In Jugner Forest—

The lone mithra Samurai paused at a clearing and looked out across Jugner, aware of the steady bleeding away, by degrees, of sunlight. The infallible gloom of the forest, which was dark at midday, would soon give way to pitch. And in that darkness would roam a terrible thing.

She waited there, feline ears twitching, listening for certain sounds which might signal she was no longer hunter, but prey. Hearing nothing but the soughing of wind through verdant trenches, and the occasional flutter of wings, she moved on, and with every step she became more aware of her distance from the road. She had left the path and its relative safety hours ago, when her chocobo had refused to take even one step further into the forest.

She continued onward, alarmed by her own footsteps carrying her wide-eyed into the darkening forest, which seemed so vastly empty, so yawning, and so acceptant of her presence. Even her shadow had abandoned her in the pervasive gloom. But she would not relent.

There was a loud snap underfoot. She froze in place and gave a startled mew; her tail fuzzed up, and her hand fell to her hip, but it was only a twig. Tail flicking indignantly at the spectacle of her fear (to which there was none, except that in her mind she must have certainly seemed a coward for even feeling fear), her brows knit, and she moved on, comforted by the weight of the massive hagun on her hip. She placed her hand on its familiar hilt and felt her mind steady; swept the trees around her for clues to the killer’s whereabouts.

Just thinking of the killer filled her with anger. The murders had started almost a month ago, when a merchant from the Kingdom had been found in Jugner Forest pinned to a tree by a javelin. She remembered how disturbed she was—for no reason she could discern at the time—to learn that the merchant’s coin-purse was brimming with gil. The killer had not taken it.

Her dread proved well-founded. In the following week, a member of the Tanners’ Guild was found just off the road near the La Theine exit, pinned to the ground with a harpoon through his back. Adventurers flocked to Jugner to investigate the killings, but found no trace of the murderer. What they did find was three more victims, each dispatched in ways similar to the first two, with the murder weapon left in their bodies. Consequently, traffic between Jeuno and San d’Oria was cut by a third.

In the face of a trade crisis, the Kingdom mobilized the Norvallen Knights to guard the road through Jugner. That is when the killing spread to Batallia—a Jeunoan actor named Thaurimand wandered away from a rehearsal, drunk, and disappeared. He was found two days later on a necropolis hillock, impaled on a lance that was stuck into the ground point up, as if he were a trophy left on display. The murder was instantly connected to the Jugner slayings, and a panic quickly spread over the Norvallen region. That Thaurimand was set to play Feldrautte I Rouhent, leader of the Norvallen Knights during the Crystal War, caused the killing to take on a second, more terrifying meaning.

Then a guard of the Norvallen Knights was taken off the road. She was later found skewered on the roof of the outpost— though she had surely been killed elsewhere, and dropped there, as if from a height. She was the first victim of a combat status. The next victim was an adventurer who had come to Norvallen boasting that he would find and slay the notorious killer. He was found cut nearly in two, with a wound that began at the top of his body, and proceeded straight down and completely through him. These two deaths led officials to proclaim that the killer was a Dragoon.

More murders would follow, in Batallia, in Carpenter’s Landing, and even as far away as Vunkerl Inlet. The Dragoon became more brazen, leaving papers printed with the unholy crest of a vile dragon pinned to the bodies of victims, and more furiously targeting the Norvallen Knights. He taunted his pursuers with his presence, only to vanish, leaving his mark in fresh blood or paint drying on the walls of San d’Orian landmarks.

Pursuit of the Dragoon reached a fever pitch when a barge from the Phanauet Channel coasted into the canal at Southern San d’Oria with a grisly cargo of corpses. All on board were veterans of the Crystal War. A battle was evinced by the slashes to the forecastle and the deck, but in the end four ex-soldiers and the captain all lay slain. All the Dragoons of the Kingdom were detained for inquest. A thorough search of King Ranperre’s Tomb was conducted. Investigators from as far away as Aht Urhgan were brought onto the case. But as of now, the killer Dragoon remained on the loose, and there were more victims. Only the world did not know it yet.

