Return of the Mythic Bloodline

Chapter 491: Sir Tristan

For the next few days, the unnamed knight continued to tend to Ezekiel. He would bring her meals twice a day and change her bandages every two days, carefully cleaning her wounds with fresh water beforehand. Each time, he endured the sting of her nails raking across his skin in retaliation, yet never once did a frown cross his face while treating her.

"What do you plan on doing after leaving this place?" the knight started the conversation as he did each day, settling beside the low fire. "For me, I want to retire from being a knight, find myself a wife, and settle down on some peaceful stretch of farmland." He chuckled quietly. "Pathetic, right? Unlike me, you must have something grand as your retirement plan."

"Wanting a peaceful life isn’t pathetic," Ezekiel said.

The knight stilled. It was the first time she had actually answered him. Her eyes were fixed on something beyond the dark ceiling of the cave, her voice dropping to just above a murmur.

"I want to return home after leaving this place."

"Oh. Where is your home?" he asked. The question came out soft, careful as if afraid of startling a bird that had only just landed. "You don’t look like someone from this nation."

"It’s far from here," Ezekiel answered, then lay back against the ground.

"Far where, exactly?" the knight pressed, curiosity leaking into his voice before he could contain it.

"..."

"Ah. Silent treatment again." He sighed and lay back as well, folding his arms beneath his head and staring up at the same dark ceiling she had been staring at.

From the days I had spent watching them, I couldn’t help noticing that the knight was growing weaker with each passing day. The shadows beneath his eyes had deepened to a dark bruise, and his cheeks had hollowed out. He still carried a smile on his face without fail, but sometimes, while moving, small involuntary moans would escape him before he could swallow them back.

I had seen him bring food to Ezekiel. I had never seen him eat any himself.

Perhaps I was overthinking it. The memories would skip the moment Ezekiel fell asleep, so there were long stretches unaccounted for. He could have been eating during those gaps.

The next day, when the vision resumed, the knight had already gone outside.

"Has he gone to find food?" Ezekiel murmured to herself. She rose slowly to her feet, one hand briefly pressed to her side as if testing it, then dropped away once she was satisfied. She unwrapped the bandage from her belly. Where the brutal wound had been, only a faint, pale scar remained.

She clenched her fists once, then again, feeling the strength move through her knuckles.

"I have recovered more than half of my strength."

Her gaze drifted across the dying bonfire to the far side of the cave, to the flattened ground where the knight slept. A few of his belongings were laid out there with the quiet neatness of a soldier’s habit.

Her sword was among them.

A low sound left her throat, somewhere between a scoff and a breath of disbelief.

"Hah. The fool left my sword here."

She crossed the fire and picked it up. The familiar weight settled into her grip. She turned the blade once, the faint reflection of the dancing embers running along its edge

"It’s time for the payback."

About an hour later, the knight returned.

"Sir Ezekiel, you are in luck today. I found a rabbit. We will be having a rabbit ste—"

His eyes fell to his side of the cave. The sword was gone. For a moment he simply stood in the entrance, the dead rabbit hanging slack in his grip as the realization settled over him. Then the rabbit hit the ground and he pivoted on his feet.

Just as he was about to run, a hand grabbed his head from behind and pinned him to the ground with a slam.

The impact drove the breath out of him. Before he could recover, a cold blade was already touching his neck, and a knee had settled into his back. Cyan hair spilled across his face like silk curtains drawn shut.

"Guess who has run out of their luck," Ezekiel whispered.

"Aghh..." The knight groaned, the sound barely rising above a whisper.

"You said I needed to regain my strength before I could kill you," Ezekiel said. Amusement threaded through every syllable. There was a particular satisfaction to this moment, pinning the one man who had witnessed her at her most vulnerable, exposed and helpless side. She had been waiting for this. "Now pay for your preposterousness."

"Aghhhhh!" The groan tore out of him louder this time, raw and ragged, his eyes screwing shut.

"Stop overreacting. I haven’t even begun my reven—"

Her words died in her throat.

Her eyes had dropped to the ground beneath him. The earth was darkening steadily around his body, turning wet and deep in color, spreading outward.

She removed her hand and knee from him immediately, rolled him onto his back, and brought her sword down in a single diagonal swing across his torso. The shirt split cleanly along the line of the cut and fell open, exposing the skin beneath.

Ezekiel was a veteran knight. She had seen countless terrible wounds and more dead bodies than she had ever bothered to count. She had long since believed there was nothing left that could reach her yet she visibly shook.

The knight’s entire torso was a ruin of deep, ragged wounds, his bare flesh split open in long, brutal lines like butchered meat left out too long. Blood ran down his body in thick crimson trails, some dried to a dark crust and some running fresh and bright. Clumps of white pus seeped slowly from the infected cuts, pooling and mixing with the blood into a revolting paste that clung to his skin in streaks. The flesh surrounding the wounds had swollen into bloated patches of deep purple and black, stretched so tightly it looked ready to split open at the slightest pressure. In some places the skin had rotted away entirely, leaving glimpses of pale yellow fat glistening in the dim firelight beneath.

Every breath he drew made the torn muscles along his ribs twitch and peel fractionally apart, as though his own body was quietly resisting the effort of staying alive.

"H-how is he even alive?" I gasped, my eyes widening as even I was taken aback by the sight of his wounds.

"Y-you were moving around with these injuries..." Ezekiel murmured. The sword in her hand was shaking.

"S-someone had to do the moving for food," the knight said under heavy gasps. His voice, which had remained so steady and unhurried across all those days, was breaking now, agony bleeding through every syllable as though exposure alone had undone whatever had been holding it back.

"But you didn’t even eat once in the past eight days!" Ezekiel snapped. The anger in her voice was sharp and immediate, but beneath it ran something heavier and less certain of itself.

"Y-you know where we are," the knight replied, each word coming out between labored breaths. "It’s already difficult enough to find food for one person out here."

"You had healing ointment. You had bandages!" Ezekiel shouted. Her pupils had narrowed to fine, trembling points. "Why didn’t you use them on yourself?"

A low chuckle left him. The absurdity of it had reached him even through the pain. Just a few seconds ago she had been pressing a blade to his throat, and now she stood there demanding to know why he had not healed himself instead of treating her. Almost as if she was worried about him.

"The answer is the same," he said. "There weren’t enough bandages for both of us. Your life carries far more value than a nameless knight like mine. So it was only natural who deserved the treatment."

The sword fell from Ezekiel’s hand.

The sound of it rang off the cave floor and died. She took a step back, unsteady, her lips trembling at the corners.

"Y-you are not a nameless knight, Sir Tristan." The cold facade she had carried on her face without interruption, through injury and fever and every provocation across those long days, began to falter. Her eyes had turned glassy and bright.

"Wh-why would you go that far for me?"

A silence stretched between them. Then the knight exhaled, a relief eased across his face.

"So you actually knew my name... haha... it’s an honor."

Ezekiel bit her lip. Then she lowered herself beside Triston, and placed her palm gently against his forehead.

A faint blue energy surfaced from her hand and spread outward across his body. The bleeding dulled and stopped. Some of the rigid tension seizing his muscles released its grip. It was not a cure, but a temporary stop to prevent his injuries from worsening any further.

She withdrew her hand, rose to her feet, and tied the sword around her waist. Then she crouched, gathered him onto her back, and let a thin veil of Soulforce rise around his body, holding him just clear of her so that nothing pressed against his wounds. She straightened beneath his weight in silence.

She walked out of the cave without looking back, her armor left behind in the dark.