"You made a mistake… kid."
The words hadn't even finished settling when she moved.
Not a strike.
A backhand. Almost lazy.
Kabir's body left the ground before his mind caught up to what was happening, the axe spinning out of his grip mid-air. The impact came a half-second later, somewhere distant, a dull crack of branches and breath leaving him in one ragged exhale.
Then nothing.
Raghav didn't see him land.
He heard it.
A heavy, wrong sound, too far to the side, too far from where it should have been.
"Kabir!"
No answer.
He didn't have time to wait for one.
Ahiara's gaze had already shifted, sliding off the space where Kabir had been and settling fully onto him, the weight of her attention dropping onto his chest like something physical.
Steady. Unshaken.
Almost curious.
"Two," she said, her voice low, scraping at the edges like something that hadn't used words in a long time and didn't need to. "Both foolish."
Raghav lowered Aarohi the rest of the way to the ground, fast, careless of gentleness now, every motion narrowed down to a single purpose.
Survive the next ten seconds.
Then the ten after that.
He came up with the lighter axe already moving, not toward her — toward the space he expected her to fill once she closed the distance, because she would close it, because that was the only certainty left in the clearing.
She didn't disappoint him.
The strike came faster than his eyes could track, faster than anything that size should move, and he threw himself sideways on instinct alone, the air where he'd been standing splitting with a sound like a whipcrack.
Close.
Too close.
He rolled, came up on one knee, and swung — wild, off-balance, more reflex than skill.
The axe caught nothing but air.
Ahiara's tail swept low, and the ground itself seemed to tilt beneath him as it connected with his side, not a killing blow, not even close to one.
A warning.
A reminder of scale.
Raghav hit a tree trunk hard enough to lose the air in his lungs, his vision sparking white at the edges before snapping back into focus. The axe was still in his hand.
Barely.
"You don't fight," Ahiara said, circling now, unhurried, her upper body tilting with something almost like amusement. "You survive badly."
"Working on it," Raghav muttered, and pushed himself off the trunk before his legs had fully agreed to hold him.
She struck again.
This time he didn't dodge so much as fall out of the way, the motion ugly and desperate, his shoulder dragging through wet leaves as her strike tore a furrow into the earth where his head had been a heartbeat earlier.
His ears were ringing now.
Not from sound.
From proximity. From the sheer pressure of something that large moving that fast, displacing air like a struck drum.
He got one good look at her then — really looked, past the fear narrowing his vision — and saw the pattern.
She wasn't swinging wide.
She was herding.
Every strike pushed him a little further from Aarohi, a little further from Kabir, a little further toward the broken ground near the old pit they'd found days ago.
Toward the edge.
Raghav's jaw tightened.
If this was a decision she was making, he needed to break it before she finished making it.
He didn't think the next part through. There wasn't time to.
He let her come.
Closer than he should have, closer than every instinct screamed at him to allow, and at the very last fraction of a second he dropped low instead of sideways, the axe driving up and across in a single committed arc.
It connected.
Not deep. Not clean.
A glancing line across her forearm, scales splitting just enough to draw a thin, dark seam of blood before she recoiled with a hiss that cracked through the clearing like something tearing.
"You—"
Her voice lost the calm.
For the first time.
Raghav didn't wait to enjoy it. He scrambled back, putting distance between them, his chest heaving, sweat and old fear mixing somewhere under his collar.
It hadn't been enough.
It had only made her angry.
The next strike didn't herd. It came to end something.
Her whole body uncoiled toward him at once, faster than the others, faster than anything had been, and Raghav's legs simply weren't fast enough to clear it.
He got his forearm up.
It didn't matter.
The impact lifted him off his feet entirely, the world flipping once, twice, the axe torn loose from his grip and gone somewhere into the underbrush, and then the ground arrived all at once, driving the breath from him in a single white flash of pain.
He didn't get up right away.
Couldn't.
His vision blurred, doubled, came back wrong at the edges. Somewhere far away, a ringing sound that might have been his own pulse or might have been her hiss, he couldn't tell anymore.
Ahiara approached without hurry.
She had time.
She always had time.
"Persistent," she said, almost to herself, the word carrying something that wasn't quite respect but wasn't dismissal either. "It won't matter."
Raghav's hand moved before his thoughts had caught up to it, dragging through wet leaves, searching for anything — a branch, a stone, the axe he'd lost — and found instead something heavier.
Colder.
Familiar in a way that didn't make sense until his fingers closed fully around the haft.
The other one.
The one Harsh had set aside. The one too dense, too uneven, too slow to swing properly.
He hadn't meant to bring it.
He didn't remember picking it up at all.
Ahiara's shadow stretched over him, her face lowering, that same steady, unshaken gaze fixed on his.
"Stay down," she said, not cruel. Almost gentle. The kind of gentleness that came before something was ended rather than spared.
Raghav didn't answer.
He didn't have the breath to.
What he had instead was one motion left in his body, and he used all of it.
Not a swing.
Not really.
More a falling, dragging arc, every ounce of weight he had left thrown behind a blade too heavy to control with any kind of finesse — which had never been the point of carrying it.
It came down across the thick base of her tail where it curled near him, where the scales lay flatter, denser, deceptively armored.
Deceptive because the axe didn't glance.
It bit.
A sound tore out of her that didn't belong in any forest, sharp and raw and entirely unlike the low, amused thing she'd been a moment before. Her whole body convulsed, the tail thrashing once, hard enough to send loose stones skittering across the clearing, before going rigid.
Pinned.
The blade had gone deep enough to lodge, deep enough that the wound beneath it didn't close, dark blood welling up thick and slow around the steel, soaking into already-damp earth.
Real.
Not a warning shot. Not a glancing strike.
A wound that mattered.
Ahiara's upper body twisted back toward him, and for the first time since she'd stepped into the clearing, her expression wasn't unshaken.
It was pain.
Sharp, undisguised, threading through a voice that had sounded ancient and unbothered only seconds earlier.
"You—"
The word broke apart before it finished, replaced by something closer to a snarl, low and furious, her claws digging into the soil as she tried to pull the tail free and couldn't, the motion only widening the wound, dragging another sound out of her that scraped against the inside of Raghav's skull.
He didn't move.
He couldn't.
His body had given everything it had to that single motion, and now it simply refused to do anything else, his hand still curled loosely where the axe handle had been before momentum tore it from his grip.
He stayed there.
On his knees. Bleeding from somewhere he hadn't catalogued yet. Breathing in short, uneven pulls that didn't feel like enough air.
Standing over her, technically.
Though it didn't feel like standing over anything.
It felt like the last second before something either ended or didn't, and he had no way of knowing which.
Ahiara's golden eyes lifted to him again, the pain in them not gone, but pushed somewhere beneath something colder now.
Calculating.
Reassessing.
"Kid," she said, the word dragged out, rough at the edges in a way it hadn't been before. "You shouldn't have been able to do that."
Raghav didn't answer.
He didn't have an answer.
He only knew that the clearing had gone utterly silent again, the kind of silence that didn't follow a fight so much as wait to see what came after it, and that somewhere behind him, Aarohi still hadn't moved, and somewhere to the side, Kabir still hadn't answered his name.
And in front of him—
pinned, bleeding, furious—
Ahiara was very much still alive.
And he had no idea what came next.
Author's Note:
Things just got a lot more real 🌿
Raghav landing a hit no one expected — including him. But injuring something like Ahiara never comes free.
What do you think happens now — does he finish it, or has he just made things infinitely worse?
See you next Wednesday!