Chapter 4: Blood in Ashwood
2584 Words
The night air did not smell of rain or wild mint anymore. It smelled of sulfur, iron and burning straw.
Lyra jolted awake in her small cottage... her heart hammering wildly against her ribs. The dark room was suddenly painted in flickering, violent shades of orange and red. Outside, scream after scream shattered the quiet night—screams of men, women and children she had known her entire life.
"No... no, no, no!" Lyra gasped, scrambling off her bed.
She rushed to the wooden window, pushing the shutter open. The sight before her turned her blood into pure ice.
Ashwood was burning.
Black-armored, masked assassins were moving through the dirt streets like plague wind. They held torches in one hand and curved, dark steel blades in the other. They weren't looting. They weren't taking prisoners. They were kicking down doors, throwing torches onto thatched roofs, and striking down anyone who tried to run.
"Where is she?" a guttural, muffled voice roared from the street below her cottage.
Lyra ducked beneath the window frame, her hands covering her mouth to keep from crying out.
"Search every house!" another voice barked, the metal of his armor clanking as he dragged a villager into the middle of the road. "The girl with the brown hair! The healer! The Grand Elder wants her head before the sun touches the mountains!"
"Please! Have mercy!" Joan, the baker’s wife, sobbed, her voice raw with terror as she clutched her young daughter to her chest on the dirt path. "We don't know who you're talking about! We're just bakers! We have nothing!"
"Then you are useless," the masked assassin cold-heartedly declared.
"NO!"
Lyra choked back a sob, pressing her forehead against the rough wooden floorboards as Joan's screams were cut sharply short. Tears flooded her eyes, hot and blinding.
They're here for me, the thought pierced her soul like a rusted nail. The rogue wasn't lying. The council... they sent monsters to kill me. And everyone is dying because of me.
The heavy front door of her cottage burst open. Wood splintered, and the heavy footfalls of heavy iron boots rattled the floorboards downstairs.
"Upper floor!"
A killer shouted from the room below.
"Check the herbalist's quarters! If she's hiding under the bed, drag her out by her hair!"
Lyra shrank back against the wall, her hands trembling violently as she reached for her small iron trowel on the bedside table. It was a pathetic weapon... useless against steel and muscle but her knuckles turned white as she held it to her chest. She couldn't move. Fear had locked her joints, turning her blood to lead.
"Lyra!"
A heavy hand suddenly grabbed her shoulder from behind, pulling her into the deep shadow of the corner closet.
Lyra opened her mouth to scream, but a warm, calloused palm immediately clamped down over her lips.
"Shh! Be quiet, child! It's me!" a low, trembling voice rasped in her ear.
Lyra blinked through her tears. "T-Thomas?"
Old Man Thomas was breathing heavily, his white hair messy, his face covered in soot. He didn't have his wooden wheelchair. He was dragging his crushed legs across the floorboards with sheer, terrifying strength, his old eyes wide with frantic urgency.
"Thomas, what are you doing here? They're killing everyone! Joan... Joan is gone! They're burning everything!" Lyra wept quietly, her hands gripping his torn sleeve.
"I know, Lyra! I know!" Thomas whispered harshly, his grip on her wrist tightening. "Listen to me! They didn't come for the village! They came for you!"
"Why?! Why me, Thomas?! I'm just a healer! I've never hurt anyone! I don't have a wolf! I'm nobody!" Lyra sobbed, her voice breaking.
"You are not nobody!" Thomas snapped.
His voice carrying a sudden, fierce weight that stunned her into silence. He reached under his blood-stained tunic and pulled out a heavy object attached to a dark leather cord.
"Take this! Take it now!"
Lyra looked down at his hands. Thomas held a heavy, circular silver pendant. It was ancient, its surface carved with intricate, glowing runes that looked terrifyingly identical to the silver light that had burst from her palms in the woods.
"What is this?" Lyra whispered, her tears dripping onto the cold metal as he forced it into her shaking hand.
"Your mother gave it to me the night she died," Thomas said, his old eyes glistening with unshed tears.
He placed his rough, withered hand over hers, closing her fingers around the pendant.
"She told me to keep it hidden until the day the hunters came. I didn't want to believe her. I prayed to the Goddess every single night that this day would never come... but it's here, Lyra."
"My mother?" Lyra’s breath hitched. "My mother was just a midwife!"
