Dawn crept gray and thin across the Reckoning Fields. The sun's light was smothered by clouds so heavy they seemed nailed to the sky, their dull glow barely enough to distinguish horizon from earth. No bird sang. No wind stirred. The silence that blanketed the land felt brittle, a silence not of peace but of spirits broken and waiting, as if the ground itself feared to breathe lest it stir the dead again.
The caravan moved little that morning. Men and women moved as shades themselves, hollow-eyed, their limbs sluggish with weariness. They dug shallow graves in the ash-soaked earth, each shovelful crumbling back like sand through fingers. The ash resisted, swallowing edges of spades, clinging to sweat, turning every face gray. No one spoke. Only the dull scrape of metal against char carried across the camp, rhythmic, numbing.
Leo stood apart. His wrists were free now; the ropes cut after the battle but freedom was no comfort. The empty space around him was its own kind of prison. Not one guard came near. Even the boy he had saved the day before only spared him a glance from across the graves.
He watched as the bodies were lowered into the earth. Some were wrapped in cloaks, their faces veiled with frayed cloth, as if dignity could be borrowed from the living. Others were not wrapped at all. Their pale skin, their broken limbs, were offered bare to the soil. The boy he had saved wept softly as he laid a flower, half wilted, scavenged from a roadside bush, on the mound of a fallen guard. The tiny blossom looked absurdly fragile upon the ash, like a spark hoping to outlive a storm.
The shard was quiet, but not absent. Its whispers threaded faintly through the back of his mind. Waste, it murmured, almost sighing. Strength turned to rot, when it could have been yours. The breath in their lungs, the fire in their blood, all of it slipping back to dust when you could have risen stronger.
Leo dug his nails into his palms until they broke skin. He welcomed the pain, sharp and human.
The guards performed a rite Leo had never seen. Once each grave was filled, they stacked small cairns of stone atop the mounds. Rough hands carried blackened rocks from the charred hills, arranging them in uneven towers. When the cairn stood as high as a knee, they hammered an iron nail into the topmost stone with the butt of a knife or a hammer from the wagons. Each strike rang sharp and hollow across the Fields, echoing unnaturally long before fading into the stillness.
Owen whispered as he worked, his voice carrying words too old for comfort:
"Stone to guard, iron to bind.
Rest, and trouble us no more."
Leo frowned. His voice rasped when he spoke. "You think nails will hold them?"
Owen's hand lingered on the last cairn, fingertips tracing the cold iron head of the nail. His eyes were shadowed, older than his young face should have allowed. "It's not for them," he said softly. "It's for us."
The last grave belonged to the man Leo had burned. No one had draped him in a cloak. No one laid flowers. His comrades built the cairn with stiff hands and turned away without a word.
Sofia drove the final nail herself. The hammer strike cracked the silence, the iron ringing across the ash. She stood long over that mound, face unreadable, her scar stark in the dull light. When she turned, the silence shifted into command.
"Form ranks," she said. "We move."
Reluctant, the caravan obeyed. Harnesses creaked, wagon wheels groaned, boots sank into ash. The survivors filed into line, though their eyes strayed often to Leo, each glance a knife. They watched him as if he were fire itself, useful when tamed, deadly if loosed.
And in truth, Leo felt no less alien to himself.
As they marched, low voices whispered behind him.
"He burned one of ours."
"Better him than all of us."
"Better none if he weren't here."
The words stung sharper than blades, but Leo did not answer. Their fear was not wrong.
Sofia ignored the mutterings, but her gaze slid to Leo more than once. Each look was measured, appraising, like a smith weighing a blade that might cut the hand as easily as the enemy.
By midday, the Fields thinned into rolling hills. The ash receded. Green returned, creeping timidly back into the world: grass between stones, wildflowers on slopes, a scattered thicket of birch.
The air lightened, but the heaviness did not. It clung to every survivor like soot in their lungs, carried forward in silence and sidelong glances.
At the wagon's edge, Owen walked beside Leo. His voice was quiet, uncertain. "You didn't mean it, did you? The guard, you…" The boy's words faltered, unable to name the burning.
"No." Leo's throat tightened until the word was barely breath. "But meaning doesn't bring him back."
Owen's face paled. His fingers flexed, as though he wanted to reach out but lacked the courage. At last, he only nodded. "Still… without you, none of us would be walking."
Leo almost thanked him. Almost. But the shard stirred faintly, laughter trickling through his bones, and the words curdled on his tongue.
At the crest of a hill, Sofia raised her hand. The caravan halted. Below stretched a valley town, low roofs, curling smoke, the faint sound of bells carried by wind. A place alive, untouched by ash.
Her voice carried down the line, firm, unyielding. "We resupply here. Keep tongues sealed. Word of what happened last night does not leave us."
Her eyes swept the line, then locked on Leo. Her tone hardened like iron. "Or we'll answer to more than shades."
Leo followed her gaze down into the valley. The houses looked harmless, ordinary. Smoke rose from hearths. Children's laughter faintly reached his ears.
And for the first time, a deeper dread struck him, not for himself, but for them.
He wondered not if he could survive the shard.
But if the world could survive him.