Luna stepped a little closer, silent as always, and stood beside her. Not comforting with words. Just… presence. A body in the dark that didn’t demand anything.

Viola didn’t look at her. She just threw another stone into the ocean and watched it vanish.

Luna’s fingers flexed once at her side, then relaxed. For once, she wished she had a better answer than silence.

And for once, she understood that silence was sometimes all she could offer, because Viola’s burden wasn’t something you stabbed.

It was something you carried. Viola stared at the ocean for a long moment, then spoke like the question had been sitting in her throat all day.

“Why does life get more complicated the more I live?”

Her voice wasn’t angry this time. Just tired. Like she’d run out of ways to make the world feel simple again.

Luna blinked once, thinking.

“I believe…” she said softly, choosing the words like she was handling a blade by the wrong end, “that’s something everyone thinks as they grow older.”

Viola huffed a short laugh that didn’t carry any humor. “Great. So it never stops.”

Luna didn’t argue. She didn’t have the experience to claim otherwise.

Viola rubbed her fingers together, feeling sand grit and salt. Then, suddenly, she slapped her cheeks, light taps, just enough to wake herself up.

Luna’s gaze sharpened. “Viola—”

“I’m fine,” Viola said quickly, then exhaled. “I just…”

She looked down, and for a second her expression softened into something that almost resembled embarrassment.

“I can’t keep dumping this on you,” she admitted.

Luna didn’t react, but her eyes stayed on Viola’s face, listening.

Viola’s shoulders rose and fell with a controlled breath. “You already carry enough. You follow me everywhere. You protect me. You deal with my moods. My fights. My… everything.”

She swallowed, jaw tightening again.

“When I was a kid, I was selfish,” Viola said, quieter. “I didn’t think about what it cost you. I just assumed you’d be there because you always were.”

A beat of silence. Viola’s hands clenched, then relaxed.

“But I know I have to do better,” she said. “If people are treating me like an adult already, then I should at least act like one.”

Luna’s voice came even softer. “You’re trying.”

Viola glanced at her, eyes sharp and vulnerable at the same time. “Trying isn’t enough.”

Then she looked back at the ocean, and the wind took the edge off her words.

“…But it’s what I have.”

When Viola returned to camp, she looked… lighter.

Not happy. Not relaxed. But less tangled. Like the ocean and a few honest words had pulled some of the thorns out of her head.

Her shoulders weren’t as tight. Her eyes weren’t as sharp in that restless, angry way. Even her steps had steadied, more purposeful, less like she was running from her own thoughts.

Ludger noticed immediately.

He was sitting near the shelter entrance, checking the watch and quietly confirming which trainees were on ship duty and which were assigned to the perimeter. The camp was dim, low fires, no big fires, light kept minimal under the webbed canopy.

Viola passed by and gave him a short nod. He frowned slightly, not at her, but at the fact that something had clearly shifted and he didn’t know why. His gaze flicked to the shadows, searching for Luna out of habit.

He wanted to ask. Not Viola, he knew better than to poke at her pride when she’d just managed to pull herself together.

Luna. He wanted to ask Luna if she was truly fine.

Because Viola always said she was fine. She always acted fine. And Luna always noticed things related to Viola… But as usual… she was gone.

The moment Viola started moving, Luna had vanished like smoke, one blink and she wasn’t by the beach anymore, not by the camp either, not anywhere obvious. Off doing what she did best: being the unseen edge of their safety.

Ludger’s jaw tightened.

He felt a flicker of guilt, not loud, not dramatic, but there.

He’d let this happen to Viola. Not the ocean talk. Not the sighs. Not the growing up too fast. The fracture.

The sense that something had shifted between him and her grandfather and nobody would tell her cleanly… And it was his fault more than he wanted to admit.

Because he couldn’t truly take chances with Torvares anymore.

Not after everything he’d seen. Not with the Empire changing. Not with enemies pushing pieces around the board and smiling while they did it.

Torvares had his eyes on the Empire and its future, on power, survival, positioning, the next ten years. Ludger didn’t. Ludger cared about his family. And his allies.

The people who stood beside him when the world got hungry.

He watched Viola disappear into the shelter entrance, then looked back at the dark webbed island and the sky above it. He exhaled once, slow. Politics wanted him to grow up too. He just wasn’t willing to let it decide what he became.

In the end, Ludger didn’t sleep. Not really. He chose the deck.

He stayed outside near the ship, close enough that his presence steadied the first watch without him having to say much. Ironhand worked their stations like professionals, but the trainees were the ones who needed the extra weight, someone calm nearby so their imagination didn’t start inventing wings in every shadow.

Ludger moved between them in short loops, checking grips, correcting posture, quietly fixing small mistakes before they became big ones.

“Eyes up,” he reminded one kid who kept staring at the rail like the wood might jump him.

“Don’t lock your knees,” he told another. “You’ll topple when the ship rolls.”

He didn’t preach. He didn’t comfort. He just anchored them in tasks. The night dragged on.

