After hours of walking, the sun was finally setting on the horizon.

The light came through the trees at that low angle that turned everything amber and long-shadowed, and the road had narrowed to something that felt more like a deer trail with ambitions than an actual thoroughfare. Nobody had said much in the last hour. The kind of quiet that settled when people were tired and close to something and their bodies knew it before their minds had confirmed it.

Then Valen raised his fist.

Everyone stopped.

From somewhere ahead, carried on the evening air, voices. Not close, maybe three hundred meters, maybe more. The clank of armor. Something that sounded like a fire being fed. And underneath all of it, a low rhythmic sound that took Noah three seconds to identify as dragon breath, the

deep cycling of large animals at rest.

Valen turned to them. Held up four fingers, pointed at the trees on either side of the road, made a spreading gesture.

They split without words.

---

The camp was larger than Noah had expected.

He found his vantage point in the fork of an old oak fifteen feet up, the bark rough under his palms, and looked down at what Arthur had built in the shadow of the Duskwater crossing. Fires in a wide circle, maybe thirty of them, throwing orange light across rows of black tents arranged with military precision. Soldiers moving between them with the unhurried efficiency of people who had been in this camp long enough to develop routines. Three dragons were visible from here, two lying at the camp's western edge with their wings folded and their eyes half-closed, one circling above at an altitude that said it was on watch rather than resting.

No sign of Arthur.

Noah looked for the command tent, the largest structure, the one that would sit at the center and face the approach. He found it, a black pavilion twice the size of everything around it, but no light came from inside and no guards stood at its entrance, which was wrong in a way that sat in his chest like a stone.

He came down from the tree.

The others filtered back to the road in ones and twos, Werner first, then Nami moving carefully on the leg, then Pip appearing from somewhere that seemed implausibly far to the right given how long they'd been gone.

"Command tent is dark," Noah said, keeping his voice low. "No perimeter guards on it. That's not a king who's home."

"Could be a decoy," Werner said.

"Could be," Noah agreed. "Either way we go in the same. Valen and Werner take the eastern approach through the tree line, stay off the road. Pip, you're overhead cover, highest ground you can find on the northern ridge. Nami." He looked at her. "I need you on the western approach watching the dragons. If either of them starts to move before we're inside that tent, you signal."

"And you?" Nami said.

"Center. Straight down the road."

Pip opened his mouth.

"I know," Noah said. "It's the most visible approach."

"I was going to say it's also the most confident," Pip said. "Which is either brilliant or catastrophic and I have stopped being able to tell the difference with you."

They moved.

Noah counted their steps. Fifteen meters. Twenty. The camp's outer fires were visible through the trees now, the voices clearer, the smell of woodsmoke and cooked meat reaching them properly.

They had covered maybe twenty meters of the approach road when Noah stopped.

Everyone stopped with him because when Noah stopped without warning there was always a reason.

There was a reason.

A man stood in the center of the road ahead, maybe thirty meters out. Arms folded. A hammer on his back that caught the last of the evening light across its head and threw it back gold.

Nobody moved.

Nobody said anything for a long moment because nobody had the right words for what they were looking at.

Pip broke first, his voice dropping to something barely above a breath. "Is that..."

Then from the tree line to the left, someone stepped onto the road.

A woman. She looked no older than twenty, pink hair so bright it had no business existing in a forest, cut and styled in a way that belonged in a different century entirely. High boots, clothing that sat completely wrong against the backdrop of old trees and packed dirt roads, and she was skipping. Actually skipping, her feet light on the ground, covering the distance to where the man stood with the energy of someone who had been waiting for this specific moment for a very long time and was thrilled it had finally arrived.

She reached him and leaned up and whispered something in his ear.

Then she pointed.

At Noah.

She was smiling when she did it.

Werner's hand went to his gauntlet. Nami's went to her knives. Pip's chakram appeared in his palm without him appearing to consciously reach for it.

Noah stood still and looked at the woman with the pink hair and felt his theory, the one he had been carrying since the road, since Pip's offhand comment about two women with no origin and no name, crystallize into something so cold and so complete that it took everything he had to keep his face from showing what it was doing to him.

