Small Fires, Small Smiles.
The sun was low when the first wagon wheel broke. A loose stone, half-buried in frost, had wrenched the iron-bound rim clean from the axle. The wheel rolled ten feet before collapsing on its side as if exhausted by the journey itself.
Red and Jane had just watched the entire event transpire in silent bitter grace.
Jane laughed. A short tired sound, not bitter, not mocking, just the kind of laugh one gives when the road's been too long and the world too big.
Red crouched beside the damage, his hands already moving with practice to repair the wheel.
From the wagon, smiling faintly "that's the third one."
Replying gruffly "Fourth, you forgot the spare." She raised a brow, but said nothing. Both knew how to count and neither cared to win.
Swaddled in overlapping folds of wool and soft fur two tiny bodies stirred, Cassia fussing again. Always first to cry.
Anecus, ever the opposite lay staring, studying the canvas above him with unnerving silence, as if already studding. Understanding the shape of the world.
Jane leaned over them, humming something soft, something wordless. Her silver hair had grown long and unkempt from months without a proper trim.
Red couldn't help but think the opposite, she'd never looked more radiant. Not even when she wore the high robes of the Halls Of Hearing.
Red carried the broken wheel aside. The sun falling fast, purple bleeding into black at the horizons of the sky. He worked quickly and silently, when he returned Jane was still humming that sweet toon.
The twins cradled like they were the only warmth left in the world.
This was their life now, one full year on the road, from the outer vessels of the Empire. Through burned fields, ghost villages, and unnamed ridgelines. Now, only a couple months from the Goldenfields.
They survived, one step, meal or wagon repair at a time. The babies? They thrived, explored. Cassia had begun definitely trying to sit up early, arms flailing, eyes burning with fierce curiosity.
Anecus had barely cried once throughout this journey. Sometimes they had to check his breathing just to be sure.
Jane carried them both constantly, one on her back and the other against her chest. Red had made a comment once, out of care
Suggesting she put them down, just for an hour. Jane had fixed him with a look so fierce he almost apologized without thinking.
He never brought it up again but he'd be lying if he said it didn't sting.
He missed her weight in his arms, missed her eyes on him, not as the father of her children, but as him. If the others could see him now, they'd act like the sacred 12 had returned.
Only a woman could tame a living cataclysm that a 5 star Pillar was.
That night, when the fire was crackling low and the children finally slept, he lay beside her under the thick furs. Jane curled around Anecus, with Cassia nestled between her knees.
Red watched her face in the firelight, the exhaustion, the love. The total surrender to motherhood.
Somewhere, deep in the quiet corners of his soul he whispered to himself 'Redgwrick You're not a weapon anymore. You're a father. But even so the danger was coming.
Soon, they would enter the untamed region. Where Depravity slept beneath roots and beasts walked with no fear of flame or sword.
Where the maps fade.
The road narrowed until it wasn't a road at all, just a trail. Just memories of wagons that passed long before, and then even those paths ceased. crossing a dry ravine where the last guidepost laid broken, the last remnants of human influence touched the lands.
Until the Goldenfields.
The Untamed Region, Between the Empire and Goldenfields Between what men could claim, and what they were never meant to.
Even the wind changed, it stopped carrying smells, and started carrying warnings. It made the skin crawl, even when nothing was there.
Red felt it first not with his eyes but in the twitch behind his right shoulder. The way the wagon groaned too sharply, the way birds stopped singing two ravines back.
Red with a flat tone, not of a father or husband, but of a man who has survived. "We're in it."
looking up from where she was nursing Anecus she didn't ask any questions, didn't need to. She simply reached behind her and checked the strap holding Cassia tight to her back. Then she nodded.
That was the last conversation they had for three days.
At night Red Masked the wagon by pressing is palms to it and made a Vector field that bent the light.
To anyone or anything passing…if anything stilled walked on two feet here, the wagon would appear only as motionless wind, or shifting grass, or emptiness.
From this point forward, it seemed like Red traveled alone.
When setting up camp in natural hollows or buried thickets Red would leave.
Not for supplies but war. At first it was just minor beasts, starless. little more than mutated wolves, oversized crows, and crawling things.
Red dispatched them without effort. Methodical, Efficient, Clean. He used only what was necessary.
A Vector Splice here, a sudden strike there. Vector was a ruthless Pillar it was widely viewed as the strongest of the Pillars do to its raw ability to effect the physical world.
The world had a way of balancing things out. There only being 8 known Vectors alive it brought a level of mysticism to them.
The deeper they went into the Untamed Region the more twisted things became. It wasn't until a clearing of dead trees with unnatural levels of elasticity started to call his name…it sounded like Jane, But the mingled whispers in the air gave it away.
Red wasn't someone to fall to such tricks either way.
Knowing the inevitable would happen if he didn't walk into that veiled clearing, Red started to walk. Not with worry, not with rage, but with cold calculation.