Ryn could not contain his heavy, shuddering sobs. One of his father’s legs was entirely missing, taken off at the thigh, where now a stump stained what was left of his trousers and the grass around him red.

“D-Dad…” Ryn spluttered. “You’re hurt...here, let me help you…” He knelt down next to his father but he had no idea what to do. He had no idea what he was saying. He was just speaking for the sake of saying something. His tears continued to leak down his eyes.

Should I tie up the wound? His hands were shaking. Should I try to do something to stop the bleeding? His whole world, all the safety he had ever known, was disappearing from him.

Ryn reached out towards his father’s leg.

“No!” his father said, insistent though his voice was still weak. “Leave it, son… I am past help…”

Ryn looked into his Dad’s eyes. They were hazel-brown, like his own, ornamented with wrinkles. “I don’t want you to die, Dad…” he whispered truthfully through his tears. He didn’t know what else to say. He just said what he felt.

“I know, I know son…” His Dad cupped Ryn’s cheek with his hard, calloused palm, tough and leathery from his years working in the fields. “But you must...listen...”

“Shhh, Dad,” Ryn said, pressing his own hand against the back of his Dad’s, treasuring it while it was still warm. “Don’t talk...”

“No...Ryn...listen… left inside pocket... my jerkin... now.”

“What--?”

“Take it now.”

Though it was inhibited, Ryn had only heard that tone a handful of times in his life before--once when he had left the door to the chicken coop open all night, and maybe once when he had broken his mother’s favourite vase.

He made his trembling hands obey and reached inside his father’s jerkin for its inner pocket. Inside was a hard round object. He drew it out and examined it: a gold band, with a bright, oval, red ruby set into it.

“Do not hold it up!” his father spoke again urgently. “Hide it!”

Ryn immediately slipped the ring into his own shirt’s front pocket. What is happening? This made no sense. None of this made any sense… the senseless destruction, the senseless death, and now why had his father asked him to take this ring?

His father spoke more quietly now, still looking into Ryn’s eyes, and it seemed that the last of the light was going out of his own hazel-brown gaze. “That...is the reason the Empire came here today…” said his father.“I don’t know how they...found out about it…” his father went on, “...but they took us by surprise...I didn’t even get a chance to use it…”

“Use it? What do you mean ‘use it’, Dad?”

“Just listen!” His father’s eyebrows creased up in irritation for a moment, then he coughed hard and some blood spilled from his lips, trickling in lines down his chin. “Don’t have long… Ryn...you must protect this ruby now...at all costs...do not let it fall into the hands of the Empire...Run, my son….you must...run…”

“Where? Run where, Dad?” was all that Ryn could ask.

But his father’s eyes had lost focus. His mouth stayed part open, the shape of the last ‘n’ sound it had formed still on it, and a long, chill breath escaped from it…

His father’s eyes glazed over, no longer looking at Ryn or at anything. His father’s expression froze in place, all colour draining from it, and his face began to stiffen.

“Dad!” Ryn called out. “No! Don’t leave me here!” He buried his head in his father’s unmoving chest and sobbed uncontrollably into the sweat-soaked wool.

“We’ve got a straggler here!” shouted a man’s voice. “Someone forgot to cut down this whelp!”

Shock spasmed through Ryn. He stood and span.

Two Imperial soldiers bearing down on him, about twenty paces away across the square of littered corpses. These ones wore square black helmets, with horizontal slits for their eyes.

Run. His father had told him to run. Run, Ryn, run.

Ryn span again on his heel, making to dash off in the opposite direction, but his foot caught on his father’s body and he tripped. He fell on to his dead father, but put his hands out to break his fall and bounced off him, turning and landing on his back on the dust floor.

Ryn pushed himself up on his elbows, and froze.

The soldier was just a step away from him, his sword raised high in preparation. This is it.

The world slowed down and took on an unusual clarity. Ryn could pick out every detail of the soldier’s jet black armour, the dents and smudges on his breastplate, the mud spattering his greaves, the gleam of his gauntlets in the light from the burning buildings, the glint in his irises as they looked out from the horizontal slit of his helmet.

Accompanying them, images from Ryn’s brief life flashed across his mind’s eye, bringing a whole range of different emotions with them in a few short moments: joy at playing treasure-maps with his mother and father out in the fields as a small boy, sadness on the day they had buried his grandmother in the ground at the shrine, longing at the sight of Carlotia, the girl he liked from his lessons, turning and smiling at him in class, the Summer sun playing through her hair.

And then in his mind he saw his mother’s pale white face twisting up in horror as a man’s sword ran her through, and the shock surged through his body again. He saw his father’s hazel-brown eyes dimming and losing focus as he passed away, and a pang of grief followed.

The very last feeling Ryn was left with as the soldier’s bloody sword arced down through the air towards him was despair. What was the point of it all? he thought. A few short moments of happiness and now I’m going to die. I haven’t even lived very long yet. What was the point?

Only, it wasn’t the very last feeling he felt.

Just as the soldier’s blade came down towards him, red hot anger exploded out of Ryn.

“NO!” he shouted, at the soldier, at the world, at death.

Fire came out from Ryn.

He felt no heat, except for the heat of the anger that filled his heart, but shimmering orange flames leapt from his body, from his mouth, from his head, from his chest, from his arm and open hand which he instinctively held up and thrust towards the soldier.

The soldier’s blade disappeared in the torrent of flame. For a heartbeat Ryn’s vision was obscured by the inferno he had unwittingly released, and then…

...as quickly as they had appeared, the flames receded, disappearing entirely, leaving only tendrils of black smoke twisting up from Ryn’s unharmed body and the air around him, hissing.

Ryn looked down at the soldier who had been about to kill him.

The man lay spread-eagled on his back. His armour was sooty and scorched. His face was a mess of deep pink burns, the skin singed away entirely, leaving charred muscle underneath. His eyes had melted.

Ryn looked at his hand, his mouth hanging open, dumb with astonishment. His whole body trembled.

The second soldier still stood nearby. Ryn couldn’t see his eyes through the visor of his helmet. He stood statued in place, facing Ryn, saying nothing.

Without thinking about it, Ryn extended his hand at this soldier, palm out, and willed for the fire to reappear and consume this man too.

Nothing happened.

Ryn thrust his hand out at the soldier again.

Nothing.

He tried a few more times, then shook his hand, wobbling it up and down, as if that would fix whatever had stopped the fire from appearing.

The soldier began to laugh a cautious, nervous laugh; the laugh of a man whose life has just been spared by accident.

Another unhelmeted soldier appeared at the man’s side, walking up to stand alongside him.

This one had flame-red hair and an animal mouth-twitch.

“Hm,” said the new arrival. “Funny that you should have it. I stuck your mother earlier, didn’t I? You didn’t use it on me then. And it looks like you don’t know how to use it again now either.”

That was his mother’s lifeblood still staining the blade of man talking to him.

“Take this one alive,” the man said to the other soldier. “Now.”

“Yes sir, General Vorr!”

The soldier began to walk towards Ryn.

Ryn frantically shook his hand up and down, desperately willing for whatever had just happened to happen again.

It didn’t.

Pain rang briefly through his head as something bashed into the side of it.

Darkness took him.