Axel woke to cold earth against his cheek. His body ached as though every bone had been struck. His tongue felt like leather, his lips split, his throat raw as if he had swallowed smoke for hours. For a moment he did not know where he was, or why the world smelled of pine sap and damp soil instead of blood and fire.
The canopy above swayed in the breeze, pine boughs rattling softly, sunlight cutting through in pale shards. The silence was wrong. No laughter. No voices. No hound padding at his heels.
Memory returned like a blade twisting in his gut.
He pushed himself up slowly, limbs trembling as if someone else's weight clung to them. Hollowfang lay against his chest, wrapped still in its ragged cloth, mud and pine needles stuck to its folds. He gripped it tighter as if it might vanish if he loosened his hands. For a long time he only stared, eyes burning, waiting for the sword to crumble into smoke like everything else had.
It did not.
His throat ached. His chest heaved once, then again, until the air broke into shudders. The numbness that had carried him through fire and flight collapsed all at once. Axel bent over, shoulders convulsing, and sobbed until he thought his ribs would split. His tears cut clean tracks through the grime on his cheeks, soaking the black cloth of the blade he had never wanted to hold.
They were gone.
Lyra's laughter, shrill and full of mischief, chasing Casper through the hall. His mother's fire, hot enough to stand against soldiers with nothing but a kitchen knife. His father's steady voice, calm even as he faced death. Taren's smirk in the training yard, quick and confident, the way his brother had looked when Axel finally struck him. Casper's white streak bounding through the fields, ears flying.
All torn away in a single night.
Axel curled around Hollowfang like a child clutching a toy for comfort, though its weight was anything but comforting. His shoulders shook until his body was hollow, until his voice was little more than a rasp against the cold morning. He pressed his forehead to the damp ground and prayed to wake again, to find that the last day had been some cruel dream. But the earth stayed cold, the sword stayed heavy, and the silence stayed endless.
When his sobs finally slowed, grief hardened. Slowly. Pain gave way to heat, heat to anger, anger to a fury that clawed at his insides. He lifted his head, eyes red, jaw set.
"They'll pay." His voice cracked, but the words felt carved into stone. "Every one of The Cohort. All of them."
The vow lingered in the stillness, thick as smoke.
But even as he spoke it, Axel knew the truth. Right now he was nothing. A boy with calluses from sparring but no scars of war. His father had been a warrior. His brother had been a soldier, seasoned and strong. And both of them had fallen. What chance did he have as he was?
His fingers flexed on the blade. He had Hollowfang, but even that felt more curse than blessing, a relic dragging him down instead of raising him up.
Axel forced his gaze northward. He remembered the whispers that drifted through the village when traders came: of a continent across the straits where magic walked like men, where the Cosmic Cradle pulsed at the heart of the world. The place where power was created, where gods still left their fingerprints on mortal flesh.
If there was power enough to fight Thalvorne, to burn the Blacksteel Cohort from the earth, it would be there.
He wiped his face with the back of his sleeve. The tears left streaks but he didn't care. He pressed Hollowfang tight against him and rose unsteadily to his feet.
The boy who left Greyvale would not return. He had no home to return to. Only north to seek the power to take revenge.
The days blurred into one another. Axel followed deer paths and game trails, always leaning north when the choice came. Hunger struck quickly. His stomach gnawed at itself, and shame disappeared fast. He chewed bitter roots that made his teeth ache, swallowed tart berries that left his tongue raw, and licked dew from leaves in the mornings. His first attempt to eat mushrooms left him doubled over, vomiting until his ribs hurt. He learned fast to scrape the skin from birch and chew the inner bark, stringy but filling, though it left splinters on his tongue.
When hunger grew unbearable, he shaped crude snares from twine and bent sticks. Most nights they caught nothing, and he lay awake listening to his stomach gurgle like an empty pot. Once, a rabbit, trembling and small, twitched in the loop until he broke its neck with shaking hands. Another time, a pheasant, its feathers mottled grey, flapped until he pinned it to the ground and crushed it beneath his knee. He cooked them half-raw over fires that smoked more than they burned and forced the meat down even when it clawed back up his throat. The taste of blood and ash stayed on his tongue.
