Intruder
The first man I ever killed was a strongman of the horde—feared, revered, a giant among savages. I was twelve when I made the mistake of stealing food from him—and I got caught. The leaders gave me two choices: surrender myself to the man I had wronged and serve him, or fight him to the death. I chose the fight. It wasn't a hard decision. I'd seen what happened to those who chose servitude—how they were broken, stripped of dignity, reduced to shadows trailing behind the boots of brutes. Death, at least, offered an end. Maybe it was my mother's pride that pushed me. Even when hopelessly outmatched, she had the defiance to stand and fight. That defiance lived in me. My opponent was a full-blooded hordesman—scarred, seasoned, a veteran of countless battles and five death matches. I was certain I would die. But still, I stepped forward. Because to surrender wasn't survival. It was extinction by a slower name.
Iron was rare in those days. Only the strongmen owned iron weapons; the rest of us made do with carved stones tied to hardwood shafts. Against steel, stone never stood a chance. The man I was to fight wielded a curved iron blade and a steel axe with a wooden handle. I had nothing but a crude spear I'd fashioned from a branch and a sharpened rock.
That battle taught me something about myself: my survival instinct was feral, unrelenting. I fought with everything I had. It helped that he underestimated me. He could have killed me early—he had the skill, the weapons, the strength—but instead, he played with me. He laughed as he struck, taunting me for the crowd, amusing his fellow strongmen. His blade sliced through my makeshift spear after a few blows, leaving me defenseless. Then he sheathed his weapons and used his fists.
I hit the ground, blood pouring from my mouth and nose. I had lost hope. I had no weapon, no strength left. He thought the fight was already won. So when he grabbed me by the throat and lifted me off the ground like I was nothing, he didn't know he was making a fatal mistake.
The night before, I'd considered every desperate path to survival. In a final act of hope, I had sharpened a small rock and hidden it in my clothing. As he held me up, laughing, I pulled it free and drove it deep into the side of his neck.
He dropped me instantly.
Staggering backward, his eyes wide with shock, he clutched at the wound, blood pouring between his fingers. The horde fell silent. Even the jeering strongmen stopped. No one had expected this. Least of all him.
I rose slowly to my feet. He knelt before me, still pressing against the bleeding wound, swaying. I stepped toward him. When I reached him, I pulled his sword from where he had tucked it before humiliating me. And in that moment, I felt something unexpected—not triumph, but fear. A strange, quiet fear of surviving. Of killing. Of victory.
I hesitated. Just for a breath.
Then I drove the blade into the left side of his chest.
He gasped, breathed once more, and collapsed face-first into the dirt. Dead.
I could say from my time in the horde, I understood the world in ways my children never could. I had seen its madness, felt its teeth. So, the moment they could walk, I placed swords in their hands and began to shape them—not into killers, but into protectors. I trained them with the same hands that once dealt death, hoping to mold something better than I had been. There was doubt in my heart, yes—but also hope. A desperate hope that, through them, I might preserve the fragile utopia we had carved out in the wilderness from the rot of the world beyond.
Cain took to the blade like he was born holding it. By the time he was six, he fought with the calm precision of a grown man. Aclima, fierce and quiet, found her gift with the bow—her arrows flew straighter than the lies men tell in war. Abel struggled at first; he wasn't as fast as Cain, nor as strong, but he burned with the fire of envy and admiration. He wanted to surpass his brother. He never did—but that ambition carved him into a fine swordsman, one I was proud of, though I never told him so.
Seth, Awan, and Azura would never live up to my expectations in combat. Perhaps they were never meant to. But as fate would have it, Cain, Aclima, and Abel were all I needed. For a time, I allowed myself to believe that the skills I had instilled in my children might never be needed—that perhaps the darkness I prepared them for would never come. We have lived in Eden for many moons without outsider intrusion, and then one day, the impossible happened. A stranger wandered into Eden.
He was the first to ever make it through the mountain pass—the first soul, besides our own, to step foot into our sanctuary since Eve and I had fled the world. I had always imagined such a moment would come wrapped in blood and ruin, heralded by fire and screams. But instead, he came alone, quietly, and not with sword in hand but with empty palms and eyes that did not gleam with cruelty.
