Smoldering flames licked at the blackened bones of houses, painting the night in dull orange and choking gray. The air tasted of iron and soot. Somewhere, a beam gave way with a low groan, and sparks sprayed into the dark like a dying star's last breath.
Eryk woke to that groan.
For a heartbeat he thought it was his father, low and rough with sleep, calling him for the dawn milking.
Then the heat pressed in.
He coughed, throat raw, and the illusion shattered. Smoke clawed at his eyes as he blinked. Charred splinters bit into his palms when he pushed himself up. The world lurched, fire, darkness, a swollen orange glow that did not belong.
He was lying beside the well.
The stone rim dug into his ribs as he rolled and forced himself upright. His legs trembled, refused, then finally obeyed in jerky pieces. Each breath rasped like sandpaper dragged through his chest.
Not a dream.
Not a fever.
Not something he could wake out of.
The square of Hollowford, his whole world, was a smear of ruin.
The tavern's sign, the painted fox his uncle used to tap and call a "drunken mutt," lay split and black in the street. The baker's roof had fallen inward, timbers glowing dull red, sagging like ribs around a heart of coals. A door hung from a single hinge, creaking whenever the wind shifted.
Bodies lay where people had been.
For a moment he could pretend they were sleeping. Curled on their sides. Sprawled on their backs. Half-hidden by fallen beams and ash.
Then his gaze caught the wrong angles: an arm bent where no joint should be, bare feet burned to bone, a woman's hair still burning, feeding the flame as if even grief could be consumed.
By the tavern steps, an old man lay half-covered in ash. One stiff hand still clutched a warped tankard.
Old Ostin.
The same hand that had wagged at Eryk for climbing the fence, and then slipped him an apple slice when no one was looking.
Eryk's stomach clenched. He turned and vomited over the well's rim, bile splattering hot stone. The heat dried it almost at once, as if the night wanted evidence gone quickly.
He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. The cloth came away black.
His ears rang, a high, thin whistle. Beneath it lay the crackle of fire, the low groan of dying houses, and faint under everything else,
Hooves.
Retreating thunder, already fading down the road.
They're leaving.
The thought did not bring relief. It only made the world tilt, because leaving meant they had been here.
He did not remember when they came.
Memory was shattered glass: shouting. A horn. Torches moving like angry stars along the ridge road. Dogs barking until they stopped. His mother's hand clamping his shoulder hard enough to hurt.
"Into the root-cellar," she had said. "Don't argue, Eryk. Go."
He had, because her voice had never sounded like that, tight, frayed, as if something inside her had already torn.
He had climbed down into the cool dark beneath the house and crouched among baskets of turnips and potatoes while the lantern above shrank to a thin line as she pulled the door almost shut.
"Stay quiet," she whispered through the crack. "No matter what you hear. Do you understand?"
He had nodded. His throat would not work.
Then the noises came.
Men shouting. Harsh laughter. Wood bursting. A scream that might have been Ostin's or Father's or some stranger's, and then the awful thing about screams was how quickly you ran out of breath.
He pressed his hands over his ears anyway.
As if that could keep the world out.
His mother's voice came once.
Just once.
It cut through everything, sharp with pain and command, and then it was gone.
He remembers trying to rise. Trying to claw at the cellar door. His nails tearing against hard-packed dirt. The thought, I have to go. I have to see. I have to help, so clean it might have been hope.
Then something slammed into the ceiling above, dust raining down, and the lantern jerked, and the world went out.
Now he stood by the well with no memory of how he had come up.
He pressed a palm to his chest. His heart hammered like it was trying to break its own cage.
"Ma," he croaked.
The word came out thin and broken.
He forced his legs to straighten. The square tilted, then steadied as if reality took a moment to decide whether he was allowed to stand.
"Ma!" he tried again, louder.
His voice slapped off ruined walls and disappeared.
No answer came back.
Only fire and the distant fading of hooves.
His feet moved without permission.
He crossed the square, stepping around bodies he could not look at too long without something inside him cracking. The ground was slick in places, not just with ash but with things the ash tried to hide.
He found the alder tree out front, what was left of it.
A half-burned stump, smoke curling from the hollow like breath from a wounded animal.
Once, his father had hoisted him into that tree's branches until the world below looked smaller.
