Southern Reclaimed Village
The air still smelled like fear.
Not smoke. Not blood. Not even ash—though all of those clung to the thatched roofs and broken windows like moss. No, what lingered was something older. Sharper. The kind of fear that soaks into floorboards and stays long after the fire dies.
I dismounted outside the village square.
The people didn't run.
They just stopped moving.
A woman with a laundry basket froze mid-step, the cloth slipping silently from her arms. A blacksmith's hammer paused above a cold anvil. A boy, no more than nine, dropped a turnip and hid away behind his mother's skirt.
They looked at me like I was the storm that followed the plague.
Or like I was death.
I guess they weren't all that wrong.