It was Cain and Abel who found him first. I had warned them for years—taught them that the world beyond our walls bore nothing but violence, that outsiders were predators draped in human skin. But they had not only my voice in their ears. Their mother's stories of mercy and kindness had not fallen on deaf hearts. And when they saw this man, ragged and road-worn but unarmed, they saw not a threat—but a miracle.
They welcomed him.
I remember the sound of their voices as they came running toward me—so bright, so eager, so utterly blind. I was bent over the rows of our field, my hands deep in the soil, when their shouts shattered the stillness of the day.
"Father! Father!" Cain's voice rang through the valley. "A man has come through the pass! A man has come through the pass!"
For a moment, I froze. The spade slipped from my hand and hit the ground with a dull thud. My mind raced—not with joy, not with hope, but with dread. I knew then what they had done. They had brought him here. Brought him to us. A stranger. An outsider. A piece of the old world walking straight into the heart of the new.
I thanked whatever luck had kept him from harming my sons—but luck is a fickle thing. It had favored us that day, yes, but it could just as easily turn tomorrow. So I stood up slowly, brushing the dirt from my hands, my heart already beginning to harden.
This man had stepped into Eden. Now I had to decide what part of him would leave it—his body or his bones.
Cain was seven and Abel five at the time. I couldn't fault them entirely for their naiveté—what did they know of the world beyond our mountain walls? But innocence has its price, and I made sure they paid it. Not out of cruelty, but necessity. A mistake like theirs could have cost us everything, and I needed them to understand that.
The man they brought was named Achill. That's how he introduced himself—calmly, politely, with a kind of quiet confidence that only made me more wary. He said he was a wanderer, the last of a settlement razed by a horde. He claimed to have traveled many moons in search of a new beginning, somewhere safe enough to bury his past and begin again.
Eden was safe—but it was ours. It was my safe place. And I had no intention of sharing it with a man I didn't know, couldn't trust, and had not chosen.
Still, we offered him food and a bed for the night. Hospitality, Eve insisted, was the least we could show. She saw something in him—a brokenness perhaps, a kinship in the way he spoke of loss. The children were beside themselves with wonder. To them, Achill might as well have been a creature from myth: another human being who wasn't born of our blood. They asked him endless questions, stared at the scars on his skin as if they were maps leading to hidden stories.
He was darker than we were, with skin baked by long days under foreign suns. He looked older than me, though not by many winters. His body bore the marks of his life—scars that told me he had fought to stay alive, and had won. His clothes were stitched from the hides of beasts, worn and battered but practical. He carried a knife at his belt and a sword across his back. He never reached for either, not once—but that meant little. A man trained in violence doesn't need to show it to remind you it's there.
I watched him closely all evening. I watched how his eyes scanned the space between his spoon and the fire, how he glanced over his shoulder when the wind shifted. I saw the tension in his shoulders as he lay on the straw bed in our guest room—he never fully relaxed, not even in sleep. That alone told me he was dangerous. Not necessarily evil. But dangerous all the same.
And I had spent too long protecting Eden to be anything less than suspicious of any man who could survive the horrors he claimed to have fled.
Achill seemed like a good man—one of the rare few, I admit, who still existed in the world. That night, we sat around the fire, bowls of stew in our hands, and he spoke to the children with a gentleness that unsettled me. He didn't flinch from the truth, but neither did he wield it like a weapon. He told stories—real stories—of the world beyond the mountains. Stories of hardship, of horror, and of humanity still clinging to the edges of ruin.
He spoke of the hordes and the settlements, and how the horde still ruled the world by fear and fire.
"There are two ways men live now," he told the children, his voice low and even. "The settler's way... and the horde's."
The settlers, he explained, were the ones who chose to stop moving. They planted roots deep into the land, built homes of stone and wood, raised livestock, and grew their food from the earth. They tilled fields and raised children with dreams that reached beyond tomorrow. Some hunted, but most lived by the rhythm of soil and season. They believed in future harvests.
The horde, he said, believed in nothing but survival.
