The rain had stopped by morning, but the world still smelled like iron and thunder. Smoke clung to the ruins where walls once stood, and beneath the ashen sky, Cain moved like a shadow through the wreckage — slow, methodical, deliberate.
Each step sank into the soaked mud with a sound that was too loud for the silence around him. The battlefield had quieted, but it wasn't peace. It was just exhaustion — the kind that came after gods and men alike had spent everything they had to kill each other.
He stopped when he reached what was left of a barricade. Corpses slumped over shattered shields, faces caked with blood and disbelief. Cain's jaw tightened. He didn't avert his gaze. He never did.
A faint shuffle of movement pulled him back to the present. His grip on {Eidwyrm} tightened as his eyes cut toward the sound. A soldier — young, terrified, still alive — struggled to crawl away from the pile of dead. His uniform marked him as one of theirs.
Cain knelt beside him. "Name."