'There you are,' he thought.

"The witch," Valen said, his voice low, his breath barely carrying the words.

Everyone took a step back.

Noah did not move.

Egor unfolded his arms.

"Hear me." His voice went out across the evening road with the weight of a man who had spent a lifetime making his voice carry across battlefields. "I am Egor. Black Dragon Knight of a kingdom long at war." His eyes moved across all of them and settled on Noah. "Surrender. Or perish."

The words hit Noah like cold water because he had heard them before. Not from Egor. From Ego, in a throne room with a broken throne, a man in dragon scale armor with chains wrapped around his arms delivering the same cadence with the same absolute certainty.

'The last dragon knight,' Noah thought. 'Different man. Same conviction. Same finality.'

Valen stepped forward. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

He moved past all of them, past Noah, past Werner, until he was standing at the front of the group with his spear in his hand and his scarred face doing something that was past anger and into something older and more personal.

"What nonsense are you spouting, Egor." Not a question. An accusation delivered in a flat voice. "Surrender to whom? You're standing on a road in the middle of a forest with Arthur's witch beside you, blocking a mission the king himself sanctioned." He held Egor's eyes. "I have profound respect for you. I have always had profound respect for you. So I am going to give you one chance to step away from that woman, right now, and walk with us to finish what we came here to do."

Gigarose laughed.

It came out bright and delighted and completely wrong for the moment, the laugh of someone watching a play they had already seen and were enjoying more the second time.

"Silly," she said. Her voice was sweet, almost singsongy. "Silly, silly, silly knight." She tilted her head, the pink hair catching the firelight from the camp behind them. "Arthur isn't here." She said it the way you told a child there was no candy left in the jar. "He isn't at Vethmore either. Or Crowhill." The smile widened. "In fact, at this precise moment, Arthur is most likely having a very productive conversation with your king." She clasped her hands together in front of her chest like the thought brought her genuine joy. "All three of your strongest forces, scattered across three locations. And the door you left open behind you." She made a small sound of pure delight. "Oh, the looks on your faces right now."

The dawning terror moved through the group like cold wind. Werner and Nami looked at each other. Pip's jaw went tight. Valen's hand on his spear went white at the knuckles.

Noah said nothing. He was looking at Gigarose and she was looking at him and both of them knew things the others in this road did not know and the weight of that sat between them like a physical object.

Valen turned back to Egor.

"Last chance," he said. "Step away from her."

Egor looked at him.

"The tavern boy," Egor said, his eyes moving to Noah. "I know what he is now. A foreigner. A plague that crossed into our land from somewhere unknown." His voice carried no malice, which was somehow worse than if it had. He sounded like a man reading from scripture. "Ending this war begins with ending him. So says our god."

"Has he completely lost his mind?" Pip said, loud enough that he clearly did not care if Egor heard it.

"Which god?" Werner said.

"The one that gave us everything," Egor said. "The one who blessed this land. Who opened the gates. Who gave us our magic and our purpose." He looked at each of them in turn. "She came to me. In a dream. And she showed me the truth of what stands among us."

Pip stared at him. "You met a woman in a dream who told you she was a god, and she said the person who has done nothing but help us win this war is actually the enemy, and your response was to walk into Arthur's camp and stand next to his witch?" He pointed at Gigarose. "That woman. Right there. And you think this makes sense?"

"Last chance," Egor said. "Surrender. Or be destroyed."

Valen drew his spear.

The golden energy came up through the shaft immediately, the blessed weapon responding to whatever was running through Valen right now, and he pointed it at Egor across thirty meters of road with the steadiness of a man who had made his peace with what he was doing.

"Over my dead body," Valen said.

Egor looked at him.

"I'll see to that."

He reached back.

"Render." His voice dropped to something almost gentle. "Show these fools despair."

He moved.

BOOOM!

The after image stayed where he had been standing, a ghost of his shape burned into the evening air, while the real Egor was already across half the distance. Pip's head snapped toward the after image and then tracked to where Egor actually was and his mouth said the words before his brain finished forming them.

