Homecoming

Jari had known the mountain paths since childhood, and the darkness had always been his ally, but even he was surprised at how easily he slipped past the desert huts carved into the cliff face. No sentries watched the ledges. No women carried jars from the wells. No merchants shouted for coin.
The place was dead.

A village without voices was a grave, and Veyorun felt every inch a grave.

He crouched behind a tumbled wall, staring down at the streets he once raced through as a boy. The market stalls lay smashed, canvas fluttering like torn skin. Pottery shards littered the Ashspan Bridge—shattered amphorae, cracked bowls, the things of a life now abandoned. Murals that once showed his father triumphant were smeared with ash and filth, the faces gouged out with deliberate hatred.

The castle beyond—his home—was a ruin of its old pride. Moss clung to the pillars. Cracks ran down the white stone. The great banners of Veyorun no longer hung there.

Crimson hung instead.

“Father lost,” Jari murmured. The words tasted like ash. “Gods… let him be alive.”

He moved carefully through the wreckage, but the silence cracked behind him. A gasp. A woman’s breath snatched by fear.

He turned, and she was staring at him with wide, horrified eyes.

And before he could speak—

“HELP! PRINCE JARI HAS RETURNED!”

Her scream tore across the courtyard like a trumpet call, and the guards by the castle doors jerked their heads up. Their armor was a mismatched mess of stolen pieces—iron scales strapped to leather, dented shields, weapons scavenged from corpses or stolen from the armory. They weren’t his father’s men.

But they were running at him.

No choice now.

Jari drew his blade. The first guard came too fast, expecting fear, not fury. Jari stepped in, sliced the man’s arm, kicked his knee out, then drove the sword up beneath the ribs. The guard sagged, choking, and Jari shoved him aside like refuse.

More came.

He ripped another sword from a corpse’s belt and met the next man head-on. The fellow swung a scrap-axe with clumsy ferocity, but Jari knocked aside the blow, struck his shin, then lunged. The sword punched through the man’s chest, and momentum carried the body over the bridge’s railing, tumbling into the chasm below with a fading cry.

Jari snatched back the blade he’d left in the first kill. His shoulder throbbed with each movement, but pain only fed the anger boiling in his gut.

Another guard attacked—only an axe, but the man came screaming like a mad dog. Jari cut him, once, twice, three times—bloody stripes across the chest and arm—yet the man did not fall. He roared and swung wildly, and the axe head kissed Jari’s shoulder, sending fire down his arm.

Rage swallowed sense.

Jari slammed into him, drove him into the stones of the bridge, and slit the man’s throat with a single, furious sweep. Blood pooled. Jari hurled both body and sword into the chasm.

The next guard hesitated, axe shaking in his grip.

Jari hurled his own axe at him—missed. The guard ducked, shouted a curse, and came running.

Jari had only his fists now.

The man swung hard. The blade opened a burning cut across Jari’s chest, but he twisted away from the second blow, rammed his knuckles into the man’s ribs, his gut, his jaw. The guard toppled, and Jari was on him instantly, fists drumming bone, smashing the man’s head into the bridge stones until his struggles ceased.

He tore the man’s sword free—but another guard was already coming. A woman this time, helmetless, eyes wide with terror. Jari flung the dagger at her. It spun harmlessly past.

He charged.

One heavy punch to the jaw felled her like a dropped sack of grain.
And he should have stopped there. Any decent man would have stopped.

But the anger had hollowed him out.
He dragged her limp body up and struck her again. And again.
Her blood smeared across his knuckles.

When she groaned—alive still—he kicked her clean in the face, sending her rolling across the stones. He snatched her fallen axe and hurled it off the bridge, a meaningless victory over a weapon.

He barely noticed when the next man charged with a mace. Jari ducked, slammed his fist into the man’s arm, driving the weapon loose, then hammered his chest, his face, until the man sagged. Jari grabbed the back of his armor and smashed him to the ground, then took up the mace and struck—once, twice, a third time until the man was still.

There was no pause.
No breath.
No mercy.

Another guard swung an axe at Jari’s skull. He ducked by instinct alone, rammed his fist into the man’s wrist, and sent the axe spinning away. His punches became a blur, his body moving faster than his mind could follow. When the man crumpled, Jari snatched a shield from the ground and beat the guard’s skull with its rim until the metal dented.

He heaved the corpse over the bridge wall.

He reached for the mace—threw it—missed again.

A bald guard snorted. “Idiot,” he spat, and slashed.

The sword ripped a line down Jari’s cheek, hot and sudden, then cut across his chest a second later. Jari stumbled, vision blurring. The bald man seized him by the throat and carved another line across Jari’s face.

The world tilted.
Blood filled Jari’s mouth.

But he kicked—hard—between the man’s legs. The guard folded with a wheeze. Jari twisted his legs around the man’s, yanked him down, and seized the fallen axe. Desperation guided him more than skill as he slammed the blade into the man’s face.

Once.

Twice.

The bald man was dead long before Jari drove a sword into his forehead.

