A WARRIOR'S HANDS

Blood. Rusted iron. And a sharp, chemical reek that bit at the back of the throat.

As his mind slowly surfaced from dark water, his first contact with the world was that arid, barren dryness inside his mouth. Then sounds began to seep in: the heavy rain drumming a rhythm against the thick canvas just above his head, and outside, the muffled, urgent shouting of orders.

His eyes opened.

His mind was empty. No memory, no name, no voice. Only the staggering weight of existing.

He was inside a dim, makeshift tent. Beneath him, a hard wooden cot; over him, a coarsely woven wool blanket, stained through with sweat. He pushed himself up slowly, trying to sit. His tangled hair fell across his face. His body carried a heavy exhaustion, but there was no open wound, no aching bone.

He raised his hands and brought them to eye level.

Large hands, knuckles thickened, covered in countless scars and calluses. Beneath the skin, thick veins coiled like the bed of a river.

A warrior's hands.

But the problem was: Whose hands were these?

He searched his mind for a name. A face, a memory, a color... He tried to find even the smallest fragment from one second before entering this tent. There was nothing. His mind was like a vast, untouched plain of white snow, without a single footprint on it.

There was emptiness, just a White Void. No fear, no curiosity, no anger. As if he himself were a part of that void too. There was no 'self' left to look at the void.

Silence.

"I..." he whispered, his voice cracking. His dry lips barely parted. He didn't even recognize his own voice. It had the timbre of a thick, rusted blade scraping against stone.

Suddenly, in the middle of that White Void, he felt something. He was not alone in the room.

He turned his head slowly to the left. In the shadow by the tent's entrance, sitting silently on a wooden stool, was a small child, wearing a mud-stained, filthy tunic several sizes too big. In the dim light, the child's face wasn't quite distinguishable, but the eyes—

The child's eyes, each a different color, were locked directly onto him.

In the middle of that vast void within him, the instant he looked at the child, a non-physical, burning ache surfaced in his chest. Independent of flesh and bone, as if some ancient vein hidden deep inside his soul had suddenly begun to pulse. A heavy, warm sense of familiarity.

The child wasn't afraid of him. There was no panic of a victim in the child's eyes, no helplessness of an orphan. Only a deep, weary understanding, and a wariness beyond his years.

Neither of them said a word. The invisible, trembling bond between them was the only loud thing in that silent tent. Krazoc reached his right hand toward him. He didn't know why he was reaching out, what he meant to do, or what he expected from it.

Then, all at once, the spell over the tent broke.

"There's no one left to save, I'm telling you! No one's left!"

Right after the shout from outside, the tent's thick canvas flap tore open violently. A medic burst in, his leather apron streaked with blood and mud thinned by the rain, exhausted from hours of searching for soldiers in the muck. His breath came in ragged bursts.

When he turned around, he found himself face to face with the massive man sitting on the cot.

"Well, well, look who's come back from the dead," the medic said, his voice mocking but taut with nerves. "Couldn't find a single wound on you, and even then I wasn't sure you'd wake up. After that lake of blood out there, anyone walking out of that valley alive must be God's idea of a sick joke."

His gaze drifted past the man, catching on the child standing right by the entrance. His frayed nerves snapped. "You damned brat, you've been underfoot all morning! Get out of my way!"

The child didn't move. He just watched the medic with the still, territorial stare of a small predator guarding its den.

The medic lunged forward angrily and grabbed the child roughly by the collar. He raised his arm, ready to throw him out into the rain and mud—

Krazoc didn't understand what happened.

His mind hadn't made a single decision; no sound had left his lips. He hadn't assessed a target, hadn't formed a plan. And yet his body moved with a terrifying autonomy entirely independent of that White Void.

In a tenth of a second he was off the cot. The moment his feet found the ground, he was already beside the medic, like a shadow cutting through the air. Before the man could even release the child's collar, Krazoc's massive hand had clamped onto his wrist like a vise. He pivoted in a perfect arc around his own axis, twisted the man's arm at an angle that threatened to break it against his back, and with his other hand seized the medic's throat and drove him face-first into the ground.

