Something Always Follows the First Mercy
Ashkore didn't sleep.
Even in the bone-hut's quiet, with Grim muttering soft necromantic lullabies to his jars of preserved marrow, and the child curled against a patchwork quilt that had once belonged to a Thornheart spy, Ashkore stayed on the edge, knife-drawn, shadow-splayed.
Something was coming.
You didn't live three centuries between two warring species without learning to feel the weight in the air before a blade was drawn. The Veil was too thin tonight. The shadows were too loud. The silence had shape.
He stood by the threshold, half in shadow, half in the fading glow of Grim's witch-lanterns.
"Can't keep watch forever," Grim rasped from the corner, stirring bone broth thick enough to coat the walls. "Even monsters gotta blink."
Ashkore didn't respond.
Grim sighed, as if tired of the sound of his own living.
"She's still asleep," the old Boneclaw said. "That's something. Could've screamed herself into a fever. Seen it before."
Ashkore's jaw clenched.
"She didn't."
"No," Grim muttered, ladle scraping skull-shaped bowls. "She didn't."
There was a lull in the war here, on the edge of the Thirteenth Territory, in the no-man's land carved between shattered border-forts and the first lunges of creeping rot. But lulls in war were lies. Nothing in Umbraterra paused. It only crouched.
Ashkore stepped out into the veil-mist, letting the door sigh shut behind him.
The woods here weren't natural. Shadow-thinned. Once part of the Mistwalkers' old hunting grounds before the Council tore their roots out. Trees still bled from their bark in places. Leaves fluttered soundlessly. The ground hummed like something asleep but dreaming wrong.
Ashkore's shadows spread low, slicking across earth, checking for scent trails, pressure shifts, broken grass. The usual.
Then he found it. A mark.
Small. Clean. Purposefully quiet.
Bootprint. Human. Silver Dawn make steel-threaded sole, designed to shed blood and snow alike. The priest-warriors were close. Too close.
And not just one.
Three. Two scouts, one heavy-footed tracker, likely a zealot, the kind who burned children's names into their sword hilts and slept with scripture sewn into their skin.
Ashkore moved fast. A low blur of smoke and bone, breathing in silence.
They'd crossed through a cracked Shadow Gate less than a mile from here, he could smell the residue. Sanctified ether and burning salt. They'd used holy tech to pierce the Veil without alerting the Council. Meaning they were hunting not shadows... but something else.
Her.
He vanished.
The scouts never heard him.
The first died before he even saw his death, throat severed in a strangled gasp, blade pulled silently from ash to artery. The second managed a single word,"Monst..!", before his lungs collapsed around a void spike.
Ashkore held the third one.
The zealot. Young. Pretty, in that too-clean way the Order bred their rising stars. Pale hair shaved at the sides, silver eyes still burning with conviction, even as Ashkore's shadow pinned him to a tree by the wrists and ankles, crucifixion-style.
"Talk," Ashkore said.
The boy spat blood and defiance.
"Child-killer," he hissed.
Ashkore leaned in, letting his eyes shift from silver to black, back again. "You first."
The zealot sneered. "The baby's marked. The prophecy's clear. A Bridge-Walker brings ruin."
"Funny," Ashkore murmured. "You're the ones dragging ruin into cradles."
"You can't protect her. You're a stain. A walking corruption. You think you can outpace judgment?"
Ashkore's blade found the boy's collarbone. "No. But I can slow it."
He didn't kill him. Not yet.
Instead, he opened the zealot's mind.
It was a trick his Whisperling side had always hated, a fragment of blood memory he wished he could sever. But tonight, he needed it. Shadows slid into the boy's skull, sifting images, rooting into terror.
A vision bloomed behind Ashkore's eyes.
Lyara.
The Silver Dawn's Brightbane. Hunter-General. Sword-Saint. Bloody-handed, glory-drenched, beautiful in the way storms were before they broke the trees.
She was close. Closer than she'd ever been.
He returned to Grim's hut before sunrise.
Luna was still asleep, though the shadows around her had changed, they pulsed now, gently, in time with her breath.
Grim met his eyes.
"Trouble?"
"Her name is Lyara," Ashkore said. "And she doesn't miss twice."
Grim cursed in Old Tongue.
"How long?"
"A day. Maybe two."
Grim's bones cracked as he stood. "Then we pack."
Ashkore nodded. But something in him, it hesitated.
He looked down at Luna again. She stirred, tiny hands curling into her chest. For a heartbeat, he thought he saw a flicker of blue light beneath her skin. Not shadow. Not human magic.
Something older.
He exhaled, low and rough.
"I should've left her."
"No," Grim said quietly, gathering vials and relics. "You could've. But you didn't."
Ashkore didn't answer.
Outside, the Veil groaned. A sound like worlds weeping through thin walls.
And in its wake, Ashkore could feel Lyara's breath somewhere beyond the trees, already hunting. Already close.