Ashwall's greatest hunter returned from the wilds to find his beloved wife and daughter murdered by a passing noble. Powerless and broken, he buried them beneath the weeping pine. The noble walked free, leaving only a lesson carved in blood. The forest watched in silence.
The forest didn't mourn.
It simply absorbed.
Blood in its soil. Ash in its breath. Screams in its bark. The forest didn't ask what was lost—it grew around it, the way trees twist around corpses, roots curling through ribs like they're trying to hold the dead together.
The hunter sat beneath the weeping pine for three days. No food. No water. Just silence—and the unbearable shape of the earth where they now slept.
His hands were raw from digging. Nails cracked. Skin bloodied. But the graves were perfect. Lyria's had stones. Nya's had her totem, carved again from the same driftwood she'd once held. He remembered her laughing, carving it beside the hearth, too small to hold the knife right, but proud anyway.
He whispered their names until his voice died. Then he whispered them again anyway.
The villagers didn't speak to him.
Some glanced. Most didn't.
Even those who once cheered when he returned with fresh kill—shoulders heavy with meat, smile wide, the village's children running to greet him—now only watched from behind doors. Eyes shadowed with guilt. Or fear. Maybe both. Maybe neither. Maybe just silence.
The noble had left a message.
Defy me, and I erase your story.
And so the hunter's story had been erased.
So he wrote a new one.
Two days after the burial, he walked into the forest.
Not with traps. Not with rope.
With only his axe—and the old oath his father had taught him long before his first kill:
"You are not what you carry. You are what carries you back."
He would not come back until he was something else.
Gravewood Forest didn't welcome him.
It tested him.
The deeper he went, the more the trees changed—losing leaves, growing bark like bones. Sounds became distant. Direction warped. Nights whispered in dialects no human had words for.
Even the stars above seemed to vanish beneath the canopy. The air grew thicker, wetter, as if it remembered every breath ever stolen within it.
He followed no trail. Slept in mud. Ate what didn't bite first. The taste of raw root and insect shell became familiar. He chewed through the hunger like it was penance.
He bled more in that first month than in the ten years before it.
But he survived.
Not because he was strong—he wasn't.
He survived because he didn't care if he died.
And the forest recognized this.
The first trial came in the form of a wolf.
It should've been dead—ribcage exposed to the wind, one eye missing, the other glowing faint blue despite a hollow throat. It limped forward, slow, deliberate.
He didn't hesitate. He killed it.
No roar. No scream. Just axe through skull. Then silence again.
He sat beside the corpse that night, wondering why the beast had come. Wondering if it too had lost something. Wondering if they all had.
The second trial was a tree.
It bled when cut—black sap, thick and sticky, releasing spores that made his vision blur. He saw Lyria there, her voice echoing through the leaves, calling his name in that soft lilt she used when teasing. For three days, he sat beneath it and listened. He wanted it to be true. He begged it to be true.
When he awoke, the forest was darker.
He burned the tree.
The third was worse.
A child's laughter in the dark.
He followed it.
He always followed it.
Year One.
His hands learned new shapes. Not just how to swing an axe—but how to sharpen, bind, break, disarm. He learned pressure points from monsters, their corpses splayed open beneath torchlight. He memorized the anatomy of fear—where to cut so they stopped moving, where to slice so they screamed first.
He started carving bones. Not out of boredom. Out of guilt.
Each monster he killed—he carved a token. A fang. A spine. A sliver of horn. Not trophies. Apologies.
He whispered to them too.
"I'm sorry. I didn't see you then. I do now."
He stopped counting days.
He started counting scars.
Year Two.
He stopped speaking.
Not from choice—there was simply no one left to hear. The forest didn't require words. It required instinct.
He didn't need light anymore.
He didn't dream anymore.
Even the animals that once fled from him now watched. Crows perched near his camps, staring. Wolves followed from a distance. None attacked. It was as if they sensed he wasn't prey, wasn't predator. He was something else.
His axe grew heavier—not physically, but spiritually. It held their weight now. All of them.
He didn't carry a second weapon—not because he couldn't, but because he believed if he couldn't kill with one, he didn't deserve to kill at all.
And when the moment came—when his strength no longer trembled, when his muscles remembered how to crush, not just survive—he left Gravewood.
He returned to the edge of empire.
The first noble he hunted was Baron Blaze Rockheart.
The name alone made him sneer.
A tyrant in polished armor, Rockheart ruled the Town of Kiev—stone walls, iron chains, and servants who didn't blink without permission. Rumors said he kept a room called "The Choir"—where rebel tongues were broken until they sang praise.
The hunter arrived on market day.
No armor. No army. Just a hood, and the silence of two years wrapped around his shoulders like a second skin.
He slit the throat of the baron's lieutenant behind the stables.
By dusk, five more corpses lay beneath the manor walls—each one marked with the same sigil:
A cracked horn drawn in ash.
The fight wasn't glorious.
It wasn't clean.
It was punishment.
He moved through the manor like a ghost dragging flame—splintered doors, shattered staircases. He wasn't fast. He wasn't clever. But he was unrelenting.
When Baron Rockheart met him on the terrace, sword in each hand, he scoffed.
"You think I'm the one who killed your family?"
The hunter didn't answer.
Because it didn't matter.
This was the oath.
"I'll drag all of you down. One by one. Until the one who did it watches your ashes rain."
The baron's enchanted armor cracked beneath the axe in three strikes.
The last thing Rockheart saw were the hunter's eyes.
Not red with rage.
Not black with hate.
Just empty.
By nightfall, Kiev burned.
The townsfolk watched from rooftops—no soldiers left to stop them. Some cheered. Some wept. All understood:
A monster had passed through.
But not one they feared.
One they needed.
When he vanished into the woods again, he left no trace.
Only whispers.
A man with a cracked horn mark. Who doesn't speak. Who never misses.
And far across the empire, a noble with golden gloves heard those whispers.
He smiled.
And ordered the next purge.