Grasha Ironhide drove her heel into the dirt and held the stance. Sweat ran down her jaw. She drew her hand back, fingers curled, nails long and sharp, and struck the air the way her clan once struck. The motion felt right. She held the shape, breathing slow, the last of her line rebuilding a fighting style from memory alone in the quiet hills of Rindhollow. She trained inside an old stone ring her grandfathers had built, its arch carved with worn marks of her clan. She moved through the maze of pillars, striking each shadow as it came. Then she heard a crash beyond the steps. A man stumbled through the arch and fell at her feet. Blood soaked his shirt. Four deep gashes tore across his chest, spaced like fingers. Grasha knelt and spread her hand above the wounds. They matched. Her claws, her clan's strike — exactly. She had not made these marks. Someone else alive knew the style. The man's hand twitched at his belt. Grasha pulled back his cloak. A long sword lay strapped against his hip, its blade running with veins of green jade. She knew that sword. Her grandfather had described it once, by firelight — the blade carried by the hunter who came for the clan's last children. The man's lips moved. He whispered her clan's name, then her own. His eyes closed. Grasha sat back on her heels, breath steady, hand still curled in the strike. She was not the last. And whoever had clawed this man open was coming. A bell rang faint beyond the arch. Wheels rolled over stone. Grasha looked up. A wooden carriage drew to a stop on the path below, small winged shapes flitting around its painted roof. Pale hands reached through its curtains toward her, toward the bleeding man. She had not called for help. Someone had sent it ahead. Grasha gripped the green sword, slid it from the man's belt, and stood. The blade was heavy in her hand. The trail had found her before she had even started walking it.

Grasha stood in the ring with the green blade heavy in her grip. The carriage waited below, its pale passengers still reaching, still silent. She did not move toward them. Instead she turned the sword in the morning light and looked closer at the jade veins. Tiny marks ran along the flat of the blade. Not decoration. Lines. Symbols. Something carved with care. She knelt beside the dead man and laid the sword across a flat stone to read. The stone was old, its top engraved with green jade patterns she had not noticed before. The blade rested clean against it. The marks were a map. A river bent across the steel. Small hills rose along its edge. Each turn carried a name she knew — old places, clan places. A black notch sat at every name. She counted them. Seven. Seven cuts down the blade, seven stops on the road. Her finger followed the last one. The carving ended at a ring of pillars under an arch. Her arch. Her ring. She set the sword down and looked at the stone walls around her. The blade did not point her toward the hunter. It marked her as the final kill. Grasha traced the sixth notch. A tall peak rose from the steel, crowned with a small arch and tongues of flame curled around its base. She knew that summit. A half day's walk east. The flames there burned green and never died. If the hunter kept the route, he stood there now, or had just left it. Six names before hers. Six dead, or dying, or already gone. She had been waiting at the end of a line she did not know she stood in. Grasha pressed her palm flat to the cold stone and breathed once. She lifted the blade and wrapped it in the dead man's cloak. The carriage bell rang again below, closer now. She would not stay to be the seventh notch. She walked to the arch, sword bound at her back, and stepped past her clan's old marks for the first time in years. The ring was no longer a place to train. It was a place marked for her death, and she was leaving it behind.