"This… this was your village once?" I asked, my voice snagging between awe and unease. We'd drifted far north from the pig-goblin village before, only to find something that didn't fit a single shard of the tragedy that chief had spun for us.
Spread before me lay a landscape unnervingly familiar, like the first riverside village we'd stumbled upon. But there were no moss-choked ruins, no fingerprints of death. Instead, houses stood upright and whole, rigid in their defiance of logic. The layout was scattered, as if the Gods had tossed a handful of dice and called it order, yet every stone, every thatch threaded into the roofs, looked set with deliberate care. Not a whiff of deceit clung to any corner; this was no goblin handiwork of mud piles and bone fences.
"You said… this village was destroyed?" I asked again. The chief could only stare back at me, eyes swollen, face crumpled.
"We never truly checked," the chief muttered, voice hoarse and snagging with shame. "Or perhaps ours raiding parties were too thick-skulled to notice the strangeness of it."
Our steps faltered and started, as if our feet found the earth too unfamiliar to trust. We prowled each corner, each alley, every breath a held note.
"Hello? Anyone home?" Gelemia called, rapping awkwardly on a door. Her voice cracked the tension like thin ice. No reply—only silence rolling back to fill the space.
She knocked again, harder this time, all demand and no patience, as if pounding on the hush itself to cough up an answer. Still nothing. The wood held its breath; the quiet turned stubborn, stony.
As I moved on, a strange warmth grazed my stride. Off to the right, in a yard lifted straight from some childhood painting, stood an old stove. The coals were still alive, embers glowing a fierce, sullen red.
"This was lit just now, wasn't it?" I murmured, hardly trusting my own eyes.
Crokard only dipped his chin, gaze raking the coals as if a heartbeat might be hiding under the ash.
Gelemia, never one to spook, called out again, "Hello? Anyone there?" Her voice came harder this time, pressing, prying, as if she meant to cut through the seams of space and time. The result? The same old hush, only thicker.
My eyes snagged on the food set on the stove. My breath felt heavy in my chest. Without thinking, I shoved the chief hard enough that his frail body spilled into the wet dirt.
"Eat it," I ordered, eyes narrowing like I could lance straight through his ribcage.
"Eh… you can't be serious, right? My hands are tied, you know! How am I supposed to eat?" he sputtered, nerves and a wisp of gallows humor tugging a thin smile across his mouth.
"Don't you guys… eat with your mouth?" I asked, under my breath.
The chief vacant stare only made the moment more absurd.
Hesitantly, he bowed his head toward the pot, inch by inch, like livestock at a trough. His tongue flicked across the surface, sloppy and unsure, and when he swallowed the first mouthful, shame went down with it.
"How's it taste?" I pressed.
"Fresh…" he muttered. He lifted his face, scraps clinging to the hollow edges of his lips, then bent to the food again, chewing without rhythm, without a hint of manners.
I held my breath. Disgust and curiosity knit together pressed to my chest. The village head kept gulping mouthfuls, heedless of everything around him—
"Hey! Over here!" Gelemia shouted, sharp enough to snap my neck around.
I hurried toward the ruckus. The chief and Crokard trailed after me, their steps dragging like shadows.
By the time we reached her, Gelemia was already inside a goat pen. She was stroking the back of a plump goat, fingers busy tucking grass into its mouth like she was asking, "Why are you still here?"
"This… is strange," Gelemia murmured, brow knitting. "They said the village was destroyed, but look, livestock fat and glossy, pens tidy, bellies… damn, like pillows." She pinched the goat's side, and it bleated in bliss.
Right… that tracks, I thought. My eyes swept the whole pen, cows, goats, sheep, all well kept, none starving or skittish, not a single one trying to bolt.
If this place had truly been abandoned ages ago, these animals should be bones by now or swallowed clean by the wilds.
"You know something, Crokard?" I asked, voice dropping to a hush.
"Could be… this is a human village," Crokard said, blunt as a hammer.
