Even with the sky shifting from bruised violet to a dull, graying blue, that unnatural chill clung to his bones. Ilan sat among the corpses, unmoving, a breath of wind stirring the grass around him. Crows circled above, silent and watchful.
His comrades lay where they'd fallen, unburied, forgotten. Karo's mouth was still open in defiance. Others had been left in grotesque positions, limbs bent wrong, faces crushed. The final insult. No rites. No pyres. Just blood and soil.
If they had won, someone would've buried them. Marked the ground. Sent prayers into the smoke.
But no one came.
And that meant only one thing.
"We lost." Ilan said quietly.
He stood, slow and steady, his frame casting a long shadow over the field. Even stripped of armor, even bloodied and half-naked, he still looked like a figure carved from iron, broad-shouldered, thick with muscle.
Back in Enar, he'd always stood out. From the time he was fifteen, Ilan had been the strongest. The tallest. When other boys still threw rocks at trees, he was lifting ox carts. By twenty, he was the one the younger men followed. By twenty-five, the elders named him sword-bearer of the village, protector and war-leader. His voice had weight. His fists had stories.
And yet, for all his strength, the gods had denied him one thing: legacy.
He had married young. Elari, his first wife, had hair like summer wheat and a laugh that lit the air. She died in the frost famine, lungs filled with ice. Years later, he married Mira, dark eyes, clever hands, strong will, but no matter how often they tried, no child ever came.
No miscarriages. No signs. Just... emptiness. Like the seed never took root. The healers whispered that maybe Ilan was cursed. He never believed in curses.
He wrapped a bloodied tunic around his shoulders and walked. The air was dry, and the sky above held no warmth. A few wisps of cloud drifted across the pale sun, and the wind smelled faintly of iron and damp grass.
By midday, the terrain changed. Hills became scattered with burnt trees, blackened and claw-like
The road to Enar was broken. Grass had begun to reclaim the path, as if the land was trying to forget the feet that had trampled it.
When he reached a stream, he crouched and stared into the water.
His reflection looked unchanged. Same square jaw, same thick brow, same deep-set eyes. But there was something off. Something that didn't belong in that familiar face.
He splashed the water over his skin anyway. It felt like trying to rinse off a stain that was inside him, not on him.
That night, he made camp beneath a fallen pine, the roots twisting up like the claws of a buried beast. No fire. He didn't feel the cold in a normal way anymore, and the sky above was a vast sea of black silk, speckled with faint stars.
He leaned back against the bark and closed his eyes, but sleep didn't come.
Instead, he thought of Enar.
It was no small place. Not a tiny hamlet huddled in the hills, but a sizable village of over four hundred souls. Stone homes. A central hall. Fields that stretched far enough to turn gold in the sun. People came from smaller settlements to trade, to listen to Ilan speak at the gatherings, to watch him train the boys in the art of war.
"If Enar is gone," Ilan whispered to the dark sky, "then what remains?"
The next day, the second dusk fell heavy with silence.
Ilan crested the last ridge, boots crunching over old gravel. The trees thinned, and Enar came into view.
He stopped.
Smoke didn't rise from the chimneys. The houses stood dark, their stone walls blackened with soot and ash. The gates hung twisted, one snapped clean off the hinges, the other splintered in two. What once was a proud outer fence now sagged like broken ribs.
And then he saw them.
Bodies.
At first, they looked like bundles of rags tossed into the dirt. But as he drew closer, their shapes took form. Legs. Arms. Faces.
A child's head turned toward him, mouth agape. One eye missing. A woman sprawled half-naked across the steps of the old temple, her throat torn open, limbs stiff with rot. A man he recognized, Tarin the baker, had been pinned to the wall with a pitchfork, flies buzzing around the hollow cavity where his stomach used to be.
The whole village had been gutted.
Women. Children. Elders. Slaughtered without mercy.
And not just killed—plundered. Clothes stripped. Doors kicked in. Pots overturned. Homes looted.
Even the animals were gone. No dogs. No goats. Just silence, and the distant creak of a shutter still swinging in the breeze.
Ilan walked slowly down the main path, feet stepping over the dead.
He stopped at the village square, the same place where the midsummer dances were once held, where Mira had once kissed his cheek and laughed beneath the lanterns.
Now her body lay near the well, limbs twisted unnaturally, her dress bunched around her waist, eyes open to the sky.
He didn't cry.
He didn't scream.
He just stood there, jaw clenched so tight his teeth ached.
He dropped to one knee beside Mira and closed her eyes with one hand. Her skin was cold. Too cold. As if the warmth had been stolen from the entire village.
"You'll pay for this," he muttered, voice low, almost reverent. "Whoever you are… whatever you are."
He didn't know it yet, but this was only the beginning.