"Make me a warrior."
The words left him and went nowhere. No echo. No response. Just smoke and wind and the distant sounds of a city trying to survive itself.
Leon stood with his fists clenched, chest heaving. Moments ago the declaration had felt like the only true thing left in the world. Now, beneath Raymond's silence, the certainty was already bleeding out.
Raymond had known his brother his entire life. He knew anger. He knew grief. And he knew that a person did not change in a single moment—not truly, not because of a speech or a battle or the particular way ruin looked from a height.
"Follow me," he said.
He turned and walked toward the stairs without waiting.
The descent felt longer than it should have.
With every step downward, the city grew louder. The cries of the wounded. The crack and spit of fires still burning in the eastern quarter. Soldiers calling out to each other across rubble. And beneath all of it, cutting through everything else, the sound of people weeping in a register that had no strategy in it, no discipline—just raw, animal grief.
By the time they reached the streets, Leon already felt the wrongness of it.
From the wall, destruction had possessed a kind of terrible order. Distances compressed things into shapes, patterns, something the mind could organize. Down here there was no such mercy. The dead lined both sides of the road—humans and orcs, soldiers and civilians—collapsed into positions that bodies were never designed to hold. Some were missing limbs. Others were damaged in ways Leon's mind refused to fully process, sliding away from the details like water off stone.
Blood had dried black between the cobblestones.
The smell reached him a moment later. Not smoke—something older and more fundamental. Rot and iron and things he couldn't name and didn't want to.
His stomach clenched hard.
A hand caught his shoulder.
"Easy," Raymond said.
Leon swallowed. His mouth had gone completely dry. "You walked through this during the battle?"
Raymond glanced around at the street with the mild assessment of a man checking weather.
"Worse," he said.
That single word did more damage than a lecture.
They walked. Near a collapsed storefront, a soldier sat clutching the ruins of his arm while a medic worked over him with the focused silence of someone who had run out of things to say. A few feet away, another soldier lay beneath a blanket. Still. The two men had probably fought within arm's reach of each other hours ago. Now one was dead, and the other would spend the rest of his life relearning how to exist.
Raymond stepped over a body without breaking stride.
"People tell stories about warriors," he said, "the same way they tell stories about mages."
Leon kept pace beside him, eyes forward.
"They talk about glory. Courage. Honor." Raymond stepped over another. "They rarely talk about this."
He didn't gesture. He didn't need to.
"A warrior fights close enough to smell his enemy's breath. We don't stand behind walls of magic. We stand where steel meets flesh, and every battle is a gamble." He nodded toward a cart stacked with bodies being hauled toward the burial grounds. "One mistake. One slow movement. One moment of hesitation."
His voice didn't harden. It just stayed level, which was worse.
"And your fate becomes theirs."
Leon's eyes moved to the cart, then away—and stopped.
One of the dead soldiers looked younger than him. The face was strangely unmarked, almost peaceful, as though he had simply decided to lie down and hadn't gotten back up yet.
"His name was Tomas," Raymond said quietly.
Leon went still. "You knew him?"
"He served under me." A pause. "He was seventeen."
Seventeen.
The word landed differently than it should have. Leon was eighteen. He had spent his eighteenth year reading, studying, waiting for an awakening that never came. Tomas had spent his seventeenth year here, and it had been his last, and his face was peaceful in a way that had nothing peaceful about it.
Raymond walked on.
The longer they moved through the streets, the more Leon's mind began to do something he couldn't control.
It started as a kind of selective blindness—his gaze sliding off the worst of it, shapes replacing faces, colors replacing details. A self-protective blurring that happened below the level of decision. But Raymond's voice kept cutting through, steady and relentless, each sentence dragging him back before the fog could fully settle.
“This is what warriors become.”
The words didn't feel instructive. They felt like a sentence being read aloud.
*Why am I like this.* The thought arrived quietly. *Why am I so weak.* Then louder. *Why am I such a coward. Why can't I make a single decision for myself.* The questions metastasized, each one feeding the next, until they stopped being questions and became something closer to a verdict.
Sweat traced cold lines down his back. His fingers trembled at his sides. The ruined city seemed to tilt slightly, the way things do when the body has decided it has had enough and begins issuing warnings.
