Ryn was ten the first time he learned that the world did not care how quiet you were.
The village of Greymire lay low in the marshlands between kingdoms, a place the maps barely bothered to name. Its houses were timber and clay, its streets mud and reed. Traders passed through rarely, and when they did, they never stayed the night. There was nothing here worth stealing. Nothing worth fighting over.
That was what the elders liked to believe.
Ryn remembered the smell first.
Smoke did not rise in Greymire the way it did in cities. It crept. It clung to wet air and low roofs, crawling into lungs before the mind understood what it was. He had been mending fishing nets behind his father's shed when the wind shifted, carrying with it something bitter and wrong.
Burnt grain. Pitch. Blood.
He looked up and saw birds fleeing the trees.
Not flying.
Fleeing.
Shouts followed. Not words at first, just sound—ragged, panicked, tearing the quiet apart. Someone screamed his name. Or maybe it only sounded like his name. Ryn never knew.
By the time he reached the main path, the soldiers were already there.
They wore no colors he recognized, no banners he had been taught to fear. Their armor was mismatched, iron plates over leather, cloaks stained by travel and old fights. Some bore the sigil of a broken sun scratched crudely into their shields. Others bore nothing at all.
Mercenaries, then. Or deserters. In those years, the border wars bled men into monsters easily.
A man fell near the well, cut down while trying to pull his daughter behind him. Ryn froze, the image burning into him—the way the sword rose and fell, the way the man's body collapsed as if someone had removed the bones holding it up.
He did not scream.
He did not run.
His legs simply refused to move.
Someone shoved him aside. He hit the ground hard, mud filling his mouth. When he looked up again, the world had changed shape. Houses burned. Neighbors bled. The familiar had become foreign in the span of heartbeats.
A soldier saw him.
The man's face was scarred, his beard knotted with grime. His eyes held no rage, no joy. Only exhaustion. The kind that makes killing feel like work.
The sword came down.
It never reached him.
Steel rang against steel, sharp and sudden, the sound cutting through chaos like a bell. The mercenary staggered back, swearing, his blade knocked aside by another—older, darker, nicked by years of use.
A man stood between Ryn and the soldier.
He was tall, but thin, his posture relaxed in a way that made no sense amid the slaughter. His hair was iron-gray, tied back at the nape of his neck. His sword was plain. No glow. No flare of aura. Just steel.
"Enough," the man said.
The word carried no threat.
The mercenary laughed anyway. "Move, old man."
The man did not move.
The fight ended quickly.
Not spectacularly. Not heroically. The mercenary swung. The man stepped aside. Steel flashed once. The soldier dropped, blood darkening the mud.
Ryn stared.
The man turned and met his gaze.
"Get up," he said. "And don't look back."
Ryn did not know why he obeyed. He only knew that he did.
That man's name was Kael.
Kael stayed.
After the fires burned out and the dead were buried in shallow ground that the marsh would reclaim within a year, Kael did not leave with the others who drifted in and out of ruined places. He took shelter in an abandoned hut near the reeds, repaired it with his own hands, and said nothing of where he came from.
People whispered.
A knight, some said. A butcher, others. A man hiding from his past.
Ryn did not care.
He went to Kael every morning after chores, carrying water or tools or nothing at all. At first, Kael ignored him. Then one evening, without looking up from sharpening his sword, he pressed a folded parchment into Ryn's hand.
"Bury this," he said. "Under the willow. Deep."
"What is it?" Ryn asked.
"Names," Kael replied. "Men who owe debts. Men who don't like being remembered."
Ryn hesitated.
"If I die," Kael continued calmly, "you burn it. You never read it."
That was how it began.
Not training.
Work.
At twelve, Ryn was finally allowed to touch a sword.
It was heavier than he expected.
Kael corrected his grip without ceremony, pushing fingers into place until Ryn's hand ached. "If your wrist bends," he said, "you bleed faster."
Training hurt.
Not the clean pain of effort, but the dull ache of wrongness. Ryn fell. He stumbled. The sword slipped from his hands more times than he could count. Kael never raised his voice. Never praised. Never punished.
He simply waited.
"You're not gifted," Kael told him once. "That's not an insult. It's information."
At thirteen, Ryn took his first real wound.
A band of raiders tried to take livestock from Greymire's outskirts. Kael went alone. Ryn followed.
A blade caught Ryn's thigh as he rushed in too early. Pain exploded white-hot. He fell screaming into the marsh grass, blood soaking into mud and reed.
Kael ended the fight while Ryn lay shaking.
Afterward, Kael bound the wound tightly. "You moved because you wanted to help," he said. "But you didn't understand where you were."
The scar stayed.
At fifteen, Kael grew ill.
One morning, a stranger stopped at the well. A traveler's cloak. No accent. His eyes lingered too long on Kael's hut.
He bought water. Asked nothing. Left by noon.
That night, Kael coughed blood.
At sixteen, the priest came.
Father Elric wore the simple gray of the lower clergy. He buried the dead properly this time.
"Not all who serve the Church are liars," he told Ryn. "And not all liars wear vestments."
At seventeen, Kael died.
Quietly.
Ryn burned the parchment beneath the willow as instructed.
But in the firelight, one thing burned slower than the rest.
Not a name.
A title.
The Scribe of Rust.
Three days later, soldiers bearing the sigil of the southern crown passed near Greymire.
This time, they did not pass through.
They asked questions.
They carried a description, sketched roughly on faded parchment.
A quiet boy.
From the marsh.
Seen near a dead swordsman.
That night, Ryn stepped onto the muddy road beyond Greymire, the worn hilt of his plain knife pressing against his hip.
He did not know who was hunting him.
Only that someone, somewhere, remembered Kael.
And intended to finish what the marsh had not.