“The city crouched in the dark, its walls rough with age, its towers haloed in the low flicker of braziers. Wind carried the scent of damp stone and soot, stirring dust in the narrow alleys between slumping buildings. He moved through them without hesitation, a shadow among the ruin, his body an extension of the iron weight on his back. Every step was measured, not careful in the way of a thief, but deliberate—momentum contained, ready to explode.

  A pair of sentries idled near the side gate, shifting their weight against the cold. One had wrapped a bright blue sash around his spear shaft, the cloth fluttering like a forgotten banner. Even in the dim light, he knew the words stitched along its length by heart. The sight caught him, pulled him backward—afternoon sun through leaves, weapons propped carelessly against an old oak, that same blue fabric draped across their hilts while laughter carried on the warm air. His head drifted slightly, chin tilting down and to the side, eyes unfocused as if scanning invisible words in the dark, Brooding over the past, he stood within the ruined spine of an old statue, a broken god whose outstretched arm once pointed toward something no one remembered. A scowl flickered across his face, brief and instinctive, before he shook his head and blinked hard, forcing the memory down.

  This decision had been made for him long before this moment.

  His fingers flitted out feeling for a loose stone, weighing it in his palm, then sent it clattering into the darkness beyond. Both men stiffened. The one closest to the sound turned, shifting his spear up, head angling toward the empty street beyond. The other hesitated, eyes sweeping the dark, his grip tightening but his feet unmoving.

  A breath. Then another. The one by the sound moved forward, cautiously, his companion a step behind.

  He was already moving.

  The gap between torchlight and shadow was all he needed, his stride quick but silent. The wall of the city met him, old stone rough beneath his fingers as he slipped through the service gate before the guards had even turned back.

  A corridor of barrels and stacked crates swallowed him. Beyond them, the city stretched inward, a mess of stone and firelight, twisting roads snaking toward the keep at its heart. The fortress. The reason he was here.

  His breath was steady as he moved deeper.

  Two more guards blocked his path, half-shrouded by the low-burning lanterns that lined the inner market’s edge. He stopped just before they noticed him, standing within the spill of darkness where a ruined building had half-collapsed. Not enough cover for long.

  No time for patience.

  The first blade slid free from its sheath, iron whispering against worn leather. He tested its balance with a subtle roll of his wrist, though he already knew its every imperfection—felt the old scars along the steel, the places where battle had reshaped it. An unguilded slab of sharpened steel, built for utility and function not parades and formal parties, weighty enough to cleave through both armor and the man beneath it. No filigree, no elegance. Just function.

  A single step forward. Time slowed.

  The guard on the left barely had time to react before the blade rose, cutting a clean arc upward. The force of it drove through collarbone and deep into the man’s chest, parting him in a spray of crimson. The lantern light caught the blood midair, freezing it for an instant in the space between breaths.

  Before the body had even begun to fall, he was already turning. The second guard’s mouth opened, but no sound escaped—only the sharp breath of surprise as the backstroke of the sword met his throat.

  A final spray of warmth against the cold air. The scent of iron.

  He flicked the blood from his blade, stepped over the bodies. Then—he saw it. The blue oath-weave, tied to a dagger sheath, limp in death-stiff fingers. He exhaled through his teeth, not quite a sigh, not quite a curse. His grip on the sword tightened. Then he moved on.

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  The streets ahead were clear for now.

  The fortress gates rose before him, black and hulking, their edges worn by age but no less imposing. Above them, torches flickered in their sconces, their orange glow casting jagged shadows along the walls. He exhaled once, shaking the tension from his shoulders.

  Then, finally, he reached behind him.

  Fingers closed around the second hilt. Thick, wrapped leather, shaped to fit his grip. A weapon forged for the weight of two hands but wielded with one. He drew it slowly, letting its mass settle against him, twin blades now poised at his sides. They felt right together, the same way they always had—an extension of him, of the violence that followed wherever he went.

  From the street ahead, movement. The first wave of men emerged from the gloom, swords in hand, metal catching the firelight in bright flashes.

  They had been waiting.

  The world was a blur of motion and steel, a vortex of weight and velocity that shrank to the space of his reach, the arc of his blades. He moved within it, was it, his twin greatswords carving the air with the inevitability of celestial bodies in their orbits. The clash of metal was a deafening choir, each collision singing in sharp, percussive violence, the rhythm of war tattooed into his bones.

