It was unusually quiet.
Chief Arven noticed it before he understood it.
LThe crickets that usually sang from the tall reeds by the stream had gone silent. The dogs had stopped barking.
Even the leaves of the banyan and evergreen trees, always whispering to one another, had stilled as though listening for something only they could hear.
He walked slowly along the village path, lantern swinging in his hand. The light painted the mud huts gold and black, stretching their shadows into crooked fingers across the ground.
Smoke from the celebration fires still lingered low in the air, smelling of fish, oil and wine, warm and familiar.
Home.
But something in his chest felt wrong. Tight. Like a drum stretched too hard before it splits.
He paused at the edge of the central square, in front of the Tree Temple. He bowed his head briefly toward the carved image of Yggdrasil etched into the surface of the stone doors, his fingers brushing the cold grooves.
A habit from years ago, when he had been young and foolish and believed that gods listened to men like him.
No one truly knew if the gods existed. But the people of Mythos recognised two things above all else. The World Tree, Yggdrasil. And the Great Titans, beings that had carried the world through ages that would have crushed anything lesser. He had spent his whole life in the shadow of that belief.
Tonight it felt very thin.
He lifted his lantern and scanned the square.
It was empty. The fires still burned in their pits but the people had gone to their huts, the celebration finally wound down.
A scrap of garland from the ceremony lay crushed in the dirt near the well. A child's sandal sat abandoned near the temple steps.
Everything looked normal.
Yet, everything felt wrong.
A sound suddenly cracked the night.
Metal striking metal. Then a scream, cut short and violent, like a rope snapping under too much weight.
Arven's lantern fell from his hand.
He was already moving before it hit the ground.
----
They came from everywhere.
From the rooftops, from behind the granaries, from the shadows between huts. Black-cloaked figures, faces wrapped in cloth, blades glinting like teeth in the firelight.
Some moved low, some high, some with the smooth coordinated steps of trained fighters who had drilled together for years until the rhythm of it was as natural as walking.
Arven knew that rhythm.
He knew it the way a fisherman knew the pull of a river current, instinctive and immediate, recognised before it was consciously identified.
His body understood it before his mind caught up and his hands were already up and his weight already shifted by the time the first one lunged.
A name rose in his chest before he could stop it.
Neridia.
They were hiding their Spirit beasts, but their stances gave them away. The sliding footwork, designed to control ground the way water controls shoreline.
The wide arcs of the blade work, meant to redirect rather than block. The fluid rotations that mimicked tides, pulling back and flowing forward in the same motion.
Water-style combat, taught only in the Neridian Empire, drilled into their soldiers from childhood until instinct and technique became the same thing.
Arven bared his teeth.
"So," he muttered, voice rough. "You finally came."
He had known this might happen.
Had known it the moment Lysa stepped out of the Heartlands trembling and radiant, the air bending around her like grass before a storm, her eyes wide and full of something she hadn't yet found words for.
He'd felt it in the quality of her silence when he asked what had bonded with her and she had looked at him for a long moment before answering.
A creature of living tide and ancient sea. Sacred. Divine rank.
He listened and felt pride and terror in the same breath.
He told her to keep it quiet, to tell no one, to perform a small and ordinary beast in the square with the other children and let the moment pass without drawing attention.
Then the Neridian delegates had arrived. Smiling too politely, their eyes searching every doorway and roofline while their mouths spoke of friendship and exchange and the warmth of diplomatic relations between nations.
They had felt the ripples of her aura from thousands of miles away in their water castles at the edge of the empire, and they had come to measure the cost of taking it.
He had believed silence would be enough.
He had been foolish.
The first attacker leapt from behind a grain shed, cloth wrapped tight around his face, steel flashing.
Arven twisted aside, the blade cutting only cloth, and drove his elbow into the man's throat. Bone crunched. The attacker folded with a choking gasp and went down.
Another came from the left. Arven caught the wrist, wrenched hard and heard tendons pull.
