Wet reached him first, then cold: damp along his cheek, soaked through the shoulder of his coat, the forest standing over him with its branches knitted shut. Somewhere above, water gathered until it could not hold and let go, one drop at a time.
No fire. No warmth. Moss and wet bark under his palms.
"...seriously, if this is dying, I'd like to lodge a formal complaint."
The voice cut through the fog before he could put a face to it. Close. Familiar.
"Because this is terrible. Genuinely the worst way to go. Cold, wet, no idea where I am, and I'm pretty sure something's broken."
Archon pushed himself upright. His body protested like a man who had run for miles and stopped without resting. He reached for his memory and nothing answered.
No armor. A coat over a wet shirt, trousers heavy at the knee. He had traveled light, and the only steel on him was the long blade and the short one at his belt. His hand went to the blade before thought caught up, and the motion came right.
"Easy," the figure said, lifting both hands. "Unless you were planning to stab me. Which, honestly, feels like something you'd do. You've got that look."
Compact and solid, crouched a few paces off with elbows loose. A fade cut, a trimmed beard, a crooked grin that stopped short of the eyes, old scars across the knuckles, a dark cowl slack at his neck.
Shadow. The name surfaced without effort, plain as knowing which way was up. He had not remembered it. He simply had it.
"What look?"
"The 'I wake up stabbing' look. Very distinctive."
Archon loosened his grip. "I know you."
Shadow blinked, then laughed. "That's comforting. Because I have absolutely no idea who I am." He gestured at himself. "Could be anyone. Could be a baker. Could be a murderer. Could be both, depending on the bread."
Beyond them a third stood with his back to both of them, attention on the trees. Dark fabric swallowed light instead of returning it, dreadlocks heavy from the edge of his hood. Midknight turned a fraction, and his eyes caught what light there was with a violet glow.
Midknight. The second name settled with the same certainty.
"You're no baker," Midknight said, without turning.
"How do you know?"
"Your hands."
"Calluses are wrong."
Archon stood. "What are we..."
"...doing here. Unknown."
The completion landed like a step on ground that should have been lower down. "You knew what I was going to..."
"...ask. Yes."
"That's not creepy at all," Shadow said.
Midknight turned fully. "We arrived recently. Minutes, perhaps. Long enough for you to wake. Not long enough for..."
"Pursuit."
"Yes."
"Good. Love that." Shadow shifted his weight. "'Pursuit.' Great word to wake up to. Really sets the tone."
"What are we running from?"
Midknight crouched, brushed the soil, lifted a leaf, examined the underside, let it fall. "There are disturbances. Footprints that aren't ours. Pressure in the Pattern."
"Pressure how?"
"The kind that..." His eyes flicked to Shadow, brief. Shadow went still and looked away. "...tracks."
The sentence had a hole in it. Archon let it sit.
"Cool," Shadow said. "No idea what that means. But it sounds bad. Is it bad?"
"We should move."
Shadow hopped onto a fallen trunk, arms out for balance. He wobbled, corrected. "If this is a dream, I want a refund. And better lighting."
"You're hurt."
Shadow pushed his sleeve up. Dried blood smeared the inside of his forearm, and he studied it longer than the mark deserved. "Huh. That seems important." He looked at Midknight. "Am I dying, or are we figuring that out later?"
"If you were dying, you wouldn't ask."
"Comforting."
Something tightened under Archon's ribs that had nothing to do with injury. Guilt without cause.
"Doesn't hurt. Should it hurt?"
"Eventually."
"Ominous."
"Realistic."
Shadow dropped off the log, landed badly. "You're not great at pep talks."
"Standing still will not improve our position."
"Neither will walking blind into whatever's chasing us."
"It's not chasing," Archon said, and the word landed heavier than it should have. "Yet."
"See, that 'yet' is doing a lot of work."
They moved. Midknight cut the path. Shadow read what the ground gave him and went around it. Archon walked between them and matched their pace without deciding to.
"Anyone else getting the feeling we're supposed to know where we're going?"
"No," Midknight said.
"Just me, then?"
"Yes."
