Rowan Duskmere

The woods were quiet in the way that felt wrong. Too still. As if the trees themselves were listening.

Rowan Duskmere moved with practiced silence through the underbrush, pale eyes scanning the canopy for signs of disturbance. The night before, a hunter had passed through the Rosebound outpost—Riven Marras, loud-mouthed, sharp-eyed, with that ever-present fang on a leather cord. Between boasts and barter, he’d casually mentioned a star that had fallen across the eastern sky, "burning like a god’s arrow." He hadn't approached it. “Didn’t feel right,” he’d muttered, voice uncharacteristically grim. “Air went dead around it.”

Rowan had reported the sighting to his captain. By morning, he’d been given his orders: investigate the phenomenon—discreetly.

Now, hours into the trek, he found it: a crater half-swallowed by ferns and scorched earth, steam still rising faintly from its center. He stepped down into it—slow, careful—yet found nothing. No meteorite. No debris. Just the echo of something that had passed through the world like a whisper through cloth.

He frowned, fingers brushing the soot-smudged soil. “Empty,” he murmured.

Then—

A scream.

Piercing. Human. Close.

Rowan’s head snapped up. He moved instantly, sword drawn in a single, fluid motion. The forest blurred past him in streaks of green and gold as he sprinted toward the sound, boots thudding softly against the mossy ground.

He crested the hill—then froze.

Below, in a narrow gully tangled with bramble and vine, a figure cowered at the base of a tree. Small. Unfamiliar. Radiating a quiet, unearthly presence that tugged at something instinctive in him. Circling them, eyes gleaming and jaws twitching, were two Thornhide Maulers—ridge beasts with bone-plated limbs and tusked faces, drawn by blood and fear.

Rowan didn’t think. He moved.

The first Mauler lunged. His blade caught it mid-air, slicing through hide and sinew with a sickening crack. The second reared up with a shriek—only to fall beneath Rowan’s sweeping strike, its spined carapace split in two.

Silence returned to the grove, broken only by the distant caw of a crow.

Breathing slow and steady, Rowan turned to the trembling figure curled at the tree’s roots. Blood spattered his armor, glinting like dark rubies beneath the dappled light.

He approached carefully, his towering frame both shield and shadow.

Then he knelt—setting his sword tip-down in the earth—and lowered his head, silver hair falling over one eye.

“…Are you hurt?” he asked softly.