The Last Stand of Two

The ancient forest held its breath.

Trees older than memory loomed in every direction, their gnarled canopies swallowing the sky whole. The ground, once blanketed in roots and moss, had been scorched bare - stripped of all life by the sheer force of the battle being waged above it. Not a single leaf stirred. Even the wind had retreated.

Twenty feet overhead, suspended in the air as though gravity were merely a suggestion, stood a figure draped in a sweeping black cloak. A panther mask covered every inch of his face - expressionless, absolute. His presence radiated something wrong, something that made the air itself feel heavier.

Below him, two figures stood their ground.

The man was thirty years old, with jet-black hair matted against his forehead and faint navy-blue eyes that had long since stopped calculating odds. He held a sword - barely. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth in a slow, steady stream, and his legs trembled with every breath.

Beside him stood the woman he loved: twenty-eight years old, her long dark-green hair tangled and damp, her matching green eyes fierce even now. Her left arm was gone. Gone - severed somewhere in the madness of the fight - and blood still poured freely from the wound. With her remaining hand, she gripped her sword like it was the last thing tethering her to the world.

They were losing. They had already lost.

But neither of them had fallen yet.

Kenshiro moved first.

He poured the last dregs of his aether into his blade that fragile combination of mana and stamina that every fighter burned through like a candle in a storm - and hurled himself upward with a ragged scream.

Fade Light Rain!

Droplets of liquid light erupted from his blade and cascaded upward like a reverse rainfall, each one burning with a cold, silver glow. They peppered the masked man a distraction, a prayer - and Kenshiro lunged through the shower with his sword aimed at the throat of the enemy.

He never reached him.

The rain stopped mid-air. Kenshiro felt it the instant it happened - the hollow, bottomless sensation of an empty well. His aether was gone. Every last drop. His body seized, momentum carrying him forward even as his power deserted him entirely.

The masked man raised one hand. Unhurried. Contemptuous.

Starfall Infusion.

A lance of deep crimson light tore through the air and struck Kenshiro dead-on. He didn't scream. The impact simply erased his momentum and sent him plummeting - a broken comet tumbling back to the earth.

He hit the ground beside Sona with a sound that made her flinch.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. The forest was silent. Even the masked man above them had gone still, watching.

Then Kenshiro turned his head toward her - slowly, painfully - and found what little air remained in his lungs.

Kenshiro:
"Sona... go home. Save our child. Please."

Sona stared at him. Her sword slipped from her fingers.

Sona:
"I can't go without you. I won't."

Kenshiro:
"Forget about me." His voice cracked on the last word, but his eyes held steady, certain, and full of something that had no name. "Forget about me and go. Save our child, Sona."

She was crying. She hadn't noticed when it started - only that her vision was blurring and her chest felt like something inside it had caved in. She pressed her remaining hand over her mouth. Then she nodded.

It was the hardest thing she had ever done.

She gathered the last of her own aether - a thin, guttering flame - and shaped it into a single word.

Grigor!

The world folded. The forest vanished.

She reappeared inside a medium-sized wooden house, gasping, stumbling forward onto her knees. The familiar scent of the place - timber, hearth smoke, something like home - hit her all at once.

Her child was there. A boy of only six months - impossibly small, impossibly peaceful. Fine wisps of black hair dusted his head, threaded faintly with traces of dark green, as though both his parents had left their mark on him. His eyes, half-lidded in the drowsy way of infants, were dark green - her eyes, looking back at her. He was warm and soft and entirely unaware that his world had just shattered.

Sona dragged herself to the back door - the strange one, the one that looked like a doorway but was in truth a wormhole, its frame connecting this house to another home in another world entirely. She opened it. Beyond the threshold, the air shimmered with a faint, alien light.

She placed her child beyond it.

Then she closed the door.

She sat back on her heels in the empty house, eyes shut, and spoke the final word she had left in her.

Aegis Field.

An invisible barrier bloomed outward from the house a last act of protection, soundless and invisible, drawn from a body that had nothing more to give.

The aether ran dry.

The wounds caught up with her all at once.

Sona sank slowly to the floor, and the house grew very quiet.

***

The forest was still.

The masked man descended slowly, his black cloak settling around him as his boots touched the scorched earth without a sound. He stood over Kenshiro's body and looked down at it the way one might glance at something already forgotten.

He reached out with his senses - the subtle, practised sweep of a man who had done this many times before. He searched for mana. That faint, ever-present hum that flows through every living body like blood through veins.

Nothing.

Not a flicker. Not a trace. The current that had once burned so fiercely inside Kenshiro had gone completely dark as cold and still as a river frozen solid in the dead of winter.

He listened next. Pressed his awareness deeper, past flesh and silence, searching for the one thing that could not be faked.

No heartbeat.

Not a murmur. Not a dying flutter. Nothing at all.

Kenshiro was dead.

The masked man straightened. A sound rose from behind the panther mask low at first, then louder, curling upward into something dark and thoroughly pleased with itself.

Masked Man:
"Mission accomplished." He let the laughter settle before he spoke again, his voice carrying easily through the dead trees. "They were too weak..."

He laughed again. The sound echoed through the barren clearing and faded into the trees, and the forest swallowed it whole.

*
*
*

Somewhere far away - in another world, on the floor of a house he had never asked to arrive in - a baby cried.

He did not know why. He could not know why. He was six months old, and the only world he understood was warmth and voices and the steady rhythm of his mother's heartbeat.

All of that was gone now.

So he cried - small fists trembling, dark green eyes squeezed shut, alone on the floor in the silence as the chapter that had begun with two people in love came quietly, irrevocably, to its end.