The campfire was little more than embers when Lyra and her party found it.
Korr sat on a flat rock at the edge of the glow, his back against a stone outcropping that had weathered the Barrens' winds for longer than anyone could remember. His red eyes followed Lyra closely as she walked tentatively but didn't make any motion to reach for his sword.
"You walk quietly for a pretentious imperial noble's daughter," he began. "But not quite enough to sneak up on a person like me, though."
Lyra stopped at the edge of the firelight. "I wasn't trying to sneak."
"No, I suppose you weren't." He gestured to the rock across from him. "Sit or don't. I'm not in a position to order you around, nor do I care enough to bother doing so."
As she sat down, she tried to study Korr, who watched her with that patient, assessing gaze that she'd seen on sharp merchants before, the look of someone who had spent decades reading people and wasn't about to stop.
"You wanted to speak with me," he said to her bluntly.
"My father taught me to gather information from every source, and I didn't really see you after the brief introduction in the village. When I saw the camp as we were on our way back, I knew you did it intentionally to draw us over. I chose to take it as an opportunity to find some more answers, letting the others keep a short distance with the excuse that if this is a trap, they could escape and report it." Lyra met his eyes. "From what I've come to understand, you're a former demon general that now serves a human other worlder somehow brought to the Barrens who grows plants."
"I didn't see any question there, just a series of facts." Korr said with clear disregard as he reached down and picked up a small leather flask, uncorked it and took a slow drink. He didn't offer her any, not that she expected him to.
"I could tell you stories," he said. "Of battles won and lost. Of men who followed me into hell and didn't come back, or even of my former 'lord' who threw me away when I became inconvenient for him." He turned the flask in his hands, watching the firelight play across its worn surface. "But you don't want any of that. What you want is to know about Chris, the guy actually making the impossible real with a dream he will never reach."
Lyra said nothing, but the slight way she twitched was all he needed to know he was right.
"You want to know if he's dangerous. If the village is a threat to your precious empire, and if you should tell your father to send an army or an alliance." Korr's voice was low, measured, the voice of someone who had delivered ultimatums and watched empires crumble. "You know your rulers will try to control him and no doubt end up sending forces to subjugate him, so you want to know if you should tell your father to stand with or against him. You're curious about what he really is."
"Yes. And being who and what you are, I had hoped you would have been able to give me the insight I want. It's no doubt why you set up this camp, to talk."
Korr was quiet for a long moment with a slight frown forming across his features. He had wanted to give his own warnings and thoughts to the girl about Chris and what he was creating. The wind stirred the ashes of the fire, sending a few glowing embers spiraling into the darkness.
"Chris is unfinished, as is his village." Korr finally said.
Lyra frowned. "Unfinished? What does that even mean?"
"It means while the possibility of him being a threat exists, he hasn't grown enough to become one. He has yet to even grasp if he will be a sword or a shield, teetering between the two." He set the flask down and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his red eyes fixing on her with an intensity that made her want to look away. "He's full of potential currently. Raw and ever-shifting. Something that's still being shaped by everything that happens to him and the actions of others towards him."
"Everyone is shaped by their experiences." Lyra whispered softly, her teachings coming to mind and how knight families would mold their own into future knights and merchant children into future merchants, rarely straying unless there was a benefit to it.
"While that is true, it isn't so for him." Korr shook his head. "Most people harden. They become what they've always been or raised to be, but their core character never truly changes. A coward becomes more cowardly, while a tyrant becomes more tyrannical and a victim becomes bitter or broken." He paused, frowning. "Chris, though, he didn't harden from the pressure or break from what he had been put through; rather, he grew and channeled it all into the plants that he grows. Every failure, every loss, every moment of pain has been absorbed to become something slightly different. To use an analogy you can better understand: instead of letting all he's been through act as a smith hammering him as the steel, he's been taking everything into himself and using it to refine himself, going from being steel to adamantite but never allowing himself to become a solid, singular form, using everything that happens to keep refining. Even if some events can be nightmarish…"
Lyra thought about the grey patch. About the way Chris had looked at it not with guilt, but with something like reverence and notes of fear. Realizing it was his own personal reminder of what he refused to become but could have.
"He could become a serious monster," she said quietly, the words slipping past her lips without meaning to.
"Yes, he could, in so many indescribable ways."
"But he could also become a savior if he focuses on growing things that can help people."
"Yes, that is also possible." Korr leaned back against the stone with a wide smile. "That is exactly what makes him so interesting, along with what makes him dangerous — not to your Empire, not to your armies, but rather to the way you all seem to think the world works."
Lyra's jaw tightened. "Explain."
Korr gestured toward the village, its glow barely visible in the distance, a faint green and white glow against the black of the Barrens night. "That place shouldn't exist. You know this. Everyone knows this. It's a fact everyone has accepted as fact. The Barrens are a dead zone. They've been dead for centuries, and no matter what empire has tried to claim them, cultivate them or use them, they all failed, instead choosing to use it as a buffer between the various powers due to how nothing grows out here, nothing survives, and if it does, it doesn't last long."
