The Blackstar Legacy
Copyright© 2026 by Lumpy
Chapter 5
After leaving the travelers to make their way south as best they could, they turned back north. Thankfully, the days had been uneventful, although the road was indeed nearly empty, as the travelers had described. The small section he’d seen in Farvale had been a near-constant flow of people, and Osric had been picturing at least half as much as he’d seen there.
Instead, in three days of travel, they had only passed one other group, also travelers who’d been nervous to pass a heavily armed group. Osric felt bad leaving them behind to travel south on their own, but if they started escorting every group of travelers they encountered, they’d never complete the rest of their mission.
As they neared the very end of their time on the road, before continuing north as the road curved away northeast toward Wolfridge, Osric thought they might get off the road without any further issues.
They’d seen signs of bandits along the way, but it seemed like they’d decided to avoid well-armed travelers and look for easier targets instead. While Osric would have been happy to rid the world of their kind, he was also happy not to have to deal with it.
His hopes for an uneventful remainder of the trip were dashed when Rowan, traveling a bit ahead of the group, held up a hand. They didn’t pull their weapons, except for Rowan who had his bow held loosely, but they put hands to hilts as they moved to fan out behind him.
A group of seven men on horseback appeared wearing worn but well-made armor, to Osric’s eye. While they weren’t brandishing weapons either, they also had hands on hilts.
Which was fair. It was a dangerous road these days and everyone was nervous when encountering others there.
The riders drew their horses to a halt a dozen yards away.
“Ho there, travelers,” Rowan called out, holding up a hand.
“Move aside and let us pass,” one of the men said.
“Gladly. Be careful on the road. Bandits are thick, and the Rangers are spread thin of late.”
The leader of the mounted group tilted his head, studying him.
“Rangers? Your kind don’t exist anymore.”
“As long as I’m standing, the Rangers still exist,” Rowan replied, more calmly than Osric would have expected.
They started to step to the side of the road to let the men pass when one said, just loud enough for the group to hear, “Weren’t the boy and girl supposed to have others with them? An old man, a wolf...”
“They didn’t say anything about no ranger,” his companion replied.
Osric’s hand tightened on his sword hilt. “What are you talking about?”
“Seems there’s a good-sized bounty out for a young man and a girl traveling together. Word is, they came from somewhere near Farvale. You lot wouldn’t happen to have an old ring on you, would you?”
“We want no quarrel with you,” Rowan said.
“Then leave the boy and girl. They’re the only ones listed on the bounty.” The leader shrugged. “Or step aside and let us search them. If we don’t find a ring, you can all go on your way.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Jasper said.
“That’s fine by me,” the scarred leader said, drawing his sword. “The bounty says ‘dead or alive.’ We can check their corpses for the ring just as easily.”
When the leader drew his sword, and the rest followed his lead, pulling their weapons. Osric cursed himself for relaxing when they weren’t instantly hostile. They’d split themselves to make room for the riders, and now half his people were on the other side of the road, too far away from him to support.
It could have been worse. At least Talia was with him. Jasper was on the other side, but he had Rowan with him, who was more than capable of defending himself and the others.
Grace was her own story. As soon as the leader started to pull his sword, she took two large steps backward and disappeared into the forest. A month ago, Osric would have been worried that she was abandoning them, running to safety. After what he’d seen over the last few weeks, she’d shown that there was more to her. That she did care about others, regardless of what she said.
Her disappearing was part of a plan. Something these men would regret.
Surprisingly, Talia was also already in motion, her hands drawing symbols in the air, moving in an intricate pattern. She hadn’t let herself relax, even if only to wait to see what the men would do.
She never took her eyes off the men as she pressed her palms together, rotated them apart while drawing her left hand down as her right moved up, fingers spread wide.
As she brought her right hand sweeping across her body, a roiling ball of fire leaped out of thin air, pushing away from her outstretched hands and speeding toward the group, which had just started their horses charging forward.
Her aim wasn’t perfect; the ball exploded behind the group instead of in the midst of them, spreading out in a roar of flame and heat. Horses screamed and reared and the three men furthest back joined them, ripping burning cloth from their skin, which was blackened and charred.
Surprisingly, they managed to regain control of their mounts, which must have been well-trained indeed to not run at the first hint of pain.
