Ashenveil Chronicles : Embers Of The Godless Age

Chapter 3: The Silver Knight

"Do not mistake composure for coldness. The still lake runs very deep."

— Seraphine Valdris, private journal, age fourteen

Lady Seraphine Valdris arrived in Calder's Notch on the third day of autumn, two years after Grimoire Day, in a manner that was technically unannounced but practically impossible to miss: a silver-armoured knight on a black horse, her indigo grimoire orbiting her shoulder like a small faithful moon, her posture calibrated to the precise angle of someone who has grown up being watched and decided to give them something worth watching.

She was eighteen, and she was Rank Seven.

Rank Seven. In a village that celebrated Rank Four as extraordinary. Kairu heard the number from three different people before he saw her himself, each repetition carrying a different flavour of awe — the awe of people who lived their entire lives at the edge of things and had just been reminded, without cruelty but without softness, how very far the centre was from them.

He was at the well when she rode past. Their eyes met for approximately one second — hers grey and assessing, his probably doing something stupid — and she looked away first, which felt like a victory until he realized she'd looked away because he was simply not relevant to whatever she was assessing.

She was hunting something. The village headman's wife told anyone who would listen: a creature had been taking livestock from the outlying farms for three weeks — not eating them, not killing them for any discernible purpose, just taking them. Dragging them away, leaving no tracks beyond the first hundred metres.

"It's a curse-beast," old Gerra said sagely, from her usual position beside the baker's stall. "Mark me. Sent by someone with a grudge."

"It's a catoblepas," said the young man beside her, who had recently started reading things beyond his reach. "From the southern swamps."

"Catoblepas are mythological," said Gerra.

"So was the hydra that ate Ferin's Pass, and there's a museum exhibit of its tooth now."

Kairu was not listening to either of them. He was watching the Silver Knight set up her investigation with the focused efficiency of someone who had done this before — talking to the farmers, measuring the drag marks, consulting something in her grimoire that made the orbiting book fall open to a page she read quickly and closed again.

He followed her. Not covertly. He was not particularly good at covert.

"You're trailing me," she said, without turning, when he was about fifteen paces back.

"I know the land," he said. "You don't."

She stopped and turned. Up close, the grey eyes were very direct. "Is that an offer?"

"It's a fact. The offer is: I show you where the tracks go cold — I've been watching them for two weeks — and you let me come."

Something moved in her expression. Calculation, he thought. Then something that might have been curiosity, though it was dressed in the clothes of professional assessment.

"What rank are you?" she asked.

"Unclassified."

A pause. The indigo grimoire completed one slow orbit of her shoulder. "Show me where the tracks go cold."

The creature was a Strix — not the small owl-like nuisances the name usually conjured, but an old one. An ancient variety, the kind that appeared in myths: half-bird, half-shadow, entirely wrong to look at directly. Its feathers were the absence of light rather than any colour. Its eyes were Rank-silent, which meant any mana pulse near it bent around it like water around a stone.

This was, Kairu learned, why Seraphine's precise magical attacks were doing nothing.

"It absorbs structured mana," she said, retreating beside him behind a boulder while the Strix circled overhead with a sound like tearing silk. There was a cut on her cheek — the first time he'd seen her anything less than composed, and even now the composure was merely dented, not broken. "Standard affinity-based attacks are useless. I need something unstructured."

"Unstructured," Kairu said.

"Something that isn't classified. Something the suppression field can't recognize and therefore can't —" She looked at him. Then at his grimoire. Then back at him. "Oh," she said. "That's inconvenient timing for your first field test."

"I've been practicing."

"For two years with an unclassified flame against a mythological anti-magic bird. Yes, I can see you're very prepared."

"Do you have a better idea?"

She did not have a better idea. She had a look on her face that said she was filing this entire situation under unacceptable and intended to register a formal complaint with the universe later, but that for now she would, reluctantly, acknowledge that he was what she had.

"Don't die," she said. "I'm not explaining that to anyone."

He stepped out from behind the boulder. The Strix swung toward him. He breathed, found the place in his chest where the flame lived, let it come — dark, quiet, wrong — and threw it.

The Strix screamed. Anti-magic feathers turned out to be very flammable when the fire doing the burning wasn't technically classified as magic.

Grim Flame · Ashvane Style: Soot Volley

Rank Pending · Anti-Suppression Property Confirmed

In the aftermath — the Strix fled rather than died, which Seraphine noted in her report as repelled, damage sufficient, mission complete — they sat on the boulder in the quiet of the empty pasture and she cleaned the cut on her cheek with a cloth from her saddlebag and did not look at him, and said:

"You've been training alone for two years with no instructor, no guild support, no formal rank."

"Yes."

"That's either very determined or very stupid."

"Both, probably."

A long silence. The cloth came away red. She folded it with precise movements and put it away.

"I'm going to the capital next week," she said. "The Royal Knights are forming a new company. Experimental composition — they want non-standard abilities." A pause. "I will not tell you to come. I will also not tell you not to come."

She mounted her horse and rode back toward the village.

Kairu sat on the boulder for a while longer, listening to the wind. Then he went home and told his father he was leaving.

His father, who knew things he did not say, looked at him for a long moment and then said: "Was she as composed as they say, the Valdris girl?"

"More," Kairu said.

"Hm." His father turned back to his work. "Watch yourself."

Kairu, who did not yet understand what his father meant by that, said he would.

.

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