But she knew. She had just finished burying them. They were a pair of Norvallen Knights stationed to Batallia. She’d found them hanging from the branches of the same dead tree, so thoroughly skewered that their blood had painted the trunk crimson. After burying them, she set the tree on fire, and with a prayer of hope that the cursed ground of Eldieme would not see them rising by nightfall, she bore herself to Jugner, where her heart told her there was a reckoning to be had—because that was where it had begun, and that was where it must end.

Now she stood in Jugner, where attendant oaks leaned over her in mock interest, their boughs festooned with curtains of graybeard that might hide any manner of surprise, any matter at all, and where, in the distance, a tiger roared twice and fell suddenly silent, and where she saw no sign of the killer, except everything was a sign of the killer, and all around her were curiously inclined trees and stone outcroppings that contained a dangerous mystery.

And then, off to the right, a glimmer caught her eye. She moved toward it and came upon a stream babbling its way through the heart of Jugner. She squatted there, dipping her fist into the trickling current which was now tinged with a peculiar color she at first took for muddy silt stirred up by the passage of her hand. Her fingers clenched something solid and she fished up a gold chain. Attached to this was a medallion of a Norvallen Knight—one of the two she had buried, by the name inscribed upon it.

Off to the south, she heard the rustling of brush. Now her heart was trip-hammering, her ears were cocked, and she heard another sound, but also saw a receding shadow crawling over distant trees, further down the river. And was that second sound not the slow, lackadaisical beat of leathery wings? The Dragoon!

She bolted after him without hesitation, breaking through the brush and drawing her blade as soon as she cleared the first tree. There she saw him, turning slowly to face her as if to greet an old friend, but she was in mid-leap and not interested in a hug. He seemed frozen in her path, forevermore imprinted there by the clear / tranquil moment before her rending blade would send him down to Hell. There in the deep blue-blacks of his wyrm armor, his head half swallowed by the iconic dragon-winged armet of his caliber, he was a transcendent thing, beautiful and terrible. She unleashed all of her fury to strike him down.

He turned her aside with a single arm, drawing a heavy Near Eastern lance with a nasty twin scimitar head from his back and driving it along the angle of his twisting body, a move that was the combined structure of a fencer and a matador. Deflected, the mithra flew wildly, nearly going face down in the stream. Summoning all of her strength, she rolled over midair and came down on the shore, tumbling back onto her feet and turning to slash at him with one fluid motion.

“Murderer!” she howled, her blade clashing off his haft in a flash of orange sparks. She threw a flurry of attacks, backing him up as he spun his lance in both hands, turning the haft at angles to drive the hagun away from his body.

“I’m not the killer!” he roared.

“Lies!” cried she, feinting a step back, and then blurring under his polearm in a surge of unbelievable speed. Yet he must have believed it, for he turned with her, going perfectly back to back with her for an instant before she twisted her blade under her arm to stab him through the heart, and yet that failed too for all her blade found was the haft of his lance bowed behind him. He spun away from her, whirling his weapon at angles over his shoulders and finally falling to a half knee at six paces, with one hand out to her, and his lance clutched behind his back.

“You’re making a mistake,” he said.

She cleared those six paces in the flash of an eye and was at kissing distance with him for a split-second, close enough to see his eyes widen before she unleashed the power of her finest technique. “You arrre the mistake I am correcting!” she cried, driving her shoulder into his chest, launching into the air perchance to strike a star out of orbit, a great purple moon blazing from the ethers of her attack, inscribed with the legend of Genesis and cleaving an oak vertically in two… but not the Dragoon.

Airborne, the Samurai twisted, looking over her shoulder for her target, not knowing how he had dodged her but knowing the battle was lost, expecting that she would never again touch the ground in this life…but when she saw him, he merely turned his back on her and seated his lance in the scabbard there. She spiraled as she came down, landing on her feet with a thump, her great katana pointed at his back, but her mind full of confusion, her heart conflicted. Why was the aberration not attacking?

The Dragoon stood with his chin slightly bowed, pensive, yet striking in the growing dusk. Then he sighed heavily and reached up under the pointed nose of his armet with one hand, while reaching behind his back with the other, to free his weapon. He turned, simultaneously peeling back his helmet and spinning his lance-point down to plant it in the ground. “To the honor of the Kingdom,” said the Dragoon, falling to a knee before her, his eyes shut, his blond bangs flying up with his descent and then waving at her on impact.

