---The Age of Ash---
They called him the Red Ghost, and the name travelled faster than he did.
In the borderlands, Ashen Order columns were found slaughtered at dawn, their white cloaks so red they looked sunburned. Prison wagons stood open and empty. Survivors whispered about a man with black veins and burning eyes who asked one question before he killed — who gave the order? — and one question after — where is the next one?
The Order doubled its patrols. The Order's patrols kept disappearing.
Ren stayed with him. Ren talked so that Shizui didn't have to, and it was, in its own way, a kind of mercy. Every night by the fire, Ren told stories from the war — funny ones, stupid ones, ones where Shizui was the hero. Shizui never spoke during them. But he listened. Ren counted it as a victory and kept the stories coming, because he had begun to suspect — correctly — that the stories were the only rope still tying his friend to the world of the living.
In the spring, they hit a prisoner train bound for the capital. "Collaborators," the manifest said. Among the starved and the beaten were elves — border traders who had sold grain to the wrong village.
One of them did not look like a prisoner. Silver-eyed, unbroken, she moved through the wrecked wagons like someone taking inventory of the world's ruins. When Shizui broke her chains, she did not thank him. She caught his wrist, turned it over, and studied the black lines crawling beneath his skin.
"Royal blood," she said. "Underworld royal blood. And unsworn." She looked up at his eyes. "Now that is something I never thought I'd live to see."
"You know my blood?"
"My people keep the histories your people burned." She released his wrist. "What do you hunt, red-eyed man?"
"The men who burned my family."
"And when they're ash?"
Shizui had no answer.
"Then the ash will have you too," she said, not unkindly. She pressed something small into his palm: a single seed, pale as a moon. "From the World Tree. Trees remember what people burn. When you have spent everything else — plant it. Follow the rivers east."
She gathered the other elves and was gone into the trees like water into sand. Shizui stood holding the seed long after the light had gone.
"She wasn't afraid of you," Ren said behind him.
"Everyone's afraid of me."
"She wasn't." Ren shook his head slowly. "I think she's seen further."