The boy woke to unfamiliar voices outside his home. They were quiet, almost completely muted by distance and insulation. But there was no caution in their tone, nor any of the respect due when standing before his father's home. He dressed quickly, throwing on his tunic and breeches, and tying his training sword to his belt with simple twine. There was tension in each motion, as he gently eased open the door.

It was dawn, creeping tendrils of light peeking over the horizon. They gave just enough illumination to grant the boy vision of his father's meadow. Two beings stood there, beside his birth-tree. The first was a man in a red cloak, facing away from the home. He was crouched in the grass, his hands running across the green grass. He had no weapon that the boy could see, and was immediately dismissed as a threat.

The second person was more concerning. She wasn't human, that much was clear. Her skin was unnaturally dark, and something about her posture sent a thrill of fear through him. The boy was untested as a warrior, but his sense of danger had been honed from a lifetime of living at the edge of the Barrens. His father had been careful in teaching him to recognize the signs of a predator.

Furthermore, she was armed. She kept a long, straight sword sheathed at her hip, and an oddly shaped dagger in the sash acting as her belt. The hilt of the sword was wrapped in cord and clearly weathered from use. The boy noted her lack of armor, and exposed skin with clinical interest. She was a warrior who held no fear for her own well-being. Strong or stupid. Both options carried their own dangers.

The woman was examining his birth-tree, her hand running along the grooves and nicks along its trunk. Anger flared inside of him at the sight; the casual disrespect, the disregard of privacy. There was a safe distance between these strangers and his home, so he strolled out the door and called out to them, not bothering to hide the budding rage in his tone, "Ho, strangers! For what purpose have you come?"

Neither flinched at his words, he observed. There was no surprise there, meaning they had known of his existence. He was not as stealthy as he'd hoped, it seemed. Neither turned at first, seeming to hold a brief, muted conversation between themselves. The boy could not make out the words, but he could feel the almost visible disrespect wafting off the pair.

Finally, the man in red turned to face him. The boy found the man's eyes, and forced himself not to react to the clouded silver that matched his gaze. They seemed to regard him with almost supernatural intensity, peering into him like his father often had. Seeing beyond his skin and into something deeper, that the boy could not access nor control. He despised the familiarity that this stranger invoked.

"Who are you?" he demanded once more. "Why have you come here?"

The man cocked his head. His eyes closed, narrowing into slits as he grinned roguishly. With a sweeping motion, to include his companion, he announced, "We are thieves, come in the night to rob you. But we were distracted by this fascinating tree and lovely meadow."

The boy was flabbergasted for only a moment, before his face hardened into steel. Fury coursed through him, righteous and burning. Before he'd formed a conscious thought, his sword was in his hand, and he was dashing forward across the meadow. He was the son of the Hero of Farathun. When faced with an enemy, he did not retreat, he advanced.

Years of practice guided his form. He'd executed the same strike thousands of times, but never against an enemy. It was the danger, perhaps, that let him make the connection. The Memory of his ancestors, of the Heroes who came before him, answered his call with eager ease. The same strike that they had made, one echoing into hundreds echoing into thousands. Every strike, with the same purpose. With the same result.

For the briefest of moments, the boy burned with power. The meadow blurred beneath his feet as he flashed across a sea of green blades. His grip was steel. His training blade became an extension of his own arm, united in grim purpose. His target was the woman, the one who bore a weapon. The threat. His vision narrowed on her slitted eyes, as they went from distant pinpricks to looming chasms.

The air screamed as his blade ripped it apart. He gave no warning, no battle cry. Only a grunt of effort as he put the entirety of his being into a single motion. A single strike! The perfect cut! His ancestors struck alongside him, generations of Heroes all mirroring his movement. Their form guided his own, finally, finally, unleashed.

An unstoppable advance!

There was no reaction from the woman. Not even at the final moment. Her eyes bored unceasingly into his own, judging him. Judging him! He was ready for her to dodge, to try and parry, to do anything. His eyes were keen, his reactions honed. His strike was an unerring inevitability from which there could be no escape.

There was a blur of dark skin and a mountain collided with his blade. The boy's grip was steel, but it shattered like brittle glass. He had just enough time to register a flash of amusement on his enemy's face, before his world lurched, his vision tilted, and his back slammed into something solid. Then, darkness.

He woke facing the sky.

"Welcome back," a man's voice said from somewhere beyond his sight.

The boy sat up, slowly. He wasn't dead, which was nice. His mind was clearer, and his anger had cooled as an inevitable result of losing consciousness.

He turned to face the blind man, belatedly realizing that his sword was missing. It was held in the hands of the woman who had struck him down, and she twirled it between her fingers with disinterest. She loomed behind the man, towering over the both of them. The gaze she laid on the boy made him feel like an insect.