"World looks bigger from up here," Father had said, laughing. "Remember that."
Now the world felt very small.
One wall of the house had fallen outward. The roof was a blackened skeleton. The door was gone. Only the scorched threshold remained, as if the house itself had been picked clean of the parts that made it a home.
"Ma?" His voice cracked on the question.
He stepped through.
Inside was a maze of shadows and embers. Floorboards had split and fallen in, revealing the black mouth of the cellar below. A heavy beam lay at an angle, half-buried in ash, pinning a section of collapsed ceiling like a lid forced shut.
There should have been light where the hearth was.
There should have been his mother's rug.
There should have been his father's boots by the stone.
There should have been a chipped clay cup on the table, hers for tea.
None of it was where it belonged.
The air smelled wrong, smoke, yes, but also scorched cloth and hair and that iron tang that didn't belong to burning wood.
He found it by noticing what didn't burn.
A strip of pale cloth beneath the beam, charred and torn, yet still pale where flame hadn't reached.
An apron.
His mother's apron.
For a breath his mind refused to connect it to anything else. It hovered there as a separate object, like a tool left on the table by mistake.
Then he saw the hand.
Not all of it, just fingers curled under the beam, knuckles dusted in ash.
Eryk's chest cinched tight.
He stumbled over a broken bench, slid in ash, and gripped the beam. Splinters drove into his palms.
He heaved.
Nothing.
He planted his feet and leaned his weight into the wood until his shoulders shook.
It creaked. It held.
"No," he whispered. "No, no…"
He tried again.
And again.
Splinters burrowed under his nails. Skin tore. His lungs burned. Smoke clawed down his throat like a living thing.
He did not stop.
Because stopping meant deciding the beam was heavier than love.
His vision narrowed until there was only the beam and that strip of pale cloth.
He pushed harder, and something inside his ribs lit, heat blooming in a place that had no business being warm.
A vibration rose, not sound but a pressure through bone and teeth.
The stone-deep thrum.
The beam shifted.
Barely. Just enough that ash beneath it stirred. Just enough that the world, for a single breath, seemed willing to bend.
Eryk sucked in a searing breath and let out a raw, wordless sound, half prayer, half command, half animal.
Then the thrum tore loose.
Not like a muscle relaxing. Like something being ripped away.
White pain knifed through his chest and up his arms. His hands spasmed and slipped on the beam. He fell back onto the floorboards hard enough to knock air from his lungs.
The heat vanished.
The hollow it left behind was worse.
He folded over himself, clutching his forearms. Muscles screamed. Tendons felt like ropes pulled too tight.
He stared at the beam.
At the hand beneath it.
It could be anyone, he told himself.
His mind tried to fill in the rest anyway. His mother's face. His father shouting. The cellar door. The moment a life becomes an ending.
He let out a short, broken laugh that scraped his throat.
Those were tavern tales. Old men talking about saint-blooded warriors who called iron to their hands and witches whose words folded men in on themselves. Eryk had listened wide-eyed once, imagining himself in those stories, high above everything in the alder branches, looking down like the world couldn't reach him.
He was no saint-blood. No witch.
Just a boy in the ashes with shaking arms and a beam he couldn't lift.
Hooves sounded again.
Closer.
His head snapped up.
Shapes emerged from the smoke at the far end of the square, horses, dark against the dull glow. Men in leather and mismatched steel, outlined by embers. One laughed, a thin harsh sound. Another spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand like he'd just finished a meal.
The bandits hadn't all gone.
They had come back.
His breath caught.
He counted four clearly, maybe more behind the gray curtain. One rode ahead, cloak trailing, sword at his hip catching firelight in dull flashes. The others spread out behind him, spears and axes hanging easy in their hands, as if this was an errand.
They hadn't seen him yet.
Move.
The thought came clean and cold.
Eryk slid off the broken step into a crouch. The well lay too far. The center of the square was bare stone and bodies.
The alley.
A narrow gap between the baker's house and Old Ostin's. He had raced through it a hundred times as a child, a stick in hand, shouting orders to boys who followed no one but still humored him.
Now it was a strip of darkness just wide enough to vanish into.
He hunched low and slipped toward it, boots crunching softly. A roof tile snapped under his heel like breaking bone. He flinched, but did not stop.
