The forest at night held its breath.
No wind. No insects. Just the kind of silence that presses against your ears and makes your instincts scream at you to turn back.
Claire stood at the tree line, staring into the dark, and felt exactly that urge.
She looked back at Cid.
He stood a half-step behind her, hands in his pockets, expression unreadable. Calm in the way still water is calm — not peaceful, just deep.
*I want to protect him.* The thought steadied her. *I want to be an older sister worth having.*
She stepped into the forest.
Cid followed without a word.
He had no intention of stopping her. Some lessons couldn't be taught — they had to be lived. Their father had warned her plainly, and she had chosen to come anyway. There was something she needed to find out for herself, and she wouldn't believe it until she did.
His job was simply to make sure she survived the finding out.
---
They walked in silence for a while.
Then a bird burst from a low branch — a sudden explosion of wings in the dark — and Claire flinched hard, one hand flying to her sword.
She caught herself. Looked at Cid.
He hadn't moved. Hadn't blinked.
*If he's not scared, then I absolutely cannot be scared.* She released a slow breath and squared her shoulders.
"Are you alright, Sister?"
"Of course," she said. "I'm your older sister."
A moment later, Cid's gaze shifted — quiet, unhurried — toward a tree some distance to their left.
Claire followed his eyes.
For a moment, nothing.
Then the darkness *moved.*
A figure tore out from behind the trunk at violent speed, crossing the gap between them in a heartbeat. In the dark, Claire couldn't make out anything except motion and the dull gleam of a blade.
She drew her sword on instinct. Steel rang against steel.
The impact rattled up her arms to her teeth.
As the figure steadied, his face came into focus — a man, heavyset, with the kind of features that looked like they'd been arranged in permanent contempt.
"Out past dark instead of sleeping safe at home." He clicked his tongue. "That's what bad children do. And bad children need to be punished."
He pressed forward. Claire held her ground, but only just — the sheer weight behind each swing was staggering. She was strong for her age, genuinely strong, and the fact that she was still standing after the first exchange was remarkable.
The man seemed to notice.
"Blocking my strike at your age?" He grinned, and it didn't reach his eyes. "You'd be something extraordinary grown up. The thought of snuffing that out before it happens..." He exhaled slowly, almost reverently. "...it makes me tremble."
He surged forward, and one brutal stroke sent Claire airborne.
She hit the ground hard, rolled, and lay still for a moment with the breath knocked clean out of her.
"Cid—" She forced herself up, forced herself to look. "Run! I'll hold him — just *run!*"
She was already charging again before she'd finished speaking.
"Oh?" The man glanced past her with mild interest. "There's another one. Two for the price of one — generous of you."
He let Claire swing. Caught it. Kicked her in the stomach with the casual force of someone moving furniture.
Claire crumpled. The pain was white and total, and then the world went dark.
---
Cid watched his sister hit the ground and didn't move.
*I hope she learns something from this.*
That was the thought he allowed himself. Nothing more.
The man turned toward him, rolling his neck.
"You're a strange one." He studied Cid with something between curiosity and contempt. "Most kids would be screaming by now. You're not even scared."
"Scared of you?" Cid looked at him the way you look at a bug on a windowpane — not with hostility, just with a total absence of concern. "What exactly are you, that I should be afraid?"
The man's expression went flat.
"You're asking to die."
He swung.
The sword stopped an inch from Cid's face.
Not because Cid had moved. Because the man had *chosen* to stop it — and now leaned in close, voice dropping into something uglier.
"You think I'd give you something that fast? You nobles... every last one of you deserves to suffer. I'll take my time."
He reached out to grab Cid by the throat.
A small hand closed around his wrist first.
The man's arm stopped moving entirely.
He pulled. Strained. Looked down at the child's grip in genuine disbelief.
"Why can't I—"
"My physical strength isn't greater than yours," Cid said simply. "So I used magic."
He turned the man's wrist.
The arm rotated one hundred and eighty degrees.
