Chapter 18: Fiery Ambush
The crossbow’s release was a deafening crack that shattered the basin’s calm, a sound of snapping bone and shrieking metal. The black bolt took the orc archer in the base of his thick neck, punching through with a wet, terminal thunk. He toppled sideways, clawing at the protrusion, a gurgling fountain of dark blood soaking the quiver of blight arrows beside him.
Chaos erupted.
Luna was already moving, a blue-grey streak discarding the spent weapon. She scooped up a fallen hatchet and buried it in a second orc’s collarbone before he could stand. “Left!” she barked, her voice a guttural snarl from behind the grinning metal mask. Ezra was already turning, his sword meeting the crude cleaver of a charging orc in a shower of sparks. The impact shuddered up his arm. He shoved back, using the creature’s momentum to unbalance it, and drove his boot into its knee. He felt the joint give with a sickening pop.
The air filled with roars and the iron stink of blood. Luna fought with a feral, economical grace, all pivoting hips and slashing angles, her tail lashing for balance. An orc lunged at her flank with a rusted dagger. Ezra parried a wild swing from his own opponent and threw a desperate elbow backwards, catching the new attacker in the snout. He heard cartilage crunch.
Luna didn’t thank him. She finished her orc with a brutal downwards chop, then spun, her eyes finding his for a split second—a flash of yellow acknowledging yellow. Another orc, the big one with the gear necklace, charged her with a spiked club, swinging wildly. She dropped low, the club whistling over her head, but the backswing was coming fast, straight for her spine.
“Ezra!” The name was ripped from her, half warning, half command. He was already moving, not thinking, throwing himself forward in a desperate tackle meant to shove her clear. He connected with her side, but her own momentum was shifting. They tangled, limbs knocking, and the world tilted. The massive club smashed into the rock where her head had been, showering them in stone chips.
He hit the ground hard, the breath knocked from his lungs, the cool moss against his cheek. The weight on top of him was warm, solid, and moving. Luna’s masked face was inches from his visor, her blue-grey hair a curtain around them. Her hips were settled against his, her forearm braced beside his head. He could feel the rapid drumbeat of her heart through their armor, or maybe it was his own. For a heartbeat, there was only the panting, the heat, and the violent understanding in her unblinking yellow eyes.
The understanding shattered as a slab-like shadow fell over them. Both sets of hellish yellow eyes snapped to the right. Another orc, one whose approach had been masked by their crash and the general din, was already upon them, a notched sword raised high for a killing plunge. There was no time to rise, no space to roll.
Luna’s body tensed, a coil ready to spring uselessly. Ezra’s hand, trapped beneath her, moved. He didn’t chant. He didn’t focus. He simply snapped the fingers of his free hand. The sound was crisp, final. A tiny, brilliant ember spat from his fingertips. It flew, a minuscule comet, and touched the orc’s leather brigandine.
The creature vanished inside a sudden, roaring column of white-orange flame. The fire consumed with a sound like tearing silk, so hot the air itself seemed to blister. It was over in two seconds. Where the orc had stood, a pair of blackened, clattering boots hit the scorched earth, followed by a fine, greasy ash that drifted down on the sudden, ringing silence.
The heat washed over their faces. Luna hadn’t flinched. She stared at the dissipating plume, then slowly looked down at him. Her mask hid her expression, but her eyes were wide, the pupils contracted to pinpricks in their yellow fields. The weight of her on him felt different now—not an accident, but an interrogation.
“You said you liked the fighting,” she stated, her voice oddly flat. The unspoken question hung in the air, acrid as the smoke: You never said you were the fire itself.
From across the basin, the gear-necklaced orc leader bellowed in raw fury, the spell of shock broken. Ezra swallowed, the taste of his own power—metallic and hungry—coating his tongue. “I do,” he managed, his voice rough. “Sometimes the fight needs a spark.”