"Your mother was the guardian of the lineage!" Thomas hissed softly, glancing back at the bedroom door as footsteps began pounding up the wooden stairs. "Listen to me, Lyra Ashbourne! You must never... do you hear me? Never let the Alpha Council find this pendant! If they take it, if they destroy it, the last light of our kind dies with you!"
"I don't want a pendant! I want you to come with me! We can run together! The woods—" Lyra sobbed, clinging to his old, fragile arms.
"I can't run, child," Thomas offered a small, sad smile, his eyes softening with fatherly love as he looked at her face. "Look at my legs. I'd only slow you down by ten seconds. And ten seconds is the difference between your life and your death."
"No! I'm not leaving you!" Lyra cried, shaking her head wildly. "I can heal you! I healed a rogue yesterday! I can—"
"There's no time!" Thomas barked, dragging her toward the back corner of the closet.
He pushed aside a pile of heavy woolen blankets, revealing a small, square trapdoor hidden beneath the floorboards.
"This tunnel leads under the cottage, past the storage cellar, and exits out into the old drainage ditch near the creek. It's narrow. Only someone your size can crawl through."
"Thomas, please!" Lyra wept openly now, the sound of her heartbreak drowning out the roaring flames outside. "Don't do this! Please, come with me!"
"You have a kind heart, Lyra," Thomas whispered, his voice trembling as he cupped her cheek with his soot-stained hand. "The kindest heart this broken world has ever seen. That's why the Goddess chose you. That's why you have to live."
The bedroom door was kicked off its hinges, crashing onto the floor with a deafening thud.
"In here! I hear voices!" a harsh voice shouted from the bedroom.
"Go!" Thomas shoved Lyra violently into the dark opening of the floor. "Go and don't look back! Run to the mountains!"
"Thomas!" Lyra screamed as she tumbled down into the cold, damp dirt of the tunnel.
Above her, Thomas slammed the trapdoor shut. She heard the heavy sliding of a wooden crate being dragged over the wood, sealing the entrance from above.
"Where is the girl, old man?!" a cold, metallic voice demanded from the room above her head.
"She's far from your reach, dog of the Citadel!" Thomas’s voice echoed through the floorboards, filled with a defiant, roaring strength Lyra had never heard from him before.
"Where is she?!"
"May the moon strike you down..." Thomas rasped.
A sickening, heavy sound echoed down into the dark tunnel, followed by the heavy, lifeless thud of a body hitting the floorboards.
"THOMAS!"
Lyra choked on her own scream, burying her face into the cold dirt of the narrow trench. The silence from above was absolute, broken only by the crackling of the burning roof beams.
Her lungs burned. Her heart was tearing itself apart in her chest. Every instinct screamed at her to crawl back up, to fight them, to die with the people who had raised her. But as her fingers tightened around the heavy silver pendant, its icy metal biting into her palm, she remembered his last words.
Run.
With tears blinding her eyes and sob after sob tearing from her throat, Lyra began to crawl through the suffocating, pitch-black dirt.
The air in the drainage ditch was freezing, but Lyra didn't feel the cold.
She tumbled out of the stone culvert, landing hard on the wet rocks near the creek. Dirt covered her face, her hands were scraped raw, and her dress was torn, but she didn't feel the pain. She forced her shaking legs to stand, stumbling up the steep, muddy embankment toward the treeline of the eastern hills.
When she finally reached the crest of the ridge, she turned around.
Ashwood was gone.
The peaceful village where she had spent twenty four years, where she had healed scraped knees, brewed chamomile tea, and walked through lavender fields was now a raging, infernal sea of fire.
The tall wooden roofs were collapsing into bright showers of orange sparks. The screams had stopped. The only sound left was the hungry, roaring consumption of the flames and the howling of the night wind.
"Why?"
Lyra collapsed to her knees in the damp grass of the hill, her hands clutching her head as she stared down at the destruction.
"WHY?!" she screamed at the sky, her voice echoing off the silent mountains.
The sky offered no answers. The moon remained hidden behind heavy, bruised storm clouds, refusing to shine its light upon the c*****e below.
"What did they do to you?" Lyra wept, her chest heaving as she rocked back and forth in the mud. "They were just farmers! Joan... Toby... Thomas... they didn't know anything about prophecies! They didn't know about the council! Why didn't you just take me?!"
She pulled the silver pendant from her pocket, holding it up before her tear-filled eyes. The metal reflected the distant, terrible glow of her burning home.