More often, he failed. A squirrel escaped his trap, mocking him from the branches with shrill chatter. Birds stole berries from the bushes before he could gather them. Once, he tracked deer prints through the snow only to startle the animal too soon, watching it vanish into the trees with the grace he lacked. Each failure weighed heavier than hunger, another reminder that he was no hunter, no survivor, just a boy stumbling where others would have died already.
The sword never left his side. When he slept, it lay beneath his arms. When he walked, it dragged against his hip, its weight carving bruises into his body. Sometimes he hated it. Hated the cold iron and what it represented. Yet whenever he thought of setting it down, terror surged. Without it, he felt certain he would vanish, just as his family had.
Nights were worse than hunger.
In dreams, Greyvale burned again and again. He walked the yard over and over, always too slow, always too weak. He saw his father's mouth shape words he couldn't hear, saw his mother's last "oh" again and again, saw Lyra's blanket thrown aside and her bed empty. Sometimes he dreamed of Casper racing through the fields, white fur gleaming, only for the hound to vanish into smoke before Axel could reach him. He woke with a strangled gasp, Hollowfang half-drawn, breath ragged and eyes wild.
Some nights he thought he heard boots in the underbrush. He would freeze, heart hammering, until he realized it was only his own pulse echoing in his ears. Other nights he thought he saw movement in the trees, dark shapes slipping between trunks. Once he swore he heard his mother calling his name, the same tone she used to call him in for supper. He stumbled through the dark toward the voice, heart racing, only to find nothing but empty woods and the echo of his own ragged breathing.
The farther north he pressed, the colder the air grew. Leaves thinned, winds sharpened. The streams he drank from began to freeze along their edges, and ice cracked beneath his palms when he cupped them for water. His hands cracked and blistered from cold and rough bark. He pressed them against Hollowfang's wrapped hilt when the pain grew too much, as if its weight could anchor him, could keep him from falling apart. His breath fogged the air, each exhale proof that he had survived one moment longer.
Sometimes, when exhaustion blurred the edges of the world, he whispered to himself. "Mother. Father. Taren. Lyra." He repeated their names until his voice failed. He wanted the forest to hear them, to carry them forward, to make the silence less complete.
Once, on a night when the wind howled through the pines, he thought he saw them. Shapes, faint and pale, standing at the edge of the clearing where he had made his fire. Lyra with her crooked smile, Taren with his practice blade on his shoulder, his mother and father side by side. They stood watching him, motionless. He reached toward them with a hand that shook, tears already blurring his vision. When he blinked, they were gone, only trees and smoke in their place. He cried again then, harder than before, and did not sleep until dawn.
On the eleventh day he staggered upon a frozen stream. Thirst tore at him, but when he knelt to drink, his knees buckled. The ice cracked and gave way beneath him. He plunged waist-deep into water that cut like knives. His scream tore the silence, but his voice faltered halfway. He flailed, dragging himself onto the bank, lungs heaving, cloak frozen stiff in moments. His teeth chattered so hard his jaw ached.
For an hour he lay there, too cold to move, too tired to care if he froze. He thought of lying back and letting the water pull him under, down into silence where fire and screams could not follow. But when his eyes drifted closed, his hand clenched Hollowfang on its own, knuckles whitening. He stayed alive because the blade demanded it.
On the twelfth night, the cold bit so deep he thought his bones would splinter. He had eaten nothing in two days. His traps lay empty. His legs dragged beneath him like sacks of stone. He stumbled through the dark and found himself at a clearing ringed with stumps, trees felled long ago, their roots jutting from the soil like bones.
He collapsed there, Hollowfang clutched to his chest. The stars wheeled above him, sharp and endless, indifferent to his vow, indifferent to his suffering. The world stretched wide and empty, and he felt smaller than ever.
For the first time since Greyvale burned, he prayed.
Not to the Harbinger of Ash. Not to gods he did not know. He prayed to his father's memory, to his mother's fire, to Lyra's laughter, to Taren's steady arm.
"Guide me," he whispered, voice hoarse. "Make me strong enough. I'll burn the world for you if I have to."
The trees did not answer. The sword did not stir. Only the wind answered, cold and merciless, tugging at his hair and gnawing through his cloak.
Axel closed his eyes and let the darkness take him.