Charen whistles, long and low. “Ooooh. Revenge party.”
Kragna growls, a sound that rattles the stones under my feet. “You don’t know that. Could be any unit. Could be twenty different ones.”
“It doesn’t matter. They’re elves. They’re his.” My jaw locks so tight it aches. “Every step they take on this mountain is an insult. Every breath they draw spits on the dead. I can’t just walk away.”
His roar splits the fog, sudden and violent. “Your rage will get you killed!”
It echoes off the cliffs, a sound too big for the space. Charen skitters backward, muttering about how she doesn’t want to get stepped on by accident.
I bare my teeth, stepping into him, close enough to feel the furnace heat of his chest. “And what would you know about it, troll? You sit under your bridge and drink while the world burns. You don’t understand sacrifice. You don’t understandlosing everythingand having to keep moving anyway.”
His eyes blaze, fire flaring. “You think I don’t know loss?” His claws flex, sinking into stone until it cracks under his grip. “You think I’ve never buried friends, lovers, kin? Don’t youdaretell me I don’t know.”
“Then prove it,” I spit. “Stand with me. Don’t cower behind your caution like an old man afraid of shadows.”
His face twists, torn between fury and something else I can’t name. For a breath, I almost expect him to lunge, to drag me back by force.
But he doesn’t. He just shakes his head, voice breaking low. “You’re going to tear yourself apart chasing ghosts.”
And that… that hurts worse than if he’d shouted again.
I shove past him, boots crunching frost as I storm into the fog. I need space, air, anything that isn’t the fire in his eyes or the echo of my own rage. My chest heaves, throat raw, vision blurred.
Behind me, the fire crackles, Charen cackles, and Kragna doesn’t follow.
Good.
Because if he did, I might not stop myself from breaking.
The fog swallows me whole as I march off, boots sinking into crusted snow, breath ragged in my chest. Every step burns, but I keep moving, stubborn and stupid, because turning back nowwould mean he’s right. And I can’t let him be right. Not about this. Not about me.
The night air is knife-cold. My fingers ache around the rifle’s grip, my ears catch every snap of twig, every crunch of frost underfoot. My anger should be warming me, but all it does is make me shake.
Then I see him.
One of them.
A dark elf scout, half-hidden behind a pine, his trousers unlaced as he pisses steaming arcs into the snow. His head tips back, relaxed, unaware. His skin is that same pale ash, his ears tapering to points that make my teeth grit. His hand rests careless on the hilt of a blade.
I raise my rifle before I even think. The cold iron feels like an extension of my arm, my rage channeled into steel and powder.
The report cracks the silence.
His skull snaps back, neat hole punched right between the eyes. He doesn’t even gasp—just crumples, knees folding, piss hissing into the snow as blood pours after it.
My breath comes sharp, almost sobbing. One down. Not enough. Never enough.
Movement.
Three more shadows flinch at the noise, less than twenty paces away. They whirl, blades flashing. My finger twitches on the trigger, but my hands are shaking. Too close. Too fast.
The first lunges, a short sword whistling through the fog. I fire again, but the bullet tears his shoulder, not his head. He screams, blood spraying against the snow like paint. Another rushes from the left, and I spin, rifle butt cracking into his jaw, teeth snapping like brittle stone. He falls, snarling, but I can’t line up another shot before the third is on me.
Steel arcs toward my throat.
And then Kragna’s roar splits the world.
He hits them like a storm given flesh. One claw rakes across the elf with the shoulder wound, splitting him from collar to gut in a spray that paints the trees. Another he grabs by the leg and swings, once, twice, before dashing his skull against a rock until nothing’s left but ruin.