"Is he faster or is it me—"

Valen was already moving before Egor's feet fully left the ground.

His spear came up, the golden energy surging through the shaft, and he drove it forward to intercept the hammer's path above Noah's skull.

BOOM!!

The road between them split. Not cracked. Split, a fissure running from the point of impact outward in both directions, the packed earth separating along a line that went three feet deep, and from that line heat came up, the orange-red glow of something below the surface that had been waiting for exactly this kind of invitation. A magma seam, ancient and pressurized, exhaling through the gap that the collision had opened.

Valen held for one second, his boots carving backward through the road surface, the spear absorbing the force with everything its golden energy had.

Then Egor's follow through came.

A haymaker with the hammer's face that caught Valen across the chest before he could reset, and Valen left the road sideways, his body rotating through the air before he disappeared into the undergrowth at the road's edge with the sound of branches making way for something they had not been given a choice about.

Egor did not watch him land.

He was already looking at Noah.

"TRAITOR!"

The leap covered fifteen feet of vertical distance, Render coming down from above with both of Egor's hands behind it and everything the black knight had decided this moment required.

Werner appeared from nowhere, one arm up, the gauntlet catching the hammer's face a foot above Noah's skull.

The reverb traveled up Werner's arm and through the road surface and into the soles of everyone's boots simultaneously.

Then a small chunk of the gauntlet's facing fell away and hit the ground with a sound like a coin dropped in a very quiet room.

Egor looked at it.

Then he kicked Werner.

The kick caught him in the ribs and Werner folded around it and went sideways into the tree line.

Pip moved.

His chakram went low, angled at Egor's ankles, and Egor stepped over it with the ease of someone who had been reading attacks for thirty years, and his elbow came around in a return that caught Pip across the cheekbone with the full rotation of his body behind it.

Pip's head snapped sideways and his feet left the ground briefly and he hit the road face first, his palms catching him before full impact, and he stayed there for a moment on hands and knees while the world reorganized itself.

"Burt!" Nami's voice. "Move! Burt, move!"

Noah could hear her. He could hear all of it. The fight, the voices, the crack and boom of Egor working through the people between him and his objective. He could hear every word and feel the ground shaking under each impact.

He could not move.

His entire body had simply stopped responding, the signal from his brain reaching his limbs and finding nothing on the other end, and on his invisible display screen something was happening that he had never seen before.

[jajahajshehmwia$###!+#!#!#&#-#;@]

Strings of corrupted text cascading down the display field, symbols that were not symbols, characters from no alphabet he recognized, the whole system interface scrambling and reassembling and scrambling again like something had gotten into the architecture and was rearranging it from the inside.

He could not make sense of a single line of it.

He could not move.

Valen came back from the undergrowth.

He came back the way Valen always came back from things, without announcement and with his spear already in motion. The golden energy running through the shaft was at a level Noah had not seen from him before, the glow bright enough to throw shadows from the shaft itself, and the thrust he drove at Egor's chest was not the controlled precise strike of someone managing output.

Egor turned it aside with Render's face.

CRACK.

Valen followed through immediately, spinning the shaft, driving the other end at Egor's knee, forcing him to step back and reassess the distance. Another thrust, high this time, and Egor swayed backward, and the golden energy discharged from the spear tip close enough to his face that it scorched the air between them.

Blood appeared at Egor's temple. A thin line of it, running down from where the discharge had grazed him.

Egor touched it with two fingers.

Looked at them.

Then he hit Valen with the hammer.

Not swung. Drove it forward like a battering ram, the hammer's face connecting with the center of Valen's chest at close range with every ounce of enhancement Egor carried behind it.

The sound it made was brutal.

Valen left the ground and was still leaving it when Egor's follow through came, a full horizontal swing that caught him mid-air, and the follow through sent him into the tree line so hard that the trees he went through did not bend.

They broke.

The silence that followed lasted exactly one second.

Then Egor walked to where Valen had landed and stood over him and raised Render above his head and brought it down and the sound that came after was small and final and absolutely nothing like what it should have sounded like for what it meant.

Werner's eyes went wide.

Nami made a sound that was not a word.

