The cruelest act is not a swift death.
It is a life, granted by an enemy, that you can never repay.
It is a mercy that feels like a brand.
A forgiveness that is unforgivable.
It was over.
He had won. The dagger's tip pressed against her throat, a cold promise. He could feel the frantic pulse of her life beating against the steel. One push. That was all it would take.
Hate demanded it. Vengeance demanded it. The ghosts of his past screamed for it.
Kill her. She is the Order. She is the enemy.
He looked down at her, ready to deliver the final, satisfying thrust.
But he stopped.
He looked into her eyes. The winter-gray eyes of the Silver Huntress.
He expected to see fear. He expected to see terror. He expected to see a desperate plea for her life.
He saw none of it.
Her nose was bleeding, a dark crimson stream against her pale skin. A bruise was already forming on her temple. But her eyes were clear.
They held no fear. They held only a profound, soul-deep weariness.
It was the look of a soldier who had fought her last battle and lost. The look of a professional who understood the price of failure.
It was the look of acceptance.
In that moment, she was not the monster who had cornered him in the monastery.
She was not the symbol of the Order's might.
She was just a soldier. A tool. A sword in a murderer's hand.
Just like the knight who had driven his blade through his mother's chest.
The memory hit him like a physical blow. A flash of green healing light, extinguished in an instant. A look of surprise and love. Gone.
The anger surged, hot and pure. She was one of them. She deserved to die.
His grip on the dagger tightened.
But another image pushed its way through the red haze of his rage.
The little girl in Silvercreek. Her eyes open to a gray sky. The wooden wolf clutched in her small, still hand.
She was not a soldier. She was not a tool.
She was just… in the way. A casualty of the Order's brutal, unwavering sense of "duty."
Lysandra served that same duty. She followed those same vows. If she had been ordered to burn Silvercreek, would she have done it?
The honest, terrible answer that rose in his gut was: Yes.
But was the sword to blame, or the hand that wielded it?
A voice, not his own, echoed in the silent, frozen cavern of his mind.
It was not Gregor's harsh growl.
It was his father's voice, deep and sorrowful, from a lifetime ago. The night he had received the wolf's fang.
"Be a man, not a monster."
What was a monster? A creature that killed without thought, without reason.
And what was a man? A creature that made a choice.
To kill a defeated, helpless opponent… what was that?
Was it justice? Or was it just butchery? Was it the act of a man, or the act of a beast?
He hated the questions. He hated the hesitation.
The ghost inside him, the one forged in ash and fueled by hate, screamed at him to finish it. It was weakness. It was sentiment. It was a betrayal of his mother, his father, and the dead of Silvercreek.
But another part of him, a part he thought long dead and buried, a part that sounded like his father, whispered back.
Killing her changes nothing. Killing her makes you one of them.
The dagger trembled in his hand.
With a low snarl that was half-rage, half-disgust at his own weakness, he made a choice.
He pulled the dagger away.
The cold steel left a thin, red line on her throat, a final, bloody kiss. But it did not cut deep.
Lysandra's eyes, which had been closed in acceptance of her death, fluttered open. She stared at him, her professional composure finally cracking, replaced by a look of pure, unadulterated confusion.
"Your life is mine," Adrian whispered, his voice a low, cold rasp. He leaned in close, his breath a cloud of frost between them.
He was not showing mercy. He was asserting dominance. He was branding her.
"I have taken it from you. And now… I am giving it back."
He stood up, towering over her, a dark god in a tomb of ice.
"Go," he commanded. "Crawl out of this mountain. Find your way back to your masters."
He paused, letting the weight of his next words settle in the freezing air.
"Tell Grandmaster Valerius that the son of the Ashen Wolf is coming for him. Tell him his ghosts are coming home."
He turned his back on her, an act of supreme confidence, of ultimate contempt.
"And tell him," he added, his voice dropping to a deadly whisper. "That I am not like my father."
He walked away, leaving her there, unarmed, wounded, and defeated in the ghostly blue light.
He did not look back.
He found the narrow ice chimney he had scouted earlier, his escape route.
As he began the long, arduous climb toward the surface, a war raged within him.
Every instinct screamed at him. Weakness! You let her live! She will come back. She will kill you.
The ghost of his vengeance raged, calling him a fool, a traitor to his own pain.
He hated himself for it. The hesitation. The choice. The act of mercy felt like a disease, a poison in his veins.
It was a weakness he could not afford.
And yet…
As he pulled himself out of the chimney and into the blinding white light of the mountaintop, a strange, unwelcome feeling settled in his chest.
It was not peace. It was not relief. It was not happiness.
It was the quiet, unsettling feeling of having made the right choice, even if it was the wrong one for his mission.
He looked out over the endless sea of peaks, his face grim.
He had spared one life.
But in doing so, he had declared war on the rest. And he knew, with a chilling certainty, that the path ahead had just become infinitely more complicated.
Below, in the frozen dark, Lysandra slowly pushed herself to her feet.
She was alone. In the silence. Her swords lay meters away on the ice.
She touched the thin line of blood on her throat.
She had not been beaten by a blade.
She had been broken by an idea.
The boy had taken her life and then thrown it back at her like a worthless trinkel. It was not an act of mercy. It was an act of ultimate humiliation.
He had left her alive, not out of kindness, but as a message.
A living, breathing message of his contempt.
She looked at the wall of ice that sealed the tomb. Her professional world, a world of black-and-white duty, of good and evil, of Order and chaos, had been shattered into a million pieces.
The Silver Huntress was dead.
She did not yet know what would climb out of the ice in her place.