The shared, unspoken truth of his power hung between them for one more fractured second. Then Luna shoved herself off him, her movement all business, but her eyes stayed locked on his. “Save the rest for the big one,” she said, her voice a low rasp that carried a new, sharp-edged approval.
They rose together, a synchronized unfurling of limbs from the moss. The orc leader, bellowing, charged through the dissipating ash cloud, his club a blur. Ezra didn’t hesitate. He met the charge not with a block, but with a sidestep, his sword a red-gold arc that sheared through the arm swinging the club. The limb, still gripping its weapon, thudded wetly to the ground.
The creature’s roar turned into a shriek. Luna was already there, a phantom at its blind side. Her hatchet sank into the back of its knee, and as it buckled, she wrenched the gear necklace around its thick neck, pulling it backwards into a choke. “They skin children for cloaks,” she hissed into its ear, her words a venomous secret, and twisted with a brutal finality. A sickening crack echoed off the crimson stone.
They turned as one, without a word, to face the three remaining orcs who had frozen, their bravado shattered. Hatred, clean and purposeful, moved them now. Ezra drove his blade up under a ribcage, feeling the grate of bone. Luna ducked a wild swing and hamstrung another, her follow-through a merciful, swift cut across the throat. The last orc turned to run, scrambling towards the glowing stream. A shared glance was all it took.
Ezra’s second snapped ember took it in the back, a smaller, controlled burst that dropped it, smoking, into the blue water. The silence that followed was profound, broken only by the crackle of fading magic, the drip of blood on stone, and their own ragged breathing. They stood amid the carnage, the twin moons casting their long, mingled shadows across the dead.
They stood amid the carnage, the twin moons casting their long, mingled shadows across the dead. The only sound was the gentle, incongruous burble of the glowing stream. Luna straightened from her fighter’s crouch, her breath a steady, slowing rhythm, and hooked her fingers under the edges of the metal mask.
She pulled it off with a soft sigh, letting the cool air touch her face. Sweat-damp blue-grey strands clung to her forehead and temples. She was all sharp, elegant lines: a straight nose, a strong jaw softened by those lupine ears perked high through her hair. Ezra had seen beautiful girls before, human and elf and others, but Luna was anything but.
She was a matched set. The recognition was a physical jolt. A wave of heat, sudden and intense, bloomed across his cheeks and under his eyes, a demonic fire that had nothing to do with combat. It prickled beneath his helmet’s lining, a vivid, embarrassing warmth he couldn’t control.
Luna wiped a smudge of ash from her cheekbone, her yellow eyes drifting to him. They paused, then narrowed with a flicker of open curiosity. She took a step closer, her head tilting just so, and a slow, knowing smile touched her lips. “Hey,” she said, her voice quieter now, stripped of its battle-growl. “You’re glowing.”
He could only stare, the heat beneath his fur intensifying. “Ventilation’s bad,” he mumbled, the weak joke ash in his mouth.
Her smile didn’t fade; it deepened, revealing the points of her canines. She looked genuinely, openly pleased. “Sure it is.” She finally broke the gaze, turning to survey the scattered bodies, their shadows still tangled on the moss. “Let’s strip the witch-iron and get paid.” She didn’t move, though, her shoulders relaxed in a new, comfortable way. “You fight okay, for a guy who blushes.”
The heat under his fur prickled hotter at her words. He turned away, busying himself with prying a witch-iron dagger from a cold, grey fist. The scalping was methodical, grim work, their knives making soft, tearing sounds in the quiet basin. He searched his mind for anything to say, the silence between them growing louder than the recent fight.
He’d joked with Ginny for years, chatted with Lira about magic, but this was different. Luna was the first real demon he’d ever met, a fact that now struck him as profoundly lonely. The shared, sun-seared yellow of their eyes meant something. “They really do use blight arrows on their own kind if it sells,” he finally said, nodding toward the quiver.
His voice sounded too loud. He winced at its clumsiness.