Moonlight painted the webbed island in pale strips, turning the cliffs into ghost shapes. The sea rolled dark and steady, and the sky remained, unfortunately, empty.

Midnight came… And nothing happened. No wingbeats. No black dots. No feather storms. No sudden screaming alarms.

Just wind, water, and the slow creak of a ship that didn’t trust the ocean. Relief didn’t arrive like a celebration. It arrived like exhaustion finally admitting it was allowed to exist.

When it was time for the second watch, the first group began to rotate off in disciplined lines. Boots shuffled quietly. Shields were passed. Positions were explained in murmurs. A few trainees moved like their bodies had stiffened into armor.

Some looked dead tired.

But the relief was obvious, written in loosened shoulders, in shaky exhalations, in the way they avoided looking at the sky now that it hadn’t tried to kill them.

They’d survived their first night watch. Even if nothing happened, that still mattered. Then the second group came up… And Ludger immediately saw the problem. They didn’t look rested.

Eyes a little too wide. Faces pale in fire glow. That tight, braced posture of people who’d tried to sleep and failed because their minds kept replaying feather volleys and falling bodies.

A few of them yawned and then snapped their mouths shut like it was weakness. Others swallowed hard and forced their hands to stop trembling.

Ludger watched them take their stations, and something in his chest tightened, not sympathy, exactly. Calculation.

This is going to be rough.

Fatigue makes people stupid. Fatigue made them drop shields, miss signals, forget knots, misjudge distance. But it couldn’t be helped. They were on a hostile island with an exposed ship and a sky that liked to lie. Everyone needed the experience.

Everyone needed to learn what a real watch felt like, how long hours were when you were waiting for teeth. Ludger stepped toward the second watch line, voice low and steady.

“Stay sharp,” he said. “If you feel yourself drifting, tell your partner. Swap positions. Drink water. Breathe.”

No pep talk. Just survival instructions. Then he looked up at the silent sky again, eyes narrowing.

Come on, he thought, not because he wanted the fight, because he didn’t trust the quiet. If you’re going to hit us, hit us while I’m awake.

Ludger’s eyes had been half-lidded for longer than he liked.

Not asleep, never fully asleep, but close enough that the world started to blur at the edges. The kind of nodding off that happened when you’d been awake too long and nothing was happening, when your body tried to steal seconds wherever it could.

Then something changed. Not a sound at first. A pressure shift. A subtle tightening in the air that made the hair on the back of his neck rise.

Ludger’s eyes snapped open. He stood up so fast the bench creaked under him, and for a heartbeat the deck seemed to tilt beneath his feet, then his balance locked, instincts awake.

He focused.

Seismic Sense tasted the ship’s motion. The tension in ropes. The distant tremor of waves.

And then he heard it. A faint whisper through the air, too rhythmic to be wind. Too patterned to be chance. He turned his head toward the sky, listening harder.

“Positions,” he said, voice low but sharp enough to cut through fatigue.

The trainees nearest him jolted. A few blinked in confusion. Ludger didn’t give them time to question it.

“Assume positions. Shields up. Mages ready. Now.”

The second watch moved, fast and stumbling at first, then smoother as the old drills took over. Officers snapped commands down the line. Ironhand hands tightened the perimeter, already shifting into their anti-air routine.

Ludger listened again.

There. A distant flap, heavy, syncopated, like leather sheets being snapped in the wind.

Then another. Then many.

And with it, the noise of the crows, thin, ugly calls that weren’t quite caws, more like metal scraped against bone. The sound carried strangely over open water, rising and falling as the flock rode currents toward the ship.

They were coming. Ludger’s jaw tightened.

He could handle it. He could help the kids. He could, if he threw enough mana at the sky, turn the attack into a brief, brutal lesson and move on.

He started to lift his hand. Then another sound reached him. Not from the sky. From the island.

A low, crawling rustle, like thousands of fingernails dragging over silk. Like dry leaves being poured through a narrow chute. Like something massive moving just beneath web carpets and stone.

The entrance. The labyrinth. Spiders.

Ludger froze for half a heartbeat, eyes narrowing toward the dark mass of the island beyond the bridge. He could hear it now, multiple bodies shifting. Weight moving through tunnels. The faint snap of silk lines tightening as something large displaced air.

Not random. Not “one spider wandered out.” This was a wave. His frown deepened.

Coincidence? he thought.

Or something worse. The crows from the sky. The spiders from the labyrinth. Two threats. Same timing.

Ludger’s gaze flicked between horizon and island, mind racing through patterns and possibilities.

Were they working together somehow?

Or were they both responding to the same trigger, the same pressure of intruders settling in, harvesting, building shelter, daring to sleep? He lowered his hand slowly, feeling irritation sharpen into something colder.

“Of course,” he muttered.

Because the world couldn’t just throw one problem at him. It had to coordinate them. Or at least make it look like it had. And either way, it meant one thing: Tonight wasn’t going to be a simple defense. Tonight was going to be a test.

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