Pain stabbed through him with fresh, crystalline cruelty. Sharp. Merciless. When he tried to push up on one elbow, his body howled in protest. The adrenaline was ebbing, baring the broken truth beneath. He felt like a **marionette with half its strings cut**.
Randel von Eichenwald — scion of one of the continent’s most ancient houses — staggered and sank to one knee. The world tilted. The edge.
(An ordinary man would already be dead from blood loss or poison…)
And she… who was she? A ghost? A goddess descended from the heavens? (Or… am I already dead? Is this a dying hallucination?)
But the cold mud under his fingernails, the acrid reek of smoke and ozone, the bone-deep chill — everything was too real. And she… she was real too.
His pain-clouded gaze fell on the golden figure.
And then he noticed.
Something was wrong.
She had taken one step back, almost casually bracing her palm against a charred tree trunk. Beneath the armor her shoulders rose and fell — not smoothly, but in small, uneven hitches.
(The one who had just called fire from the sky and erased enemies from existence… now looked… tired.)
“A-are… you all right… my lady?” His voice came out hoarse, uncertain. A man accustomed to giving orders was now begging permission to care.
The golden helm snapped toward him. The unseen gaze slammed into him with almost physical weight.
(When was the last time…?) Only as a child, facing his father the duke in full of rage, had he felt anything like it — raw, primal terror.
(I am an insect. Dust. She could erase me with a thought and leave not even a memory.)
“Save your concern for yourself,” the voice rang from beneath the helm — cold, cutting. Yet beneath the ice ran a thread of barely perceptible strain. “Lie down.”
He didn’t understand.
“P-pardon?”
She stepped forward. The motion was silent, graceful. But now Randel saw. (She, too… is forcing herself.)
“I said — lie down.” Her voice again. “Or do you yearn to join those mercenaries, aristocrat?” Cold, yet laced with a strange, almost mocking lilt. “I will tend your wounds.”
Randel froze. (This divine being… raw power incarnate… offers aid?) Like some village barber or hedge-witch. He had no strength left to argue. Swallowing a groan, he slowly lowered his back onto the wet leaves.
She knelt beside him. A golden-gauntleted hand swept the air near her belt. Then — out of nothing — a cloth pouch appeared, smelling of sharp herbs and old linen. It simply materialized.
Randel stared, entranced. Her fingers moved with practiced certainty, cleaning the gash on his scalp. Pain flared, white-hot.
“You are impossibly lucky,” she said, voice level, as though delivering a lecture. “‘Crimson Claws’ coat their blades in ‘Grave-Whisper’ — a neuro-paralytic. Death in twelve seconds.”
“And yet you still breathe. Astonishing.”
Randel managed a faint, cracked smile. Consciousness was slipping again, this time not from pain but utter exhaustion.
“As a child…” he whispered. “Father… mixed micro-doses of known poisons into my food… Said a ruler must be proof against his enemies’ favorite weapons…”
“Seems… it worked…”
Her hand stilled for a heartbeat. (Surprise? Approval?) The face beneath the helm remained hidden.
She resumed in silence — swift, efficient. When she reached the arrow-wound in his shoulder and began binding it, Randel gathered the last scraps of strength to speak. His voice was soft, but utterly sincere.
“Thank you… my lady…” he breathed. “For my life…”
The golden helm turned toward him again. It felt as though an invisible gaze pierced straight through to his soul.
“I am not your ‘my lady’, aristocrat,” she said — no anger, only finality, like the strike of a seal. “I belong to no one. And you owe me nothing.”
“There is a debt. But to the future. Do not squander it.”
Finished, she rose. Brushed off her armor as though shaking away mundane dust. Once more she stood unshakable, radiant, impossibly distant.
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“Can you reach your people?” The steel edge had returned to her voice.
Randel nodded. He stood, swaying. He was shattered, spent. Yet alive. And already his mind — recovering from the first shock — raced. (Who is she? What does she want? Why save me?)
“Then go.” She gestured toward the opposite direction from which the assassins had come. “Remember this, Randel von Eichenwald. Your war is only beginning. And now you carry a debt — not to me. To this world.”
But he did not move. Instead he took one faltering step closer. His trembling, blood-slick hand reached out instinctively and closed around her wrist, over the golden plate.
“Wait!” His voice cracked. “At least a name… the name of the one who saved… Why did you…?”
Beneath his fingers the metal was… warm. Alive. At that lightest touch her entire frame shuddered — just once. A short, almost inaudible exhale escaped the helm. Her arm froze, but she did not pull away. (Her radiance… dimmed for an instant?)
“Names are merely labels. They bind,” her voice dropped, the former omnipotent resonance gone. “As for ‘why’… the world would be slightly more boring without you.”
In that instant the forest exploded with noise.