"Love being the only one with instincts."
"You don't have instincts. You have anxiety."
"Same thing."
"It isn't."
"Feels the same."
Archon ducked under a low branch. Cold came up through his boots, and his memory kept handing him the edge of something and taking it back: smoke, heat across his palms, laughter cut off in the middle of a sound. He caught his foot on a root and saved himself on a sapling, and the bark scraped his palm. The pain arrived at once and stayed.
"You walking like that on purpose?"
"Yes."
"You're a terrible liar."
"I'm not lying."
"You're also not convincing."
Midknight slowed, just enough for Archon to notice, and kept his eyes ahead.
The quiet thinned into fog lying low in a dip, and Archon stopped at its edge. A sound moved through his mind without reaching his ears: drums, or a heartbeat, or both.
"You feel that?"
"Feel what?"
"That." Shadow gestured at the fog. "Like something's pressing."
"What do you feel?" Archon asked Midknight.
"Yes," Midknight said, barely reacting.
A muscle flexed under Archon's temple. "Late. I feel late."
"Story of my life."
"That's not helpful."
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
"Wasn't trying to be helpful. Was trying to be relatable."
"You failed."
"Rude."
"Late for what?" Midknight asked, ignoring Shadow's grumbling.
The exchange settled something in Archon he hadn't realized was tense.
"I don't know. Late."
"Then we need to hurry."
"Wait." Archon closed the distance. "What are we late for?"
"I don't know." The admission tasted bitter. "But it's wrong. All of this."
Midknight looked at Shadow, then back. "The pressure isn't random. I can see the Pattern. Threads, violet, running through everything, and when something moves through them I feel it. We are connected through those threads, all three of us. Something else is moving through them now, measuring how we're bound."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer I have."
"You're holding something back."
"Because you don't need it yet. Not until you remember."
Midknight looked at a patch of empty air between the trunks. "You don't see it."
"I don't."
"Most people don't." A pause. "You aren't most people."
"Can I try?"
Midknight went still, shoulders locked. A pressure tightened in Archon's chest that did not belong to him.
"Yes. Close your eyes. Don't look for it directly."
He closed his eyes. The fear sharpened the moment he opened his awareness, as immediate as a blade resting against skin. It was not his. It came down the connection between them, and it was Midknight's, and Midknight had offered him this anyway.
"There's something." Violet, faint, at the very edge of his sight even with his eyes closed. "It's moving. Threads. I can almost..."
He reached. Violet light flared behind Midknight's closed eyelids, hard enough to throw shadows across his cheeks. Through the connection Archon felt muscles lock, fists clench, breath turn short. The lines thinned into threads that connected and almost held.
"Archon." Midknight's voice came out tight. "That's enough."
Almost.
The threads slipped and he lost them. Midknight slumped where he stood, hands uncurling with a faint tremor. Relief moved through the connection in waves.
"Most people never see anything."
"I had it. Another second and..."
"You'll get there. When you're ready."
"Why don't you want him to see it?" Shadow asked.
"Because some things can't be unseen."
Nobody answered that.
They walked deeper. Midknight stopped them with one raised hand, crouched, laid his palm flat on the ground.
"The pressure's changed. It's not searching anymore."
"What's it doing?"
"Measuring."
"We're being watched," Archon said.
"Measured."
"What's the difference?"
"Intent."
"Intent to do what?"
Midknight looked at Shadow, longer this time. Shadow's face moved through question, then understanding, then resignation, and he nodded once.
"It's trying to understand what you are."
"What am I?"
"That's what it's trying to understand."
"You know."
"I don't."
Archon heard the lie, clear as a discordant note. "You're lying."
"I'm protecting you."
"From what?"
"Answers you aren't ready for."
Something pulled at him then, not sound and not movement but direction, into the trees where the dark failed to behave. He turned slowly and his hand came up.
"What are you doing?"
"The dark. The place where it doesn't move right."
Shadow squinted. "I see trees. Very convincing trees."
Midknight went still. "Hollowbirth."
The word went into the trees and did not come back.
