His name was Hen Xi'an, just another soldier among the hundreds who made up the 5th Vanguard Company of the Chinsonite army. When they crossed the twilight line, he didn't expect to survive.
His boots sank into the charred mud, into the mixture of earth, blood, and ash. He breathed through his mouth, because the stench of burned corpses still clung to the walls of his throat like a punishment. His face was covered with a black cloth and his left arm bled from a superficial cut. Of the thirty with whom he had charged the fort's barbican, only three had returned. One was shouting incoherently. Another wouldn't release the burnt staff of what was once a flag.
Hen Xi'an couldn't speak.
He had seen it with his own eyes. What the elders called the Silver Curse, what the generals insisted on calling just a trick. "An old exiled mage," they said. "One last lightning bolt before dying."
But no. It wasn't a trick.
The sky had opened like a torn parchment. Clouds appeared from nowhere, and with them, fire. Hundreds, thousands of lightning bolts, as if the gods had unleashed their judgment upon them. There was no warning. No truce. Only ash and screams.
He had felt the heat of the lightning as it exploded nearby, he had seen his commander dissolve in a flash, his armor melting into his flesh. And then, that man.
A slender man with silver hair and storm-colored eyes. Standing on the wall. Alone. Like an invincible statue.
The terror didn't come from the fire. Not from the magic. It came from the gaze.
That mage looked with sadness, not hatred. As if what he did brought him not glory, but sorrow. As if those who fell were part of a tragedy already written.
Hen Xi'an ran. And he didn't stop. Not when the retreat trumpets sounded. Not when the catapult line collapsed. Not when the officer of the west wing called him a coward.
He just ran. Because he knew that if he stopped, if he looked back, the thunder would catch him.
Now, hours later, hidden in a small ravine among the stones, sheltered by a scorched cloak and with his eyes open to the night sky, he understood something that would change his life forever:
That man was not a soldier. He was a punishment.
And someday, his people would have to decide if they were willing to pay the price that magic brought with it.