Chapter 2 — Everything I Became Alone
The road to the Ashveil Mountains was three days on foot.
Cidd preferred it that way.
He’d had a horse once — a good one, steady temperament, didn’t spook at monster smell — but he’d given it to a family outside Drenfall whose cart had broken an axle in the mud and whose youngest was running a fever and whose father had the specific look of a man who had used up every option he could think of. Cidd had handed over the reins without being asked and kept walking and hadn’t thought about it much since.
That was four months ago.
He didn’t mind walking. Walking was thinking time.
The road was empty this early in the morning, just pale grey light coming over the eastern hills and the sound of his boots on packed dirt and somewhere behind the treeline a bird starting its first tentative notes like it wasn’t sure yet if the world deserved the song. His pack sat easy on his shoulders. Sword on his back. The quest document folded in his inner pocket, already memorized — SS rank dragon subjugation, confirmed sighting in the upper Ashveil range, significant territorial expansion over the past three months, two villages already evacuated as precaution.
SS rank.
Four years ago he couldn’t have looked at that document without his hands shaking.
He thought about that sometimes. The distance between who he’d been and who he was now. It didn’t feel like growth from the inside — it never did — it just felt like time passing and problems getting solved and mornings coming one after another until suddenly you were someone different and you couldn’t quite remember the exact moment it happened.
He’d been fourteen when he left the party.
fourteen, alone, somewhere on the road outside Melvarn with forty silver coins and a sword that was slightly too big for him and two years of rage compressed into a ball somewhere behind his sternum that he absolutely refused to let out because if he started he didn’t think he’d stop.
He remembered the first night.
He’d walked until his legs gave out — genuinely gave out, just stopped working, sat down hard in the middle of the road — and looked up at a sky absolutely crowded with stars and thought with complete clarity: nobody in this world knows where I am right now.
Not the hero. Not Elara. Not Lynia.
Not a single person.
He was twelve years old and he was completely invisible and the strange thing — the thing that surprised him even now when he remembered it — was that it hadn’t felt like loneliness. Not exactly. It had felt like something being set down. Like he’d been carrying a weight so long he’d forgotten it was there and now his hands were empty and he didn’t know what to do with them yet but at least they were his.
He’d gotten up. Kept walking.
The first monster had found him before he found it.
A Bog Rat — ugly thing, size of a large cat, teeth like rusted nails, came out of the drainage ditch beside the road at two in the morning with the specific confidence of something that had never met anything that fought back. Cidd had been half asleep on his feet. His body moved before his mind did — four months of Aldric’s party had burned certain reflexes into him, not because anyone taught him but because surviving required it — and he’d put his boot on the thing’s neck and his knife through its skull before he was fully awake.
He’d stood there afterward in the dark looking at his hands.
Then he’d felt it.
Something shifted. Deep in his chest, lower than breath, quieter than heartbeat. Like a door opening in a room he hadn’t known existed. A pull toward something — toward the dead creature at his feet — and without understanding why he’d crouched down and pressed his hand to its matted fur and felt the skill move into him like water finding a crack.
Pack Instinct.
Filthy Bite.
He hadn’t known what World Gain was yet. He hadn’t had a name for it. He’d just sat in the middle of a dark road next to a dead rat with two new things inside him that hadn’t been there before and felt the quiet certainty that something had just changed permanently.
He thought about those early months a lot.
Not with pain anymore. More like you think about a house you lived in as a child — the specific smell of it, the way the light came through certain windows, the smallness of rooms that seemed enormous at the time.
He’d been terrible at first. That was the honest truth.
Strong for twelve. Fast. Already knew more magic theory than most adult mages because he’d read everything the party’s supply cache contained and memorized it the way a starving person memorizes a menu. But knowing and doing were different countries and he’d spent those first months crossing the distance between them one bloody lesson at a time.
The Goblin Scavenger that gave him Coward’s Dash had also given him his first real scar — a crude blade across the ribs, shallow but ugly, that he’d pressed a torn piece of his shirt against and kept moving because there was no one to call for help and stopping felt like giving something up he couldn’t afford to lose.
The Field Lynx had nearly taken his eye. He still remembered the wind of the claws past his face. The way time had stretched. The way his body had moved into a stance he’d watched Lynia use once and never been taught and afterward he’d stood there breathing hard thinking — oh. I can do that. I can just — do that.
That was when he’d started to understand what he was.
He’d registered with the Adventurer’s Guild in Melvarn at thirteen.
F rank. Standard. The woman behind the desk had looked at him the way adults look at children who are doing things children shouldn’t be doing — not unkind, just tired — and asked him if he had a guardian.
"No," he’d said.
She’d processed his registration without another word. He’d appreciated that.