The leader spurred his mount forward, charging straight for Osric. His blade came down in a vicious arc that Osric barely managed to deflect. Osric let the impact push him back, rolling away from the warhorse, its hooves slamming into the cobblestone where Osric had stood a moment before.
On the other side of the road, Rowan surprised Osric by shooting an arrow not at one of the men, but burying the shaft into one of the animal’s rump. The animal, already scared from the burns it had received, had reached its breaking point, instincts taking over as it reared up, spilling the man on its back onto the roadside.
Osric popped back to his feet and lunged forward at the scarred leader, the tip of his blade sliding under the thigh plate of his armor, drawing first blood. The leader grunted in pain but kept his seat, wheeling the animal just out of Osric’s reach, turning it to put his blade in a position to attack again.
“Heathus protect him!” Jasper called out, loud enough for his voice to be heard over the shouts and clashing steel.
Osric felt the familiar warmth of the gods coursing through him again, filling him with purpose and strength.
A scream from the trees drew everyone’s attention as Grace suddenly emerged from the forest, leaping out of a tree and onto the back of one of the mounted men. Her arm locked around his throat as she buried her short sword into a gap in his armor.
Rowan took advantage of the momentary distraction to send two more arrows flying, again into the rump of a horse. Not a fatal blow for the animal, but enough to send it rearing up, its hooves pawing the air as it threw its rider to the ground.
That was enough to jolt everyone back into action, with the leader pressing his attack on Osric, who, feeling the surge of energy from Jasper’s blessing, moved just in time to deflect the blow.
“Give us the boy, and the rest of you can live,” the leader yelled.
None of Osric’s friends bothered to reply. They’d already made their decision. Talia, in response, sent a wave of golden light rippling across the field of combat from her outstretched hands, washing over Osric, Grace, Rowan, and Cinder. Osric had felt the energies when the gods had healed him and when Jasper had blessed him but this was something ... else. Something more raw.
He felt incredibly fast. Impossibly fast.
Osric’s blade recovered from the deflection a moment before and moved lightning fast, striking under the leader’s parry and cutting into his thigh, drawing both blood and a scream.
“Kill the girl first! She’s the dangerous one!” he yelled through gritted teeth.
One of the men spurred his mount toward Talia, but his wild swing went wide as she ducked behind Osric.
On the other side of the road, the fighter Grace had been clinging to finally stopped his struggling and slumped forward as she continued to press the sword deeper and deeper. She pulled her sword free but kept him pinned to the animal, using his dead weight as an anchor to help her fight from.
“One down!” she yelled triumphantly.
Osric grimaced. Even in battle, she took nothing seriously. Rowan, for his part, continued to retreat as fighters closed on him, putting more arrows into another horse, just as one of the men started to make a charge at Jasper. Rowan was smart. The attackers had come into the fight with a clear advantage, and he’d made it his mission to bring them to the ground, take their advantage from them.
The attacker fell from his horse, which bucked as the animal reacted to the pain, ending his attack before it started.
Osric stepped back himself, pushing Talia almost into the trees. It created more space between himself and his friends, but with the new rider and the leader, he was feeling pressed from two sides.
The leader may not have been possessed with speed granted by arcane magic, but he was still fast. Osric managed to parry his first strike against his sword’s crossguard. Osric was distracted as, at almost the same instant, the man who rode for Talia took another slash, thankfully directing his ire at Osric and not Talia.
His distraction caught up with him.
Osric managed to dodge to the side, still locked against the leader’s blade, and avoided the slash, but that left an opening for the leader to counter his stroke, the blade drawing a line across Osric’s arm, where the metal chest piece he’d acquired could not protect him.
The stroke had been imprecise, a counter against a target moving sideways, so it didn’t take his arm clean off, but Osric still grunted from the pain of the slash.
“Duck,” Talia yelled as her hands moved quickly in front of her, manipulating the energies only she could see.
Osric didn’t need to be told twice and ducked enough to give her room. He couldn’t see what she did with her hands, but three of the diamond-shaped bolts of energy flew past him, slamming into the new attacker’s chest, burning holes clean through the leather armor he wore and burying themselves deep into him.
The man’s eyes rolled back in his head as he toppled from his horse, dead before he hit the ground.
Across the way, one of the men thrown from his horse earlier pushed himself off the ground where he had fallen from his animal and began to run at a retreating Rowan, clearly angry for the attack that caused him to be thrown from the saddle.
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