No one spoke when the crying finally broke into hoarse, shuddering breaths.The camp did not resume its rhythm. It stalled—caught between motions that no longer knew where to go. Hands that had reached out slowly withdrew. Eyes lowered. Even the wagons seemed to lean inward, canvas creaking softly as if embarrassed to stand so close to something that raw.
Sawyer remained where the sound had left him.
He did not remember choosing stillness. It simply claimed him. The ringing in his ears faded only enough for other noises to filter back in—the crackle of embers being stirred, the creak of leather as someone shifted weight, the distant, ordinary call of a bird that did not know what it had interrupted.
Agnes knelt beside the girl at last.
She did not try to pry her loose. She did not speak right away. She only placed one hand on the child's back, firm and present, and let the sobbing spend itself against bone and cloth. When the girl's strength gave out and her grip loosened on its own, Agnes eased her back with care, guiding her into Aluna's arms.
Aluna held her tightly this time.
The girl did not resist. She went limp instead, crying into Aluna's shoulder with a small, broken sound that no longer tried to be loud. Aluna murmured to her, low and steady, words stripped of meaning and chosen only for cadence. The Song did not interfere. It hovered at the edge of the camp like a thing unsure whether it was still welcome.
Agnes rose slowly.
She looked at Sawyer again.
Not the sharp, searching look from before. This one was quieter. Heavier. It carried concern over anything.
"We need to move," she said at last.
The words carried, but they were not an order. More an acknowledgment that time had not paused for them just because they had wished it to.
Faust moved first.
He had been lingering near the wagons, hands idle at his sides in a way that meant they were very much not at rest. Now he stepped forward, boots quiet on packed earth, gaze flicking once to Aluna and the child before settling near Sawyer without quite meeting his eyes.
"Time isn't the only thing that moves when we don't," Faust said softly. Not admonishment—observation.
Bran joined him a moment later.
He had removed his helm at some point. It hung from his fingers now, forgotten, knuckles pale where he gripped the rim too tightly. He stopped a half-step behind Agnes, stance squared by habit, as if bracing against something he expected to charge out of the trees.
His eyes swept the camp once—counting, measuring, noting what had been broken that could not be repaired—then came back to Sawyer.
None of them spoke his name.
Agnes drew a slow breath, straightening as if the motion alone could reestablish balance. She glanced to the tree line, to the way the forest seemed to lean closer the longer they stood still.
"The nest is close," she said.
Bran nodded immediately, jaw setting as the words settled into place. "We need to subjugate it."
Sawyer did not turn toward the trees.
He remained where he was, shoulders squared to the camp, eyes unfocused in a way that suggested the forest no longer required his attention. For a moment, it seemed as though he had not heard them at all.
Then he spoke.
"The nest is dead."
Two breaths passed before the words were understood.
Agnes stilled first. Not in surprise—but in recalibration. Her eyes narrowed slightly, not disbelieving, but adjusting to a truth that arrived without warning or preparation.
Bran's grip tightened on his helm. Leather creaked softly under strain. "Dead," he repeated, testing the sound of it. "As in… abandoned?"
Sawyer's gaze shifted then, finally meeting his.
"No."
The single syllable left no room to soften what followed.
"There is nothing left to subjugate."
Faust frowned, attention sharpening. "Nothing?" he asked carefully. "No scouts? No stragglers? No—"
"Nothing breathes inside that nest," Sawyer said, cutting in—not sharply, but cleanly.
The Song stirred at that, threads drawing taut as if recognizing an old, uncomfortable truth. It did not contradict him.
Bran exhaled through his nose, slow and measured. "You're saying you cleared it."
Sawyer did not answer right away.
His eyes drifted, just briefly, toward the child in Aluna's arms—toward the way her small fingers still clutched fabric as if afraid the world might slip out from under her if she let go.
Then back to them.
"Yes."
The word landed heavier than any confession.
Agnes closed her eyes for half a second.
When she opened them again, her voice was steady. "All of them?"
Sawyer nodded.
No pride. No apology.
Just confirmation.
Silence spread outward from that nod, filling the camp in a way even the girl's earlier wailing had not. Faust rubbed a hand over his mouth, thinking through implications rather than ethics. Bran looked away, jaw working, as if trying to reconcile procedure with outcome.
Finally, Agnes spoke again.
"We still need to check," she said—not because she doubted him, but because leaders could not afford to trust even truths that felt absolute. "If the nest is truly gone, we confirm it. For the Guild. And for ourselves."
Sawyer inclined his head once.
But the Song knew the truth already.
It lay quiet and wary, stretched thin over a forest that no longer held an answer where one had been screaming only hours before.