"Anyone want to explain what a Hollowbirth is?" Shadow asked. "Anyone? No?"
"I don't know what it is," Archon said.
"You just knew the word."
"Yes."
"Without knowing what it means."
"Yes."
"That's worse."
Midknight stepped closer. "You shouldn't know that. Neither of us should."
"I don't."
"Great," Shadow said. "So something's coming that we know the name of and nothing else, and we're tied together by something that might collapse. Did I miss anything?"
Midknight's head came up. "We've been found."
Archon felt it half a second later, the pressure turning, closing. His hand came off the hilt as the space ahead stopped being empty.
She came out of the trees without breaking a branch.
Darkened steel shaped her frame, etched with runic geometry and lit by thin crimson lines. Her braid lay tight against her back. The estoc at her side was long and rigid, built to hold a line rather than cut one, its runes lit through the relic she wore.
Her eyes found Archon first, and something in her attention slipped and corrected before he could name it; then her gaze crossed Midknight and settled on Shadow.
"That is unexpected." The smile was contained, almost clinical. "It will not change the outcome."
"I really hate people who talk like that," Shadow said.
She had already gone back to Archon.
"We don't want this," Midknight said.
"What he said."
She answered by moving. Shadow moved first, dragging the cowl up as he dropped low, dagger in his off hand and rapier questing ahead, both hunting the seams of her armor. She turned just enough. Her gauntlet closed on his dagger wrist mid-strike, and Archon heard the joint give before Shadow did. She drove him into the ground.
Archon was already moving. Steel met steel, and for a heartbeat his timing held. Then her blade adjusted inside the contact and erased it. His wakizashi caught the follow-through, and the point raked his shoulder through cloth and then skin.
"You hesitate," she said.
"So do you. Again. Come at me!"
She came forward with nothing left to interpret. His boots slid in wet soil until his back struck bark.
"Little help would be great," Shadow said from the ground.
Midknight moved. The Pattern gathered around him in a visible distortion, then went outward in a wave that split the air and threw stones in a violent circle meant to make room.
She stepped through it. The runes across her armor flared, absorbing just enough force to preserve her momentum. Midknight adjusted too late. Her forearm struck across his chest and lifted him off his feet into a fallen trunk.
"Midknight!" The word tore out of Archon before he could keep it in.
She turned back to him with the blade already rising. He planted his feet. Fear stripped everything down to her blade and the space around it. He raised his sword anyway.
Shadow came off the ground with a ruined arm and no leverage, driving into her side. Steel met and held, a bind rather than a clash, and the force drew them closer until there was no room left to give.
For a fraction of a second nobody moved. Her eyes came up to Archon's, measuring. She should have broken the bind and driven through him. She held. The pause stretched thin, and then it snapped.
She shifted her balance, her gauntlet driving down into Shadow's shoulder. The joint compressed and he folded.
"Predictable," she said, almost to herself.
Midknight moved, not at her but at the ground between them. The Pattern went down in a jagged line that tore stone and soil apart. He chose a barrier over a strike, leaving her uncontested. Her footwork adjusted at the edge of the fracture without losing alignment, and her expression changed into recognition.
"They are protecting you." Her eyes flicked to Archon, then back. "Intriguing. Foolhardy."
She moved, and the line she took ignored Archon entirely. It collapsed on Midknight before he could rise, and her blade went in through his side and came out clean.
Archon did not think. He hauled Shadow up under one arm and shoved him into motion.
"Run," he said.
Shadow did not argue. Midknight did not resist. Because Archon said it, they moved.
Branches tore at their faces. Behind them steel struck earth, patient and unhurried.
The trees ended. One step was root and leaf litter, and the next was a break in the ground with the sound of the water coming up out of it.
The shelf ran three paces and stopped. Past it the ground went down in a broken face of rock, and the bottom of the drop was a channel the river had cut for itself, wide and white and loud where it hit the stone. Mist came up off it in a slow turn. Nothing in the face of it offered a way down at a run.
Steel rang on stone behind them. Then it did not ring again, and that was worse.
"Go," Midknight said, and stopped.