"Impossible!" the village head snapped, face flushing, veins in his neck bulging like roots clawing out of ancient stone. "Every human who shows up here gets tossed or killed once they're used up. No human could carve prosperity like this on land we left behind!"
"That's why you're only fit to lead a pack of fools, old man. Your stupidity's contagious," Crokard shot back, tossing sparks into a puddle of oil.
"What?!" The chief voice climbed and broke, see-sawing at the edge of a shout.
"Your raiding parties only ever carried off the women for ceremony, didn't they?" Crokard went on, words slow and sharp. "You never wiped out the men who came here."
I nodded slightly. The thought had already been stalking me. The chief face twisted into something bitter and raw.
"And those women… you threw them away like single-use tools. Weak, sure… but not dead," Crokard said, voice low as a tolling bell. "And the women you discarded… were likely saved by the men you didn't catch."
His gaze drifted past us, a thin smile cutting across his lips. "They gathered here. Built a village of their own. Then, once they had enough steel in their ranks… they'd march on ours."
Fire glimmered in his eyes, waiting for a wind. "These guys shown up or not," Crokard added, pointing at me, "our village is going to be wipe out."
"N-no… impossible…" the chief choked out, voice shattering like glass pitched against stone.
I cut the current before the talk turned to knives. Across the pen, Gelemia seemed immune to the storm, still fussing with a fat goat in the corner, fingers tearing up grass, the little mouth chewing in perfect peace. The quiet rhythm of it sat at odds with the intention coiling tight in my chest.
My hand clenched around the black sphere I'd reshaped into a rope, wound tight around the chief since the moment we'd set out. He stumbled behind me, dragged step by step across the open ground, breath snagged in his throat like an animal that knows it's being led to the slaughter.
The air in the middle of the village square was more open, yet it pressed in heavy, thick enough to choke on. The neat rows of houses stood around us like silent spectators, their shadows pooling at our feet. Every step seemed to echo in the weight that hung between earth and sky.
When I finally stopped, I placed him dead center in the open space, a spot where anyone, or anything, could see him plainly. His eyes darted wildly before settling on the crushed grass trembling beneath his feet.
"Wait… what are you doing?" His voice cracked, high then low, the quiver of a rat cornered in pitch darkness.
I bent toward him, letting my stare cinch tighter than the rope biting his flesh. "Nothing… just wanted to set you down here," I said evenly, light in tone.
I turned my head toward Crokard. "Crokard, the woods ready?" My voice was flat, steady.
Crokard jogged over, hauling several thick lengths of hibakujumoku wood in his arms.
"Wait! You're not actually going to call it here, are you?" The chief words went brittle, rising into a thin, panicked shriek that wrapped around the air like a twisted cord.
I lifted one hand in a short, silent signal. Crokard crouched, stacking the woods, and a moment later fire caught, embers licking up the grain, smoke curling skyward. The air grew darker, heavier, as though even the heavens were holding their breath.
"Wait—please—have mercy! Didn't you promise to spare me? I told you how to get out this place!" he spat in tumbled words, each tripping over the next.
I sank down into a crouch until our faces were level, my gaze locked into the black of his pupils. "I… never promised to spare you," I whispered. "I told you… I'd reunite you with your pet."
A smile unfurled across my mouth. "Think of this… as my generosity."
Cold sweat slicked his temple. He began thrashing like a beast sniffing the scent of its own hunt, straining against the rope until it bit deep, but panic doesn't bargain with reason.
"Oh… and one more thing," I murmured.
I stepped in close, fingers finding the edges of the cloth wrapped around his body. Slowly, one binding after another came undone beneath my touch, and his unease climbed, snapping and fluttering under my gaze.
"Wait… what are you doing?" His voice splintered between ragged breaths, his body shaking as he thrashed to no effect.
My fingertips slipped to the frayed collar across his chest. I tugged at the knot, inch by inch. The fibers whispered as they loosened, a thin rippling hush that cut the stillness in two. One quick pull and the upper half of him was bare, laid open to the cold air that bit like teeth.