Word traveled the camp in fragments—half-heard phrases passed from mouth to mouth, sharpened or dulled by the speaker's fear. The nest is dead. Some scoffed. Some stiffened. A few looked at Sawyer the way one looked at a blade left too long in a fire—still useful, but no longer safe to touch without care.
Ridgeholt's people gathered slowly.
Guild members first—those who had ridden escort, those who had been roused by shouting and grief and now found themselves pulled into something far larger than a broken caravan stop. Staff followed after: quartermasters with ledgers tucked uselessly under their arms, medics with hands already stained and minds braced for more, guards whose armor had not yet been properly buckled because urgency had outpaced routine.
No one laughed. No one argued.
They followed because Sawyer was already walking.
The forest parted less reluctantly this time, though the Song remained thin and watchful, guiding spacing more than direction. The trail Sawyer took was not marked by sign or signal—only by certainty. He did not slow to ensure they kept up. He did not need to. Something in his pace demanded alignment rather than obedience.
Whispers rose anyway.
"That's the one?""Alone?""I heard the singing stopped.""Doesn't feel stopped."
Bran walked near the front, hand resting on his sword without drawing it. Agnes kept to Sawyer's left, eyes scanning canopy and ground with equal care. Faust drifted just behind them, attention split between the air itself and the faces of those following, as if gauging how far disbelief could stretch before it snapped.
The cave mouth emerged from the earth like an old scar.
Conversation died on sight.
It looked unchanged—still jagged, still half-swallowed by roots and shadow—but the pressure that had once radiated from it was gone. No hum behind the eyes. No crawling tension along the spine. Just a hollow quiet that felt less like safety and more like aftermath.
"This is it," someone murmured.
Sawyer stopped at the threshold.
For the first time since leaving the camp, he hesitated—not because of the dark ahead, but because of the number of people behind him. Then he stepped aside, wordlessly ceding the entrance.
Agnes went in first.
Torchlight followed, flaring orange against stone and packed earth. The tunnel breathed cool air outward, stale but no longer oppressive. As the light traveled deeper, shapes resolved—bodies slumped where they had fallen, limbs folded wrong, expressions caught mid-motion.
A sharp intake of breath echoed.
"What in the—""They're all—"
Faust swallowed. "This wasn't a rout," he said quietly. "This is… termination."
They moved deeper.
Every step confirmed it.
The nest was not merely cleared—it had been ended. No survivors tucked into cracks. No wounded dragged away. No signs of hurried retreat. Bone piles lay undisturbed. Crude bedding remained where it had been slept in for generations that no longer mattered.
One of the Ridgeholt adventurers stopped abruptly, staring at the far wall. "There should be more," he said, voice thin. "Scouts. Young. Something."
Sawyer let reality answer on his behalf.
When they reached the central chamber, silence took on a different weight.
The space where the Song had once screamed was empty of sound now. Not suppressed. Not masked. Gone. The air felt bruised rather than charged, as if something had been torn out and the world had not yet decided how to fill the absence.
Agnes stood still, torch raised, eyes tracing the chamber slowly.
"It's true," she said at last.
Suspicion did not vanish—but it bent.
Awe crept in where certainty failed.
Kristaphs closed his eyes briefly, sensing for resonance that refused to answer. "There's nothing left," he confirmed.
Murmurs spread again, different this time.
"How—""One man?""That's not possible."
Sawyer remained near the edge of the chamber, half in shadow, half in light. He did not watch them confirm his claim. He did not need their validation. His gaze rested instead on the far stone, where memory still pressed faint impressions that only he seemed to see.
Bran approached him quietly.
"You weren't exaggerating," he said after a moment. It was not accusation. Not praise. Just truth spoken plainly. "You really did it."
Sawyer nodded once.
Behind them, Ridgeholt's people stood among the dead in stunned stillness, trying to reconcile the scale of what they were seeing with the man who had led them there.
The nest was gone.
And the road ahead had just become something none of them had prepared for.
They did not rush the count.
The group fanned out in measured lines, discipline reasserting itself where shock had first taken hold. Torches were placed deliberately, light overlapping light so no corner remained ambiguous. Names were called softly—assignments given, acknowledged, repeated—until the cavern settled into a grim, methodical rhythm.
They began at the entrance.
Bodies were marked with chalk where they lay. One guard knelt, another stood watch, a third recorded. No one spoke louder than necessary. The sound of boots on stone echoed too easily here, and no one wanted to hear their own steps more than they already did.
The first chamber was dense.
Adults lay clustered near the mouth, some fallen mid-stride, others slumped against walls as if rest had claimed them without warning. Blades had struck cleanly. Efficiently. The pattern repeated again and again—no wasted motion, no lingering struggle.