His body wanted to curl in on itself and disappear. To find a cellar, a door, a place where sound couldn't reach him.
There was nowhere left to hide under a roof.
Hooves clopped on stone behind him.
"Place still smolderin'," a man said, voice rough with satisfaction. "Good work tonight."
"Could've been better," another replied. "Boss says half the coin was hidden. We'll search again when it cools."
Eryk pressed himself into the alley's shadow, chest heaving. He clamped a hand over his mouth so his breath wouldn't betray him.
The stink of old piss and smoke mixed in his nose.
From there, he watched.
They moved into the square. The leader reined in beside the well, cloak settling around him. He pushed his hood back.
Eryk froze.
Close-cropped hair shot with gray. A face cut from old scars and hard angles. Eyes the color of wet stone, flat, unhurried. A plain iron ring gleamed on his thumb. He rubbed it once with his forefinger, absent as breathing, as if checking it was still there.
Not a wild raider.
Someone who had done this before. Many times.
"Messy," the leader said, looking over the dead with mild annoyance. "Told them keep it cleaner."
"You said 'no witnesses,' Garren," one of the others replied with a shrug. "Hard to do that gentle."
Garren.
The name fell into Eryk like a pebble into deep water.
Garren snorted. "I said I wanted hands left. Fields do not till themselves. Lords do not care how the grain shows up, only that it does."
One of the men laughed. "Should've let the Sheriff do it, then."
"The Sheriff likes clean hands," Garren said. "He likes a clean conscience. He likes his coin delivered."
He spoke like the world had rules and he was merely explaining them to people too slow to learn.
Eryk's fingers tightened around the club he'd found, a broken plank from a bench, nails half pulled, edges jagged. It felt too light to matter. It felt like all he had.
"Find anything useful?" someone asked.
Garren's gaze drifted over the square, over bodies, over wreckage, over ash like snow.
It landed, briefly, on the ruined threshold of Eryk's house.
Eryk pressed back into shadow until his spine hit stone.
"Maybe," Garren said. "Search. Quick. Fire'll drop by morning."
A man wandered nearer the alley. Boots scuffed. A spear tip nudged debris aside.
Eryk held his breath.
The man paused.
Then, as if drawn by something he couldn't name, he leaned and peered into the dark.
Their eyes met.
The bandit's mouth stretched into a grin.
"Well," he said softly. "Look at that."
Eryk moved before fear could make him freeze.
He lunged out of the shadow and swung the club with everything he had left.
The wood crunched into the man's cheekbone.
The crack was wet and ugly.
The bandit staggered, surprised more than hurt. Blood ran in a bright line down his jaw.
Eryk swung again.
A hand caught the club mid-arc.
The bandit wrenched it free as if taking a toy.
Then his boot came down on Eryk's hand.
Pain screamed up Eryk's arm. The plank snapped out of his grip. He yelled, twisting, but the man's weight pinned his wrist to the ground.
"Got a live one!" the bandit shouted.
Garren's head turned toward the alley.
No.
Heat surged beneath Eryk's ribs, sharp and violent, like metal grinding against rock.
The stone-deep thrum roared back to life.
The world narrowed to the boot crushing his hand, the bandit's weight, ash in his mouth.
He had never wanted someone dead as much as he did in that moment, and the fierceness of it frightened him.
"Do not touch me," he gasped.
The bandit snorted. "You are in no—"
The air shivered.
Subtle, like the tremor underfoot when a wagon passes. But there were no wagons. No storm. Only fire and this man's weight.
The thrum snapped outward.
Iron hoops, bent barrel rings from the cooper's yard, jerked up from the ash behind the bandit as if yanked by invisible hands. They spun through the air.
One hammered into the bandit's shoulder with a dull clang. Another clipped his ear. He flinched with a curse and ducked.
"The fuck?" he spat, glaring back into the empty shadows.
Eryk stared.
He hadn't moved. His free hand clawed at ash, useless.
The hoops lay scattered now where they hadn't been.
The thrum tore away again, leaving his chest aching and empty.
"Who's there?" the bandit barked. Angry, not afraid, yet.
Garren's voice cut in, flat and irritated. "What are you doing, Droth? I said bind him, not scream at ghosts."
So that was his name.
Droth cast one last suspicious look at the deeper dark, then grabbed Eryk by the hair and wrenched his head back. Pain flared across his scalp. Eryk cried out, fingers scraping trenches in the ash.