Clanking armor, ringing steel. From the trees poured soldiers in blue-and-silver cloaks — the colors of House Eichenwald.
At their head thundered a giant knight wearing a black patch over his left eye, face twisted with rage and terror.
“Witch! Remove your hand from my lord!” His roar shook the trees. A massive battle-axe rose high. In heartbeats the soldiers formed a ring of leveled spears — menace thick in the air.
(They made it…!) Amanda knew the chronicles: Sir Kael’s company had arrived minutes too late, finding only their lord’s arrow-riddled corpse. But because of her intervention… they were in time.
Yet now every spear pointed at her.
Before Amanda could react — vanish or answer with force — Randel moved. He lunged forward, ignoring his wounds, throwing himself between her and the steel.
“Lower your weapons! This instant!” His voice was raw but carried unbreakable authority; even the trees seemed to flinch. “This woman just saved my life — she annihilated an entire company of Crimson Claws!”
“Lower them — that is an order!”
The soldiers faltered, spears wavering. Before them stood their wounded yet living duke. And behind him — the enigmatic golden figure. Every eye turned to Sir Kael.
The old knight’s single eye bulged. Slowly, as though it cost him everything, he lowered the axe.
“Your Grace… but she…”
“She is my savior,” Randel’s stare stabbed into the veteran like a dagger. The man involuntarily bowed his head. “Kael, you just raised steel against the one to whom I owe my life.”
“Apologize. Now.”
The giant flushed crimson with shame. He stepped forward, head bowed.
“…I beg your pardon… my lady.”
“I… did not know. I only saw…”
He fell silent.
Amanda shifted her gaze from Kael to Randel. In the duke’s eyes she saw turmoil — and unshakable resolve to protect her. (An intriguing turn.)
“Commendable loyalty, knight,” she said at last, the distant divine timbre returning. She turned to Randel. “You are surrounded by faithful men, aristocrat.”
“Treasure them. They will be your shield in what is to come.”
With those words she stepped toward the clearing’s edge. Her golden silhouette already began to blur, dissolving into gathering dusk. She flicked a hand over her shoulder — a farewell as cold and final as winter.
In that moment something inside Randel snapped its leash. Etiquette, years of iron self-control — crushed beneath one overwhelming certainty.
(If I let her go now — I will never see her again.)
Defying every rule and reason, desperate, he lunged and caught her arm again — higher this time, fingers slipping into the narrow gap between golden plates.
She froze. Did not pull away. But the body that moments ago had embodied sacred might trembled — not with anger. With something far more profound and personal. (A touch… to skin untouched for an eternity?)
“Wait!” His voice broke, almost pleading. The Duke of Eichenwald begged. “You… you’re fading like a mirage.”
“Without even a name. Without showing your face…”
“At least the face of the one who gave me back my life… the future of my house!”
He released her, stepping back as though burned, and **bowed low** in formal court fashion.
“You say you are no ‘my lady.’ I understand.”
“Your power is beyond titles.”
“But to me you are savior. Benefactor.”
“And if I let you walk into the night without offering even bread and salt, shelter to rest…”
“…I would be the basest fool, unworthy of the name noble.”
He straightened. Fever-bright eyes burned with sincerity.
“Castle Eichenwald’s gates are open to you.”
“I ask not as duke, but as a man who owes you everything.”
“Grant me this honor. Let me repay even a fraction.”
She turned slowly. The blank helm **weighed** on him like judgment. Seconds stretched; the air itself seemed to quiver. The soldiers held their breath, afraid to move.
At last she spoke — quietly, in a voice entirely different. No longer resonant with godlike power; almost a whisper. Fragile, perilously close to breaking.
“I… do not like being touched.”
There was no anger in it. Only a raw, naked vulnerability that struck Randel harder than any display of might ever could. (This is not the voice of a goddess… This is a human voice.)
“Forgive me,” he blurted, cheeks blazing. “It was… unforgivable presumption.”
“I let emotion overrule sense.”
“I beg your pardon for my insolence.”
He braced for wrath. Or for her to simply vanish.
But she was silent, staring. As though weighing something on invisible scales.
“You would invite… me… into your domain?” Her tone lightened, almost teasing. She had switched to the intimate “you.” Erasing distance. “A ruler who barely escaped death, scarcely stand — invites a power he does not comprehend into his home?”
“That is either the greatest folly in history. Or…”
She paused.
“…courage I have not seen in a very long time.”
Randel met her unseen gaze without flinching.
“Call it folly, then.”
“But it is a debt of honor. And—” he forced himself to look straight into the featureless mask “—curiosity. Today the world I knew turned upside down.”
“I cannot simply let its source walk away.”
Silence again.
At last she inclined her head — slow, weightless.
“Very well. I will come.”