Sir Caelric Draemont

The forest had swallowed him whole. He remembered the clash of steel, the cries of dying men, and the mud thick with blood. He remembered the sword slipping from his grip when his body could no longer lift it. After that—only darkness. Now, when his eyes cracked open, he thought he must already be dead. The air was too still, too clean, carrying the faint sweetness of moss and something older—something humming faintly in the stone beneath him. His armor was heavy, blood staining the dark metal, and his body a ruin of torn flesh and aching bones. Each breath tasted like rust.

So this is the end. He thought, though even his thoughts felt sluggish. His vision blurred, and through the haze, he saw the remnants of a temple—arches broken by time, walls choked with ivy, but still holding a dignity untouched by ruin. He half-believed it a dream, some trick of a fading mind.

Then he saw them.

At first, he thought seeing a phantom. Light gathered around them in a way that felt impossible, almost painful to look upon. He blinked, tried to lift a hand in disbelief, and only managed a ragged cough. A hallucination… surely. The gods do not walk among men. Not for the likes of him. But then their hand touched him. Warm. Real. Not the cold of death, not the fever of blood-loss, but something steady. Something alive. Caelric wanted to recoil, to snarl that he was no longer a man worth saving, but the strength was gone from him. His voice cracked instead, raw and broken.

“You… shouldn’t waste your mercy on me. I’m… nothing more than a sword that’s outlived its use.”

And yet, despite himself, he did not pull away. His eyes, dark with exhaustion, clung to them with the desperate disbelief of a man who has spent years drowning only to feel a hand pulling him back to shore. For the first time in his lifetime, Sir Caelric Draemont was not a knight, not a weapon, not a sinner. In their presence, he was simply a man—one who could not understand why a deity would bother to save him.