The dagger fell. He kicked it away, spun, struck the man across the jaw with the heel of his palm and sent him into the wall of the nearest hut hard enough to crack the mud.
They moved like water. That was the thing about Neridian fighters, they never blocked when they could redirect, never pushed when they could pull, never wasted energy on force when leverage would do the same work at half the cost.
They flowed around him in patterns he recognised and could counter but could not counter indefinitely, not outnumbered like this, not with no beast at his side capable of turning the tide.
His Eidos wasn't suited for combat. That left him alone to fight against multiple opponents.
He spat blood and kept moving.
A third rushed in. A fourth. A fifth.
A voice behind him, one of the villagers, screamed with panic. "Chief!"
"Stay inside!" Arven roared back without looking. "Bar every door and do not open them!"
That was a mistake.
A torch arced through the night and shattered against a thatched roof the moment he said it.
Flames climbed fast, catching the dry grass and spreading sideways in both directions, and the village square turned orange and red and full of smoke that had nowhere to go.
Children screamed. Goats bleated in terror behind their pens. Pots and tools clattered and fell as people fled the heat.
Arven drove forward into the attackers, pushing them away from the homes with everything he had, trading ground for time.
A blade slipped past his guard and bit into his ribs, deep enough to matter.
He hissed through his teeth, twisted to break the man's grip on the handle, grabbed the wrist and snapped it. Blood soaked through his robe immediately, warm and spreading, and his vision wavered at the edges.
He did not fall.
He could not fall. Not yet. Not while they were still taking children.
He had seen it the moment it started. The masked men moving through the chaos with a purpose that had nothing to do with destruction, selecting carefully among the fleeing villagers, reaching for the twelve-year-olds, the newly bonded.
A boy dragged by both arms, his sandals carving furrows in the dirt before a boot connected with his skull and he went limp.
A girl thrown over a shoulder, screaming until someone covered her mouth with a rag cloth.
The next generation. Taken to be used, interrogated, traded, held until Neridia found the one they were actually looking for.
Lysa.
The thought hit him like a second blade.
They did not know her face yet. He was almost certain of that.
The delegates had smiled and left without asking direct questions about specific children, which meant they were searching blind, collecting the newly bonded and sifting through them until they found the right one.
That was the only thing working in his favour right now but it would not work for long.
He had to reach her before they did.
"Where is the child?" A masked fighter whispered, locking blades with him, eyes cold and patient above the cloth.
Arven answered by biting down on the man's hand. The attacker cursed and jerked back and Arven rammed his shoulder into him and driving him through a wall that came apart on impact.
Another torch went up. Then another. The sky above the village square had turned fully red, the light of it pressing down on everything, and the smoke was thick enough now that he could feel it in his lungs with every breath.
His strength was failing. He knew it in the specific way a man knows things about his own body after decades of living in it.
Too much blood lost, too many wounds stacking up, too many fresh fighters rotating in while he had nothing and no one to rotate in with him.
Around him his guards and the villagers fought with whatever they had. Farming knives, hand axes, fire pokers and lengths of rope.
Beast Tamers and Beast Experts with their Eidos, all of them, fishermen with spirit bonds and the spirit of people defending what was theirs. Brave. Desperate. But against Neridian military training it was not going to be enough.
He was the only Beast Master in Seaside. He had always known that. Had always known that his Eidos, patient and gentle and utterly unsuited for combat, was a limitation that would one day matter.
He'd told himself for years that Seaside had no enemies, that their obscurity was their protection, that nothing would ever come to this small village on the eastern coast that required him to be what he had never trained to be.
He had been wrong about that too.
A hut collapsed in a roar of sparks and heat. Somewhere nearby a mother wailed, the sound cutting through the smoke and the noise of steel and the shouting.
It tore through him worse than any blade had tonight because he knew that voice and he knew which hut had collapsed and he knew what she had just lost.
He forced his legs forward anyway.
He could grieve later. He could rest later. He could fall apart later when there was time for it and the children were safe and Lysa was somewhere these men could not reach.
He rounded the village well... And saw her.