Raymond noticed. He said nothing. Some lessons had to be survived rather than taught.
"Why?" Leon finally said. His voice came out smaller than he intended.
Raymond kept walking.
"Why are you showing me this?" Leon pressed. "You wanted me to become a warrior."
Raymond stopped.
The street felt suddenly, oddly quiet.
He turned. And for the first time since they had left the wall, Leon saw something in his brother's face that wasn't control. Exhaustion. Sadness. Something that might have been fear—not for himself, but directed outward, toward Leon, in the way that fear looks when it belongs to someone who loves you.
"Because I love you, idiot."
Leon had no answer for that.
Raymond exhaled. "You think I want this life for you?" His hand moved briefly toward the devastated street, then dropped. "When you were younger, I prayed you would awaken."
"You did?"
"Of course I did." A bitter, brief smile. "I wanted at least one of us to escape this."
Leon stood very still.
All the years he had assumed Raymond resented his obsession with mages—all the years he had read that impatience as contempt—and it had been the opposite. Raymond had wanted the dream to come true. At least once. At least for his brother.
Raymond looked away, toward the wounded, toward the dead, toward the city they had barely managed to hold.
"But it didn't." His voice had gone quiet. "And now you're asking me to make you a warrior." He met Leon's eyes. "So I'm showing you the truth. If you still choose this after seeing what it costs—" he held the gaze— "then I'll know it isn't anger speaking."
He put a hand on Leon's shoulder.
"It will be your choice."
The pressure had been building for some time before Leon recognized it for what it was.
He had mistaken it for grief, for exhaustion, for the particular weight of a day that had destroyed too many things at once. But this was something else—something that did not care about grief or exhaustion, that had its own timeline and its own intentions.
It crested without warning.
A sharp crack, deep inside his skull.
Leon's knees went out. He caught himself on one, hands flying to his temples, a sound escaping his throat that he didn't recognize as his own voice. His heart hammered so hard he could feel it in his back teeth. Something was moving through his blood—not warmth, not fever, but pressure, as though his veins had been repurposed for something they were never built to carry.
"Leon!"
Raymond grabbed him. Leon barely registered it.
The world dissolved.
In its place: visions. Thousands of them, arriving faster than thought could organize them. A wolf with silver fur beneath a blood-red moon. A serpent vast enough to coil around mountains. A stag whose antlers were formed from living crystal, catching light that came from nowhere. Birds whose wings, spread open, looked like a second sunrise laid across the horizon. A six-legged predator moving through a forest of black stone. A fox wrapped in golden flame. A bear the size of a fortress. A mantis with blades where its forearms should have been.
They kept coming.
Creatures of fur and scale and feather. Creatures that swam through cloud-seas and creatures that had never touched ground. Creatures of terrible majesty and creatures that triggered something older than reason—a deep, instinctive recognition that one was prey and the other was not.
And every one of them turned toward him.
Every one looked directly at him, through whatever distance existed between vision and reality, as though they had been waiting for exactly this moment and had simply been patient about it.
Then the images accelerated beyond anything he could track—a torrent of claws and scales and ancient eyes—and the pain stopped being something that happened to his head and became something that happened to all of him at once.
Leon screamed.
"What's happening—" Raymond's voice cracked. "*Leon!*"
Then he stopped speaking entirely.
His brother's eyes were glowing. A deep, brilliant gold, bright enough to be visible through the haze of smoke and failing light. Raymond had stood on a hundred battlefields. He had seen things that rewrote what he believed was possible. He had no category for this.
Then he saw the other thing.
Between Leon's brows, the skin had begun to move.
Not swell—*move*, with the purposeful, awful patience of something that had always been there and had finally decided to arrive. A thin line appeared. Light leaked through it, the same impossible gold. And slowly, with a kind of dreadful inevitability, a crystalline structure pushed free of the skin—not bone, not anything Raymond had a name for. Its surface caught the dim light and held it, and it was still growing, still emerging, as though it had a great deal more of itself to show.
Raymond's hand tightened on his brother's arm.
He had stopped being afraid of things he could fight a long time ago.
This was something else.
Whatever was happening to Leon—whatever had chosen this moment, this street, this ruined city to finally announce itself—it was no ordinary awakening.
Of that much, Raymond was certain.
Of everything else, he knew nothing at all.