They were a roving sea of men and women who had abandoned permanence long ago. They traveled endlessly, never stopping long enough for the earth to know their names. They built no homes, only temporary shelters of hide and cloth. They raised no crops, nurtured no animals unless for food, and left no legacy behind. They took what they needed—by force—raiding settlements and slaughtering rivals. They were the fire that swept across fields planted with hope.
"And yet," Achill said, stirring the fire with a stick, "as savage as they are, theirs is the way most followed. They dominate the world because they've learned how not to die. Settlers die standing still. Hordes survive by never stopping."
The children sat spellbound, their eyes wide, their soup growing cold. Even Eve listened, silently, her hands wrapped around her bowl. I watched all of them from my seat by the door, my fingers curled around the hilt of my knife, my ears catching not just what Achill said—but what he didn't. He spoke without hatred. That's what chilled me most.
To me, the horde were nothing but animals in human skin. But to Achill, they were men—flawed, violent, yes—but not monsters. And that kind of thinking could soften the wrong heart. Especially a young one.
Achill spoke late into the night, his voice weaving tales that made the fire seem warmer, the room feel less remote. He told the children about the horde's savagery and the settlers' stubborn hope. He spoke of gods—forgotten, distant, silent gods—who had long abandoned the world, and yet, the settlers still believed. Their faith, he said, was like a dying candle that refused to go out.
While my family dreamed of gods and distant lands later that night, I lay awake, dreaming only of blood. Before the sun could rise, Achill would be gone.
And so he was.
By morning, the hearth was cold, and the bed where Achill had slept was empty. I told the children he had thanked us for our kindness and gone on his way. A wanderer like him could never stay in one place for long, I said. It was his nature to keep moving. The children were crushed. They had hoped he would stay one more day—just one—to tell another story, to answer more questions. They wanted to believe he was more than a stranger.
Eve said nothing at first, but her silence was louder than the children's cries.
She didn't believe me. Not truly.
She stared at the door for a long while, then at me, and I knew she was trying to trace the night backward. She was looking for the place in the story where I had changed it—where my version of the truth split from the one she feared.
And she wasn't wrong.
She had always known the depth of my distrust, how deep the poison of the world ran in my veins. She couldn't prove it, not in any way that mattered, but a woman doesn't need proof to know when something has died in the dark.
And something had.
While they slept, dreaming the sweet dreams of innocence, I rose in silence, knife in hand. The fire had burned low, casting long shadows on the walls like ghosts. I moved through them without sound, a shadow myself, gliding toward the sleeping man.
Achill lay still, his breathing soft and steady. He had spoken kindly. Laughed with my children. He had asked nothing of us but food and a place to rest his head. And still—still, I could not afford the risk.
I knelt beside him, held his jaw firm, and with one clean stroke, opened his throat. His eyes burst open, wild and wet, and he made a sound—a wet, choking gasp that turned to gurgles. Blood spilled over his neck, warm and dark, pulsing with the last desperate beats of a heart that didn't yet know it was finished.
I watched.
Watched as the life left him. As his body thrashed, then stilled. As his eyes lost their light.
Then I wrapped him in silence and carried him deep into Eden's heart, to a thicket I knew well, where the trees grew thick and the earth was soft. I dug until my hands bled. I laid him in the ground like a seed I hoped would never grow. Then I covered the wound in the earth and walked back into the dark, to my family, who still slept soundly beneath the roof I would protect at any cost.
Perhaps he truly was a good man. Perhaps he would have left in peace and never returned.
But I couldn't take the chance.
What if he had come back? What if he led others through the pass? What if they burned our sanctuary to the ground and slaughtered my children in their sleep?
I couldn't—wouldn't—allow that.
So I made a rule. An unspoken law written in blood: no one who finds Eden shall leave Eden.
Time passed. Strangers came—one, then another, then more. Always few, always lost. And always alone.
I did what had to be done.
I met them on the path, greeted them before they could reach my home. And I silenced them before they could utter a word of what they saw.
To my family, no one ever came after Achill. The world beyond the pass stayed silent. Peaceful. Safe.
They never knew what I buried in the forest.
They never knew the price of their Eden.