"Is it because of this?" she asked the empty night, her voice dropping to a hollow, broken whisper. "Is it because of whatever is inside me? If I'm the one marked for death... why am I the only one left alive?"
She pressed the cold silver against her forehead, her body shaking with violent, unstoppable sobs. She was completely alone. No family. No home. No village. She was a human girl hunted by the most dangerous monsters in the world, carrying a secret she didn't understand.
Down in the burning village, a single tall, dark figure emerged from the smoke, stepping over the scorched debris of the bakery.
Lyra’s breath hitched as she watched the figure from her high vantage point. Even from this distance, she could feel the oppressive, terrifying aura radiating from him. He didn't wear a mask like the other killers. He wore a dark cloak that billowed like smoke, and as he turned his head toward the mountains, his eyes caught the firelight.
They were silver. Cold, piercing, and terrifyingly clear.
It was the man from her dreams. The hunter the rogue had warned her about.
Kael Draven.
Lyra backed away slowly, stepping deeper into the shadows of the forest. Grief, terror, and a sudden, burning ember of hatred twisted together inside her chest.
"I won't let you catch me," Lyra whispered, wiping the tears and mud from her face with a raw, bloody hand. "I won't let Thomas's death be for nothing."
She turned her back on the burning ruins of her life and plunged into the dark, untamed timber of the Mistveil Mountains.
The heat from the burning structures was intense enough to melt iron, but Kael Draven didn't flinch as he walked through the ruined center of Ashwood.
His face was a mask of cold, deadly rage. His broadsword was drawn, its edge clean, untouched by blood. Behind him, Vance and six Nightshade warriors stood in uneasy silence, watching the flames consume the cottage at the end of the lane.
"Alpha..." Vance began, his voice trembling slightly under the weight of Kael's heavy, suffocating aura. "This... this wasn't our squad. We maintained the perimeter as you ordered. None of our men entered the village."
"I know," Kael said, his voice dropping into a register that made the ground beneath their boots vibrate.
He stopped in front of the scorched wooden threshold of a small cottage... the herbalist's home. The roof had collapsed, leaving only charred beams and ash.
Kael knelt down, sweeping his gloved hand through the hot ash near the doorway. He pulled out a single, half-burned stalk of dried lavender.
His inner wolf roared in his mind, a sound of pure, unadulterated agony and fury that nearly tore his own throat open. The scent of wild mint and earth was here, but it was suffocating under the smell of fresh blood and burning pine.
"Who did this?" Vance demanded, looking around at the dead bodies lining the dirt path. "The executioners from the Sanctum? Cassian?"
"No! Cassian works silently. He leaves no fires. This was a slaughter meant to erase evidence. The Grand Elder lied to us. He sent his own secret strike team behind my back." Kael stood up slowly, crushing the scorched lavender into black powder between his fingers. His silver eyes flashed with a dangerous, terrifying light.
"The Grand Elder?" Vance gasped. "Why would he destroy a neutral village?"
"Because he didn't just want her dead," Kael said, stepping toward the back of the burned cottage near the creek. "He wanted to make sure no one else could claim her."
Kael stopped at the edge of the muddy creek bank.
The moonlight finally broke through the heavy storm clouds for a brief, fleeting second, illuminating the soft mud near the drainage pipe.
Kael's eyes narrowed.
Printed deeply into the wet clay were small, light footprints leading away from the creek, heading straight up into the steep, treacherous slopes of the deep forest. Next to one of the footprints was a single, fresh drop of blood.
His wolf hit the walls of his mind with terrifying force, howling a single, clear command: HUNT.
Kael looked up into the vast, dark expanse of the mountains. The anger in his chest was no longer just the pride of an Alpha King whose orders had been violated. It was something far deeper, something primordial that sent a chill straight down his spine.
"She's alive," Vance whispered, looking at the tracks. "Should we send the squad to track her down?"
Kael sheathed his broadsword with a heavy, metallic that echoed through the burning valley.
"No," Kael commanded, his silver eyes fixed on the distant peaks where the shadows were thickest. "She is in my territory now. Tell the men to fall back. She is mine to find."
He stepped over the muddy bank, his eyes locked onto the single set of footprints disappearing into the dark timber.
"I've found your trail, Lyra," Kael whispered into the cold night wind. "And this time, no one will stand between us."
- Writer
