The ache in Aros’s abdomen had settled into a dull, permanent pulse, like a second, weaker heartbeat buried beneath his ribs. Every step sent a flare of heat up his side and into the base of his spine, but the pain no longer clouded his mind. If anything, it sharpened him. His thoughts moved with a clarity he hadn’t felt in years, clean, cool, almost surgical, freed from the fevered fog that had consumed him during his recovery.

  He walked at the head of the small formation, boots sinking into damp earth that gave slightly with each step. Digiera kept three paces behind him, her breath steady, almost meditative; Seren Dal moved on his right like a shadow stitched out of smoke; and Legs trudged on his left, spear tapping against his thigh with each uneven stride. The morning fog clung low, swirling around their ankles, and the air tasted metallic, like water left too long in a rusted basin.

  They were supposed to be following the residual trail of Light, whatever that meant. The Priesthood always made such concepts sound precise, divine, when in truth they were vague as mist. To Aros, it felt like they had been walking in circles. He had studied the terrain, the slope of the land, the lean of the trees, the bend of the river running east, and something in him, some old instinct he thought he’d lost, whispered that they were heading back toward Preta.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Digiera muttered when Aros slowed. “Nothing about this road feels like we’re moving toward anything.”

  Aros nodded. “Because we’re not.”

  Legs blinked, breath visible in the cold morning air. “Wait… what do you mean?”

  “We’ve already turned,” Aros said. “Somewhere back there. Doesn’t matter how. Maybe we followed an illusion, or a false echo. Maybe there never was any Light to follow. Maybe someone wanted us moving away from Preta.”

  Seren Dal scratched his jaw, dark eyes sharpening beneath his hood. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone pulled that trick. Governments change. Methods don’t.”

  Aros glanced at him. “You were with Jacobo during his rise, right?”

  Seren nodded once. “Aye. When he purged the last of Valeo’s loyalists, when he burned the sanctum to reforge the throne… I was there. You and I fought together that day.”

  Aros hesitated, searching Seren’s face for any spark of familiarity, but the memory wall inside him remained cold and smooth. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I don’t remember.”

  A shadow crossed Seren’s expression, old wounds briefly exposed, before he hid them again. “Memory’s a fickle thing. Doesn’t matter. What matters is: if you say we turned, I believe you.”

  Legs groaned. “Great. So we’ve been marching for no reason?”

  “We don’t march for no reason,” Digiera snapped. “We march because someone out there needs killing.”

  Aros almost smiled. Almost. Digiera’s blunt certainty had always felt like a blade cutting through fog. She never coated anything in hope or ideals. She fought because fighting was the only truth she’d inherited.

  “And you?” Aros asked her. “Still chasing whatever your parents left unfinished?”

  Digiera shrugged, muscles rippling under worn leather. “They fought. Then they died. Didn’t leave much else to follow but their example.”

  Legs rolled his eyes. “You both sound like you want to die. What’s the point of fighting if there’s no belief behind it? If there’s no…”

  “No illusion, you mean?” Digiera cut in.

  “No. No light.” Legs planted his spear into the ground with a dull thunk. “If we’re willing to fight for something, shouldn’t it be because we believe it’s worth fighting for? Isn’t that what separates us from…?”

  “From what?” Seren asked, tone dry enough to scratch stone. “The men who ruled before Jacobo? The ones who’ll rule after Jacobo? Governments are masks, boy. Put a good man in, he rots. Put a bad man in, he thrives. Doesn’t make a difference.”

  Legs huffed. “Well, I’d like to think there’s more to life than surviving long enough to die in a ditch.”

  “Then you joined the wrong rebellion,” Digiera muttered.

  Aros didn’t speak. Their voices faded into a dull hum beneath the rustle of leaves and the distant calls of crows. His mind had drifted back to Gemma: her small frame, the stubborn fire in her eyes, the weight of her head against his shoulder when he carried her out of the collapsing house in Sbelto.

  He didn’t feel the panic he expected. No frantic fear of losing her. Instead he felt… steady. Too steady. As if something in him had cracked open, letting light (or darkness) pour in.

  He felt almost liberated.

  And that terrified him.

  He pressed a hand to his abdomen. The wound throbbed under his palm, reminding him he was alive, tethered to the world by pain and obligation.

  “Movement ahead,” Seren Dal said quietly.

  All four froze.

  A thin ribbon of smoke curled upward just beyond the next hill, wavering as if unsure whether to rise or collapse.

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  Aros frowned. “That’s not camp-smoke.”

  “No,” Seren agreed. “It’s too much. Too thick. Wrong color.”

  Legs leaned forward. “Maybe it’s the Light trail?”

  “No,” Aros said. “It’s death.”

  He didn’t know how he knew. But he did. His stomach knotted, not from pain, but recognition.

  They crested the hill.

  And the world seemed to stop breathing.

  Below them, stretched across the clearing like a toppled beast, lay a caravan. Overturned wagons. Shattered crates spilling grain like spilled bones. Broken harnesses. And bodies.

  Dozens.

  Hundreds.

  The air was thick with the copper scent of blood, warm beneath the chill of the morning, and the sweet rot of opened flesh. Crows had already gathered in flocks, black flecks hopping from corpse to corpse, tugging at seams of clothing and skin.

  Legs gagged, hand pressed to his mouth. Digiera stood rigid, jaw clenched. Seren’s jaw tightened enough to whiten the skin around it.

