Chapter XII
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Mainland — The Burning Coast, Ten Years Ago
Smoke strangled the sky above Saltmere.
Flames devoured thatched roofs, turning the village into a roaring orange mouth. Knights in golden cloaks marched in disciplined lines, swords already slick and dark, banners cracking like whips in the hot wind. The Allthing had ordered it — the full extinction of the remaining Drevaries, the last of them gathered here in Saltmere. They were making good on the order.
Nine-year-old Kael crouched behind a splintered cart, fingers locked around his mother's trembling hand. His father lay a few paces away — face-down in the churned dirt, blood spreading beneath him in a slow, accusing pool. His mother dragged Kael tighter against her side, voice a cracked whisper.
"Don't look, love. Just don't look."
A golden knight stepped over the corpse without breaking stride.
Metal flashed. The blade came down.
Kael's scream tore free — raw, animal, useless.
His mother's grip loosened. She folded slowly, like cloth cut at the seams, and collapsed across his father's back. Warmth left her fingers one heartbeat at a time.
The world narrowed to ringing ears, choking smoke, and the endless sound of people dying.
Then — movement. Across the street, a boy stumbled from a blazing doorway. Thirteen, silver hair plastered with ash and sweat, eyes huge with the same mirrored terror.
Their gazes locked through the haze.
No words. No names.
They simply ran — two small shadows swallowed by smoke.
Five Days Later — The Mass Grave
Hundreds of bodies lay in neat, terrible rows under a grey sky. The golden cloaks had left nothing breathing behind them.
Only two boys remained alive, half-crushed beneath the weight of the dead, too weak to drag themselves free.
Kael's fingers twisted in Sylric's torn sleeve. His voice was a thread.
"We're gonna die here."
Sylric stared upward — past the corpses, past everything — at the indifferent clouds. His answer came flat and certain.
"We're not. I'll protect you."
The Black maw pirate ship ghosted into the cove like a blade through water.
Captain Varkis "Ironjaw" Thorne leaned on the rail — tall, lean, eyes the color of old bruises — watching his men strip the ruined village of anything worth taking. A raider hauled the two half-dead boys aboard by their collars and dropped them on the deck.
"Captain. Found these two still breathing." He prodded them with his boot. "How in the hells did they last?"
Another crewman laughed. "Worthless. Toss 'em."
Varkis crouched. A gloved finger lifted Kael's chin, forcing the boy to meet his gaze.
"Worthless?" His smile was thin as a knife edge. "Look at their eyes. They've seen death and didn't blink."
He shifted to Sylric. The older boy stared back — silent, unblinking, giving nothing.
"You two belong to me now," Varkis said.
The crew muttered amongst themselves. Rations were already stretched thin.
Varkis straightened. His voice dropped to something very quiet and very cold. "Anyone who complains can join the next pile on the beach."
Silence fell like a blade.
Years One Through Four — Life on the Black Maw
The boys grew hard.
Varkis trained them the way a man breaks dogs — fights drawn to first blood, starvation for every loss, nights chained to the mast for the crime of crying. The crew watched and said nothing.
Sylric learned to wield chains — whipping them into deadly arcs, turning restraint into violence. Kael carved himself a speargun from scavenged wood and iron, something precise and personal, a weapon that felt like an extension of the rage he had no other outlet for.
Varkis pushed Sylric hardest. Older, stronger, faster — he pitted him against grown men, then lashed him bloody when he refused to finish them.
Kael watched everything. Learned. Slowly began to mirror the captain's wide, empty smile.
But whenever Varkis came for Kael — whenever the captain's mood darkened and his attention turned toward the younger boy — Sylric stepped between them. Every time. Without hesitation. He took the beatings that were meant for Kael and said nothing about it after.
"Why do you keep doing it?" Kael whispered one night, when Sylric's ribs were still bad and his breathing came in short, careful measures.
Sylric didn't look at him. "Because I think of you as my little brother."
Kael started calling him *big brother* after that — half tease, half something he couldn't name.
Sylric hated the name. It felt like chains of a different kind.
But he never told Kael to stop.
Age Sixteen — The Fracture
Kael had shot up taller, broader. Sylric stayed lean, shorter, sharper. The crew noticed.
Whispers slithered across the deck in the dark hours. *Captain favors the younger dog. Kael gets the soft watches. Sylric bleeds for every scrap.*
One rum-soaked night a crewman leaned close to Kael, voice low and oily. "The captain sees greater things in you, boy. All you have to do is reach out and take them."
The next evening Kael found Sylric on deck, coiling rope in the last of the light.
"Got to hit the mainland at dawn," Sylric said.
"I'm coming with you."
"No. We've talked about this."
Kael's face twisted. "You think you're better than me, big brother?"
"I don't. But you can't come."
"Stop looking down at me. I'm not a child anymore."
Sylric turned away. "I'm not doing this now. Sun's coming. I have to go."
"You're not going anywhere."
Kael lunged. They crashed together — fists, elbows, blood — pure wordless rage that had been building for months and had finally found its moment. Neither of them said a word. They didn't need to.