Then I moved lower. I took the tie at his waist, turned it once, then once more, until the knot slackened. I slid the cloth down, past his hips, over his knees, until it puddled wrinkled at his feet. In the span of a few breaths, nothing remained to shield his age-worn body.
At last, I stripped him of every scrap, leaving him roped and naked from crown to toe, set square in the very center of the broad, open square.
Panic burst in his eyes, feral light, the look of a beast realizing every exit has been fenced tight.
Off to the side, the hibakujumoku woods Crokard had stacked caught flame. Small embers danced at the tips, then the tongues of red crept, eating into bark and grain. A pale, silvery smoke unspooled upward, drifting slow, and the sweetness of it slid along the breeze, stroking the square from end to end.
Crokard pressed a thick wad of cotton into my palm for my ears. Without a word, I stuffed it in. We shifted positions, slipping into cover not far off, leaving the chief alone at the heart of that thickening ring of scent and smoke.
It didn't take long, the tremor came from the east.
"Wait! Don't leave me here!" the village head screamed. Even with cotton tamping my ears, his voice punched through on the back of the wind.
"Crokard! Crokard… how can you do this to your own father?" he bellowed, voice raw. "Take me away, Crokard!" I flicked a glance at Crokard now and then. He was a stone idol, face cold, utterly still, not a single thread of feeling moving beneath the skin.
The shaking deepened, running the bones of the earth, piling into the soles of my feet. The houses around us swayed like twigs in a storm. The livestock, cows, goats, even the pigs, broke into panic, slamming against their pens with black, terrified eyes. Blood seeped from their ears.
Then the ground throbbed… and split. From those opening seams, bodies began to surface, corpses heaving upward, slack and sightless.
The chief still stood there, naked, bound, blood threading from every opening in his body. From his eyes. His ears. His nose. Each breath rattled out of him in broken stutters.
"S… someone… please…" His voice fractured, drowned beneath its own trembling. "Forgive me…"
It didn't take long for the monster to arrive. Crawling slow, its massive body slid across the ground, breaching the towering wooden fence at the village's edge. The barrier fell apart at the first push, timbers splintering, exploding into dust that swirled wild in the air.
There it was.
Pesi.
The giant salamander didn't rear up. Instead, it slithered forward, bringing its head low, level with the chief hunched frame. Its breath came heavy, waves of heat rolling all the way to where I was hidden.
"Pe… Pesi…" The chief voice broke, more a gasp trapped in his own throat than a word.
"I'm sorry, boy… can you… can you set me free?" he pleaded, just shy of sobbing.
Silence.
The creature only stared at him, long, wordless, eyes deep and unreadable. Sweat mingled with blood, tracing lines down the chief jaw.
Then, slowly its slick, massive hand began to rise, drifting toward him.
"Wait…" I breathed, barely moving my lips. What I saw made no sense.
"What the—" Gelemia's voice hissed from her hiding place, thick with the same disbelief gripping me.
Right before my eyes, Pesi dipped its colossal head lower. That cavernous breath sighed between teeth glinting behind its jaws. Its black, unblinking gaze never left the frail figure bound in the open.
And then, with a kind of deliberate care, the salamander's clawed fingers grazed the black sphere-ropes I'd wound around the chief body. The sharp tips pressed once and the black sphere shattered, scattering like glass into the air.
He was free.
But the old man only swayed in place, skin slick with blood and cold sweat. His trembling eyes climbed upward, meeting the face of the beast he once called his own.
"Pesi…" he whispered again, thin, shaking. His tongue felt frozen in his mouth, yet he forced the name out. Then, staggering forward, he pressed himself into the salamander's snout, clutching it with brittle arms, tears falling fat and hot against the monster's hide.
"I know you remember me… you must remember… right?" The words splintered in his throat.
But without warning, without mercy, Pesi's jaws opened wide.
Wide enough to swallow the world. And in a blink, the chief head, shoulders, and chest vanished within, sucked clean into that gaping furnace.
Gone.
We didn't move. Not me, not Crokard, not Gelemia. We just stood frozen. No words. Not even a breath.