THE RAID PART 2

P R O L O G U E — P A R T    T W O

THE RAID

✦

Marren didn’t look up at her. She didn’t have time to—a paladin was already closing the distance, warhammer dragging sparks off the garden path, and she put herself between it and Ken with her feet rooted and her hands loose, exactly the way she had for the skeletal thing before it. This one hit harder. This one she felt in her shoulders.

An arrow hissed past her ear before she’d finished breathing out. The archers had found their range, and three more followed in a volley meant to finish what the paladin hadn’t. Marren twisted low, curling her whole body around Ken like the world’s worst shield, and felt one shaft open a line across her shoulder close enough to draw blood. She didn’t have a hand free to check how bad it was. She didn’t have time to.

That was when the assassin found the gap.

It didn’t run at her the way the paladin had. It arrived, the way the others at the tree line had, a blade already low and already moving for the space between Marren’s ribs where Ken was pressed against her side. She saw it a half-second too late, her weight still wrong from twisting away from the arrows—and for the first time since the sky had gone quiet, Ken felt his mother’s whole body go rigid with something that wasn’t readiness. It was fear.

“MARREN—”

Erwin’s blade found the assassin before it finished its second step, a single stroke that didn’t slow down to make sure of itself, because it didn’t need to. He came through the hedge line already moving, and Ken would spend years afterward trying to describe what his father looked like in that half-second and never quite managing it—not like a man fighting for his life, but like something that had been waiting to be let off a leash. The sword unfolded again, longer this time, hungrier, stretching past any length Ken had seen it hold before, and where it passed, rooks stopped being ranks and started being pieces. Poppy tore through the archer line before they could loose a second volley, jaws and claws turning careful formation into scattered, screaming retreat. Between the three of them the garden path became something Ken didn’t want to look at directly.

But the tree line kept emptying. For every rank Erwin’s blade cut through, another stepped up to take its place, patient and endless, and something went tight in his jaw as he understood what Ken couldn’t yet—that this wasn’t a number a sword could out-cut, no matter how far it unfolded.

“Run, baby. Straight to the fence. Don’t stop, don’t look back—”

“Mama—”

“RUN.”

He ran.

That was when Erwin saw Jonny break from the smoke, already sprinting, already cutting the distance toward the boy.

“KEEP HIM SAFE.” Erwin didn’t stop fighting to say it. He barely turned his head. “I’m counting on you.”

Then the sword found the next rank, and he didn’t look again.

High above the garden, the witch’s head turned.

She had an army at her back that she could summon and unmake a hundred times over if she wished it—this was nothing to her, a fraction of what she could bring, a taste held back on purpose—and none of it held her attention for longer than the half-second it took her to find the small shape breaking away from the smoke, running the wrong way, running alone.

Something in her went very still.

She didn’t call an order. She didn’t need her army for this. She simply dropped from the sky, scythe and all, and went after him.

He ran until the garden ended and the wild forest began, and that was when he ran into the witch.

He didn’t see her coming. One moment there was only trees, and the next she was simply there, kneeling in his path, and Ken skidded to a stop so hard he nearly fell into her arms.

She was beautiful the way a held breath is beautiful—something about her felt like waiting. Her eyes, when they found his face, went wide, then wet, then something Ken had no word for at five years old and would spend years afterward trying not to remember.

“There you are... I thought I sensed you here,” she whispered, and reached for him.

“You,” she said, and her voice cracked down the middle, half fury and half heartbreak, “you look like him. You look like both of them.” Her hands closed around his shoulders, too tight, pulling him into an embrace that had no warmth in it at all—only need, raw and endless, the kind of need that doesn’t care whether it’s wanted. “Marren always did get everything I wanted. Even this. Even you.”

Ken didn’t understand a word of it. He only understood that her arms hurt, and that something about her touch felt like it was sinking into him, past skin, past bone, settling somewhere he had no name for.

Then a hand closed around his collar and yanked.

“Got you—move, move, MOVE—”

Jonny. Fifteen, scrawny, terrified, and somehow already running before Ken’s feet had found the ground, dragging him through the underbrush while the witch’s scream tore the evening apart behind them.

“WHERE ARE YOU TAKING HIM—BRING HIM BACK TO ME!”

The forest itself answered her—a wall of humming, dark light snapped into place around them, ground to canopy, sealing the world into a cage with no visible bars and no visible way out.

