He was the last to fall.
Even as the sky cracked open with fire and the field below wept in silence, the knight stood unmoving. His armor—blackened with the soot of centuries—gleamed against the carnage like a relic pulled from the deep earth. His name was Caelen, though few dared speak it aloud. They called him the Deathless, the Flame's Warden, the Blade of Aurelwyn.
And now he bled.
It was a quiet wound. No cry left his lips. But the crimson that trickled from beneath his breastplate was undeniable. For the first time in over four hundred years, Caelen felt the throb of life inside him—not the slow pulse of enchanted breath, but the raw ache of being breakable.
He staggered, falling to one knee among the ash and iron. All around him, the battle had ended—not with glory, but with silence. The enemy had retreated. The banners of Aurelwyn snapped in the smoky wind, hollow and tired.
The Queen's mage approached him, eyes wide with something like reverence... or fear.
"My lord—your chest, it's—"
Caelen lifted a gauntleted hand to silence him. The touch to his wound brought more blood. His blood. Real.
"Say nothing of this," he commanded, voice low, shaking. "Let the songs lie."
The mage hesitated. But who was he to defy a legend?
Caelen rose on shaky legs. And in that moment, he felt the weight of time—of centuries he had cheated. His bones creaked. His breath no longer tasted of frost and steel, but of earth and smoke.
He was dying. Slowly, yes. But dying nonetheless.
And no one—not the crown, not the gods, not even Caelen himself—knew why.
Three nights later, he left the capital under a veil of shadow. No guard. No steward. No torch to guide him.
The castle halls had whispered as he passed through them. No one stopped him. No one dared. A living myth walked among mortals with rusted joints and slow steps.
He rode into the wild places, where the Queen's law faded into forgotten rivers and old stones. Where names carried weight, and magic was not yet buried beneath prayer and steel.
The Hollowwood awaited.
It did not welcome him. It did not reject him. It simply watched.
The wind threaded cold fingers through the branches above as Caelen trudged deeper into the thickets. He had long since abandoned his horse to the wild. His armor he left behind beneath a tree whose bark peeled like bone. He wore only a traveler's cloak now, hood pulled low to hide the silver at his temples. His wound burned, pulsed—then ebbed. Then burned again.
But it was not death that haunted him.
It was the strange sense that something was pulling him forward. Not fate. Not prophecy. Something quieter. Older.
Something like longing.
On the fourth night, the forest changed.
It happened slowly. A stillness fell—thick and full, like the hush before a thunderclap. The trees thinned. Moonlight spilled like silver blood across the moss-covered path.
And then came the fire—not flame, not really. It rippled at his feet in a soft, haunting circle of blue. Cold light that hummed like a lullaby meant for the dead.
He froze. One hand went instinctively to the hilt of a blade he no longer carried.
Then he saw her. The witch. She was not cloaked in shadows as the old stories warned. She did not hiss or curse. She simply… was. Standing in the stillness like something time had forgotten to carry away. Her robes were gray and loose, drifting like mist. Her hair, dark and soft, curled behind one ear as though even the wind dared not displace it.
But it was her eyes—green, luminous, ancient and young all at once—that cleaved Caelen open.
The knight forgot his wound. His name. His centuries. In that instant, he felt for the first time in memory. Not the ache of a failing body—but the unbearable pull of recognition. As if the soul he'd never believed in had been waiting, quiet and coiled, for this woman to appear. The witch stepped forward, barefoot, unafraid. Her gaze didn't question. It knew.
"You're late," she said, voice like rain on parchment. Caelen tried to answer. Couldn't. The words died in his throat. "I've seen you," the witch murmured. "Not just in dreams. Not just in echoes. In me." She knelt, eyes level with Caelen's. Her fingers brushed the knight's jaw, featherlight—more intimate than any swordplay, more dangerous than any wound. And in that simple, impossible touch, the knight saw it all:
A cabin tucked deep in snow. Fingers brushing over calloused palms. A voice whispering his name like a prayer. Lips he had never kissed, and yet mourned the loss of.
"I don't know your name," Caelen rasped. "You will," said the witch. "But you already know me." The fire dimmed. The forest breathed. And the knight who had never known death... fell, not into darkness—But into love.