The Guardian’s Echo

Out of the Shadows: Soren

I shifted my weight, the gravel in the square crunching beneath my boots. My heart hammered against my ribs, but my hand on the hilt of my blade was steady. I had seen monsters, I had seen the remnants of the Great Time War, but this woman… she was a masterpiece of wrongness.

Beside me, I could feel Penny’s light trembling, not with fear, but from the sheer pressure of the woman’s presence. The lavender in her eyes mirrored the stranger’s, but where Penny’s held the soft glow of the Highland dawn, this woman’s was bruised and violent like a dying star.

“So,” the woman spoke, and the sound wasn’t a whisper like it had been in the manor. It was a cold, melodic resonance that made the stones of the square hum. “The anchor has a chain.”

She looked at me — not with hatred, but with the clinical curiosity of a gardener looking at a weed. “General Soren. A relic of a broken timeline, guarding a girl who is little more than a stitch in a garment I intend to unravel.”

“You have no business here,” I growled, my grey magic floating around my blade until it glowed like white-hot iron. “The Ashendor line has returned. The clock has started again. Your time here is over.”

She laughed, a sharp, crystalline sound. “Time? General, time is a lie told by those who fear the void. You cling to this present as if it were a gift, but it is a prison. A messy, chaotic, decaying mistake.” She stepped forward, the shadows at her feet lengthening even as the sun climbed higher. “I am Vespera Nyxos. I have come to offer this world the mercy of a blank page.”

She turned her gaze to Penny. Her expression softened into something far more terrifying than anger: pity. “Little bird, look at them. These ‘ghosts’ you’ve woken, they’re suffering. They’re mourning two hundred years of life they never got to live. Do you really think they want to live in this wreckage? I can give them back the years. I can make it so the war never touches these hills. I can make it so that your daughter was born into a world of peace. Here, where she belongs. Where you belong. Rosariel will never have left.”

“Don’t listen to her, Penny,” I whispered, the air between us cracking with the clash of our energies.

“She is right about one thing, General,” Vespera said, he ringed eyes flaring red. “The foundations are solid. Solid enough to crush you.”

She raised a hand and the two living shadows surged forward. They didn’t run. They blurred into stretched, jagged ink-black blades. The villagers screamed, scattering as the temperature in the square plummeted to sub-zero.

One of the shadows lingered for Penny, its faceless head tilted in a silent shriek. I stepped forward to intercept it, my sword raised to cleave through the dark—

Thwip.

A whistle of wind cut through the air, followed by a brilliant flash of silver-tipped light. An arrow, fletched with moss green feathers and humming with a localized temporal pulse, buried itself in the shadow’s chest. The creature didn’t bleed. It shattered. The ink-black form solidified for a fraction of a second, showing the agonized face of a man trapped in stone before it dissolved into a spray of silver.

“The foundations of the Vale are not yours to break, Weaver!” a raspy, ancient voice called out from the edge of the square.

I looked toward the tree line. Five figures had emerged, cloaked in mottled green and grey that seemed to shift with the light. They moved with a predatory grace I hadn’t seen in two centuries. At their head was a woman with a scar across the bridge of her nose, her bow already notched with a second shimmering arrow.

The Wardens had arrived, and they weren’t looking for a savior. They were looking for a target.

Vespera didn’t flinch at the sight of the Wardens. She didn’t even look toward the archer who had just vaporized her soldier. Instead, she kept her gaze fixed on Penny, a thin, chilling smile playing on her lips as the second living shadow recoiled, hissing like steam on a hot iron.

“Wardens,” Vespera mused, her voice carrying over the gasps of the still-terrified villagers. “How quaint.”

The lead Warden stepped forward, her silver-tipped arrow trained directly at Vespera. “Leave this place, Nyxos. The Highlands rejects you.”

Vespera’s eyes flared, the red rings around her pupils glowing with a sudden, violent intensity. The shadow beside her began to destabilize, its form flickering between a solid man and a jagged smear of ink. I didn’t wait for her to take another opportunity to strike. I moved forward, my blade held in front of me.

The air around her began to ripple again. “This isn’t a retreat, General,” Vespera said, her voice dropping to a frequency that made my bones ache. The air continued to warp and bend around her, sucking her back in. “This is a stay of execution. Enjoy this timeline while it lasts. Every tick of the clock is a dent you can’t pay.”

She raised a hand and the remaining shadow lunged — not at me, or even at Penny. It slammed into the ground, and a shockwave of cold, stagnant time rippled through the square. The gravel turned to grey ash where the shadow touched, and the villagers screamed as their movements suddenly slowed, trapped in a pocket of sluggish air.

“Soren!” Penny cried out, her hand catching my shoulder.

I felt the drag too. It felt like trying to breathe underwater. I forced my magic outward, the grey shield shattering the stasis around us as the rift — and Vespera — vanished.

With the pressure lifted, the villagers slumped over, gasping for air as time resumed its natural flow. I stood my ground for a long moment, my sword still glowing, my eyes scanning the ridge and the rooftops. My heart was still racing while my tactical mind was cataloguing the threat. She hadn’t been trying to win — not yet. She had been testing us.

Slowly, I lowered my blade, but I didn’t sheathe it yet. I turned to Penny. She was pale, but her eyes were hard, looking at the spot where Vespera had stood.

“Soren,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “She was in my head. I could feel her… wanting to help.”

I reached out, catching her arm to steady her. “That’s her greatest weapon, Penny. She doesn’t just want to kill you. She wants you to agree with her.”

The sound of soft footsteps drew my attention back to the edge of the square. The Wardens were approaching, their bows lowered but their eyes wary. The woman with the scar led them. She stopped ten feet away from us and looked from me to Penny, her expression unreadable.

“The General and the Heiress,” she said, her voice like grinding stones. “You’ve made a mess of my valley, Soren.”

“Commander Caelis,” I said, recognizing the harsh set of her jaw. “It has been over two hundred years since I last saw you.”

“For you,” she laughed, a smile breaking across her granite-like features. “I was a statue. It was only yesterday I saw you leave the Highlands for the Guard.”

I couldn’t help the faint blush that colored my cheeks. I bowed my head to her in respect.

“Soren, please, you’re a general now,” she nodded her own head towards us. Then she continued, “We should get to the Keep though, we must put together a plan before Vespera strikes again.”