What is left when everything you love turns to ash?
A ghost.
A ghost haunted by a single word.
Live.
The word was a brand on his soul.
It was a fire in the gray, silent haze of his shock.
But his body did not want to live. His mind did not want to live.
He stood in the doorway, a hollowed-out shell, as the world burned down around him.
He watched as Grandmaster Valerius, his face a mask of smug satisfaction, strode over to his father's body.
He watched as the Grandmaster placed a booted foot on Kazimir's head, a final, petty act of desecration.
"So ends the Ashen Wolf," Valerius announced to his weary, blood-soaked knights. "A lesson to all who would defy the Order. Burn this place to the ground. Leave nothing but ash. I want no shrine to this traitor."
The knights moved to obey, their torches casting a hellish, dancing light on the red snow.
They were laughing.
They were laughing as they threw their torches onto the roof of his home.
The home where his mother had sung to him. The home where his father had taught him.
The dry wood and thatch caught fire instantly. The flames roared, hungry and orange.
The Sanctuary was becoming a pyre.
Adrian did not move.
He should have run. He should have hidden in the cellar as his mother had pleaded.
But he could not.
His feet were rooted to the floor. He was a statue of grief, waiting for the fire to claim him, too.
It would be a mercy.
A hand, rough and heavy, suddenly clamped down on his shoulder.
It was not a gentle hand. It was hard and calloused, the grip like iron.
He was yanked backward, away from the doorway, away from the sight of his burning home.
He stumbled, his legs clumsy and unresponsive.
"Not this way, pup," a gruff voice snarled in his ear. "The Wolf's last command was to live. We will obey."
He looked up.
It was a man he had seen only a few times, a grizzled old trapper who sometimes came down from the high peaks to trade furs with his father. His name was Gregor.
His face was a roadmap of wrinkles and old scars, his beard a tangle of gray and black. His eyes were the color of chips of ice.
He was not smiling. He never smiled.
He was all business. The business of survival.
"They'll be searching the cottage," Gregor grunted, his voice like rocks grinding together. "They'll find the cellar. We go another way."
He half-dragged, half-carried Adrian through the back of the cottage, into the small pantry where his mother had stored her herbs and preserves. The air still smelled of dried lavender and rosemary.
A memory threatened to surface. Adrian's mind, too fractured to handle it, shoved it back into the darkness.
Gregor kicked at a section of the stone wall. It swung inward, revealing a dark, narrow passage.
The air that wafted out was cold and damp, smelling of earth and stone and deep, hidden places.
"Your father was a paranoid bastard," Gregor said, not without a hint of respect. "Always had a way out. Now get in."
He shoved Adrian into the tunnel.
The darkness was absolute.
Gregor followed, pulling the stone door shut behind them.
The sound of the fire, the crackle of burning wood, the triumphant shouts of the knights—it was all gone, muffled by a ton of rock.
They were plunged into a silence as profound as the one that had fallen over the valley just before the attack.
A tomb-like silence.
Gregor lit a small, oil-soaked torch. The sudden flame was blinding.
It cast long, dancing shadows on the narrow, roughly hewn walls of the tunnel.
"Move," Gregor commanded, his voice echoing in the small space.
And so, Adrian moved. He did not know where he was going. He did not care.
He was a puppet, his strings cut, being dragged along by a man who smelled of pine sap and old leather.
He walked, leaving behind the ashes of his life.
He walked, carrying the weight of his father's last command.
A command he did not want.
A life he did not ask for.
The memory faded, the edges blurring like smoke.
The cold, damp darkness of the tunnel gave way to a different kind of cold.
The cold of mud and ash seeping through his clothes.
The smell of earth was replaced by the stench of burning wood and death.
He was kneeling. In the snow. In the mud.
His face was wet.
He touched his cheek. Tears. He had been crying without knowing it.
He was back.
Back in the smoldering ruins of Silvercreek.
Back in the present, a place that was just as much a nightmare as the past.
He was kneeling before the body of the small, dead girl.
The wooden wolf doll still clutched in her hand.
For a long moment, he did nothing. He just knelt there, the past and present a tangled, bleeding knot in his mind.
The ghost of the boy he was, and the ghost he had become, were at war within him.
The boy wanted to lie down in the ash and die with this little girl, to finally disobey his father's final, cruel command.
The ghost, the hunter, the thing Gregor had forged in the harsh wilderness for six long years, had other ideas.
It saw the girl not just as a tragedy, but as a failure.
His failure.
These people were dead because of him.
And then, a new feeling began to crystalize out of the storm of his grief and guilt.
It was not the hot, explosive rage he had felt before.
It was something colder. Something harder. Something purer.
It was a cold, absolute certainty.
A purpose.
His father had been wrong.
Peace was a lie. Mercy was a weakness. Hope was a fool's dream.
The world was not a place to be lived in. It was a place to be purged.
The Order, Valerius, every knight, every mage, every man who had stood by and watched his world burn—they were a plague.
And he was the cure.
His grief did not disappear. It hardened. It transformed.
It became the whetstone upon which he would sharpen his soul.
His guilt did not vanish. It became the fuel for the fire that would burn his enemies from the world.
He slowly, deliberately, reached out.
His fingers, trembling slightly, closed around the small wooden wolf clutched in the dead girl's hand.
He pried it gently from her grasp.
He stood up.
The pain in his ribs was a distant, unimportant ache.
His tears had stopped. His face was a mask of cold, serene resolve.
He was no longer the boy from the Sanctuary. He was no longer the ghost of Ravenport.
He was something new. Something terrible.
He looked at the wooden wolf in his hand, then looked down at the wolf fang amulet still resting on his chest.
Control the wolf, his father had said.
He had it wrong. The wolf was not a thing to be controlled.
It was a thing to be unleashed.
He reached into his tunic and pulled out his father's journal.
He ignored the name of Tiberius, a name that already felt like it belonged to another lifetime.
He looked at the next name on the list.
Lysandra, the Silver Huntress.
The knight the Order had tasked with hunting him personally.
The one they sent when they wanted a ghost caught.
She would be looking for him in the mountains near the pass.
Good.
Let her hunt.
But she was no longer the hunter.
He was.
"I am coming for you," he whispered to the wind, his voice calm and steady. The promise of a coming storm.
And this time, when he walked away from the dead, he did not feel empty.
He felt a purpose.
He felt like a god of vengeance, ready to begin his sermon of blood and ash.