The wind howled across the cliffs, loud enough to drown thought. Snow whipped through the forest like a veil of daggers. But Riven stood still, eyes fixed on the flickering orange glow below—pirate firelight, scattered along the shore like embers bleeding into night.
He had watched them long enough.
Six men. A beached longboat. Three tents pitched among the rocks. They laughed loudly, unaware. Their blades lay too far from their beds. Their sentries dozed or drank.
They were killers, but not careful ones.
Riven crouched in the trees above, his green-cloaked form nearly invisible among the frost-covered pines. His sword—beautiful and deadly, forest-colored like the woods around him—rested on his back in silence. It had not yet tasted blood.
Tonight, it would.
He descended in silence, every footstep calculated. No leaves. No sound. Just the whisper of cold wind, and his breath slow and steady.
At the edge of their camp, he waited. One man broke off from the group to relieve himself behind a snow-slick rock.
Riven struck.
Not with rage, not with noise—just motion. A single, smooth sweep. The man gasped once, but Riven was already gone, melting back into the dark.
It wasn't rage that drove him.
It was precision. Control. Proof.
By the time the others noticed, they were surrounded by shadows they couldn't name. One by one, they vanished into snow and fear. Not all died. One ran—Riven let him. He needed word to spread.
Let them speak of a shadow in the cliffs. A ghost with a green blade and winter in his veins.
By dawn, only the wind remained.
Riven returned to his cave not with gold or trophies, but with a simple bundle: the headscarves and tokens of the raiders. Proof of their defeat. He laid them on the stone beside his mark wall and scratched a new line into the cave wall.
Seven tallies now.
Seven battles won—some against beast, some against man.
Weeks passed.
More ships came. More camps.
Riven hunted them all. But he did not strike without reason. Only when the risk threatened the coast, the hold, or the quiet northern roads did he descend.
He became a whisper. A warning.
Some began to call him the Reaper of the Pines.
But still, he kept to the shadows. No one knew his name.
Not yet.
In the cold forest clearing, Riven trained harder. He carved new forms from old drills. He swung from tree branches, leapt over streams, and wove footwork through frozen root and ice. He built traps. He forged discipline into instinct.
He counted not the days but the enemies.
Every fallen man. Every beast. Every lesson.
Each one was proof.
He wasn't just a boy with a sword anymore.
He was the sword.
By the time he returned to Kaelstrid Hold in the spring, even the guards at the gate flinched when they saw him.
His father, Darnic, said nothing—only studied him with the eyes of a commander weighing a weapon.
His mother, Veyra, offered a single nod.
"You've begun," she said. "Now see it through."