They had come and gone like shadows with teeth.
By the time dawn cracked over the walls, there were three dead, seven wounded, and one missing, a boy named Nerin who had been on his first night patrol. His blood had been found, but not his body.
The town was awake, but not alive. It was reeling.
Ethan stood by the north barricade where the first creature had been spotted. The wood was clawed open, not shattered, not broken, but peeled, like bark from a fruit. Whatever it was had intelligence. Precision.
And it wasn't alone.
"This wasn't the tide," Garren said beside him. His voice was like a cracked anvil. "This was a probe."
Ethan didn't reply. He didn't have to. Everyone felt it.
The true attack hadn't begun. This was only the wind before the fire.
That morning, the residents of the town buried their dead.
No eloquent speeches were given. Only shovels. Tears. silent supplications to gods that had been forgotten for years. Until her voice broke, the boy's mother yelled his name.
One of the bodies, that of Thallin, a young man who had offered to watch over the east wall, was carried by Ethan. When the roads reopened, he hoped to become a merchant.
Lina's hands trembled only when no one was looking as she assisted in cleaning the injured's wounds. She hadn't slept.
Not one of them had.
They still had the sense of unity they had developed over weeks of labor, but it had taken a different turn. No more hope. More like defiance. The town wasn't prepared. It had not broken, but it had bled.
Before noon, Ethan called a meeting. Near the incomplete wall, not at the square.
He wanted them to see what was still unfinished. His voice was rough from exhaustion as he told them,
"We held the line." However, they are putting us to the test. observing. They will return. more powerful. More intelligent. More hungrier.
Nobody objected.
He stated, "We have one week." "Perhaps less. We complete the wall. We double our scouts. We lay traps. We train harder.
The crowd murmured. Grim resolve, not panic.
Ethan said more loudly, "We're not just building a wall." Our line is being built in the ground. Nothing gets through after this.
He turned to face Garren. Next, at Lina. Then at the scores of faces, battered, burned, and bruised, but still standing.
We may not have an army. But we have a people."
And the people shouted back.