Gregor’s Stand

Flashback to the Raid

Gregor - POV

Lyra screamed, and I was awake before the sound finished tearing through the room.

Not fully awake. Awake the way soldiers wake. With the body already moving before the mind catches up.

Hands seized me in the dark.

One clamped my shoulder.
Another hooked under my arm.
A third grabbed for my throat as they dragged me half out of bed and into the main room.

“Got the big one.”

“Watch his hands.”

“Move him, move him.”

Three on me. Maybe more in the house. Hard to tell yet. Too much dark, too much motion, not enough room.

The floor under my bare feet buckled.

Wood groaned. Split. Shifted.

From the bedroom came men cursing and the raw sound of furniture slamming into walls where nothing should have been moving at all.

Lyra.

Still fighting.

Good.

The man on my left pulled instead of striking. That was his mistake. I planted one foot, let his own drag turn my hips, and drove my elbow backward into his throat. Hard. Full body behind it.

Something gave under the point of the blow. Cartilage. Windpipe. Maybe both.

He made a wet choking sound and folded.

I ripped my arm free and turned.

No weapon. No armor. Nightclothes. Blood already up in my mouth from biting my tongue when they yanked me off balance.

That left what was mine.

Hands.
Heat.
Weight.
Training.

Two men between me and the bedroom door. One circling wide. All armed with short blades built for house work, not battlefield honor.

The nearest thrust for my ribs.

I stepped inside the strike.

Caught his wrist.

Heat answered me at once, running into my palm and fingers. Leather smoked under my grip. The man screamed and tried to yank back, but I was already turning with him. I drove my shoulder into his chest and hurled him sideways through the wall into Seraphine’s old room.

The boards burst apart around him.

I followed through the hole before the others could close it.

He landed on his back in splintered timber, still clutching his knife. I kicked his wrist once. Bone cracked. The blade spun loose. I took it on the way down and buried it under his jaw before he could breathe to scream again.

Now I had steel.

“Fire bastard!”

“Ice him down!”

Cold swept fast across the floorboards toward my feet, a slick white sheet skimming low and fast. Water-work. Good control too.

I stamped once and drove heat downward. Frost hissed into steam around my soles.

The room was cramped. Good.

Cramped rooms make numbers stupid.

A second raider came in high with a slash meant to make me guard up while the third cut low. I ducked the first and stepped through the second man’s centerline before he finished committing his weight. My fist caught the outside of his knee. Earth hardened through my arm at the moment of impact.

The leg bent sideways.

He screamed and dropped.

The first man recovered faster than I wanted and thrust for my face. I caught his knife wrist with my left hand, turned it outward, and dragged him into me. Close-quarters. Where height, muscle, and panic all become useful.

I drove the stolen dagger into the soft place under his ear.

Pulled it free.
Turned.
Used his falling body to block the next strike.

Steel glanced off dead weight instead of my ribs.

Behind me the cottage kept changing.

The walls bulged as roots worked under them. Window frames split. Thorned runners punched through seams in the wood and lashed into the hall. The whole house smelled of sap, smoke, and blood.

And under it all I could hear Naelira.

Still crying.

That was enough to keep me moving.

More raiders poured through the broken wall, six now, crowding the room with blades and bad breath and the confidence of men who believed they had already won.

One of them laughed. “Just keep him busy. The rest have the cargo.”

Cargo.

My wife.
My son.
My daughter.

Something in me went cold and exact.

The wind-mage moved first, trying to shove me off balance with a burst angled low at the legs. I let earth sink through my stance and rooted where I stood. The gust hit. My shoulders shifted. My feet did not.

A spearman rushed in behind it.

I caught the shaft in both hands.

Heat flared through my grip. The wood blackened, cracked, then split outright. I tore the broken end free and drove it into his chest so hard the sharpened splinter came out his back. Before he finished dying, I dragged him sideways and took the crossbow bolt meant for me into his ribs instead.

Another man came over the body with a short hatchet.

I stepped into him before he could get the full swing.

Forehead to nose.

Felt cartilage cave.

Then my right hand, hot enough now to brand, clamped over his face. He screamed once. I shoved him backward into the wall, pinned him there, and cut his throat low and wide with the dagger while his hands clawed uselessly at my wrist.

Too slow.

Still too slow.

For every one I dropped, another took the gap.

A water jet slammed into my side hard enough to lift me off my feet. I crashed through a half-softened partition into a storage alcove in a burst of snapped slats, folded linens, and dust.

I hit the floor on one shoulder and rolled.

Too late.

A sword pommel caught me across the temple.

Light burst behind my eyes. White first. Then red.

Boots drove into my ribs while I was still down. One. Two. Three. Something cracked. I stabbed blindly upward and felt the blade go in somewhere soft. A man grunted and stumbled away.

I forced myself up on one knee.

My skin had started cooling. That was bad. Heat was harder to hold once the body got this damaged. My fists lost some of their stone certainty and became knuckles again. A blade slid across my back and opened me from shoulder to hip. Hot wetness followed.

Still I rose.

Still.

Because Lyra’s magic was slowing.

I could hear that too.

The house had been alive around us. Angry. Protective. Answering her. Now the roots in the walls moved less. The warped boards settled by degrees. The wild shape of the cottage was beginning to die back into ordinary wood.

She was losing.

Or gone.

No.