Varkis's laugh cut through it. He hauled them apart with a hand on each collar, still chuckling.
"Good scrap, brothers. Nothing strengthens a bond like a little blood, eh?" He looked between them, something bright and dangerous in his eyes. "I had brothers once." His grin sharpened. "I killed them."
Kael and Sylric went still, staring at him.
Varkis waved a hand. "Enough. I've got a real job for you both. Time to prove you're still my boys."
He sent them to lead separate crews on a raid near Thornhold.
The Battle of Thornhold Outskirts
Greenwood's army collided with Thornhold's in a screaming chaos of steel and fire.
Amid the slaughter, a massive silhouette moved through the smoke — Boldr, rising and falling, crushing men aside like they weighed nothing.
Kael crouched behind a shattered wall, speargun shaking in his hands. "This is madness. How do we raid in the middle of a massacre?"
"I told you to wait until it ended." Sylric's voice was tight. "You charged in anyway. Get back to the ship — now."
Kael bolted.
He scrambled up a steep hill, lungs burning, the battle roaring below him, nowhere left to go.
A crewman stepped from the smoke ahead — knife already drawn, expression settled into something that had clearly been decided long before tonight.
"Been waiting for this," he said. "Couldn't let you two finish each other, so I'll start with the favorite."
The blade flashed downward.
Sylric appeared like a storm — chains whipping outward, crashing into the traitor with everything he had. They grappled at the cliff's edge, snarling, until Sylric heaved. The man went over screaming, his voice swallowed by the gorge below long before he hit the bottom.
Sylric stood at the edge, breathing hard.
Something heavy cracked against the back of his skull.
He staggered. Turned slowly.
Kael stood there, a club in his hand, his face completely blank.
Sylric looked at him for one long moment.
Then he went over the edge — body striking rocks on the way down, vanishing into the dark water below.
Kael stood at the cliff's edge and watched the river take him.
The crew talked afterward, the way crews always do. *Jealous little bastard. Wanted to be the only son.*
Varkis believed every word.
He chained Kael to the mast for three days and three nights.
When he finally came to look at him, his voice was quiet — the worst kind of quiet.
"You killed your brother," Varkis said. "You're no better than the rest of us."
That was the day the last of the boy's real smile died. What replaced it was wider, and permanent, and completely hollow.
Years Later — A Coastal City
Kael — the Cowboy now — strode the docks with his hat low and his speargun across his back.
Golden cloaks were working their way through a rival pirate crew in the street ahead, quick and efficient, the way they did everything.
And among them — silver hair, chains coiled at his belt, eyes flat as slate —
Sylric.
Kael's breath caught in his chest like a hook.
He ran forward before he could think. His voice cracked open, shedding every year of careful hardness in a single second. "*Big brother!*"
Sylric turned.
No flicker. No recognition. Nothing behind his eyes but cold, polite indifference, the way a man looks at something he has no use for.
A golden cloak seized Kael from behind and forced him to his knees in front of Sylric. "Caught him eavesdropping. Pirate scum." He looked at Sylric. "I'll take his head."
Sylric's gaze moved over Kael slowly. Took him in. Found nothing that mattered.
"No," he said quietly. "He's nothing. No use killing him." A pause. "Let him go. And make sure he never comes back."
The grip released.
Kael stood.
The smile he had worn for years was gone. His face was just a face — young, exposed, stripped all the way down to the thing underneath that had never stopped being nine years old and crouching behind a cart.
He turned and walked away.
That was the day the boy finally died completely.
Fury replaced him — fury that Sylric lived, that he wore the golden cloak they had both once despised with everything they had, that he had forgotten. All of it. Every single thing.
The Cowboy was born on that dock, and he never looked back.
Present — The Cove, Aftermath
Sylric knelt beside the Cowboy's broken body.
He reached out and closed the dead man's eyes with careful fingers — gently, like it was the only thing he could still give him.
A single tear cut a clean line through the ash on his cheek.
"Rest, little brother," he said quietly. "You've carried enough."
He rose.
Dren watched in silence, a few paces back, arms at his sides.
Dot stood nearby, Yiva cradled on one shoulder, the little girl's small hand clasped in his. He said nothing. There was nothing to say.
Behind them the hideout burned, orange light rolling across the water, the smoke climbing into a sky that was just beginning to go grey at the edges. In the distance the villagers' voices rose and fell — victory and grief and rage, all braided together into something too tangled to be purely any one of them.
Then — hoofbeats.
A man dropped from his horse at the edge of the cove, easy and unhurried, as though he had all the time in the world. A katana hung at his hip, its blade catching the last of the firelight.
He walked forward and stood over the Cowboy's body.
Looked down at it for a long moment.
A low, quiet laugh drifted from him on the wind — not cruel, not kind. Just amused, in the way of a man who has seen the end of something he always knew would end this way.
He lifted his eyes to the horizon.
The firelight caught his face fully for the first time.
The assassin from Greenwood.
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— To Be Continued —