⚔️ When the Blade Met the Handshake
Two enemies. One job. Zero room for pride.
They had tried to kill each other three times before breakfast. ☀️
Not metaphorically. Not emotionally. Very literally.
The first attempt happened at dawn on the bridge of Cinderwake, where fog hung like an unmade decision. Ashryn loosed an arrow that shaved a strand of black hair from Kade’s temple. Kade answered with a knife that split the air inches from her throat. The bridge still smelled faintly of iron from last year’s war, and neither of them missed that irony.
By noon, they were shackled together by a man who smelled like parchment and panic. 🗝️
The Chancellor cleared his throat, adjusting spectacles that had no business surviving this long in a kingdom that solved problems with steel. “You are,” he said, “the only two people who can stop what’s coming.”
Ashryn laughed, sharp and humorless. Kade didn’t bother.
They stood on opposite ends of every story told about the war. She was the Hawk of the East, the woman who turned hills into graves with her bow. He was the Butcher of Blackmere, whose blade work was still taught in whispers and scars. Their names were curses on opposite sides of the river.
And now a chain linked their wrists. ⛓️
“You expect cooperation,” Ashryn said, tugging the shackle. “I expect survival,” the Chancellor replied. “The rest is optional.”
The threat lived beneath the city. Not a monster, exactly. More like a consequence.
The old tunnels had been sealed after the war, after someone decided burying forbidden engines was wiser than dismantling them. Someone had been wrong. The ground was waking. Buildings cracked. Wells turned bitter. People dreamed of fire and woke screaming. 🔥
Ashryn had hunted men. Kade had hunted armies. Neither of them knew how to hunt something that wasn’t alive.
They were escorted to the tunnel mouth at dusk, the sky bruised purple and gold. The guards did not meet their eyes. Even enemies deserved privacy, apparently.
The chain clinked with every step. It forced proximity. Forced awareness.
Kade noticed first that Ashryn walked without sound, even in gravel. Ashryn noticed that Kade counted his steps under his breath when the light dimmed. Both filed the observations away like weapons not yet drawn.
“Try anything,” Kade said quietly, “and I won’t miss again.” “Funny,” Ashryn replied. “I was thinking the same thing.”
They descended.
The tunnels breathed. 🌫️
Warm air exhaled from the stone, damp and wrong. Symbols scorched into the walls pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat struggling to remember its rhythm. Ashryn felt her skin prickle. Kade’s grip tightened involuntarily, the chain biting into both their wrists.
The first collapse came without warning.
Stone screamed. The ceiling gave way. Kade shoved Ashryn hard, both of them hitting the ground as debris thundered where they had stood. Dust filled lungs and mouths. Darkness swallowed everything.
When the noise stopped, they lay tangled, breath ragged.
Ashryn realized Kade had taken the brunt of it. A slab pinned his leg at an angle that made her stomach twist.
“You move,” he said through clenched teeth, “and this gets worse.”
She hesitated. Then, slowly, she set her bow aside.
“Don’t die,” she muttered, surprising herself.
It took them twenty minutes to free him. Sweat soaked their clothes. Fingers bled. Pride cracked a little.
When the stone finally shifted, Kade exhaled something close to a laugh. 😮💨
“Guess we’re even,” he said.
“For now,” Ashryn answered.
They learned to work together the way wolves circle first, cautious and calculating. 🐺
Ashryn read the tunnels like wind patterns, sensing where the air changed, where danger gathered. Kade mapped the echoes, the weight of stone, the places where pressure wanted to break. He trusted her instincts. She trusted his timing.
Neither said it out loud.
The engine lay at the heart of the underground, a thing of metal ribs and glowing veins. It pulsed with stolen heat and old mistakes. The air around it shimmered.
“How do we kill it,” Ashryn asked.
Kade stared. “We don’t.”
The engine reacted to intent. It fed on rage, on unfinished violence. It had been built that way. A war machine that never slept because hatred never did.
Ashryn felt something cold settle in her chest. “Then why us.”
Kade met her gaze for the first time without a threat in his eyes. “Because we’re running out of it.”
She understood then. The exhaustion. The way fighting each other felt like repeating a story already told too many times.
The engine roared.
The ground convulsed. ⚡
Light flared. Heat surged. The chain between them glowed red, burning into skin. Ashryn screamed. Kade dragged her forward, both of them stumbling toward the control core.
“You trust me,” he shouted.
She almost laughed. Almost.
“Yes,” she said instead.
They moved as one. She loosed arrows into the conduits, precise and merciless. He severed braces and joints, cutting just enough, never too much. The engine shrieked, starving without its fuel of fury.
Ashryn did something she had never done in battle.
She lowered her bow.
Kade did the same.
The engine faltered.
Silence rushed in, heavy and strange.
Then the core shattered, collapsing inward like a breath finally released. 💥
They fell hard as the tunnels settled.
They woke hours later at the surface, the sky pale with early morning. 🌤️
Healers cut the chain away. The Chancellor wept openly. The city stood, cracked but alive.
Ashryn sat on the steps, wrapping her burned wrist. Kade leaned against a pillar, leg bandaged, expression unreadable.
“So,” she said, breaking the quiet. “Do we finish this.”
Kade considered her. The sun caught the scars on his hands. He looked older than she remembered. Tired in a way victories never fixed.
“No,” he said finally. “We end it.”
They stood. Not friends. Not allies. Something messier. Something earned.
Ashryn turned toward the road east. Kade toward the river west.
Neither looked back.
But for the first time since the war, the ground beneath the city slept peacefully. 🌍
Sometimes, that was enough.