"I will bind him," Droth muttered, "after I teach him some."
"Enough."
Bootsteps approached, steady, professional. Garren's face appeared above him, framed by drifting smoke.
Up close, Eryk saw a healed cut through one eyebrow, old stubble, eyes like stones in river-mud. The iron ring on his thumb caught the firelight as he turned it without thinking.
Garren took Eryk in with one brief glance: ash, blood, thin arms pinned under a boot.
"How old?" Garren asked.
Droth shrugged, still holding his hair. "Ten? Eleven?"
"Twelve," Eryk spat. Pain flared in his cheek.
One of Garren's brows twitched. "Twelve, then."
His gaze flicked to the broken plank. To the scattered hoops.
"Bold for twelve," he said. "And stupid. But bold."
He crouched until their faces were level. Eryk could smell leather and sweat and horse, smoke ground deep into cloth.
"Know who we are, boy?" Garren asked.
Eryk forced himself to meet that gaze. "Murderers."
A couple of the men laughed, short, sharp.
Garren's expression barely shifted. "That is one word." He tilted his head. His thumb rubbed the iron ring again. "Another is 'the ones the Lords pay.'"
The words landed like a blow.
"They pay you for this?" Eryk rasped. "For all of this?"
Garren glanced around, taking in the wreckage as if he were looking over a field after harvest. "You see home," he said. "I see grain that should have been on the road and was not. Coin buried instead of handed over. A Sheriff too lazy or too scared to keep the roads clear." His eyes returned to Eryk. "Leave that long enough, worse men come. Or my lot comes starving. Either way, something burns. This time it was you."
He spoke like someone reciting a truth he had stopped questioning years ago.
Eryk's fingers curled into fists. His trapped wrist throbbed under Droth's boot.
"What did you find, Garren?" one of the bandits called.
"A mouth that still works," Garren replied.
He studied Eryk for a heartbeat longer. "Hate me all you want," he said quietly. "Does not change anything. You are alive because you are small and might sell. That is all."
He straightened.
"Droth. Bind him. We move when the fires settle."
Droth finally stepped off Eryk's hand. Blood rushed back in a hot, needling wave. Rough hands yanked Eryk's wrists behind him. Rope bit into scraped skin, grinding against raw places.
The iron hoops lay scattered in the ash, dull and ordinary now.
Garren turned away. "Take what is worth taking," he called. "Leave the rest for the crows."
Eryk stared at the ground as the knots tightened. His cheek pulsed with each heartbeat.
Beneath that pain lay a deeper weight: the hand under the beam, his mother's apron, Old Ostin's tankard, the alder stump.
The heat under his ribs cooled and settled, turning into something heavier.
A stone dropped into a deep well.
He did not know what had moved the iron. He did not understand the thrum or why it hurt when it left. The part that frightened him most was how much he had wanted Droth's skull between those hoops.
Droth hauled him upright by the rope, nearly tearing his shoulder. Eryk stumbled, then found his feet.
Garren walked toward his horse, cloak dragging through the ash. The sword at his hip caught firelight in brief, dull flashes. His thumb brushed the iron ring again as he reached for the reins.
Eryk fixed his gaze on that back and did not look away. He carved every line of the man into memory, the set of his shoulders, the way his cloak hung, the battered scabbard, the twist of iron on his hand.
Garren.
The name sank in him like iron in deep water.
He would remember it when the smoke was gone and the cuts had scarred. He would remember it when dreams dragged him back to burning beams and cellar dark. Whether he woke in chains or in some stranger's yard, he would remember.
And one day, when the stone-deep thrum in his bones was no longer just a strange, fleeting pain, when he was no longer a boy who froze behind cellar doors and swung broken planks at armored men, he would say that name again.
Not as prey.
Not as a child.
As something that could make a man like Garren turn and look afraid.
They led him across the square. Hollowford smoldered quietly behind them. Roofs caved in with tired sighs. Sparks drifted up into the dirty sky and vanished.
Eryk did not look back.
He kept his eyes on the line of Garren's shoulders, on the sword at his hip, on the hand with the iron ring, on the road that led away.
Every step away from the ruins was a step toward the day he would come back to them.
Not as someone to be bound and sold.
As something else.