Four great wings beat downward, heralding death across the night sky. Below, Tsem huddled beneath a pair of bushes with his parents, their branches offering precious though thin cover from the horrors on the other side.

  The cultivator guards were long gone, fled after the first wave. Now, the caravan’s campsite, so comforting only minutes ago was aflame, cooking fires were kicked up by fleeing would-be settlers, forced to scramble through the roaring flames to preserve their lives, if only for a few moments more. Demonic beasts were quick to pounce on those few who remained, tearing with tooth and claw. Already, the screams and panicked scrambling were growing sparser.

  Tsem wanted to do something, but he and his parents had been lucky to slip away the first time. They would not be so lucky again. Still, at least they had survived, and Tsem could see a few other small groups hiding nearby. If they could group together, maybe they could actually survive this.

  A young pair that Tsem vaguely recalled sitting around a fire with were only a short distance away. They locked their eyes with him. Yes. They had spoken with his family in the first few days of the trip. They’d spoken of how they were running away together to start a new life, to be together despite their family’s disapproval. The man beckoned to his father cautiously, motioning them to approach.

  Tsem’s father looked around carefully, checking their surroundings. As he did, a giant shadow swooped down, so fast and so quiet that Tsem wasn’t sure he’d really seen it. A moment later though, his mind processed that the young couple were gone, just gone.

  “It’s clear, let’s make our…” Tsem’s father trailed off. “Where did they go?”

  His question was met with nothing more than the terrified, confused looks of his wife and son. His own face pulled together, and his eyes faced that fear, giving courage to his family. Tsem’s mother responded with a grim smile. Courage received. Those were the last expressions they ever bore.

  Four wings filled the world, and Tsem’s brain drove time to a near standstill. One moment, over him, an enormous predator swept down, as if hovering in the air. The next, his parents were gone. No. Not gone. Even with the world moving at a snail’s crawl, he barely caught a final glimpse. The glimpse was of talons piercing through the bodies of his parents. One into the back of his father and out his chest. Another from the stomach of his mother, driving out from between her shoulder blades. Four wings beat, perfectly coordinated, and it was gone.

  Not truly gone though. Those other groups who had been around, hiding, one by one, second by second, they vanished. Tsem, having no better recourse, stumbled away hoping something would save him. To his eyes, nothing did. He made it away regardless.

  Of course, if nothing had saved him, the odds of him escaping were astronomically low. Not from so many demonic beasts. Not from the hunter in the night sky. Miracles do happen though; absurdly unlikely threads of fate are sometimes tugged in the right direction. Some of the more superstitious might claim such tugs are more often than not the intervention of another, but few would bother meddling in the life of a peasant. Fewer still would bother with the trickery needed to remain unnoticed by all.

  …

  Tsem could recall the mixture of guilt, fear, and loss he’d endured as he fled that night. Right now, staring back over the site of that tragedy with Kanuk and Waska at his sides, the feeling was remembered intensely.

  There was more left here than Tsem would have thought, marks to tell all who stumbled across the area glimpses of what had happened. The wagons were tilted, sunk into the ground, and badly burnt, but their wreckage still remained, some of the caravan’s supplies still held within. Unnatural divots where cooking fires had been set up still marked the ground, some still containing burnt logs, though many had lost those to their surroundings.

  The signs, just as the cultivators had expected, didn’t end with burnt fragments and broken wagons. The dead had left their mark. There weren’t any bodies remaining, those had likely left with the demonic beasts, but they had left spirits behind. It was common for the qi of death to pull spirits into being. It was why even the smallest villages kept a safe amount of sacred water available to treat their dead, to prevent death qi from accumulating. In the rare case where such rites weren’t able to be performed, the resulting spirits were almost never particularly dangerous.

  Tsem knew how these people had died though, and he knew spirits summoned from their collective death qi would not be peaceful for it. Still, they had known that going into this. Da Kanuk had spent long hours hunting down and procuring the rare peach tree wood they needed to destroy the spirits. Now, the three of them were equipped with weapons made from the stuff.

  “Stay behind us, Tsem. Only fight if you need to.” Da Waska pushed forward, walking into the clearing that that night’s raging fires had made. “I would like to tell you it won’t be needed at all, but…”

  There were so many spirits. Sure, none seemed to possess strong qi, only ancient spirits or those summoned by a necromancer were ever truly strong, but the sheer number alone threatened to bury Tsem. The two Da clan cultivators seemed confident though.

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  The spirits themselves looked vaguely humanoid though they weren’t truly solid by nature, so their outlines wavered a little. They turned in unnatural ways, some folding in half, some simply moving through themselves to face Da Waska and Kanuk as they charged into their midst. The creatures were not constrained to their form like a human might be. Many grew spikes at the threat, the mist that made them up condensing in certain spots. Condensed enough, Tsem assumed, to do damage to even the strong cultivators charging at them.

  Da Waska in combat was not the same jovial, somewhat distractable person Tsem had come to know in their few days of travel. He was as fierce as any of the demonic beasts Tsem had encountered, his eyes concentrated on the spiked limbs of his many opponents. Even surrounded on all sides, he was not overwhelmed.

  His twin short blades spun like a whirlwind, cleaving through spirits in paths Tsem struggled to follow or understand. His style seemed erratic, yet far more spirits fell into nothingness from the touch of his blades than Tsem would have expected from more logical strikes. At the same time, his legs moved in a constant barrage of kicks, landing precisely against the sides of materialized spikes, sending scores of spirits flying away.