I drove forward before that thought finished forming. Caught one raider by the belt and throat and slammed him into the doorframe hard enough to crack the jamb. Stole his short sword with my other hand. Kicked another into the remains of a shelf. Cut low across a third man’s belly when he stepped over the body too carelessly.

A club came down on my shoulder.

My arm went numb to the elbow.

Then another impact from behind.

Then another.

The room tilted.

The house had gone quiet now.

Not silent. Worse.

Quiet the way a body goes quiet when the heart is still beating somewhere but the fight inside it is ending.

Then I heard it.

Hoofbeats.

Not arriving.

Leaving.

I turned toward the sound on instinct alone and caught one last glimpse through the shattered outer wall: torchlight moving, shadows mounted, motion dragging the shape of my whole life away into the dark.

The next blow hit the back of my skull.

The floor rose up.

And I went with it.

After the Attack

Gregor - POV

The horses were the first thing I heard when I came back.

Farther away now.

That was worse than hearing them close.

I dragged myself up on shaking arms. Blood had dried down one side of my face and fresh blood kept feeding it. My ribs felt like broken pottery tied together badly under the skin. Around me, the cottage was a carcass.

The wall between the main room and Seraphine’s quarters was gone. Furniture lay shattered across both spaces. Burn marks streaked the floorboards black. Lyra’s growth-work still clung to beam and sill in places, already withering without her will inside it.

Bodies lay where they had fallen.

Not enough of them.

I stumbled into the bedroom.

“Lyra!”

Nothing.

“Victor!”

Nothing.

“Naelira!”

The cradle was on its side.

Blankets in the dirt. One leg broken off the chair by the hearth. Deep scores in the floor where something had been dragged. The room smelled of bitter herbs, blood, and the sharp green stink of power forced too far.

Gone.

All of them.

“Gregor!”

Henrik came through what had once been the front door, limping hard, one arm hanging wrong, blood from a scalp cut drying into his beard.

“They took everyone they could carry,” he said. “Women. Children. Elena too.”

“My family,” I heard myself say, though saying it changed nothing. “They took my family.”

He nodded once.

Others began gathering behind him, villagers smoke-blackened and stunned, carrying the wounded, calling names, trying to count the dead while the village still burned in patches around us.

Then I saw Jorik.

He was propped against the far wall with one hand pressed over a wound no hand was going to fix. Blood bubbled at his lips when he tried to breathe.

I knelt.

“Save it,” I said.

He shook his head once.

“The boy,” he rasped.

My whole body tightened.

“What about him?”

“The raiders.” His fingers clamped on my wrist harder than a dying man should have been able to manage. “They came for him. Strange eyes. They knew.”

For a moment I stopped feeling my own injuries.

Victor.

Not just taken in the sweep.
Hunted.

Jorik coughed blood across his chin and forced more air through torn lungs. “Blackhaven,” he said. “Heard the name. Leader said Blackhaven.”

Blackhaven.

The word dropped into the room like iron.

“Victor?” I asked. “Did they get him?”

Jorik’s grip tightened again. “No. One of them shouted. Said the boy was in the tool shed when it came down. They left him. Thought he was dead.”

The world narrowed to a point.

Not hope. Not yet.

Direction.

I turned and looked at the collapsed workshop with new eyes.

Not rubble.

A grave that might still be breathing.

“The shed,” I said.

Jorik tried to nod.

Then his hand slipped from my wrist.

That was all.

I was moving before I fully stood.

“Victor!”

No answer.

The workshop had folded nearly flat. Beams crossed over one another in a locked snarl. The roof had become a broken lid over shattered tools, stone, and timber. No child should have survived in that.

I dropped to my knees and started pulling wood anyway.

“My son is under there!”

Henrik turned and bellowed to the others. “Help him!”

No speeches. Good.

Hands joined mine.

Widow Cora.
Selene.
Willem with one arm half-useless and still lifting.
Men, women, whoever could stand and pull.

Someone brought ropes.
Someone brought an axe.
Someone else started calling which beams could be shifted without dropping the whole mess deeper.

We dug.

Not gently.
Not stupidly either.

Beam by beam.
Board by board.
Fistful by fistful when that was all the gap allowed.

The sun climbed while we worked.

My back screamed. Blood kept blinding one eye. My hands were slick and splintered and so tired they no longer felt like part of me by the fourth hour. Still we dug.

By the sixth, we found the pocket.

Two beams had crossed and locked, making a wedge of air underneath.

Victor lay inside it on his side, gray with dust, striped with cuts, one arm trapped under him and his face so still I thought for one hideous second we had only managed to reach him in time to confirm the loss.

Then I saw his ribs move.

Breathing.

I think something tore in my throat when I heard myself make that sound. Not a word. Nothing shaped enough for language.

I tore the last board free with my bare hands and crawled in far enough to get both arms around him.

He was warm.

Too limp.
Too light.
Warm.

His heartbeat fluttered against my chest. Small. Fast. Real.

I closed my eyes.

Not in relief.

Relief is too soft a word for getting one piece of your soul back while the rest is still being dragged in chains toward hell.

Around us the workshop steamed in the high sun. The village still bled. Lyra and Naelira were gone. Taken toward a place men only named when they wanted to speak of the far edge of law and mercy.

But Victor was alive.

That changed the shape of the world.

I looked down at his dust-caked face and understood, with a certainty so clean it left no room for anything else:

There would be no rebuilding first.
No mourning first.
No waiting for help that would come too late.

We were going to Blackhaven.

And I was bringing my family home.