F to E took him six weeks. Mostly goblins. Lots of goblins. He killed enough goblins in those six weeks to build a small village out of their crude weapons and he learned something from every single one of them — not just skills but tactics, habits, the way pack creatures think differently from solitary ones, the specific tells that meant an attack was coming before the attacker even knew they’d decided to attack.
The Goblin Shaman had been his first real fight. E tier but magic capable, and magic changed everything. He’d gone into that cave expecting something like the warriors and come out with a burn across his left forearm and Spirit Sight in his chest and a new permanent understanding that the moment you thought you understood what something could do it would show you something else.
E to D took four months. He’d been more careful by then. More methodical. He’d started keeping a record — a small battered journal he’d bought in Melvarn for two copper — writing down every monster he’d killed, every skill he’d gained, every variation he’d noticed in his training. Not because anyone told him to. Because the salaryman in him, the man who’d lived by spreadsheets and quarterly reports and the gospel of documentation, couldn’t help it.
He still had that journal. Forty three of them now, different sizes, different covers, all of them filled front to back in his small precise handwriting.
D to C had taken eight months and a near death experience involving a Wraith in an abandoned mine outside Corrath that he genuinely did not expect to survive. The thing had moved through his blade like smoke and drained something from him that wasn’t blood — colder than blood, deeper — and he’d figured out by accident that fire worked when nothing else did, had poured everything he had into a fire spell so raw and unstructured it barely qualified as magic, and the Wraith had come apart like ash in wind and he’d sat on the mine floor for a long time afterward not moving.
Soul Chill. Intangible Form. Fear Aura. Memory Drain.
He’d trained the Memory Drain for three months before he understood what it actually was. Not stealing memories. Reading the residue of them. The emotional weight left on objects and spaces by people who had been there. He’d touched the wall of that mine afterward and felt something ancient and sad and very tired and he’d taken his hand away and never used that particular application again.
C to B had taken a year. He’d been fifteen. The quests were harder, the monsters were smarter, and the guild had started looking at him differently — not the tired adult look from before but something more careful, the way experienced people look at something they can’t quite categorize.
He’d met his first real adventurer during this period. A B rank man named Soren — big, scarred, smelled permanently of campfire smoke — who’d seen Cidd take down a Cave Stalker alone and offered to buy him dinner and then spent the entire dinner asking questions with the focused curiosity of someone who had been doing this long enough to recognize when something didn’t fit the pattern.
"How old are you," Soren had said.
"Fifteen."
"How long you been adventuring."
"Three years."
Soren had looked at him for a long moment. "You’re going to be a problem," he’d said, which was the closest thing to a compliment Cidd had received in three years and which he’d thought about for weeks afterward.
B to A had taken another year. He’d been sixteen. The gap between B and A was not a gap — it was a cliff, and climbing it had required everything he’d built. The monsters at A tier didn’t just hit harder. They thought. They adapted. The Werewolf Alpha he’d hunted for his promotion had changed tactics three times mid fight and he’d had to change with it and at one point he’d been running — actually running, full sprint through a forest at night — thinking fast, thinking faster, burning through options and discarding them until one worked.
He’d earned Dire Fangs and Command Howl and Shadow Leap that night.
He’d also earned three broken ribs and a bite wound on his right shoulder that the guild healer had looked at with an expression suggesting she was reconsidering her career choices.
A to S.
That one he didn’t think about the same way.
Not because it was harder — it was, significantly — but because of what he’d had to become to do it. Not stronger exactly. Colder. More precise. The kind of person who could look at an S tier monster and not feel the fear in his stomach as a warning but as information. Useful data. Input for the calculation.
He’d been seventeen when the guild master of Drenfall had called him into the office and told him he was being evaluated for S rank promotion and what did he think about that.
"I think I’m ready," Cidd had said.
He’d been right.
The ceremony — if you could call it that, it was mostly paperwork — had been witnessed by exactly zero people who cared about him. He’d signed the documents. Received the black guild card. Walked outside into the afternoon light and stood in the street for a moment.
One of four S rank adventurers in Anastacia.
He’d gone back to his inn room and written in his journal and eaten a meal alone and gone to sleep.
Nobody to tell. Nobody waiting. Nobody who would have understood what it meant even if he’d tried to explain.
He’d lain in the dark thinking about the salaryman he’d been in another life. The one who’d died at his desk with no one to call, no one who’d notice until Monday morning when his supervisor needed the quarterly report and found the chair empty. He’d thought about how some things followed you across worlds.
Then he’d closed his eyes and slept.
That was four months ago.
Now he was eighteen, walking the road to Ashveil, and the morning light had gone from grey to gold and the bird behind the treeline had been joined by several others and the sound of them was almost enough to make the road feel less empty.
Almost.
He thought about the quest document in his pocket. SS rank. Two dragons confirmed in the area per the original scout report — though the formal subjugation order only listed one. He’d flagged that to the guild. They’d said the second sighting was likely the same creature observed from different angles.