He swallowed deeply, and said to her, "That was a splendid blow."

Her lips lazily curled upwards.

"You are not thieves," the boy continued. It was a statement of fact.

The blind man regarded him with interest. "No? Why so certain?" He jerked his head over his shoulder. "She's got your sword, y'know?"

The boy frowned. "Spoils, won fairly. And I am certain because I am not dead." His frown deepened. He would need to acquire a new blade. Somehow.

"That simple, is it?" the man in red chuckled. "Very well, boy, you have the right of it. We are not thieves."

The boy shook his head, wincing at the ache he felt. "Why pretend?"

"Your father said you were cautious and disciplined," the blind man answered, and the boy's head jerked up to meet his clouded eyes. "Father's often boast about their sons. I wanted to see the truth of you."

"He's lying," the woman interrupted with a snort, and the boy glanced to her. Her smile widened. "Your old man boasted about you, but that's not the reason. He made a joke, and you reacted poorly. Don't fall for the wise man act."

"A joke—? No." The boy's brain fixed on a single fact. "You knew my father?"

"Mm, we did," the man in red hummed, quickly seizing upon the change of subject. He gestured to himself, then his companion. "You may call me the Keeper, and this is my traveling companion, Eurya."

The boy searched his Memory, but the titles were unfamiliar. "He has never spoken of you."

"He wouldn't," the Keeper acknowledged. "Your King had forbidden it, and your father was always a devoted servant."

The boy smiled slightly at the compliment, but paused. "The All-King has forbidden your presence?"

Eurya scoffed, but the Keeper quickly corrected the boy. "No. Merely our legends." The boy did not understand, but the Keeper did not elaborate.

"I see," he said, even though he didn't. "If you've come to speak to my father, I'm afraid that his time has passed. He resides with the gods, now."

"We know," the Keeper replied. "We came to see you. To... check in on you, and ensure you are being taken care of."

"I am well," the boy replied quickly. And he was. The battle with Eurya, brief as it was, had taught him much. It was a gift, and one he had not even asked for. He would ask no more.

"I see." The Keeper's gaze unsettled him. "You have food? Water? Supplies to last you?"

"I have enough," the boy said. He glanced to Eurya, who had wandered away, and was standing once more at his birth-tree. She continued to twirl the boy's blade as she ran her hand over the pockmarked bark of the sturdy evertree. "Though, I would like to barter for the return of my sword, if possible."

"You made these marks, using this sword?" the woman asked, tapping a notch with her finger.

The boy nodded with the respect due to his father's peers. "I did."

"Why?" she asked with what seemed genuine puzzlement.

He considered how to explain it. The technique involved in the family's blade art was a secret, but it couldn't hurt to explain his goal, nor the task his father had left him.

"Because father ordered me to," he replied. "I shall bear no steel nor go to war before this tree has fallen. I will remain here until the deed is done."

Eurya hummed to herself, knocking a knuckle against the tree. "I think this was a task he meant for you to fail, no?"

The boy did not understand, and he said so.

"This sword," Eurya explained, waving his blade, "cannot cleave through this tree. Not in your hands. Not as you are."

It was amazing how quickly an opinion can turn. The boy flushed at the disrespect, at the casual dismissal of his existence. Anger rose up again, accompanied by bitterness. How many times had he failed? But he was growing stronger by the day. Better by the day. The strike he had unleashed against this woman might have cut halfway through the trunk. She was stronger than him, true, but that did not give her the power to dictate his destiny.

The words slipped out without thought. "You can't know that."

His assertion hung in the air like the stillness before the storm.

"I know that it is an impossible task," Eurya stated with what seemed like amusement.

The boy considered her answer. Her words carried the weight of authority; experience and skill culminating into fact. He acknowledged their validity. Then disregarded them.

"What of it?" the boy demanded.

That seemed to take her off guard. The woman considered his question for a long moment, then smiled.

"Perhaps that Valka knew what he was doing," she murmured, almost too low for the boy to catch.

Then she turned on her heel, in a flowing motion so fast that he could barely follow it. The loose silks covering her body smoothed out like ripples on the surface of a pond. They pulled tight against her skin, dragged inexorably in the direction demanded of them. She walked forward— No that couldn't be right. She surged forward, but the motion was so obviously effortless that his brain struggled to reconcile the disparity. It was as if each step took her many times the distance that it should. Her movement took her towards his evertree; that unmovable monument to his failure. It stood there, a cliff side for waves to crash against.

The woman moved through it, as if it had never been an obstacle at all. Between steps, without breaking stride, she simply appeared on the other side. The only sign that something was amiss was the almost lazy flick of her hand, fingers fisted around the hilt of a nonexistent blade.

And the evertree—

It shuddered, then tilted, then fell. And the boy's world came crashing down alongside it.