The harsh orders drifted through the fractured wood. Stellan turned his head toward Liska, green embers waning in his irises. Her gaze remained fixed on the door's splintered timber, where the green fracture flared and smoked. Her shoulders began to tremble, a faint, almost imperceptible quiver that quickly intensified. She backed away from Stellan, bumping into the crude wooden shelf where she kept her dried herbs. Her hand instinctively went to her tunic, pulling out a thin, silver chain. At its end dangled a small, oval pendant, tarnished with age and grease. Her thumb dragged across the dented silver, her fingers rattling against the chain. Stellan pushed himself up, wincing as his weakened leg protested. He moved slowly, cautiously, towards Liska. The shift in her demeanor was alarming. She was no longer the defiant girl who had launched smoke bombs with reckless abandon. This was the terrified, hunted child he’d first found. He reached out, his large hand gently resting on her shoulder, intending to offer comfort. Her spine locked. She jerked sideways away from his palm, spinning until her back slammed into the herb rack. The silver keepsake swung wild, throwing an ember glare across her knuckles. Pine pitch vanished beneath burning tallow and dry threshed grain. “Please, Commander! Not my family!” Her father’s voice, raw with terror, echoed in the smoky haze. Liska, a tiny figure hidden amongst wilting winterblooms, watched from beneath the overturned herbalist’s cart. Her small hands covered her mouth, stifling a sob, staring past the splintered spokes. The air shimmered, thick with arcane energy, and the metallic tang of fresh blood. Her mother, strong and proud even in despair, struggled against the grip of a hulking, wolf-fused soldier. Her mother's eyes found the hidden cart, locking onto the gap in the wheel spokes. Then, a figure stepped forward, cloaked in black leather and steel, the glint of a polished gorget catching the orange glow of the inferno. Commander Vorlag. He was not a man, but an assertion of power. His gaze was cold, sharp, devoid of any warmth. He gripped a second silver oval, the matching mate to the piece in her grip. He had torn it from her mother’s neck, a cruel trophy, before tossing it carelessly into the encroaching flames. The image shattered, replaced by the warm, flickering firelight of Stellan’s cabin. Liska stood frozen against the rack, her nails biting into the metal until her knuckles turned white. Her larynx seized around an unvoiced cry. Tears, hot and fresh, streamed down her cheeks, but these were not the shimmering, healing tears that saved. These were tears of pure, unadulterated terror. Stellan pulled his hand back as if burned. He saw the shift in her eyes, the way they seemed to look through him, not at him. He recognized that distant, haunted stare. He’d seen it in the eyes of dying men, in the reflective surface of his own crippled leg after the Somnolent Glade had become his prison. He sank to one knee, bringing himself closer to her eye level, his massive frame radiating an unexpected gentleness. He waited for her to acknowledge him, to return to the present. Slowly, the frantic light in Liska’s eyes began to recede, replaced by a hollow ache. She looked at Stellan, her lip trembling, a faint whimper escaping her. Only her hitched inhalations cut through the hearth's crackle. Stellan reached out again, this time more slowly, and simply took her hand, his thumb stroking the back of her cold fingers. The metal pressed cold and sharp into her palm. “He took it,” Liska rasped, forcing words past a dry tongue for the first time since the glade took her in. “From her… before…” Her throat hitched, drowned in another spill of salt. Stellan tightened his fingers over hers. “Vorlag,” he rumbled, the name a low growl in his chest. “He is… relentless.” He paused, his gaze softening as he looked at Liska’s tear-streaked face. “I was once a Warden of the Voryan Wilds, you know. Before the Empire decided magic needed to be… controlled. Before they started fusing soldiers with beasts.” He looked down at his own withered leg, a shadow crossing his face. “Vorlag led the detachment that broke the Wilds. The same battle… the same man… that left me like this. Crippled. Left for dead.” His voice was devoid of self-pity, simply a statement of fact. But Liska heard the underlying current of shared trauma, the echo of an old wound that matched her own fresh one. It wasn’t just the Glade that had been breached. Their walls, their carefully constructed defenses against the world, were crumbling around them. The quiet held them together, bound by the same scar and the same hunter. Liska was still shivering, a residual tremor from the vivid memory. Stellan noticed it, his gaze sweeping over her small frame. Without a thought, he shrugged off his enormous, fur-lined hunting cloak. The heavy fabric, still warm from his body, smelled of pine and damp earth and something distinctly *him*. He draped it carefully over her shoulders, the thick wool enveloping her, making her almost disappear beneath its bulk. Liska burrowed into the comforting warmth, the scent a strange anchor in her turbulent mind. Grit, who had perched motionless upon the table, chittered a shrill alert. He scampered down, bouncing excitedly on the floor. He pointed one mossy appendage at Liska’s pendant, then darted toward the ancient tome Stellan had retrieved earlier. He flipped through its yellowed pages with surprising dexterity, stopping at a detailed, intricate drawing of a small, ornate key. He tapped the yellowed parchment with a sharp squeak, then jabbed his leafy arm back toward the silver trinket.

A Memory in a Locket