned toward the tavern.

Before I could reach it, the front wall exploded.

The blast hit me before I saw it. My skull bounced against stone. My vision went white, then red, then filled with spinning embers.

I rolled onto my stomach. Pushed against the ground with both hands.

Get up.

The thought was automatic. Drilled into me across a dozen deaths.

I shoved myself to my feet.

The tavern was burning fast.

Vael.

The name flashed through my mind, but I couldn’t think too much. The blast had scrambled my thoughts into a pile of broken glass.

I was still trying to recover when the shadow moved.

It came from my left.

A hooded figure, stepping through the smoke. Something gleamed in his hand. I saw it arc toward me. A strike aimed at my throat.

The same cut that had killed me before. The same angle.

This time, my sword was already in my hand.

I brought the blade up.

Steel met steel.

The sound rang through. The impact jolted up my arm and into my shoulder, but my wrist held. The parry was ugly, more instinct than technique, but it caught the curved blade and deflected it wide.

The figure froze.

For a fraction of a heartbeat, the hood tilted toward me. I caught a glimpse of pale features beneath the shadow.

“A Knight?”

The word came out thickly accented. As if the speaker’s mouth had been built for a different language entirely.

A pause.

Those gleaming eyes traveled down my body. My student’s robe. My thin frame. My shaking arm and unfinished sword.

“No,” the figure said. “A baby.”

He came at me once more.

The curved blade moved in patterns I couldn’t predict. I jerked my sword up and caught it, barely, the deflection sending sparks into the smoke between us.

The dagger reversed and swept toward my hip. I twisted sideways, pulling my body out of the cut’s path, and felt the air part where my stomach had been an instant earlier.

Left. A horizontal slash that came from an angle I hadn’t been watching. I slammed my sword down to meet it, edge to edge, and the impact made my teeth rattle.

I couldn’t attack.

The realization was clear. Every scrap of concentration I possessed was consumed by defense. My eyes tracked the curved blade like a man watching a snake. I was always a fraction behind, always reacting to the last attack instead of anticipating the next one.

Fighting wyverns had been simpler.

Wyverns were enormous, but predictable. Their bodies telegraphed every strike. You could read a wyvern’s intentions from the shift of its weight, the angle of its head, the flex of its jaw.

They were more deadly, yes. A single mistake meant instant death. But the openings existed. The gaps were there. You just had to survive long enough to reach them.

This was different.

This opponent left no openings. Every attack flowed into the next without pause, without gap. His footwork was fluid, each step placing him exactly where he needed to be, and the dagger moved so fast it seemed to exist in multiple places at once.

Fighting a wyvern demanded courage.

Fighting this demanded everything.

My concentration narrowed until the world disappeared.

The fire was gone. The screaming was gone. The crumbling tavern and the burning rooftops and the bodies in the streets.

All of it ceased to exist.

There was only his blade, my blade, and the space between them.

Something shifted.

Not physically, but inside me. Behind my eyes. In the place where instinct lived.

Each exchange was teaching me something. Each parry added a line to a map I was building without conscious thought.

The way the figure shifted weight before a low cut. The slight rotation of his wrist that preceded a diagonal slash. The rhythm of his breathing, barely audible through the hood, that quickened just before a combination.

It was my first time fighting someone. I was reading him.

Not fluently, but the patterns were there.

His next high cut came, and I was already moving before the blade descended. My parry met it cleanly.

His eyes narrowed behind the hood.

The attacks came faster.

A blinding sequence, three cuts in less than a second. Left, right, thrust. I blocked the first. Dodged the second. The third nicked my forearm and drew a line of fire across my skin.

My focus was absolute. Everything compressed into a single point of awareness.

There.

The opening appeared.

His dagger swept left, committed to a wide slash that pulled his leading shoulder past center. For one heartbeat, his right side was exposed. His elbow was extended. His balance was forward.

Now.

I moved.

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My sword deflected his blade outward, shoving it wider, and I stepped into the gap his own attack had created. My thrust was clean.

Aimed at the center of his chest. The tip of my unfinished sword drove forward with everything I had behind it.

For one perfect, shining instant, I thought I had him.

The figure didn’t flinch.

His left hand rose.

I hadn’t been watching his left hand.

I’d been so consumed by the dagger in his right, so focused on the blade, that his other hand had existed only at the edge of my awareness.

A second blade sat in that hand.

Shorter than the first. Hidden behind his forearm the entire time, waiting for this moment. For the instant I committed to an attack and couldn’t pull back.

The trap closed.

His left hand swept across in a horizontal arc. A line was drawn across the bridge of my nose and through both temples.

The world split.

My vision cracked like shattered glass, each shard showing a different piece of the burning street before they all went dark.

There was no pain.

Not yet. The blade was too sharp, the cut too fast. Pain would come later, in the microseconds before death, but I wouldn’t be conscious enough to feel it.

What I felt instead was something I hadn’t expected.

A smile.

It pulled at my lips even as the darkness rushed in.

I was smiling.

Not because I’d won. I hadn’t. Not because I’d survived. I wouldn’t.

Because I was better.

Better than the last time.

Next time, I’d watch the other hand.

The darkness took me, and I went into it grinning like a madman.

 

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The notifications dissolved the moment my eyes opened.

Canvas ceiling. The distant sounds of a camp breaking down.

Then I rose and began the day again.

 

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The column marched. The mule resisted. Grezheim’s walls appeared on the horizon and grew with each step until they filled the skyline.

I collected my pay. Thirty silver. I walked through the main gate without hesitation.

This time there was no wandering.

No browsing the market or marveling at the Knights.

I went to the tavern. Paid fifty copper for a room and a meal. Ate Vael’s cooking in silence and let the warmth of real food settle into my stomach while my mind worked.

I went to the smith. Paid twenty silver for the same ugly, unfinished blade. Strapped it beneath my robe.

Professor Molino arrived on schedule. The same elf-like professor with raven-black hair and silver earrings, along with the cluster of fourth-year students behind him.

This time, I kept my mouth shut.

I stood in the crowd, watched and said nothing.

When Molino left, I left.

I found the central square and sat on a stone bench near the fountain.

The afternoon sun pressed against my shoulders. Around me, Grezheim went about its business, oblivious to the fire that would eat it alive in a few hours.