Chapter 137: The First Cut
Candles guttered in their iron holders, casting long shadows across Sylas’s private chamber.
The air hung heavy with silence and the faint scent of smoke and oil. Soren stood perfectly still before the ornate desk, his body relaxed despite the tension radiating from the man seated before him.
Sylas’s green eyes caught the candlelight as he studied Soren, his perfect face revealing nothing of his thoughts.
He tapped a slender finger against the polished surface of his desk, the only sound in the otherwise silent chamber.
"You’ve trained long enough without consequence," Sylas said finally, his cultured voice cutting through the stillness. "Time to prove what you’ve learned."
He slid a folded parchment across the desk’s surface. Soren picked it up, the paper rough against his calloused fingers.
The seal had already been broken, revealing a hastily scrawled description and crude map.
"A Church informant hiding in the wastelands beyond the ruins," Sylas continued, watching Soren’s face as he read. "Wanted dead for selling information to inquisitors."
Soren scanned the details, location, description, patterns of movement. A single man, isolated, likely armed but untrained. His mind automatically catalogued approach routes, potential complications, methods of disposal.
"Mira will accompany you," Sylas said, leaning back slightly in his chair. "She observes. You act."
The shard against Soren’s chest remained neutral, neither warming nor cooling. Valenna’s presence lingered at the edges of his awareness, watchful but offering no guidance.
"Understood." Soren folded the parchment and slipped it into his tunic. No questions. No hesitation.
Something flickered across Sylas’s face, approval, perhaps, or simple confirmation of expectations met. He gave a faint nod, the movement so slight it was barely perceptible in the dim light.
"Don’t think, Thorne," he said, his voice dropping lower. "End him cleanly."
–
The tunnels wound beneath the Wastes like the veins of some ancient beast, their walls worn smooth by centuries of use. Soren followed Mira through the narrow passages, his footsteps nearly as silent as hers.
They hadn’t spoken since leaving the sanctuary, communication reduced to occasional hand gestures when paths diverged or obstacles appeared.
The air grew drier as they approached the surface, the mineral scent of underground stone giving way to something sharper, more caustic.
When they finally emerged through a hidden opening in what appeared to be a collapsed well, the Wastes stretched before them, pale and lifeless under a sky the color of bruised flesh.
Mira pulled her hood lower against the bitter wind, her tattooed face half-hidden in shadow. She moved ahead with practiced efficiency, each step placed with deliberate care across the treacherous terrain.
Soren followed, matching her pace. The landscape was eerily beautiful in its desolation, dust pale as bone, skeletal trees reaching toward the sky like supplicants, half-buried remains of roads leading nowhere.
The ruins of a civilization that had once thrived, now reduced to fragments scattered across barren earth.
The shard against his chest remained quiet, Valenna’s presence a faint awareness at the back of his mind. She hadn’t spoken since he’d received his orders, as if understanding that this moment belonged to him alone.
Mira glanced back occasionally, her dark eyes measuring something in Soren that went beyond his physical presence.
After the third such assessment, her gaze lingered longer than before, noting the changes weeks of training had carved into him.
’She’s looking for weakness,’ Soren thought, meeting her gaze without flinching. ’Or perhaps for remnants of the person I used to be.’
They traveled for hours across the blighted landscape, following landmarks only Mira seemed to recognize.
The sky darkened gradually, though whether from approaching night or gathering storm, Soren couldn’t tell. Time behaved strangely in the Wastes, stretching and compressing without warning.
When they finally paused on a ridge overlooking a shallow valley, Mira turned to him fully for the first time since they’d begun their journey.
"You’ve stopped asking questions," she observed, her voice low and neutral.
Soren adjusted his pack, the weight of his weapons a comforting presence against his back. "I started learning instead."
Something that might have been the ghost of a smile touched her lips, there and gone so quickly he couldn’t be certain he’d seen it at all. "We’ll see if it holds."
Below them, nestled against the base of a crumbling stone wall that might once have been part of a defensive perimeter, sat a small structure, little more than a shelter cobbled together from salvaged materials. A faint light flickered from its single window, marking their destination with unmistakable clarity.
–
The outpost, if such a grand term could be applied to the ramshackle structure, looked even more pitiful up close. Sheets of corroded metal had been lashed to a framework of ancient timber, gaps sealed with a mixture of clay and what appeared to be tar.
The single window was covered with translucent animal hide, allowing the lantern light within to create shifting patterns as someone moved back and forth.
Soren crouched beside Mira in the shadow of a fallen column, observing their target’s sanctuary. The wind had died down, leaving an unnatural stillness that made every sound seem magnified, the creak of the shelter’s makeshift walls, the occasional scrape of movement inside, the low murmur of a man’s voice.
