For three days and three nights, Kestrel kept watch over a miracle she didn't believe in, in a wasteland that defied belief.
The first day was pure, animal terror. She'd dragged Arrion's shattered, dust-choked body onto the waxed canvas tarp and used the ropes from his pack to fashion a crude travois harness for Briar. The warhorse, steadier now that the unearthly presence was gone, complied with a mournful patience. She moved them off the unnervingly flat epicenter, finding a shallow, rocky depression that offered meager shelter from the wind that now scoured the powdered hills.
He didn't wake. His breathing was a wet, shallow rasp that seemed to catch on the splinters of his own ribs. She knew broken men. They died. They died screaming, or they died quiet, their insides turning to mush. This man should have been dead ten times over.
Then the magic began.
It started subtly. A faint, greenish glow emanating from the thorn embedded at his sternum, pulsing in time with his struggling heart. Then, as the first moon rose, the smell arrived—not the stink of infection, but the clean, sharp scent of ozone after a storm, mixed with the deep, loamy perfume of a forest after rain.
Tendrils of shimmering, verdant light, like luminous moss, crept from the thorn, weaving over his chest. Tiny, impossible shoots of vibrant green grass and delicate, star-shaped white flowers sprouted in the blood-and-dust-caked grooves of his armor, growing, blooming, and withering in a accelerated cycle of life and decay that seemed to be knitting something beneath.
Simultaneously, a low, gathering hum filled the air. Not from the thorn, but from him. From the very marrow of his broken bones. It was the sound of distant thunder, trapped and vibrating inside his flesh. Faint arcs of blue-white static, no thicker than threads, crackled along the major fracture lines she could see in his misshapen limbs—along his forearms, his shins, his collar bone. Where the green light and the lightning met, there was a soft sizzle, and the terrible, swollen discoloration would recede, the limb would subtly, infinitesimally, shift back towards a natural alignment.
She watched, mesmerized and horrified, as the two magics—one of deep, patient, boundless life, the other of raw, purgative, celestial force—worked in a tense, symbiotic dance upon the ruin of his body. The forest magic regrew, the storm magic reforged. It was not gentle. Even unconscious, his body would arch in silent agony, muscles seizing, teeth grinding loud enough to hear. Sweat, smelling of ozone and pine, would pour from him, and the travois ropes would creak with strain.
By the dawn of the second day, the worst of the swelling was gone. By noon, the grotesque angles of his limbs had visibly corrected. The green light was now a constant, gentle weave under his skin, like a subcutaneous map of a living forest. The lightning had faded to a barely perceptible tremor.
He was healing. Faster than any creature had a right to. He was being repaired by forces that belonged in epics, not in the grim, gritty reality of her life.
That was when the fear truly set in. Not fear of him dying, but fear of what he was.
She had known he was different. The sword. The bow. The sheer, stupid size of him. But this… this was something else. This was the magic of kings and myths, the kind of power that got whole villages burned by paranoid lords or sparked crusades from the Celestial Choir. She was a cutpurse from Oakhaven's middens. Her world was built on silver coins, sharp blades, and knowing when to run. His world was built on thunder and the favour of forest gods. She was in a story too big for her, and the protagonist was a barely-contained cataclysm wrapped in scarred leather.
She spent the second day in a cold, calculating fugue. The children were safe, or would be, with the carter and his letter. Her debt, the one forged of silver and threat, was technically paid. She had gotten him this far, further than anyone had a right to expect. He was alive, and mending. He didn't need a guide anymore; he needed a priest or a wizard. She was neither.
She could leave. Take Briar. The horse was strong, valuable. She could sell him in the next sorry excuse for a town, buy passage west, far from Ralke's Marches, far from gods and planar breaches. She could disappear, as she'd always been best at. The giant would either finish healing and continue his doomed quest, or he wouldn't. It was no longer her business. Survival was a selfish art.
She packed her meager belongings. She checked the water-skins. She untied Briar from the travois and began to gently coax him away. The horse resisted, turning his great head to nuzzle Arrion's still form, whickering softly.
"Come on, you great fool," she whispered, her voice thick with an emotion she refused to name. "He's not ours. We're crumbs at the foot of a mountain. Time to go."
But her feet didn't move. She stood there, in the silence of the shattered hills, and looked at him. He lay peacefully now, the pain-lines smoothed from his face, the terrible rasp of his breath eased into something deep and regular. He looked younger. He looked like a man, not a force of nature. He had given her a fortune in silver and a promise of safety for eight children she'd stolen on a whim. He had faced the thing in the hills so she could run.
He was a giant in a world of ants, and he'd chosen not to step on her.
Cursing violently, she sank back down beside the travois. She wouldn't leave. Not yet. She'd wait until he woke. She'd tell him to his face she was leaving. That was the professional thing to do.
The third day was the longest. The magic had done its work and faded, leaving him in a profound, undisturbed sleep. The thorn was dormant, just a warm, carved piece of wood. He was whole again, or seemed to be, a masterpiece of magical carpentry. She was alone with her thoughts, which circled like the carrion-birds that had begun to tentatively reappear on the edges of the devastation.
As dusk approached on the third day, a strange compulsion came over her. The thorn. It was the source. The tether to the king who had spoken in her mind in the temple. She needed to understand. Her thief's fingers, always seeking truth in the tangible, itched.
Hesitantly, she reached out. Not to take it, just to touch it, to feel the wood that had spun forests from a man's blood.
Her fingertip was an inch away when the thorn trembled.