He turned with one hand pressed to his side and raised the other, and the air above his fingers began to darken and gather. Archon had watched it take the same time in the clearing. It was not taking it now.
She was already coming. The estoc came up and the runes along her armor lit, and the line she took ended where Midknight was standing, and her weight was already behind it. Whether it would have stopped short at the last hand's width, he had no way to know and no time to find out. It was not a strike he could let land.
Archon was already moving, and Shadow was already moving with him, half-carried and cursing at every pace.
He did not decide it. He did not break stride. The brink came up, and he put his arm around Midknight's chest above the hilt, took the man's weight against his own, and carried him, and the three of them went over the edge together.
The drop took the air out of him. Rock went past. Mist closed on his face, and then the river hit him and took the rest.
He fought up once, got half a breath, and lost it. A fist closed in his coat and hauled his face clear. Shadow was beside him, one arm barely working, cursing through his teeth while he kicked against a channel that would not let either of them reach a bank.
Then the current found the low line along the left side. It ran smooth and fast, took Shadow's legs out from under him, and pulled him downstream. Archon saw one fist still hooked in cloth, and then the water was empty.
Something hard stopped his shoulder. Midknight's arm came across his chest, pinning him against a shelf of rock while the river went on trying to take them both.
Above them the cliff stood at the torn line where the rock gave up and the sky began, and she was at the edge of it. She did not come down. She watched the channel take them, and her posture had not changed.
They had not escaped. They had made distance, and distance fails.
Interlude: The Swordswoman
She wiped the blood from her blade in one precise stroke, the arc scattering into the dark.
Below, the river drove through broken ground toward the narrows. She watched them go with calculation rather than frustration. The current bent their course away from pursuit; by the time she reached the crossing they would be outside engagement range.
"There was only supposed to be one," she said, without inflection. "This requires reporting."
The crimson inlay along her armor and blade flared, and pressure gathered at a single point in front of her. A shape resolved: a woman's head and shoulders, dark hair, a face untouched by strain, lit by firelight that belonged somewhere else. Behind the projection, glimpsed through the Pattern, the woman lay back inside the Suzerain's throne room. The throne behind her stood empty.
"Ah," Warria said, smooth and unhurried, with the particular patience of a woman who had been interrupted and intended it noticed. "If it isn't the Suzerain's favourite." She let the pause work. "Concordia. First Blade of the Circle. How can Warria possibly be of service to such a formidable warrior?"
"I made contact. It is different this time. The target is not alone, and he appears muted within the Pattern. One of his companions is easily tracked, however..."
"Irrelevant." She said it the way a woman sets down something she has finished with. "The Suzerain assigned a task. I'm surprised you reached the target at all, with both Acorus and Reaper operating in the field." A pause, exactly as long as it needed to be. "I'm sure they'll clean up your mess."
A restrained laugh slipped through the connection. She did not hurry to put anything after it. "So. What are you going to do?"
Concordia held her gaze. "We sent them as well?"
That was not confusion. She had put her weight on ground that was not there, and she had already caught herself.
Warria's smile sharpened. "That wouldn't be wise to question." She said it kindly, which was worse. Then, "Good luck."
The connection collapsed. The projection dissolved, and the crimson light along Concordia's armor dimmed to cold iron.
She stayed where she was. They had not acted on a command. Nothing was signalled, nothing spoken, and their movements had shifted around him, a single fixed point, without hesitation. That alone marked him.
The rogue left a trail anyone could pick up. The mage bent the Pattern around himself without knowing he was doing it. Both could be run down.
The third would not hold. He had been there — she had felt him at the other end of her own blade — and the Pattern still gave him back thin. Not hidden. Not gone. Nothing in her experience accounted for a man who stood in front of her and weighed so little.
Something else pushed at it, a shape that almost came clear and would not hold. Not memory. Expectation, near enough to be mistaken for it, and it did not fit, so she let it go.
Separating them would break what they did around him. A thing that came apart that way could be made to serve.
Her grip settled around the hilt.
"I do not fail."
She turned, already adjusting course, not toward pursuit but toward interception.