"He’s praying," Soren whispered, the words barely disturbing the air between them. Through the hide-covered window, he could make out a hunched silhouette, hands raised in supplication to whatever god still listened in this forsaken place.
Mira studied the structure with practiced efficiency, noting entrances, potential weaknesses, lines of sight. After completing her assessment, she turned to Soren with a single, simple gesture: Your kill.
The shard against his chest remained neutral, neither encouraging nor warning. Valenna’s presence lingered at the edges of his awareness, watchful but silent.
Soren settled deeper into his crouch, allowing his breathing to slow, his heartbeat to steady. He studied the scene before him with methodical precision, memorizing the path he would take, noting how the man’s shadow shifted with the lanternlight, calculating the rhythm of his movements as he paced and prayed.
’Presence,’ he reminded himself, recalling Sylas’s lesson. ’Not power through aggression, but control through certainty.’
He felt his awareness narrow, external distractions falling away until only the task remained. No fear clouded his thoughts, no hesitation tightened his muscles. Just clarity, pure and cold as winter air.
With a final glance at Mira, who had melted further into shadow to observe, Soren began his approach.
The packed earth made no sound beneath his boots as Soren moved toward the shelter. Each step measured, each breath controlled, he advanced like shadow given purpose. The shard against his chest remained cold and still, as if holding its breath along with him.
He circled to the structure’s blind side, where no window offered warning of his approach. The wall here was mostly salvaged metal, the edges poorly fitted, creating gaps wide enough to see the interior. Through one such opening, Soren observed his target directly for the first time.
A middle-aged man with a patchy beard and hollow cheeks knelt before a makeshift altar, a wooden crate draped with faded cloth, topped with a crude carving of the Church’s eight-ringed symbol.
His lips moved in continuous prayer, hands clasped so tightly the knuckles showed white even in the dim light. Fear, not devotion, drove his whispered supplications.
Soren studied the shelter’s construction, identifying the weakest point of entry. A section where the metal sheets overlapped poorly would allow silent access with minimal disturbance.
He drew his blade, not the practice sword he’d trained with for weeks, but a slender, curved dagger Sylas had presented him before their departure. The weight felt unfamiliar in his hand, yet somehow right.
With practiced care, he eased the metal aside just enough to create an opening. The hinges of the shelter’s single door creaked as the wind picked up again, masking any sound his entry might have made.
Inside, the air hung thick with the scent of unwashed body, rancid oil, and the sour tang of fear. The informant continued his desperate prayers, unaware of death’s entrance.
Soren moved across the dirt floor, each footfall placed with deliberate precision. Three steps. Two. One.
The man sensed movement too late. He turned, eyes widening as they met Soren’s, a half-formed prayer freezing on his lips.
Soren’s blade found the opening beneath the ribs with surgical precision, angling upward toward the heart. The sound was soft, final, a whisper of steel parting flesh, a quiet exhalation as life began to leave.
The informant’s eyes held his, confusion replacing fear as his body registered the mortal wound. His mouth opened, whether to finish his prayer or beg for mercy, Soren would never know.
He caught the man as he collapsed, supporting his weight, preventing the ungraceful sprawl of sudden death. The blade remained in place, ensuring the end would be quick, relatively painless. A professional courtesy.
Soren held him steady as the final breaths rattled from lungs rapidly filling with blood. He watched, unblinking, as awareness faded from the man’s eyes, replaced by the vacant stare of death.
Only when the body went completely limp did Soren withdraw his blade, carefully lowering the corpse to the dirt floor. He wiped the weapon clean on a scrap of cloth from his pocket, then resheathed it with methodical care.
The entire encounter had lasted less than thirty seconds.
Soren looked down at the dead man, noting the details he hadn’t had time to observe before, the threadbare clothes, the callused hands that spoke of manual labor rather than scholarly pursuits, the simple wooden pendant half-hidden beneath his collar.
He felt no triumph, no horror, no particular emotion at all. Only the quiet weight of inevitability, of a task completed exactly as intended. Death had been required, and death had been delivered.
As he turned to leave, Soren caught sight of Mira watching from the doorway, her tattooed face expressionless in the lantern light. She had entered silently during the kill, observing his work with professional assessment.
Her eyes met his across the small space, searching for something, regret perhaps, or satisfaction, or the nauseated shock of a first kill. Whatever she sought, she didn’t find it.
Soren stepped past her into the night, the cool air washing over him like absolution. The stars above the Wastes shone with cold brilliance, indifferent to the death that had just occurred beneath them.
The shard against his chest remained still, Valenna’s presence a watchful silence in his mind.
Behind him, Mira closed the shelter’s door, leaving the dead man to his final privacy.