(Caelum Thorne's Point of View)
The night was colder than usual.
I stood before the campfire at the heart of our field command, watching the flames lick the edge of the dark, as if trying to consume what shadows it couldn't reach. My men whispered behind me. Even those who didn't believe in omens could feel the chill in their bones.
"She's… she's not like the rest of them", said one of the scouts, his voice thin. "That strategist... the demon's woman..."
"Ayaka Rin", I corrected without turning.
There was silence after that. Her name carried weight now. Not fear, not reverence, something else. A tension that made men unsure whether to hate her or admire her.
I let the moment breathe, then turned toward the fire where my closest captains, Lady Viera, Sir Brant, and old Commander Jarek, were seated.
"We push toward Duskwind Hill by sunrise", I said.
Jarek grunted. "That cursed slope? It's where two battalions disappeared last moon."
"Precisely why we need to take it", I said. "It's a lynchpin in Rin's movement pattern. She's not aiming for our capital, she's cornering our routes, choking our food lines."
Lady Viera nodded grimly. "She's dismantling us like she's unpicking thread."
"Then let us be the knot she cannot undo", I said. I drew my sword and drove it into the dirt before us. "A silver crescent wolf never runs. We face the nightmare, not flee it."
The others straightened. My crest, a silver crescent wolf, had come to mean something to these people. Righteous virtue. Duty. Measured defiance. I held onto that now more than ever.
Later that night, I sat alone in my tent, writing a letter to my sister. The war had taken so many from us. My pen hovered over the parchment.
"She reminds me of Father."
"Not in form, but in fury."
I tore the parchment in half.
My father had been a warlord, once proud and noble. Until politics tore him down. Until betrayal hollowed him out. Ayaka Rin was becoming that, a hollowed, brilliant flame burning everything in her path.
But there had been mercy once, hadn't there?
A memory, uninvited...
Snow. Smoke. The scent of iron. I was barely twenty, standing over a bloodied field outside the fallen Keep of Norren. My mentor lay dying, and beside him stood a girl barely older than I was.
Rin.
No demon horns. No dark cloak. Just eyes like stone.
"They betrayed me", she had said then, not crying, just... shattered.
"I know", I had replied, but I hadn't truly understood.
Now I do.
(Back to the present...)
Sir Brant burst through the tent flap, panting.
"They've started it."
"What?"
"Fires. Multiple. On the outer ridge, our food store tents."
I didn't wait to ask more. I grabbed my blade and stormed into the chaos. Smoke curled through the stars. Screams rang out, not of fear, but fury.
Ayaka Rin had struck. Not with an army. With fire and fear.
She was pushing us to collapse from the inside.
Amid the shouting, I saw her shadow, just for a heartbeat. Standing beyond the smoke, watching. A figure with burning eyes.
A scout next to me pointed. "Is that her?!"
"No", I said quietly. "She doesn't need to be here. She already won tonight."
But I stared into that smoke anyway, wondering...
Would I recognize her if we met face to face again? Would she recognize me?
(Transition...)
The next morning, the command tent was a mess of maps and arguments.
"We've lost seventy percent of our food reserves", growled Viera. "Even with Duskwind Hill, we're starving in two weeks."
"We need a truce", muttered Brant.
"No", I said. "We need a plan."
There was silence again.
Then I said it aloud for the first time, "We strike the strategist. Not the demon king. Not the armies. We aim for Ayaka Rin."
"And if we kill her?" Jarek asked. "Do you think the demons will fall apart?"
"No", I said, "but the spine will crack."