  In comparison, Da Kanuk was struggling. Only in comparison though. His spear struck with the same skill Tsem had seen him use before, and his hands struck blows to those spirits foolish enough to come within his reach. Still, fewer spirits fell around him, and it was from that direction that four forms peeled off, heading for Tsem.

  He was ready. His specially made wooden spear was poised to strike in his right hand. In his left, as usual, was a net, the same needleroot one as he’d shown Lyung the other day, repaired and woven through with leftover wood chips.

  Tsem made the first move, feinting forward with his spear as if he were trying to strike the spirit on the far right while actually taking a step back. The result was that the simple creatures each pulled closer together, the rightmost one flinching wildly towards its fellows. In that moment, Tsem cast his net, a motion well-practiced in the long hours of waiting between hunts.

  The net swallowed the spirits, constraining them. Tsem thrust his spear in, banishing the first into nothingness. A second tried to push its way out of the net’s confines only to evaporate against the wooden chips woven within. The third and fourth followed soon after, victims of Tsem’s spear. His net fell to the ground, no longer held up by anything.

  Unfortunately, more spirits rushed to fill the spots of those banished, and Tsem was forced by spiked limbs to move away from his net. Without it, his lack of skill with the spear was quickly revealed. With no real instruction in the weapon’s use, Tsem’s capabilities were limited to basic thrusts. From the spirits high rate of successful dodges, he had to assume those were a little too telegraphed and too slow.

  Tsem took a slow breath in, changing the typical pattern of his qi, then with a series of sharp breaths outward, he worked it up and sent it roiling against itself in his purified meridian, trying to get it to burn. Da Waska had given him a few pointers, making his initial embarrassing attempts to burn qi marginally more successful. Still, Tsem had to concentrate fully on the process.

  His deep concentration was not aided by the spirits who continued their assault. In the end, all he managed to do was give the spirits precious moments to shove themselves into his guard, one of them, partially bent over beneath his spear, broke the skin on his left leg with a spike.

  The wound felt wrong, and the accompanying pain forced Tsem to abort his attempt to burn his qi. He swung his spear in an arc, desperately trying to force the spirits away. His spear caught immediately, jarring itself from his hands at the impact. The spirit that had blocked the attack stumbled back. Even with his minimal cultivation, Tsem was stronger than any individual spirit, but that didn’t matter here. He might have staggered one, but the rest pressed in.

  Tsem prepared to defend himself though he wasn’t sure how to do so. The only somewhat solid part of his opponents were the spikes oddly spaced across their limbs, and he lacked the technique the two Da clan disciples had to strike at those spikes.

  Before he could make any such attempt, Da Waska was in front of him, his twin blades cutting all around them. Then he was behind Tsem, kicking away a spirit that threatened his back. Then he was moving forwards again, and all the spirits around were banished.

  Tsem took the opportunity to retrieve his weapons, but in the end, he didn’t need them. By that point, the spirits numbers were much reduced, enough that no more could get past Waska or Kanuk. Eventually, all was still, and Tsem let out a breath of relief.

  “Thank you, Senior Waska.” Tsem bowed towards the man. He just shook it off with a comment about it being his role, but Tsem knew how close he’d come to death. It was never far on the frontier.

  Looking around, Tsem realized that he was standing in a dark reminder of that very fact. It took him a dozen breaths to get his qi, already disturbed by his failed attempt to burn it, back in order. His eyes returned time and time again to one of the divots in the ground, one of the campfires just like any of the others. Only, this was the one where he had sat with his parents that night. Tears pulled themselves unbidden from Tsem’s eyes and he moved to find a seat away from it all, on a log in the forest. Memory pulled at him, his qi carrying it to him with clarity.

  …

  “What is that noise?”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Honored cultivator, where are you going?”

  Tsem could see the Meiryu clan cultivator, looking so strong in his light armor and clan attire, stiffen. He paused for a moment, just a moment. “We’re leaving. We cannot protect you from this.”

  Tsem’s father hauled Tsem to his feet, an arm protectively surrounding him. “We need to run.” Tsem’s mother pointed in a direction, grabbing what little they had nearby.

  Seconds later, they were upon a wall of descending teeth and claws, finding no easy gaps. They charged forwards regardless, Tsem’s father leading the way, ready to throw himself at a demonic beast to provide his family with an opportunity to slip free. It wasn’t him that made that sacrifice though. Instead, it was a massive, muscled man, one his father regularly did chores with. The man threw his body in front of a demonic beast bigger even than him, shouting for them to go, to run.

  Tsem’s father growled his regret at leaving his friend, a sound that came from the heart, but he pulled Tsem along, shoving him first, keeping his body between the beasts and his son. Tsem ran forward, sure everything would work out in spite of everything happening all around him. His parents were here, and they were protecting him.

  …

  Tsem wiped at his eyes. Protection. It was a complicated thing. Coming back here made it clear. It was not the powerful cultivator of a great clan whose actions had kept Tsem alive. It was his father’s friend, and his parents.

  Tsem knew that his path was one of a protector, he had started to realize that, but now he saw it more clearly than ever before. The memories of all his parents had tried to do for him, all they had done to protect his childish dreams, were frighteningly obvious now. It was why he wanted to become stronger. Yet clearly strength was not a requirement for a protector. Even those lacking strength could still protect something. Even so, Tsem knew he needed to be strong. Strength was a tool, an important one. He’d need to keep his mind open though, to understand other such tools. His parents had understood more than he did about protection. He needed to learn all of that, and to grow strong enough to put it into action. It was who he wanted to become, eventually.

  “Tsem.” Da Kanuk’s hesitant voice reached into the forest. “You need to see this.”