Jonny didn’t stop running. There was no one ahead of them to plant themselves in the witch’s path this time—Erwin and Marren were an army’s width away, buried in a fight that wasn’t ending, and it was just a fifteen-year-old boy standing between her and what she wanted, with a five-year-old boy in his arms.

The witch’s scream became something worse than a scream. It became weeping.

“Give him to me,” she begged, and it was so much more terrible than her rage had been. “Give him to me, give him back, you don’t understand, you don’t—if I can’t have him, if you won’t— GIVE HIM TO ME—”

Something dark left her palm and struck Ken square in the chest, exactly where her hands had held him a moment before. It didn’t hurt. It felt like a door quietly closing somewhere inside him, one he wouldn’t understand had shut for years.

“Then no one will ever have him either.”

“KEN—” Jonny didn’t slow down. He hit the barrier’s edge at a dead sprint, and something in him—something he had no name for yet, something he would only learn much later to call by a single quiet word, Resist—tore a seam through light that shouldn’t have torn at all. They fell through it together in a shower of dying sparks.

They didn’t get far before the ground itself began to shake.

A dark, shadowy figure came through the tree line like a landslide given hunger, the air thickening with its aura, and Jonny skidded to a stop so hard he nearly threw Ken from his arms.

It didn’t have a face, not really—just a suggestion of one, a smear of deeper dark within the dark—and when it opened whatever passed for a mouth, the sound that came out wasn’t a roar so much as the absence of every other sound at once.

Jonny set Ken down behind him without looking, the way you put down something you can’t afford to drop. “Stay there.”

He didn’t have a sword. He didn’t have Poppy’s claws or Marren’s reflexes or twelve years of war behind him the way Erwin did—he had fifteen years old and whatever he could throw together in the half-second the creature gave him, and when it lunged he threw himself sideways into it instead of away, driving a shoulder into what should have been solid and finding it solid enough to hurt. The impact sent them both rolling through the underbrush, and for three, four, five heartbeats it was just noise—tearing fabric, a snarl with no throat behind it, his own breath punched out of him in a single ragged grunt.

He came up with a line across his forearm that hadn’t been there a moment ago, already soaking through his sleeve, and the creature already turning to come again.

That was when he understood the math wasn’t going to work out. It was faster than he was. It didn’t tire. He had exactly one thing left worth spending, and it wasn’t going to be on himself.

He scooped Ken up mid-stride and ran the only direction the creature wasn’t blocking, putting three long strides between them and it before it finished turning—not an escape, just enough of a head start to say what needed saying.

“Go,” he said, setting Ken down with hands that were shaking now, for an entirely different reason. “The old crossing point, past the ridge—you know the way, I taught you the way, remember it—”

“I don’t want to go alone—”

“I know.” Jonny’s voice cracked exactly the way the witch’s had, though neither of them would ever know that. “I know, Ken, I’m sorry, just—GO. I’ll catch up. I promise. I promise.” He didn’t catch up.

Ken ran until his lungs burned, until the forest thinned and the trees turned strange and pale, their bark faintly luminous even in daylight—and somewhere in that pale wood, through the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a boy about his own age standing very still between two trunks, watching nothing, watched by no one. Just a flicker. Maybe just a boy who’d wandered too far from somewhere. Ken didn’t stop long enough to wonder.

He didn’t have room left in him to wonder who the boy was, or why he stood so alone in a forest that looked like it belonged to no one and everyone. He kept running, because that was the only thing he knew how to do anymore, until the air ahead of him split open into a seam of shivering light.

He didn’t know it was a portal. He didn’t know there was a whole other world out there, or that everything that made his father’s sword unfold and his mother’s palm end fights in a single strike would mean nothing on the other side. He only knew that the light was quiet, and quiet felt safer than everything behind him.

So he ran into it.

And the garden, and Poppy, and his mother’s laugh, and everyone he had ever loved, fell away behind him into the dark.

The light did not welcome him so much as swallow him, and when it let him go, the garden was gone—not distant, but gone, as though it had belonged to some other boy’s life. The world on the other side did not care that his father’s sword could unfold across a battlefield, or that his mother’s hands could end a fight with the width of a heartbeat. It gave him nothing freely; it made him earn even the smallest mercies, one cold night and one closed door at a time. He grew up anyway, because that was the only thing left to do—and slowly, carefully, he found his way back to something like joy. But it came paired with a small, quiet weight lodged somewhere behind his ribs, patient and entirely his own—though it would be years before he understood that it wasn’t.