The scream that followed scattered every remaining bird from the canopy above.
The man reeled back, snatched his sword with his off hand, and swung wildly at Cid's head — a desperate, furious arc of magic-reinforced steel.
Cid didn't move.
The blade connected with the side of his skull.
The sword shattered.
Not bent. Not deflected. *Shattered* — shards of enchanted steel spinning into the dark, the hilt left vibrating uselessly in a trembling hand.
Not a single hair on Cid's head was out of place.
"This is—" The man was hyperventilating now, backing away. "This is *impossible.* My magic was fully channeled — that sword should have cut through *anything* — this can't—"
"It's quite simple," Cid said. "You struck something whose magical density is several times greater than your sword could contain. It broke because it was the weaker object."
"*Who are you?!*"
Cid reached down and picked up Claire's sword from the dirt where it had fallen. He looked at the man for a moment.
"A dead man has no use for names."
The man's survival instincts finally overrode his pride. He turned and ran — crashing through undergrowth, putting distance between himself and whatever he'd just encountered.
He made it three steps.
Then he looked down.
Both legs ended at the knee.
He hadn't felt it happen. Hadn't seen the movement. There had been no sound. He simply looked down and they were gone, and then he was falling, and then the ground came up hard.
*When?* The thought surfaced slowly, almost dreamlike. *When did he—*
He managed to roll over. Cid was walking toward him at a leisurely pace, Claire's sword hanging loosely at his side, a thin line of dark red trailing from the tip.
The man's mouth worked.
"Please — please, I'm not evil, I *swear* it — nobles killed my family, all of them, I was so angry I didn't know what else to do — I'm not a bad person, I can serve you, whatever you need, I'll spend my whole life—"
"Your family wasn't killed by me," Cid said.
He crouched to the man's eye level.
"What does that have to do with me?"
He drove the blade through the man's heart in one clean motion.
---
Consciousness doesn't leave all at once. It drains.
The man could still see — Cid crouching over him, expression no different than it had been throughout, the forest dark and still around them. He could feel nothing. Move nothing. He had killed a great many nobles, and he had imagined a great many endings for himself.
Not this one.
Gradually, even sight went.
---
Cid wiped the blade clean on the man's sleeve and returned it to Claire's scabbard. Then he lifted his sister into his arms — carefully, the way you carry something that matters — and turned to survey the forest.
Every tree looked identical.
He turned a slow circle. Then another.
*...Which way is home?*
He stood there for a moment, holding his unconscious sister, genuinely at a loss. Then he sighed, set her gently against the base of a tree, found a reasonably comfortable patch of ground nearby, and lay down.
He closed his eyes.
He was not going to let anyone find out he'd gotten lost.
---
Claire woke to the smell of pine and iron.
She sat up slowly. The dead man was there — unmistakably, permanently dead. Her sword was sheathed at her hip. Her stomach ached where she'd been kicked, and her hands were shaking faintly, though she made herself stop that.
Cid was lying a short distance away, still.
She was at his side in an instant, ear pressed to his chest.
His heartbeat was calm. Steady. Unhurried — as if he'd simply decided to take a nap.
His eyes opened.
"Sister. Are you alright?"
"Cid—" Her voice cracked slightly before she could stop it. "You're okay. What happened? Who—"
"After you fell, I was knocked out too." He sat up, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. "But right before, I think I saw someone — a man in black. He came out of nowhere and attacked that man. After that I don't remember anything."
Claire looked at him for a long moment.
She thought about her father — the strongest Magic Swordsman in their entire territory. She thought about how he would have fared against the man who'd just kicked her across a clearing like she weighed nothing.
She thought about the shattered sword. The severed legs. The total, eerie absence of any third party in these woods.
She didn't say any of it.
She reached out and took her brother's hand.
"Let's go home."
They walked. Neither of them spoke. And if Claire held his hand a little tighter than usual, she didn't remark on it, and neither did he.