  Five men. No, six—shadows with blades, swirling and reforming at the edges of his sight. They lunged, a tide of metal, their weapons flashing like fissures of light against the dark. His first parry was a diagonal sweep, his right-hand blade meeting steel in a shower of shrieking sparks. The force of the impact sang through his arm, but already his left sword had followed—a downward cut that sought bone, intercepted at the last instant.

  He pivoted, legs a blur of shifting balance, rolling one shoulder to let a spear-tip graze past, close enough to whisper against his skin. The world had slowed to the heartbeat of combat, where every muscle knew its role before thought could command it. He saw the strike before it came, the telegraphed twist of an enemy’s hips, the subtle bend of the knee. A downward hammer-blow of an axe. Slow.

  His swords wove upward, meeting the strike in a scissoring block that rang like a temple bell. The impact numbed his palms, but he turned with the force, siphoning it into motion—ducking low, sweeping one sword in a feral crescent that tore through leather, through flesh. Blood leapt from the wound, a radiant arc that seemed to freeze in the air, a crimson sunburst against the smudged grays of the battle’s periphery.

  The dying guard slumps against the side of an old well, knocking over a bucket, water spilling across the blood-slick stones.

  A scream. A stagger. A body falling from his awareness. No time to watch it land. A severed torch clattering onto the ground, its embers snuffed in the pooling blood.

  Another step, another twist—momentum was his god, and he worshipped in the fluid sermon of movement. His back met empty air, the battlefield itself no more than a vague impression of shifting pressure and distant light. His focus was here, where a sword’s gleam resolved into the descending slash of an enemy three paces away. His body moved before his mind could name it—forward step, parry, pivot. The attacker’s ribs opened under his counterstrike, a deep, gouging stroke. Their breath hitching as a younger man than expected clutched at the wound—barely more than a recruit. As their blood steamed against the cold.

  Time still held its breath.

  Then a mistake.

  A fraction of a second late—his right blade caught against an enemy’s pommel, tangled in its path. It was enough. A flurry of blows rained upon him, and though he spun, though he weaved and turned, his movements were losing that godlike flow. Too slow to avoid the haft of a spear slamming into his side. Too slow to angle his shoulder against the force of it. The impact sent him skidding, breath torn from his lungs in a ragged, soundless gasp.

  Time exhaled.

  The world snapped back into brutal, rushing speed.

  A sword punched into his thigh. Not deep, but deep enough. His vision wavered, the slow-motion clarity he had wielded like a divine gift fracturing into a staccato of blurs and half-realized images. No space for grace now. No elegant economy of motion. This was desperation, a beast’s instinct. He roared, wrenching his wounded leg forward as his left-hand blade punched through an enemy’s throat—an obscene, wet sound, a mouthful of red where there had been words forming a battle cry.

  The remaining shadows closed in. They had seen it, his stumble, the sudden collapse of his rhythm.

  He pushed forward, hacking now instead of striking, parrying on pure reflex, his arms leaden, his breath ragged. A downward swing aimed at his head—he raised both swords to block, but the force of it drove him to one knee. His arms burned. Blood trickled down his leg, warm in the cold air. He fought to rise.

  Then came the blow that shattered him.

  A warhammer to the side of his head—weight, brutal and absolute, a star’s fall compressed into an instant. The world detonated into light. Sound smeared into a single, keening note, a scream stretched across eternity. Vision cracked. The battlefield split into afterimages, overlapping distortions of movement, half of them real, half of them ghosts of where his enemies had been. His body had become one of those ghosts. He swayed, blind but still striking, swinging wide and missing. His own hands seemed distant, foreign.

  He tried to step forward. His knees failed him. He fell, the world lurching sideways.

  Another blow. Another shockwave of pain, and something in him gave way—perception itself collapsing, no longer able to piece together the flood of broken light and sound. The ground met him, though it was no longer ground, only a vast nothingness of sensation. Blood pooled beneath him, a warmth against the cold void.

  Black.

  thu-thump… thump.

  His body was a distant thing, an outline in the dark, blurred and smudged like a charcoal sketch smeared by a careless hand.

  thu-thump.

  There was nothing but the drifting pulse of thought, the edges of his mind floating loose, unmoored from weight or form. Pain flickered in and out, not sharp but hollow, like an ache in something long dead.

  Thu-thump… thump.

  Somewhere in that abyss, his heartbeat stuttered—too slow, too fast, skipping, lagging, tripping over itself as if uncertain whether to continue. The sound swelled, deepened, filled the silence.

  Th-thmp—THUMP—thhhhmp

  thhhmp.

  thhhh…

  …mp— - -

  - - One last flare of agony, a searing white rupture in the fabric of awareness— -

  - — Nothing.