The Samurai stepped back, shocked by this more than anything else, her wide eyes blinking rapidly. There he had given her the chance for an open strike, a blow that would have been sure to kill him, but now she was completely unable to take it. She fixed her gaze on him and saw that the Dragoon was a hume, really just a boy at that, barely into his man years but carrying the mantle of the ages. She exhaled deeply. She did not realize she had been holding her breath. Finally, she sheathed her blade.

Hearing the sound, the Dragoon rose, and turned his back on her once more. Perhaps not wanting to excite her, he merely kept one hand on his planted lance. The other, he used to replace his armet. In the sky, the Iceday moon was rising, a light blue disc on a dusky twilight that had not yet been totally abated of some distant and foreign sunset.

“What are you?” breathed the mithra.

“I am a Dragoon,” said he. “But I am like you. I too have come to put an end to the dark Dragoon that plagues our world.” He turned toward and past her, pointing south along the arm of the stream. “He is there, in Davoi, and I mean to strike him down.”

“Into Davoi?” she said tonelessly and without belief, as if speaking some alien language. Nothing in her plan involved going into that place—that she would confront the killer in Jugner was without question. That she might die trying was possible, and she accepted that. But Davoi had never even crossed her mind. That place was a death-trap, especially with the orcs so emboldened by the killer. She shook her head, trying to adjust to this new information. Her eyes went to the stream, from which she had fished the medallion of the fallen knight. That stream which flowed all the way into Davoi. Her face became a mask of grief as she felt all manner of emotions, dread at the weight of this truth, and sorrow that she had attacked him and that she must now make some attempt at an apology—but he was not interested in having one.

“I know a secret path inside,” said he, his voice somehow magnified by the armet, given gravity, depth and husk. It was a sound devoid of youth. Had this boy ever been a child? “And I have this.” He reached into the belt of his brais, and opened a leather pouch.

The mithra winced at the red light that shone forth from the slightest opening of the pouch and, as his gauntleted fingers dipped into it, they removed what seemed to her to be the star Ifrit in miniature, a crimson orb of such intensity that it turned the forest a brilliant shade of red and threw all shadows into sharp relief. Presently the Dragoon held it up to his face, beholding it with a cold, almost absent sort of reverence, before replacing it in his belt and rescuing the forest from that ruddy glow.

It was the crimson orb which could open the way to Monastic Caverns. She had seen one like it before...

When he walked past her toward Davoi, she could only watch, and all of her training, and the sense of justice which compelled her, fell as silent as she in the passage of this Dragoon, who seemed to her to be something titanic, inexplicable, and as ancient as the relics he wore. A great, silent wailing rose within her to see him depart, for with him went a vision of some unnamable quality she lacked but desperately needed; and further, despair at her limitations. Where he walked she could not go.

And then he stopped, leathered armor creaking as he looked over his shoulder and said, at length (as if struggling with the words), in a tone softer, more human than the one before: “I sense you have been touched personally by this violence. This may be your fight as much as mine. Will you come with me?”

She looked up at him with eyes more discerning than ever before, as if searching for his soul so that she might measure and name it. He turned to look her in the eyes as she did this, but did not press her for an answer. As if he had sensed her feelings all along he said, “Don’t worry about the plan. I will show you the way.”

With that, her doubts were blown away. She nodded and said no more. She was too stunned. He nodded back, and turned not toward Davoi, but to the east, and leapt the stream like taking a step. On the other side he paused and said, “My name is Kaska.”

The mithra Samurai, no longer alone, looked across the stream at him, feeling her heartbeat starting to climb, and something else, something she could not, or would not admit. “Kaska,” she said, as if tasting the name. She hopped across two stones sticking up from the surface of the creek and landed on the other side, then doubled her pace a few steps to come up beside him, wherein she then slowed down to match his pace. “My name is Rheia. Thanks for inviting me.”

“Well, thanks for joining,” he said a slim grin on his mouth carrying some ineffable meaning. “And for missing Tachi: Gekko.”

He strode off into the forest, leaving her for a moment, aghast and blushing. Then she rushed again to catch up.