It all happened within a single heartbeat. The tent's wooden poles shuddered from the force of the impact.

As the medic's face hit the muddy ground, a scream of pain and panic tore out of him. "My arm! You're breaking my arm!"

Krazoc was in shock. He knelt over the man writhing on the ground, fighting not to be choked, a single inches from killing him. He was breathing hard. He stared in horror at his own hands, at how perfectly, how lethally they gripped the man's throat. This was no ordinary fighting reflex; this was the muscle memory of a warrior.

What am I? he screamed into the White Void in his mind. Where does this killing instinct come from? And why do I feel, in every cell of my body, like I have to protect this child?

As Krazoc searched desperately for answers in his own mind, the man beneath him went from screaming to choked, guttural rasping, but no matter how hard he tried, Krazoc couldn't loosen his grip. It was as if his body were a wound-up machine, starved for blood, refusing to stop until the threat was utterly destroyed. The fingers of his right hand began to slowly tighten, closing in on the man's windpipe, ready to crush it.

Then—he felt a light, tiny touch on his back.

The child had crept closer and quietly placed a hand on Krazoc's tense, sweat-soaked back.

It wasn't a physical touch—it went far deeper than that. From the point where the child's fingers touched him, a wave spread into Krazoc's mind like a drop of cool water. No sound echoed in his ears, but somewhere in the deepest, most feral corners of his brain, he heard something like a whisper, soothing and certain:

It's over. You can stop.

It was as if the reins of a wild, maddened horse had been pulled by a hand that was gentle but unshakable. The lethal, burning tension in Krazoc's muscles dissolved all at once. The feral urge climbing up his throat evaporated and vanished. His fingers loosened around the medic's neck. As every ounce of exhaustion in his body came flooding back tenfold, he let himself fall back, toward the child.

As Krazoc slowly straightened, the child didn't retreat from him even a single step. If anything, he pressed in closer, taking shelter right beside him, and kept his silent watch.

The medic on the ground coughed and dragged himself backward, clutching his bruised throat. His eyes were wet. "You're insane! A monster!" he shouted, spit flying from his mouth. As he scrambled toward the tent's entrance, he bellowed at the top of his lungs: "Guards! Guards, get in here!"

The man's shout proved unnecessary. The chaos outside the tent had already gone silent, replaced by the heavy, disciplined sound of armor and boots. The canvas flap opened once more, but this time not in haste—with hard authority.

The first to step inside was Commander Luvo, his black-gloved hand never leaving the hilt of his sword. Right behind him came old Seer Birek, his eyes twitching constantly, his robe soaked through, and four heavily armored guards with spears. The moment the guards took in the scene on the ground, they leveled their spear-tips at Krazoc without a second's hesitation.

Luvo's eyes, cold as the steel of his own sword, swept first over the medic crawling in terror on the ground, then to the child huddled at Krazoc's leg, and finally settled on Krazoc's face.

How had a man in this state taken down a medic in seconds?

Doesn't matter, Luvo thought. He hadn't come here for that. He needed answers, and this man was going to give them to him. By force, if he had to.

"You're going to tell me," Luvo said. There was, in his voice, both the disappointment of a child who hadn't found the gift he'd been promised, and a far more dangerous anger. "Why an elite battalion like the Sanctified Bloodlines went so deep past the border, and why, out of that godforsaken valley where this massacre took place, the two of you are the only ones left alive."

Krazoc looked at the spear-points with empty eyes. He felt no need to defend himself, no need to attack. As long as they didn't touch the child, he wouldn't move.

"I haven't done anything," Krazoc said, his voice carrying that rusted timbre. "What elite battalion? What massacre?"

A mocking curl touched Luvo's lips. "Memory loss, is it? That's the cheapest lie I've heard in any interrogation room." The commander's gaze shifted to the child pressed against Krazoc's leg. "And what about this little witness? Did he lose his memory too, out there in the rain?"

Krazoc's body registered the words before his mind did. A low, animal sound, something close to a growl, tore out of his throat, and he lunged forward to put himself between the child and the words. The guards closed in with their spears in the same instant, the steel coming to rest mere inches from the great vein of his throat.

