When the Adamantine Order loses a General, they do not send an army in retribution. An army is a blunt instrument. It is loud, messy, and emotional.
When the Order needs a problem to disappear, when they need to cut out the heart of a rebellion or erase a ghost, they do not send a hammer.
They send a scalpel.
They send their best. They send Lysandra.
She arrived at Blackwood Pass two days after the massacre, a silent figure on a pale gray horse.
The air was thick with the stench of death and the incessant cawing of carrion birds, grown fat and lazy from their gruesome feast. A cleanup crew of grim-faced Order soldiers was still at work, pulling bodies from under the rocks, their movements heavy with a mixture of fear and disgust.
They were soldiers. They were used to death in battle.
This was different. This was not a battlefield. This was a tomb, carved by the mountain itself.
Lysandra dismounted, her movements fluid and precise, a stark contrast to the weary, clumsy soldiers around her.
She was not what they expected.
She was not a hulking brute like Tiberius or a pompous, decorated commander like Valerius. She was slender, her silver-gilded armor practical and unadorned, designed for silence and speed, not for parades. Her long, silver hair was pulled back from her face in a tight, severe braid that left no room for frivolity.
Her face was a mask of sharp, intelligent lines, and her eyes, the color of a winter sky, saw everything and revealed nothing.
Her second-in-command, a large, bull-necked warrior named Kael, grimaced at the scene, his hand resting on the hilt of his massive battle-axe as if for comfort.
"A whole platoon, gone," he growled, his voice a low rumble of disbelief and rage. "The Voros clans must have gathered in force. A thousand of them, at least, to do this. We will hunt them down and burn their villages to the ground."
Lysandra did not answer.
She walked to the edge of the landslide, her gaze sweeping over the devastation. She was not seeing the chaos. She was not seeing the horror.
She was reading the story it told.
"No," she said finally, her voice calm and clear, cutting through the grim atmosphere like a shard of ice. "This was not the Voros. This was not an army."
Kael stared at her, his expression a mixture of confusion and offense. "But Huntress, the devastation… General Tiberius himself… This is beyond the work of a few savages."
"The Voros are savages," Lysandra interrupted, her eyes tracing the path of the falling rocks. "They fight with rage and numbers. Their ambushes are loud, messy, and inefficient. This…"
She pointed a gauntleted finger toward the cliff face, at the precise shear point where the rock had given way.
"This was precise. Surgical. It was an act of engineering."
She walked the scene like a scholar in a library of death, her boots making soft crunching sounds on the gravel.
She ignored the mangled bodies that made the other hardened soldiers look away.
She knelt, examining the point of impact where the largest boulders had fallen, effectively sealing the pass.
"The main force of the slide hit here, and here," she said, pointing to the front and the rear of the trapped column. "It was not a random rockfall. It was designed to trap, to create chaos and panic. It was designed by a mind that understands fear."
Kael followed her, his brow furrowed in thought. "A lucky shot, then. A one-in-a-million chance."
"There is no luck in a landslide this perfect," Lysandra countered without looking at him. "There is only design. And patience."
She moved to the bodies of the soldiers Adrian had killed in the pass.
The cleanup crew had lined them up under canvas sheets. Lysandra pulled back a sheet, revealing the first two guards from the canyon floor. Their faces were pale, their eyes staring blankly at the sky.
There were no signs of a struggle.
"These men were dispatched before the landslide," she observed, her voice flat. "Silently. Look at the wound."
She pointed to a small, precise puncture mark at the base of one man's skull. A single, efficient thrust. The work of a professional, not a berserker.
"And this one," she moved to another body, a knight Adrian had killed in the shadows after the slide. "A single blade between the ribs, straight to the heart. No wasted movement. No rage."
She walked from body to body, a silent, silver ghost amidst the dead. She was not mourning. She was learning.
Kael's face grew paler. He was a warrior. He understood killing. He understood the red mist of battle-fury.
This cold, methodical, almost artistic butchery was something else entirely.
"One man," Lysandra said, her voice a soft, chilling whisper that was almost lost on the wind. "This was the work of one man."
"One man?" Kael scoffed in disbelief, his voice too loud in the quiet pass. "Impossible! No single man could defeat Tiberius and fifty of his best soldiers!"
"He did not defeat them," Lysandra corrected him, her winter-gray eyes finally turning to meet his. The coldness in them made the battle-hardened Kael flinch. "He did not fight them. He slaughtered them. There is a difference."
She walked to the spot where Tiberius had made his final stand.
The ground was churned and blood-soaked, a testament to a real fight.
"Here," she said, a flicker of something akin to respect in her voice. "Here, he fought. The only real fight in this whole valley."
She could see the signs of the struggle as if she had been there. The deep gouges in the rock from Tiberius's heavy greatsword. The smaller, faster, more frantic marks of a dagger wielder.
She knelt, her fingers brushing over the mud and dried blood. She closed her eyes for a moment, reconstructing the duel in her mind. The bull versus the wolf. Strength versus speed.
Her eyes snapped open. She scanned the ground, frustrated. The killer was clean. Too clean. He left no traces.
Her gaze swept the area one last time, missing nothing. And then she saw it.
A tiny, almost invisible fleck of green, stuck to a discarded piece of a soldier's cloak where the killer must have brushed past.
It was so small, so insignificant, that a hundred other men had walked past it without a second glance.
But Lysandra missed nothing.
She retrieved a small, sharp knife from her belt and used its tip to gently pick up the crushed fragment of leaf.
She brought it close to her face, her expression unchanging, but her mind racing.
Kael leaned in. "What is it? A leaf?"
"It is Ghost-Thistle," she said, her voice flat.
Before riding out, she had spent a month in the capital's great libraries. She had studied every known fact about Kazimir Volkov, his clan, his wife, his sanctuary. She had read military reports, historical texts, and even botanical records of the northern regions. She did her homework.
"This herb is exceedingly rare," she continued. "It only grows in two places in this entire kingdom. The Shadowfen Glades, five hundred miles to the south…"
She paused, her cold eyes holding a flicker of something that might have been grim satisfaction.
"...or in the personal garden of a master healer with a very specific knowledge of mountain flora. A healer like Elara Volkov."
A stunned silence fell over Kael. The implication was horrifying. The legend he had heard whispered as a boy was real.
"The boy," he breathed, the words catching in his throat. "The beast-child."
Lysandra stood up, crushing the fragile leaf between her gauntleted fingers. It turned to dust and blew away on the wind.
"The boy is dead," she said with absolute certainty. "The boy who lived in the Sanctuary and learned of herbs from his mother is gone. He died with her six years ago."
She turned and looked down the pass, toward the direction of Silvercreek, where she already knew the reports of a second massacre would lead her next.
She looked at the trail of death left by a single, vengeful spirit.
"He left a ghost," she finished. "And I am the one who hunts ghosts."
Her men looked at her, expecting an order, a command, a vow of righteous vengeance for their fallen brothers.
She gave them none of that. She gave them only her cold, professional assessment.
"This is not a madman," she said, her voice carrying on the wind. "This is not a savage from the wilds. This is a ghost with a grudge."
She mounted her pale horse, her movements economical and devoid of emotion.
She knew what she was hunting now.
It was not a man. It was not a beast.
It was a mirror of her own cold, deadly purpose.
The game had just begun.