He’d filed that response away in the part of his mind that kept track of things people said that turned out to be wrong.
The mountains were visible now, pale shapes against the morning sky, still far enough to look peaceful.
He adjusted the weight of his pack and kept walking.
He smelled the smoke before he saw anything.
Not campfire smoke. Not the clean smell of wood burning for warmth and food. This was the other kind — thick and dark and carrying things in it that smoke shouldn’t carry. His steps slowed. His hand moved to his sword without conscious decision.
Then he heard it.
A sound like the sky tearing open.
He ran.
The Crimson Dragon was everything the reports had failed to adequately describe.
Cidd had fought dragons before — Earth Dragon at B tier, Blackwing at A, both of which had been enormous and terrifying and which he had approached with careful preparation and executed plans. This was different. This was a creature so far past what he’d faced that his mind went briefly and completely quiet when he saw it, the way a storm silences a forest.
Sixty feet of red scaled fury. Each scale the size of a shield. Eyes like molten iron. When it moved the ground responded — not just shaking, actually responding, like the earth was trying to get out of the way.
He didn’t think.
He fought.
What happened in the next hour he would never be able to fully reconstruct from memory. It came back in pieces — the heat of the Magma Breath close enough to blister exposed skin, the moment he’d found the gap in the Iron Scale Fortress at the joint behind the left foreleg, the point where he’d stopped fighting like a person and started fighting like something else, something colder, burning through every skill he had in fluid combination the way he’d trained ten thousand times alone.
At some point it was over.
He was on his knees in the dirt. Breathing. The dragon was not.
He pressed his hand to the massive scaled flank and felt World Gain take what was there — Magma Breath, Iron Scale Fortress, Seismic Roar, Warlord’s Presence — and he stayed on his knees for a moment letting the dizziness pass.
Then he heard it.
A sound behind him.
He turned.
The second dragon was already airborne.
He hadn’t known. The report had said one. The guild had confirmed one. And he’d been so focused, so completely consumed by the fight, that he hadn’t felt the second presence until it was already gone — a black shape against the sun, growing smaller, moving northeast.
Northeast.
Toward the valley.
Toward the village.
He ran. He knew even as he ran that he wouldn’t make it, that the math was simple and brutal, that the distance between him and the valley versus the distance between a flying dragon and the valley was not a calculation that ended well. He ran anyway. He kept running even when the column of black smoke began rising from the direction of Halvern. He ran until his legs stopped working properly and he was stumbling more than running and the smoke was thick enough to taste.
He stopped at the edge of what had been a village.
Ash. Collapsed timber. Stone foundations already cooling. The particular silence of a place that had been full of sound an hour ago.
Valdris the Black was gone. Already distant. Already past the northern ridge.
Cidd stood in the ruins of Halvern and didn’t move for a long time.
This was his fault.
The thought was very simple and very complete. He had known there were two sightings. He had flagged it. He had been overruled. And he had gone anyway, taken the quest anyway, and in the hour he’d spent killing one dragon the other had done this.
His fault.
He’d carried guilt before. The quiet chronic guilt of a man who spent a whole life feeling like a burden. But this was different. This was specific. This had an address and a name and a column of smoke pointing straight at him.
He walked into the ruins.
He didn’t know what he was looking for. Survivors. Evidence. Something to do with his hands so he didn’t have to just stand there with it.
He heard crying.
Faint. Very faint. Coming from beneath a collapsed section of stone that had probably been a building’s foundation wall.
He moved the rubble without thinking about whether he could. Stone that should have required three men he shifted alone on pure adrenaline and the specific focused energy of someone who has found the only thing that matters.
Underneath — in a hollow space the fallen stones had accidentally created — four infants.
Newborns. Days old at most. Wrapped in cloth that had once been someone’s clothing. Alive. Crying with the furious concentrated energy of creatures who do not yet understand that the world can be cruel and are simply registering that they are cold and hungry and want someone to come.
Cidd looked at them.
He thought about a salaryman who’d died at his desk with no one to call. He thought about a twelve year old walking alone down a dark road with nobody who knew his name. He thought about four years of mornings that nobody had been waiting for him at the end of.
He reached down.
He picked them up one by one, carefully, the way he’d seen done exactly once in his other life at a colleague’s home and had paid very close attention to because he paid very close attention to everything.
He held all four of them against his chest and they were warm and loud and furious and real.
"Okay," he said quietly. To them. To himself. To whatever was listening.
"I’ve got you."
He stood up in the ruins of Halvern with four newborns and the weight of what he’d done and what he was going to do, and the smoke rose around him in the still morning air, and somewhere beyond the northern ridge a black dragon flew toward the horizon not knowing what it had left behind.
He looked down at the four small faces.
He named them there, standing in the ash.
Syla. Ren. Mira. Vera.
"I’m Cidd," he said. "I’m going to be your father."
He started walking.