Jari let out a shaking breath. “Who’s the dumbass now?” he muttered, the laugh that followed sounding broken even to his own ears.

A scream cut the air behind him.

“NOT MY HUSBAND!”

A woman—not armored, not trained—snatched a sword from the ground and rushed him in grief-fueled rage.

Jari parried, but she cut him, twice, drawing blood. Shame flared like a whip’s lash.

“Gods damn it,” Jari hissed. “A civilian?”

She cut him again—three quick slashes that burned.

He stabbed her. A clumsy, desperate thrust. She crumpled, breath rattling in her throat.

Another woman came with an axe. Jari kicked her legs from under her, pinned her, drove the blade through her belly. And then, blinded by fury, he stabbed again and again until her eyes emptied.

“Remember my name,” he snarled. “I was trained better than all of you.”

The next woman rushed with twin axes, swift and fearless. Jari hurled his sword—she dodged—and he leaped on her. His fists cracked her nose, her jaw, her cheek. She slumped unconscious almost instantly.

He took her axes, crossed them, and drove both into her chest.

Another woman shrieked and swung at him. Jari hauled the dead woman’s body up as a shield; the blow landed with a sickening sound into the corpse’s back. Jari threw the body aside and tackled the living woman into the bridge wall. His hands closed on her throat as she kicked and clawed.

When she stilled, he threw her off the bridge too.

He picked up her axe… then tossed it after her.

The bridge was littered with the dead. Men. Women. Guards. Civilians.
His own people.

And Jari stood in the midst of it all—bleeding, shaking, breathing raggedly.

The slaughter did not stop.
It rolled on like a fever, like something inside Jari had broken loose and now refused to be chained again.

A woman charged him—brave or foolish, he couldn’t tell—and he barreled into her with his shoulder. She went down hard. He tore the sword from her fingers and drove it between her ribs, pushing until the blade grated on bone. She twitched once, then lay still.

Jari stepped over her and moved toward the castle gates, breath rasping in his throat.

A man came running, quicker than the rest. His blade flashed and Jari felt the sting flare across his ribs. The guard was fast—too fast for the others’ sloppy swings—but Jari caught him, slammed him down onto the stone so hard the sound echoed. The man tried to rise and Jari’s fists answered him, blow after blow, knuckles cracking on cheekbone and skull until the guard’s eyes rolled up.

Jari seized him by the throat, lifted his head, and hammered it down with a brutal, ringing thud.

The man didn’t move again.

Jari’s hands found the fallen sword. He drove it between the man’s shoulders and into his chest, a final, grim certainty.

The man’s shield lay nearby. Jari scooped it up, tossed it lightly into the air, and caught it again—a childish gesture, almost playful, and that was the worst part. Even he felt the wrongness of it.

A shout tore his attention back. Another guard rushed him. Jari raised the shield just in time; the blow shuddered through his arm like a hammer on timber. He hurled the shield into the man’s face, and the fellow stumbled. Jari followed him, fists and knees crashing into flesh. He let the man stagger upright again—gods knew why—and even beckoned him forward with a taunting flick of his fingers.

The guard attacked.
Jari slipped aside.
The blade whistled past.
Jari swung and missed. The man slashed again, but Jari ducked low, then rose with an uppercut that cracked the man’s jaw. The guard crumpled, and Jari struck him twice more, each punch dull and heavy, until the man lay limp.

The world had narrowed to blows and breath and blood.

A wheelbarrow leaned against the shattered remains of a stall. Jari seized it, muscles screaming, and swung it into a female guard sprinting toward him. The wooden frame smashed her legs out from beneath her. She shrieked, and Jari kicked her hard in the ribs. He hauled her upright by one arm and struck her across the face. Her head snapped back. Blood sprayed. He brought the wheelbarrow down again, crushing the breath out of her, then took a sword from the ground and pushed it into her stomach. She folded around the blade, gasping, and he let her drop.

He took another sword. One in each hand. A strange imitation of mastery.

An older guard faced him now—gray in the beard, scars on the arms, but steady in his stance. He swung with the confidence of a man who had trained half his life. Jari caught the blow between both blades, metal clanging, then stepped in and rammed both swords into the man’s chest. The guard made a soft, surprised sound as the steel buried deep.

Jari kicked him backward, and the old man toppled over the bridge rail, swords and shield tumbling after him into the abyss.

The last guard came. Young, shaking, but desperate. Jari battered him with fist and knee and elbow until he folded. The axe the guard had dropped lay across the stones, and Jari took it up, driving it down into the man’s body with a grunt of exhaustion.

Silence.

Only Jari’s ragged breathing filled the ruined bridge. His arms trembled. Blood—some his, most not—slicked his chest and hands.

“Finally,” he muttered, wiping his forehead with the back of a shaking wrist. “It’s over.”

But the quiet did not last.

“Jari…”

A voice. Soft. Familiar.

Jari froze.

He turned.

And the world seemed to tilt.

There, standing among the corpses as if pulled from a dream—or a nightmare—was a figure he thought long dead.

“Raollin?”

His voice cracked.

Raollin stared back, alive. Or close enough to it.