But the child stepped out quietly from behind Krazoc's leg, moving to stand in front of him. There wasn't a trace of fear in his eyes. Krazoc clenched his jaw and forced his muscles to loosen.

"Birek," Luvo said coldly, not taking his eyes off Krazoc. "Get into the boy's mind. Let him tell me what hell happened in that valley."

Birek was too exhausted to perform the spell from a distance. He stepped forward hesitantly and placed his trembling hands on the child's temples. He would use the spell of Memory Projection.

For a few seconds, the only sounds in the tent were the rain and the men's heavy breathing. Then the Seer's chest began to rise and fall rapidly.

"What do you see?" Luvo asked impatiently.

"Darkness..." Birek murmured, eyes shut tight. His voice came from somewhere deep inside a trance. "The inside of a narrow wooden box... This man is standing in front of the boy." Birek tilted his head toward Krazoc. "He's covered in blood. He's holding the boy's shoulders... 'Stay here. Whatever you hear, whatever you see, don't come out,' he's saying. Then... the lid of the chest closes over him."

Luvo exhaled sharply through his nose. "Damn it. So he didn't see the massacre?"

"No. He stayed shut in. Only the sound of steel... the screams... But—" Birek suddenly flinched violently and yanked his hands away from the boy's head as if he'd touched fire. The old man's face had gone the color of chalk; he stumbled backward in horror.

"But what?!" Luvo shouted.

"What he felt... Luvo, this isn't a child's fear of the dark." Birek's voice was shaking. His eyes were fixed on Krazoc. "It's as if... while he was inside that chest, he felt the desperation of the men dying outside, the maddened fury of a monster, and the crushing loneliness of death—all of it, in his own soul... This child... he lived through the savagery of that massacre in his own heart."

Luvo did not like what he was hearing, not one bit. He regarded such things as useless excess sentiment and metaphysical nonsense. "Useless," he muttered. He fixed his eyes back on Krazoc. "Leave the boy. Look into the man's memories."

Birek swallowed and turned to Krazoc this time.
The Seer looked into Krazoc's eyes and tried to slip in through that thin border of the Essence of Consciousness.

One second. Two seconds.

Birek's eyes flew open. The hands holding Krazoc's head began to shake violently. The old man reeled backward, breathless, like a predator hunting in the dark who suddenly realizes it has become the prey. He dropped to his knees.

"What do you see now, old man?" Luvo asked, easing his hand slightly off his sword.

"N-nothing..." Birek stammered. He stared at Krazoc, at this void wearing the shape of a man, with eyes full of dread. "He's not lying. He has no memories. No past. The inside of his head is like a bottomless well of white marble..."

Birek swallowed with difficulty, his voice dropping to a fear-soaked whisper. "...And at the very bottom of that well lies something raw—a power with no shape."

Luvo's grip on his sword tightened again. Being here was no accident. He had followed a lead that had slipped out of the political webs within the Empire, from the Director of the Royal Intelligence, and found himself in the middle of this lake of blood.

"Put him and the boy in chains. They're not going back to the Empire. The roots of the Tree of Wisdom will fill that bottomless well in his mind."

"Commander..." Birek began hesitantly. His voice was still shaking. "The Tree's Keepers have their own rules. Bringing someone like this before them, especially... they read the memories themselves, and tell us only what serves their purposes. They keep the rest for themselves. We may not get the whole truth."

Luvo didn't answer for a moment. His eyes moved from Krazoc, to the child, to the bloody trails stretching across the muddy floor of the tent. "Then we'll make do with what the Keepers leak to us, Seer." His voice was tired but resolute. "If this door closes, I have no other door left."

Birek didn't object, but it was plain from the old man's face that he didn't share the decision.

Krazoc didn't object either. As the spears closed in around him, all he felt was the small hand at his leg tightening its grip, just a little more.

Luvo looked at Krazoc one last time. What would the roots of the Tree of Wisdom find, in that bottomless well? he wondered.

Or worse—what would they wake?