Luna didn’t look up from her work, slicing a precise line behind an orc’s ear. “Saw a pack of them use a poisoned spring to wipe out a feyling grove once.” Her tone was flat, factual. “For a contract to clear land for a barley farmer. Just efficiency to them.”
“Merciless,” Ezra muttered, the word fitting perfectly around the hatred in his chest. He yanked a scalp free with more force than necessary.
“Merciless,” Luna agreed, her voice a low harmony to his. She tucked the hairy trophy into her sack and stood, stretching her back. A joint popped.
The sound was obscenely casual in the silence after killing. She kicked the orc’s boot with her own. "You know? A friend of mine, Ginny—the knight—she’s always on about mercy." The words spilled out of him, raw and unpracticed. "She says even things like this deserve a chance at redemption or to be on a differente level of them, that it’s what separates us from beasts." He gestured at the scalped corpse between them, his voice tightening. "But they’re not people. They’re monsters. They take and rend and sell the pieces." He looked at Luna, needing the confirmation only her yellow eyes could give. "Why show mercy to a thing that only understands taking?"
Luna slung her sack over her shoulder, the weight of it a solid thump against her hip. "Your friend lives in a castle of principles," she said, not unkindly. "Its walls keep the reality out." She nudged a spilled waterskin with her foot, its contents dark and oily. "Mercy is a language. These things don't speak it." She finally met his gaze again, and her understanding was a physical relief, a shared anchor in a morally slippery world. "You don't negotiate with a landslide. You survive it."
Ezra let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. The simmering frustration he’d carried for years cooled a degree, validated. "Yeah," he said, the single syllable heavy with agreement. He hefted his own sack, the witch-iron inside clinking.
The climb out of the basin was a labor of silent, shared exertion, their boots scraping on the crimson scree. The twin moons painted their path in pallid light, and the sacks over their shoulders pulled with the satisfying weight of earned coin. The lingering scent of blood and ozone began to fade, replaced by the crisp, thin air of the foothills.
“Then there’s Sig,” Ezra continued, the name a catalyst for a different, fond exasperation. He adjusted the strap biting into his shoulder. “The wizard. He’d look at all that back there and make some sarcastic comment about the metabolic inefficiency of rage.” He affected a dry, scholarly tone. “‘All that adrenal expenditure and for what? Substandard ironwork and a few copper fillings. Truly, the pinnacle of orcish economic strategy.’“
A low chuckle escaped Luna, a rough sound of genuine amusement. She kept walking, her eyes on the path.
“And Lira,” he said, his voice softening despite the mockery. “Our elf. She’d be upset we didn’t at least give them a warning volley. She think that bastards have families, or maybe were just conscripted.” He shook his head, the motion visible in the moonlight. “She finds the good in rotten stumps. It’s infuriating. And kind of amazing.”
Luna listened, her silence stretching so long he thought she might not respond at all. Her head was tilted, her wolf ears angled toward him as if parsing a faint, distant signal. “They sound…” she began, then paused, searching for the word. “…complicated.” The way she said it was flat, a statement of pure observation, as if he’d described a uniquely tangled knot.
Complicated is one word for it." "Take Ginny last month," he said, shifting his sack. "She decided to 'bless' a questionable tavern's well to purify the ale." "The resulting holy water fermentation caused a minor explosion that glued a brewer to the ceiling for three hours." Luna’s eyebrows lifted, a hint of a smile playing on her lips. "Then there was Sig’s brilliant idea to test a frictionless spell on his own boots." "He spent an afternoon sliding uncontrollably around the city, crashing into laundry lines and vegetable carts, while lecturing passersby on coefficient theory." A snort escaped Luna, her shoulders shaking slightly. "But Lira," Ezra continued, warming to the theme, "once tried to broker peace between two rival squirrel families in the park." "She ended up as the primary target for a coordinated nut bombardment that left her hair a sticky, acorn-studded mess for days." Luna’s laugh broke then, a full, genuine sound that echoed in the quiet foothills. It was a rough, unused sound, but it fit her perfectly. "They’re disasters," she managed, wiping a tear from her eye. "Lovable, but utter disasters." Ezra nodded, the shared laughter loosening something tight in his chest. "Without me, they’d probably have turned themselves into folklore cautionary tales by now."