Pip was still on hands and knees on the road and he raised his head and looked at where Valen had been standing thirty seconds ago and his face did something that it had not done through any of the harbor or the gate or the pass.

"Everyone give everything!" Werner's voice came out raw. "Don't hold a single thing back, do you hear me! Everything!"

Egor turned from the tree line.

He walked back toward them unhurried, Render dragging at his side, and Nami moved to intercept him despite the leg, both knives out, her jaw locked against everything her leg was telling her about the current plan.

Egor looked at her leg. Looked at her face.

He swung Render low and horizontal and it caught the already damaged leg and Nami went down screaming a sound that she cut off before it finished, biting it back, her hands going to the leg which was now wrong in a way it had not been wrong before.

She tried to get up.

She could not get up.

Gigarose walked past her.

She did not step over her. She walked past her the way you walked past furniture, her high boots clicking on the road surface, and she did not look down at Nami at all, her eyes fixed on Noah standing frozen at the center of the road.

Nami reached for her ankle.

Her fingers found nothing to grip and her face hit the road and she lay there watching Gigarose walk away from her toward Noah with the helplessness of someone whose body has made a final decision that the mind has not agreed to.

Werner and Pip came at Egor together.

Pip went low and Werner went high and between them they had a pattern, not planned, instinctive, the result of months of training alongside each other, and for three exchanges it worked. Pip's chakram forcing Egor's hammer wide while Werner's gauntlet found the ribs. Werner's body drawing the follow up while Pip came back around with the chakram from a new angle.

Egor read the pattern on the fourth exchange.

He let the chakram pass wide deliberately, absorbing Werner's gauntlet strike on the forearm, and his counter caught Pip across the jaw with the hammer's handle, the solid steel of it connecting with a crack that sat in everyone's teeth, and Pip went sideways and kept going, skipping across the road surface before coming to rest face down ten feet from where he had started.

He did not get up immediately.

Werner took three strikes in the next ten seconds that would have ended anyone without a gauntlet and nearly ended him with one. Egor found every gap, every moment of recovery, every half second of reorganization, and put something into each one that cost Werner something Werner could not afford to keep spending. Blood from the nose first. Then the mouth. Then from somewhere above the left eye that turned that whole side of his face red.

Werner kept his feet.

He kept his feet through all of it and kept his gauntlet up and kept trying and Egor battered him down one exchange at a time with the patience of someone who had done this before and was not in any hurry.

Then the red mist came

---

Gigarose reached Noah and stopped beside him.

She looked up at his face for a moment. At the frozen stillness of it. Then she made a small sound that was almost fond.

"Burt," she said, trying the name like she was tasting it. She tilted her head. "Noah."

Nothing.

She stepped around to his front and looked at him properly, hands clasped behind her back, studying his face the way you studied something you had been thinking about for a long time and were finally seeing up close.

"Look at them," she said, not looking at them at all. Still looking at him. "Fighting for you."

She reached up and pushed a strand of hair off his forehead. Casual. Like she had done it before.

"You figured it out on the road, didn't you." Not a question. "I felt the moment it clicked. That little shift." She smiled. "You're so clever, Noah. It's my favorite thing about you and my least favorite thing about you at exactly the same time."

She moved to stand beside him, her shoulder almost touching his arm, and looked out at nothing in particular.

"The blessing. The gates. The war." A small pause. "You. Here. Now." She glanced up at his frozen face sideways. "All of it pointing to this road." She tilted her head. "Isn't that something."

The red mist rolled in around their feet, warm against the cold evening air, and she looked down at it briefly.

"Oh good," she said. "The dragons."

She looked back at Noah.

"Egor is extraordinary, you know. A true believer." She shook her head with something that resembled genuine admiration. "I showed him one dream. One. And he walked into a war for it." She almost laughed. "People like that are so useful. And so sad. Both at once."

She moved behind him and rested her chin on his shoulder, looking out at the road ahead the way you looked out at a view from a balcony.

"You have a decision coming," she said quietly. "When your body decides to work again." She stayed there a moment. "I'm rooting for you."

A beat.

"That's what makes it fun."

She stepped away.