"Thirty-two," someone called quietly."Confirmed."
They moved deeper.
The second tunnel narrowed, forcing single file. The air grew colder. Here the bodies changed—smaller frames, lighter bones. The young. Some curled instinctively, some sprawled where they had been standing, expressions unformed, unfinished.
A Ridgeholt medic stopped longer than necessary at one of them before standing abruptly and moving on.
"Mark it," Agnes said, voice steady. "Keep moving."
Further down, the captives appeared.
Men. Women. Some still bound. Some half-carried, half-dragged before they had fallen. Their deaths were quieter somehow—less violence evident, but no less final. A few of the staff averted their eyes. One guard retched softly into a sleeve and wiped his mouth without comment.
Faust recorded everything.
His voice did not shake, but it slowed with each descent. Each chamber added weight to the numbers, and with it, to the silence pressing in on all of them. He double-checked counts. Cross-referenced marks. Asked for confirmations twice where once would have sufficed.
They reached the lowest chamber last.
The place where the Song had once screamed loud enough to drown thought.
Now it was empty.
No sound. No pressure. Only stone, bodies, and the faint drip of water somewhere far above, indifferent to the reckoning taking place beneath it.
Agnes stood at the center while the final tallies were brought to her. She did not look at Sawyer as she listened. She did not need to.
Faust finished his count, took a breath, and spoke.
"156 adults," he said."84 young.""And 73 captives."
He paused, then added the sum as if saying it aloud made it more real.
"All dead. 333 bodies in total."
No one answered him.
The number settled into the cavern and stayed there, heavy and unmoving, like a truth the stone itself would remember long after they were gone.
They left the caverns in silence.
Torches were extinguished one by one as daylight crept closer, until only the thin, honest glow from the entrance remained. No one hurried. No one lingered either. The bodies were left where they lay—not out of disrespect, but because there was nothing left to do for them here. Stone would keep their count better than memory ever could.
Boots crossed from rock to packed earth.
The air outside felt lighter in a way that was almost insulting. Birds moved through the canopy. Leaves stirred. Somewhere, something small scampered away at the sound of too many feet. Life continued at a pace that did not acknowledge the weight now carried by those who returned from below.
They regrouped instinctively, spacing tightening as the wagons came back into view. Canvas, wood, iron—mundane shapes that grounded the world again. A few guards peeled off immediately to check harnesses and wheels, grateful for tasks that had edges and outcomes. Staff murmured to one another in low voices, already turning tragedy into logistics because that was how roads stayed passable.
The child was kept near the center.
Aluna remained with her, speaking softly, guiding her hands through motions meant to distract rather than heal. The girl listened without really listening, eyes dull with exhaustion, grief folded inward where it could not yet be named properly.
Sawyer stood apart, just beyond the wagon ring.
He watched the forest this time—not as a threat, but as a boundary. The Song lay thin and distant again, stretched over familiar ground, pretending at normalcy. He did not challenge it. He did not invite it closer either.
Agnes oversaw preparations automatically—final checks, quiet confirmations, nods exchanged with people who did not need words anymore. When the last crate was secured and the last lantern doused, she paused.
Something tugged at her attention.
She looked down at her hands.
Cold. Metal. An unfamiliar weight.
Her breath caught, just slightly.
Agnes turned.
Sawyer noticed her approach immediately, though he did not shift his stance. He waited, expression unreadable, eyes steady in the pale morning light.
She stopped a step too far away.
Then corrected it.
"I—" Agnes began, then stopped. Cleared her throat. The hesitation was uncharacteristic, and she seemed to realize it at the same moment he did.
She raised her hands instead.
"I almost forgot," she said quietly.
She worked the straps loose with careful fingers, one at a time. The gauntlets came free with a soft sound of leather and metal parting, the weight transferring back into her palms. For a moment, she simply held them there—as if uncertain whether returning them was an intrusion or a necessity.
Then she extended them toward him.
"Thank you," she added, after a beat. Not for the gauntlets. For everything else she could not say aloud.
Sawyer took them.
His fingers closed around the familiar weight, grounding. He did not put them on immediately. He only nodded once.
Agnes lingered another heartbeat, searching his face for something—regret, fracture, reassurance. She found none of it. Only stillness.
She stepped back.
The wagons creaked as they began to move, wheels turning toward the road that waited to carry them onward. Orders were given. Horses shifted. The camp dissolved into motion again, stitched together by routine and necessity.
Sawyer slipped the gauntlets on as they rolled out.
Discord metal settled.
The sound was small.
But it stayed with him as the forest fell away behind them, and the road—unaware, indifferent—opened ahead.