The echo of their laughter faded into the mossy stillness of the descending path. Ezra felt an unfamiliar looseness in his chest, as if a knot he’d never named had been untied. He glanced at Luna, her profile sharp in the moonlight, a faint smile still touching her lips.
"So," he said, the word hanging between them like a bridge he wasn't sure how to cross. "This was... efficient." He cringed internally at his own awkwardness, but forced himself to continue.
"The work, I mean. Good. Profitable." The sacks of witch-iron clinked with each step, a rhythmic testament to their violence. Luna nodded, her wolf ears twitching at a distant night bird's call.
"It was," she agreed, her voice neutral but her eyes curious. Ezra took a breath, the cool air scraping his throat.
"Look, given how well that went..." he trailed off, then blurted it out. "We should do it again sometime." He rushed to add, "The bounty hunting, obviously. But also... maybe not just that."
The silence that followed was so profound he could hear the blood pounding in his own ears. Luna stopped walking, turning to face him fully, her yellow eyes searching his.
A slow, genuine grin spread across her face, sharp canines gleaming. "Yeah," she said, simple and direct. "I'd like that."
Inside Ezra, something detonated—a silent, radiant shockwave of pure, undiluted relief. It wasn't just attraction; it was the staggering, vertiginous recognition that for the first time in his life, he didn't have to explain the color of his own eyes.
He finally had someone who just knew, and the future suddenly felt less like a lonely road and more like an undiscovered map.
He walked back to the city alone, the twin moons carving his shadow long and thin on the road, but the usual hollow echo in his chest was filled with a quiet, foreign hum. The Sack of scalps and witch-iron felt lighter than it should have, traded at a fencer’s stall near the Low Bazaar for a heavy leather pouch of mixed coin that pulled satisfyingly at his belt. He pushed open the warped oak door of The Grinning Imp, and the tavern’s familiar wall of sound—raucous laughter, the clatter of dice, a minstrel’s badly-tuned lute—washed over him like a warm, dirty blanket.
He spotted them at their usual corner table, half-hidden in the smoke haze. Lira was tracing a finger through a spill of ale, her expression distant, while Ginny sat rigidly, polishing the same spot on her vambrace with sharp, repetitive strokes. He weaved through the crowd, the pouch already in his hand, and dropped it onto the scarred wood between their tankards with a dense, metallic thud that made both of them jump.
Lira’s eyes went wide, flicking from the pouch to his face. Ginny’s polishing stopped. She stared at the leather sack as if it were a venomous snake, then her green eyes snapped up to his, a storm brewing in their depths. "Ezra," she said, her voice dangerously low, cutting through the tavern din. "What is that?"
"Half of Sig and Reinar's bail," Ezra said, tapping the pouch. The lute music in the tavern suddenly felt too loud, too cheerful. "At least...412 Golden crowns."
Ginny’s face went very still, a prelude to eruption. "You smell of witch-iron and blood." Her voice was a wire pulled taut. "Tell me you didn't."
"Tell me you didn't."
The words hung between them, sharp as a drawn blade. The tavern's din seemed to recede, muffled by the intensity in Ginny’s green eyes. Ezra watched her knuckles whiten around her tankard; the ale inside trembled slightly.
He leaned back in his chair, the wood creaking under his weight, and forced a casual shrug. "Didn't what? Secure funds? Because I'm pretty sure that's exactly what I did." He tapped the pouch again, the coins inside shifting with a solid, musical clink.
Lira’s hand darted out, her fingers brushing the leather sack. Her brown eyes were wide, worried. "Ezra, this is... a lot. From one afternoon?" She smelled the air, her elf senses keen, and her nose wrinkled. "That’s not just iron. That’s witch-iron residue. And blood. Orc blood." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "You went to the Crags."
