The road narrowed as they descended, squeezing between steepening shoulders of rock and a thinning screen of birches. '
For a while the trees grew so close the branches almost tangled overhead, cutting out the sky and leaving only a semblance of light from above.
Corwin kept the horses at a rigid, careful walk.
At every switchback, he leaned forward in the seat, scanning the next bend for hazards, deadfall traps, slick mud patches, and the signs of recent sabotage.
The old military nerves were showing, though he covered them with aimless banter about the price of oats and the advantage of wide-set wheels in the northern mud.
Aurelian tried to act calm.
But a bell sounded at the edge of hearing, a pressure in the jaw and the top of the spine, as if the forest had discovered a secret about him and was waiting for the perfect moment to share.
He didn't feel watched. He knew it. Knew, with the same certainty that told him how many steps to the riverbank or how many grains of salt in his palm, that there were twenty-three men in the area. Not a guess. Not a hunch.
A number, all at once, as real as breath.
He shifted on the seat, eyes on the ruts, but let his right hand slip down and rest against the wagon's footlocker.
Three planks deep, under a false bottom, a real sword waited.
He tried to meet Corwin's gaze, to warn him off, but the man was focused on the next hairpin.
The wagon jounced and creaked, and for a moment Aurelian wondered if his father felt the same chill in the air, the same hardening of the world around them.
The forest grew silent. Even the wind stopped. The last birdcall had vanished a mile back.
They made the next turn and saw the barricade.
It was almost elegant, as far as highway traps went.
Two trees, freshly felled and still weeping sap, angled across the road.
A single wagon could have cleared it with some effort, but not with a precious cargo and a soft-skinned son.
Aurelian's father drew the horses to a halt. He flicked the reins with two fingers and said, "Stay put," but his eyes never left the shadows.
Whoosh…
From both sides, the bandits emerged—twenty-three, just as he had counted.
The men wore rough leathers and homespun, but their weapons were clean and the way they moved, they'd done this before.
The leader strode out to the middle and planted his boots wide, with a heavy axe dangling from one hand.
"Evening," he called, raising his free hand in a motion that was almost polite.
"You've come a long way, friend."
Then the bandit leader dropped the courtesy like a stained napkin.
His next words had the rhythm of a transaction, not a threat.
"We don't want the boy. We don't want you. All we need is what's in the wagon." He tapped the head of his axe against the ground.
Corwin stepped down from the seat, keeping his hands visible.
He moved like someone who'd done this before—not eager, but not green, either.
"You know what's in there?" His voice was steady.
Maybe that's what made the men around them shift a little, not with fear but with the prickle that this might get ugly.
The leader smirked, showing teeth filed down to little chips.
"Does it matter? Unhitch the horses. Leave the wagon. Walk away. We'll let you keep the boots."
His men fanned out, two by two, neat as bookends. Aurelian counted the distance between each. Not far enough. They expected this to be simple.
Corwin didn't move. "Not happening," he said.
The leader's smile faded. "You think you're a hero?"
Corwin's hand went to his sword.
"No. But I know heroes. You aren't one."
"…!"
A breath, then everything happened at once.
The leader's axe came up sharp and fast but Corwin had long drawn his blade.
CLANG!
He drew, parrying with a clang that sent sparks toward the ditch.
He ducked the second swing, countered with a shallow cut across the leader's hip, and pivoted so the next man's spear only grazed his sleeve.
Aurelian saw the sequence unfold: every step, every calculated angle.
He felt the danger in his own chest, the old rhythm of a battle's opening bars.
Corwin pressed, knocked the axe aside, and brought his elbow into the leader's jaw.
The man went down, but before Corwin could finish the motion, another bandit a man with a heavy cudgel came in from Corwin's blind side.
GYAK!…
No warning, no time, just a dull thwock as the cudgel met the back of Corwin's skull.
He staggered and his sword clattered to the road.
His knees buckled before he even registered the pain. The bandit hit him again, for good measure.
This time, he didn't get up.
The bandit leader stepped over Corwin's body and fixed Aurelian with a look that skirted the edge of pity, as if the idea of a child mourning a dead parent was just another inconvenience to be checked off before lunch.
He gave a quick, two-fingered gesture.
"Do the boy," he said. "No mess, quick."
The two closest men advanced, one with a battered saber, the other with a mace whose head was banded in notched iron.
The move was practiced; they'd done this before and expected it to go the same way.
Maybe they even looked forward to it.
Why wouldn't they?
"Ah… I see."
Aurelian's body moved before his mind caught up.
There was no panic, no plan just a channel opening somewhere deep, a gate that had waited twelve merciful years to be kicked in.
His left hand found the false bottom on the footlocker, thumbed the catch, and pulled the sword free in a single arc.
The steel looked like any other blade nothing fancy, no enchantments, just a blade but the moment his fingers wrapped it, the world tilted.
SHAAAA…
He heard the pressure. It was a frequency ringing in the teeth and right behind the eyes, that only he could sense.
It started as a hum, then built, and built, and built—
The sword took the frequency and spun it into a filament of black fire along the edge.
It rippled, then solidified with every angle all black as if the daylight off its silver was nothing at its core.
"…!"
CRACKLE…CRACKLE…CRACKLE…
Nobody screamed. There wasn't time.
Aurelian moved without a single thought with his legs flexed launching him forward.
The sword still low and trailing crossed the space between the wagon and bandits in less than a breath.
There was a word for what he did.
"Sky-Severing Draw."
He didn't recall teaching it to himself, only the certainty that it existed, and that it belonged to him alone.
SLASH!
The blade left the scabbard at hip-height and cleaved the air in a clean horizontal arc.
What followed was not a line, but a wedge of black energy, wide as the road, rimmed with a crackling nimbus of black lightning.
The first two men were gone before their weapons finished rising.
Then the wave swept through the line.
At first it looked like a trick of the light: shadows popping and flickering across the bandits' bodies.
Then, as if the world remembered what should happen, each man dissolved where the arc passed, smearing into vapor and then nothing at all.
Twenty-three bodies, twenty-three erasures. Silenced in a moment.
However the slash did not stop with the men.
The trees behind them, hundreds of birches, each a foot thick and older than the city itself, shuddered.
For a moment, a black afterimage lingered across the trunks. Then every tree in the wave's path toppled at once, sheared clean at the same angle, the canopy crashing down in a roar that took half a minute to catch up to itself.
Behind Aurelian, the horses panicked and fainted.
The wagon shuddered and His father's body slumped where it had fallen.
He couldn't hear anything: his own pulse, the crash of branches, the hiss of energy still burning along the sword's edge.
It was all too much and too little at once.
He looked down at the weapon and saw the light fade.
CRACK…
"Fuck… I over did it."
The blade disintegrated and he caught the next moment only because his knees collapsed and he hit the ground hard.
He couldn't see any bandits. No corpses, no boots, not even a shred of old leather. The world had forgotten them in a single heartbeat.