Ashes of Eryndor

Chapter 6: A Lamb Among Wolves

You could say fate forced me and Vin from our home, but that's too simple a way to describe the day the gods went mad. The Four Beings didn't just destroy Eryndor—they erased it, like a child wiping clean a slate. We ran because running was the only choice left when immortals decide to unmake creation.

At sixteen, I watched my home crumble as our god turned destroyer, and my only chance at life came through a desperate gamble: thirty stolen scrolls, a captured elven mage, and a father's last attempt to save his daughters. Back then, as I fled through the burning world, I didn't understand the weight I carried. I just wanted to disappear into the chaos of war, to become so ordinary that even my nightmares would forget my name.

Now, in the quiet hours when sleep eludes me, I wonder what life would have been like if our god hadn't descended into madness. If Eryndor still existed somewhere beyond memory and nightmare. I see myself in that lazy village of my birth, the future stretching out before me like an unwritten page. In these dreams, my hands are calloused from hammering metal instead of gripping daggers, and the only flames I know come from honest work.

I'd have become a smith, like the woman who raised me, shaping metal instead of destiny. Sometimes I even dare to imagine children of my own, their laughter ringing against workshop walls that never turned to ash. And in those moments, I wonder if somewhere in all the worlds the gods didn't break, there's someone else who was meant to carry this burden. Someone with stronger shoulders. Someone who deserved to be the hero.

But the gods chose their path, and I chose mine.
Or perhaps the choice was made for both of us.

...

I stood in the heart of The Wooden Barren district, a place I'd sworn I'd never set foot in. Around me, bounty hunters prowled their territory like wolves in their den, and I felt every bit the lost lamb who'd wandered too far from the flock.

One week, three days, and about eight hours later, the clock on the mantel chimed noon.

Captain Luc, Lord of the Bounty Hunters, was late. Then again, so were Althea and Vin, but Luc had no excuse, not when they were already two hours behind schedule. Not when they were meeting in his office. And it wasn't her fault for being tardy. She couldn't control the winds, and those skittish sailors had certainly taken their time sailing into the Black Market and all around Syphorite's sea. She didn't want to think about how much money Vin had spent bribing a crew to sail into the heart of bounty hunters territory. But The Wooden Barren was on an island, so they hadn't really had a choice about their mode of transportation.

Vin commanded respect in the underworld without hiding her face - her reputation as a master broker and her web of powerful connections meant she could walk freely even among bounty hunters. They knew better than to cross someone who held the purse strings of half the criminal enterprises in Syphorite. Besides, having a known face in their meeting lent legitimacy to their presence here.

Althea's choice to appear masked was a calculated one. While the empire's wanted posters depicted the Red-Clawed Raven as a masked woman, masks weren't uncommon among the criminal elite. Those who could afford to hide their faces were usually the ones you didn't want to cross, and in the underworld, anonymity often equaled power. Without her signature red daggers and dressed in simple black, she was just another mysterious power player - the kind of figure bounty hunters dealt with every day.

She rose from her seat before Lord Luc's desk, irritation building with each passing minute. This meeting had to succeed - it was worth the risk of walking into the bounty hunters' stronghold. If they could secure this deal, it wouldn't just give them access to the hunters' shipping routes and safe houses across the empire. More importantly, it would let them track the hunters' movements, knowing where they'd strike next. Every bounty hunter that thought they were hunting the Raven would instead be leading them straight to the empire's secret operations.