Ginny didn’t wait for his answer. She stood up so fast her chair scraped against the stone floor with a screech that silenced the nearby tables for a heartbeat. "You absolute fool." Her voice was low, but it carried a vibrato of pure fury. "We had a plan. A safe, a dungeon. Slow, but secure. No one gets poisoned, no one gets shot." She planted her hands on the table, leaning in, her face inches from his visor. "And you went after the grey orcs. After we specifically discussed—no, after I ordered—that you were to avoid them. Because they kill demons. Because they use witch-iron and blight arrows that can cripple your kind in seconds. Was any of that strategic brilliance too complex for you to grasp?"
The minstrel in the corner started up again, a jaunty tune about a lost love, horribly off-key. The dissonance grated against the tension at their table. Ezra felt the heat of her anger, but beneath his fur, a colder stubbornness set in. He pushed his own chair back, rising to meet her gaze.
"Ordered?" he repeated, his voice deceptively calm. "See, that’s where you’ve got it twisted, Ginny. I’m not a fucking shiny squires. You don’t give me orders." He gestured around the tavern, at the blurred faces of strangers drinking away their worries. "We’re not on a sanctioned Order or a guild mission here. We’re in a tavern, trying to get our friends out of a cell because one of them got clever with a municipal wards and the other tried to argue jurisprudence with a guard who uses his helmet as a dinner bowl."
Lira made a small, distressed noise. "Please, both of you, lower your voices."
Ginny ignored her. Her eyes were blazing. "This isn’t about rank! This is about basic, tactical sense! Those arrows don’t just kill, Ezra. They cause a necrotic decay in demonic tissue. Sig told us. He read the case studies. It’s a slow, agonizing way to die, and there’s no antidote. You think I’m being rigid? I’m trying to keep you from melting into a puddle of regret in some ditch!" Her breath hitched, the religious medals on her armor chain trembling. "Do you have any idea what it would do to Lira? To me? To even that sarcastic lump Sig, if you…" She couldn’t finish the sentence.
The raw fear behind her anger was unmistakable. It filled the space between them, thick and sour. Ezra looked away, his gaze catching on a knot in the wooden table. He could still smell the charred orc from his own spell, feel the terrifying ease of that power. He thought of Luna’s crossbow cracking, her yellow eyes acknowledging his without flinching.
He took a slow breath. The cheerful noise of the tavern felt like a mockery.
"I knew about the arrows," he said, his voice quieter now. "I saw the quiver. I made sure it was the first thing that became irrelevant."
Ginny’s expression shifted from fury to a kind of horrified comprehension. "You didn’t go alone." It wasn’t a question.
Ezra met her eyes again. "No. I had help. Competent help."
"Who?" The word was a dagger.
"That’s not the point."
"The hells it isn’t! You enlisted some… some mercenary for a suicide run and you’re standing here acting like it’s a triumph of finance!" Her voice rose, drawing glances from a group of dwarves at the next table. She lowered it, forcing control. "You compromised your safety, you disregarded our agreed-upon strategy, and for what? To prove you’re not afraid of pointy sticks?"
The irony tasted bitter. He’d been terrified the entire time, a constant, humming fear beneath the adrenaline. But also alive in a way he never was during their careful, slow plans.
"No," he said, and the word was final. He picked up the coin pouch, hefting its weight in his palm. The leather was cool, stamped with the fencer’s mark. "I did it because Reinar and Sig are sitting in a damp cell right now. Because Reinar has that nervous cough that gets worse in mildew, and because Sig’s sarcasm is going to get him punched by a cellmate who doesn’t appreciate commentary on the structural integrity of prison gruel." He leaned forward, his own frustration boiling over. "Your safe forest retrieval would have taken three days. Maybe four. For maybe forty crowns if we were lucky. How long do you think those two last in there? Sig’s already tried to explain the legal precedent for his arrest to the guards. He’s on borrowed time."