Not a vibration. A shudder of pure, potent energy. A bolt of emerald light, silent and solid as a beam, lanced from the thorn and struck the ground before her.
Kestrel fell back, scrambling for her dagger. The light didn't fade. It coalesced, gathered, and rose.
An apparition formed. It was the Verdant King, but not as Arrion had described. This was not the majestic, physical stag, but his spirit-essence, rendered in shimmering, translucent light the colour of sun through leaves. He was smaller, life-sized, but the weight of his presence was the same—an ancient, patient, and utterly formidable will. His amber eyes, now made of condensed sunlight, fixed on her.
A voice filled her mind, not with the stormy judgment he'd used on Arrion, but with a softer, yet no less absolute, gravity. It was the sound of roots delving deep, of bark expanding in the sun.
LITTLE THIEF. YOU WHO WEAVES IN SHADOWS.
Kestrel couldn't speak. She could only stare, her heart a trapped bird in her chest.
YOU CONTEMPLATE FLIGHT. THE PATH OF THE PRAGMATIST. THE WISE PATH, FOR ONE OF YOUR SCALE.
The King's head tilted. BUT YOU STAYED. YOU WATCHED THE STORM MEND THE MOUNTAIN. YOU FELT THE WEIGHT OF THE DEBT, NOT OF SILVER, BUT OF ACTION.
"I don't understand any of this," she whispered aloud, the words torn from her.
UNDERSTANDING IS NOT REQUIRED. LOYALTY, HOWEVER FRAGILE, IS. The apparition took a step closer, its hooves leaving no imprint on the dust. THE WARDEN'S SON HAS AWAKENED EYES IN REALMS BEYOND YOUR COMPREHENSION. HE HAS SHOWN A SPARK THAT CAN BOTH MEND AND BURN THE WORLD. HIS NEXT STEPS WILL BE WALKED IN A LAND OF SERPENTS, UNDER THE GAZE OF THOSE WHO NOW MARK HIM. HIS BODY IS WHOLE, BUT HIS SPIRIT… HAS BEEN SCORCHED BY A COSMIC FIRE. HE WILL BE VULNERABLE.
The King's gaze seemed to see through her, to the core of her sharp, survivalist soul. I CHARGE YOU, KESTREL OF THE BROKEN SHRINE. KEEP HIM SAFE. NOT AS A GUIDE, BUT AS A WARDEN IN THE SMALL THINGS. BE THE EYES FOR THE THREATS HE IS TOO LARGE TO SEE. BE THE HAND THAT STEADIES WHEN THE THUNDER WITHIN HIM FALTERS. DO THIS UNTIL HE REACHES THE PLACE WHERE HIS TRUE TRIAL BEGINS.
It was an order from a god. It was also an impossible task. "I'm no warrior. I'm a shadow. I can't protect him from… from whatever that was!" She gestured at the blasted landscape.
YOU PROTECTED EIGHT SOULS IN A WORLD THAT WISHED TO GRIND THEM TO DUST. YOU WILL PROTECT ONE MORE, IN A LAND THAT WISHES TO CONSUME HIS FIRE. The King's form began to gently diffuse, like mist in morning sun. FOR YOUR SERVICE, AND FOR THE SERVICE OF THE STEADFAST HEART YOU DRAG BEHIND YOU…
The apparition lifted its head. A single, radiant breath, smelling of living soil and boundless health, washed over Kestrel and then over Briar, who stood trembling but calm.
In Kestrel, the breath did not bring magic. It brought clarity. The constant, grinding ache of old hunger-pains in her joints vanished. The fear-thrum in her veins quieted to a steady, watchful hum. Her senses didn't sharpen; they calibrated. She could suddenly separate the scent of water on stone from the scent of distant animal, could hear the scuttle of a beetle thirty yards away as distinct from the whisper of the wind. It was the blessing of a predator granted perfect focus. The blessing of the huntress, not the hunted.
For Briar, the effect was more visible. The last traces of fatigue from their ordeal melted away. His black coat, dulled by dust and sweat, regained a deep, liquid sheen. His eyes, always intelligent, now held a deeper, calmer understanding. The minor cuts and scrapes from their flight vanished. He stood taller, prouder, an avatar of enduring strength.
THE THORN WILL GUIDE YOU TO WATER, TO SAFE PASSAGE. HEED IT. KEEP HIM SAFE, LITTLE THIEF. THE FATE OF MORE THAN YOU KNOW MAY TURN ON THE SURVIVAL OF THIS ONE, BROKEN, DANGEROUS MAN.
With those final words, the apparition dissolved into a shower of emerald motes that faded on the wind.
Kestrel sat in the deepening twilight, the new stillness in her body a foreign, terrifying comfort. The compulsion to leave was gone, burned away by the divine command and the new, fierce purpose etched into her bones. She was no longer just a guide for hire. She was a warden, appointed by a king of trees. Her charge was a living weapon who didn't know his own trigger, heading into the lair of the thing that wanted to unmake the world.
She looked at Arrion's sleeping face, then at her own hands—no longer just clever, stealing hands, but steady, capable ones. She had been given a role in a story too big for her. The fear was still there, cold and deep. But under it, for the first time in her sharp, hungry life, was something else: a purpose that was not just about her own next meal. She was terrified. But she was, irrevocably, committed. The giant had bought her children's safety with silver. The forest king had just bought her loyalty with a breath. And as the first true stars appeared over the dead hills, Kestrel the thief began her first, silent watch as Kestrel the Warden.