  Aros exhaled slowly, clarity sharpening like a blade inside him. There was no fear. Only a cold, methodical assessment. The battlefield sang to him in a way it shouldn’t have.

  “This wasn’t a raid,” Seren whispered. “This was an execution.”

  Aros descended first, boots sinking into mud streaked with red.

  The others followed, weapons drawn, though no enemy remained alive.

  He passed the first body, a man with a split helm, eyes glassy and staring toward a sky that offered no explanation. His throat had been cut so clean it looked like a line painted with careful precision.

  Another lay nearby, chest crushed inward, ribs jutting like snapped branches.

  Another: limbs twisted at angles that defied anatomy, as if some force had wrung him apart like wet cloth.

  “This is…” Legs swallowed hard. “Gods. Who could even…?”

  “No one here,” Aros murmured. “No one still breathing.”

  He crouched near a wagon. The soil beneath his fingers was scorched in a perfect circle, the earth cracked and blackened.

  Not fire.

  Something else.

  He rose slowly.

  Digiera stood before a corpse pinned to a cart by a spear, driven clean through bone and wood. Seren pointed toward the treeline. “Tracks. Something went that way. Or someone.”

  “Recently?” Aros asked.

  “Hard to say. Blood’s fresh, but the rest is chaos.”

  They moved deeper.

  The deeper they went, the worse the carnage became. Bodies stacked as if tossed, faces frozen in the kind of terror Aros had seen only once before, during the fall of Valeo, when the Light had turned on its own priests. The mud thickened underfoot, sticky with blood, pulling at their boots as though the earth itself were trying to keep them from advancing.

  Aros stopped beside a wagon split clean down the middle, as if by one impossible strike.

  But the destruction wasn’t what stole his breath.

  It was the shape impaled atop the shattered cart.

  A sword—long, cruelly thin, driven straight through a man’s torso—pinned the body upright against the remains of the carromato. The blade had entered through the lower ribs and exited near the shoulder, nailing flesh and bone into the splintered wood. Blood had dried in streaks down the side of the wagon, dark and clotted, buzzing with flies.

  The corpse’s head hung forward at an angle no living neck could manage. A single braid, familiar and tied with red cloth, dangled over the man’s shoulder.

  Aros’s throat tightened.

  Lexordo.

  His armor was distinctive—dark leather reinforced with metal rings, worn from years of campaign travel. His heavy gloves still clutched uselessly at empty air, fingers curved as if reaching for a weapon long gone. The split in his breastplate revealed a wound that could have only been inflicted after he was already pinned.

  Digiera stopped beside Aros, every muscle in her face going still. “Is that…?”

  “Yes.”

  Legs stumbled backward, nearly tripping over a corpse. “No… no, that’s impossible. Lexordo left after us. We should’ve… how did we reach his caravan before…?”

  Aros didn’t answer.

  The truth settled over him like frost.

  They hadn’t followed the Light away from Preta.

  They had looped.

  Circling.

  Returning.

  Someone, some mind, some will, had pulled them away, bought time, twisted the path beneath their feet.

  And then obliterated everything ahead of them, including the man who had been leading the reinforcements.

  Seren knelt beside another soldier in Lexordo’s colors. His throat was slit, but his face was strangely peaceful, as though death had claimed him before fear could.

  “We’re looking at over four hundred dead,” Seren said quietly. “Men on their way to reinforce the rebellion. Men Lexordo trusted. Men Talon trusted.”

  “There’s no pattern. No consistency. No discipline. No soldier does this.”

  Legs whispered, “Then whose work is it?”

  Aros stared at the devastation, at the jagged, impossible wounds, the unnatural twists of bone, the scorched earth. At the body of Lexordo, swaying slightly in the breeze, sword-driven and desecrated like some grotesque warning.

  "He is completely destroyed"

  He felt the cold clarity again.

  The clarity he felt when he killed.

  The clarity he felt when he chose not to.

  The clarity he felt when Gemma screamed under rubble and he alone ran toward the fire.

  He looked at his hands.

  They didn’t shake.

  “This,” Aros said quietly, “is the work of someone who enjoys it.”

  He took a step, and his boot slid on something soft and wet. He looked down.

  A hand.

  Small. Pale. Delicate.

  For a heartbeat he thought it belonged to a child.

  Then he saw the sleeve.

  Grey. Torn. Stained with ash and dirt.

  His pulse stuttered violently.

  He dropped to his knees and shoved away a fallen plank.

  Gemma lay beneath it.

  Her body twisted unnaturally, one leg pinned at an angle that made Digiera’s breath catch. Her face was smeared with dirt and dried blood, her hair glued to her cheek. Her breathing was shallow, so faint Aros might’ve missed it if he hadn’t been begging to find it.

  Legs gasped. “Gods… Gemma? What’s she doing here?”

  Seren fell beside her, checking the pulse at her neck. “She’s alive.”

  Aros’s body moved before thought could catch up. Pain tore through his abdomen when he knelt, a sharp agony like a knife pulled clean through him. But he barely felt it. His hands reached Gemma’s shoulders, and for the first time since Sbelto, they trembled.

  “Gemma,” he whispered. “Gemma, look at me.”

  Her eyelids fluttered, a fragile tremor.

  “Aros…”

  “We need to move,” Aros said, voice cracking into urgency he could no longer contain. “We need to move, now.”