"And yet," Lyra said, her eyes widening as realization began to set in.
"And yet." Korr's voice softened. "One man, not a mage, not a cultivator, not a general, but rather one tired, frightened, ORDINARY young man decided he wanted to live. Not conquer. Not rule. Just... live. And because of that desire to live, he began to grow that!" He said, pointing towards the village. "And because he grew, others came, such as me and the little girl. And because others came, he had to grow more to protect them." He spread his hands wide now. "Now there's a village where there was nothing. Life where there was only death. And no one, not your Emperor, not the Demon Lord, not the gods themselves can change that anymore, as he is beyond them all with what he has managed to create."
"You're saying he's beyond politics and the empires themselves."
With a sigh, he looked at her calmly but with clear frustration. "I'm saying your Empire thinks in terms of assets and threats. Control and submission. Conquest and defense, while trying to balance their 'fight' with the demon lord and not become weak enough that one of the others could claim them." Korr's eyes held hers. "Chris doesn't think like that. Rather, he thinks in terms of growth and getting what he desires. Focusing on what can be built. What can be protected. What can be saved. Your father wants to know if Chris can be used. The emperor wants to know if he can be controlled. The Demon Lord will probably want to know if he can be destroyed." He paused. "The problem is, none of you are asking the right question or seeing the truth like I have. Even now, with your own statement, you proved it."
Lyra felt something cold settle in her chest, a weird kind of weight, but she couldn't help but continue the conversation. "What's the right question, then?"
Korr was silent for a long moment, but when he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper.
"What if he does manage to do so? That if something new can grow in the Barrens, what would his limits be? What if he is truly beyond the empires and your politics, more than your endless wars? What if—" He stopped before shaking his head. "I'm a really old person, girl. I've seen too much and lost even more. I've burned cities and watched children die while telling myself it was necessary. That it was war and there was no other way."
"I watched for a while, having nowhere else to go, and felt it would be interesting to see something bloom instead of burn, to see it just once before I died." He turned back to her. "And I think, no, rather I hope, that I might actually be able to see it reach its full potential and become what it's truly meant to be."
Lyra sat very still.
She'd grown up in court. She'd learned to read people the way merchants read ledgers, to identify value, weakness and how to leverage people. She'd thought Korr would be simple to read, nothing but a broken soldier looking for purpose.
But this wasn't simple.
This was a man who had seen the worst the world could do and had chosen — actually chosen for himself! — to believe in something better. Not because he was naïve, but because he was tired of what he had seen and been through already. Because he wanted, just once, to be proven wrong about the darkness he had seen all his life.
"You really do believe in him and that unobtainable dream of his, don't you."
Korr didn't answer. He didn't need to.
The fire had died down to nothing but ashes now, being picked up by the wind again and carrying the distant howl of something hunting in the dark. Lyra should have been afraid, should have been thinking about the walk back to the group and about the knight's inevitable questioning, about the report she would have to write and what theirs may contain.
Instead, she found herself looking at the village in the distance, the words 'What if something new can grow?' ringing in her mind.
Korr stood and watched as she left; he didn't offer to escort her back. They both knew it would lead to problems. He simply watched her with those patient, weary eyes.
"When you write your report," he said while she was still in earshot, "they'll ask if he's a threat."
"I know."
"They'll ask if he can be controlled and what he wants, to try and use it to control him regardless of your opinion or report."
That caused her to stop and look back at him. Korr almost smiled as she did that. It didn't reach his eyes, but it was there. Brief and honest for a few moments.
"He wants to be left alone, to be able to grow his plants and protect his people. To prove that something good can exist without being consumed by the things that want to own it, while creating a place of peace." He picked up his flask and tucked it into his coat as he gathered his things. "Your Empire won't give him that. Neither will the Demon Lord. Neither will anyone who sees power as something to be taken rather than built alongside the other empires."
She felt unsettled as she made her way back to the others, not afraid but still not convinced. Just... unsettled and confused about her own thoughts and everything she had just learned mixing with what she already knew.
One thing she knew as a fact, though, what she knew Korr was right about: the entire time, she had been asking the wrong questions without realizing it.
The knight was waiting at the edge of the camp they had begun to set up, his arms crossed and expression sour.
"You were gone a long time." Lyra walked past him without stopping, not even bothering to look at him. "I was gathering information."
"From a demon? What makes you think you can trust anything he had to say?"
She stopped and turned to look at him, seeing the familiar pride and suspicion. The unshakeable certainty that the Empire's way was the only way and to question it was treason — something she never truly realized till that moment.
"Get some sleep," she ordered. "We leave at dawn."
"My lady—"
"That's an order. I am still the one in charge here, so don't think to try and question me."
The knight's jaw tightened, but he nodded as he watched her walk to the tent she was sharing with the two other girls.
She sat on her bedroll for a long time, staring at nothing, the other two talking among themselves, but the same question Korr asked her kept repeating in her mind: 'What if something new can grow?' She still didn't have an answer for that but found herself wondering the exact same thing while starting to want to see it for herself.