*Day 35 - The Battle of Millhaven, as experienced from below*
The cellar smelled of turnips and fear.
Marta held her daughter close, feeling Eva's heart beating against her chest like a trapped bird. Too fast. Children's hearts shouldn't beat that fast. Above them, the world was ending. Again.
"Mama, are those dragons?" Eva whispered.
"Shh, little mouse. We need to be quiet as mice."
Her husband Tomás pressed his ear to the cellar door, his face pale in the light of their single candle. He'd been a soldier once, before the leg wound, before Eva, before they'd decided that running a bakery was a better life than dying for nobles who didn't know their names.
The ground shook. Dust fell from the ceiling boards, dancing in the candlelight like snow. Something massive had just landed. Or fallen. Or died.
"That's not dragon song," Tomás whispered. "I heard dragon song three weeks ago when they hit Crysillia. This is... different."
Different was worse. Different was unknown.
Through the floorboards came sounds that shouldn't exist. Metal screaming. Stone liquifying. And underneath it all, a rhythmic chanting in a language that hurt to hear even muffled by wood and earth.
"The corrupted," old Henrik muttered from his corner. He was their neighbor, a cobbler who'd seen too many wars. "Ghul'rok. They march in perfect time. Every step the same. No variation. No humanity."
As if to prove him wrong, a very human scream cut through the air above. Then silence. Then that horrible marching again.
Eva whimpered. Marta sang softly, barely breathing the words:
*"Nel buio profondo, il topo sta zitto,Nella tana sicura, il cuore sta scritto,Quando passa il gatto, non fare un suono,Quando torna la luce, ci sarà perdono..."*
A children's song. Ancient. From before the Crystal Cities, before the wars, when hiding from predators was just what small things did to survive.
The battle above intensified. The building shook. A crack appeared in the cellar wall, spreading like lightning frozen in stone. Through it, they could hear more clearly.
"For the Ashkore!" Someone screamed. Young voice. Dying voice.
"Hold the line! The corrupted one comes!"
Corrupted one. Marta had heard the rumors. An elf girl who'd survived Crysillia's fall but came back wrong. Who killed with a touch. Who was either their salvation or their damnation, depending on who you asked.
Something hit the building. The whole structure groaned. Tomás grabbed the support beam, as if his strength could hold up a house.
"We should have fled," Henrik said. "When we had the chance."
"To where?" Tomás asked. "North is dragons. South is corruption. East is plague. West is forest that eats people. Where do people like us go?"
"We survive," Marta said firmly. "We hide, we wait, we survive. Like mice. Like our parents did. Like our children will."
Eva looked up at her. Six years old. Already learning that the world was a thing that tried to kill you, and living meant being small, quiet, quick.
Above, someone started laughing. Wrong laughter. Too many voices in one throat.
"Soul Grafting," Henrik whispered. "They're wearing the dead like clothes."
The candle flickered. Went out.
In the darkness, the sounds were worse. Closer. The marching had stopped directly overhead. Marta could hear breathing—regulated, synchronized. An army that breathed as one.
Then, cutting through it all, a different sound. Chaotic. Angry. Alive.
Metal singing—but not in harmony. Two blades, each with their own song, discord that somehow worked. The corrupted one. Had to be.
The synchronized breathing above broke apart. Screams—but screams with variety, with individual terror. Whatever the corrupted one did, it gave them back their humanity just in time to die with it.
"Is she saving us?" Eva whispered.
"I don't know, little mouse."
The fighting moved away. The marching resumed, but retreating now. Distant thunder that might have been dragons or might have been magic or might have been the world itself cracking.
Then silence.
They waited. Five minutes. Ten. An hour.
Finally, Tomás pushed open the cellar door.
The bakery was gone. Not destroyed—gone. Where the shop had been was now a perfectly circular hole going down into darkness. Their home had been precisely excised from reality.
But they were alive.
The street was carnage. Bodies—some human, some things that used to be human, some things that never were. And standing in the middle of it all, a figure in torn robes, two swords dripping something that wasn't quite blood.
She turned. Marta saw her face—young, maybe nineteen, but with eyes that belonged in a thousand-year-old skull. Veins like black lightning under translucent skin. Beautiful and terrible and utterly, utterly broken.
The corrupted one. The Ashkore. Ora.
"Run," she said. Her voice was winter wind over graveyards. "The battle's won but the war's here. Take your family north. The dragons won't attack refugees. Probably."
"You saved us," Eva said, stepping forward before Marta could stop her.
Ora looked at the child. Something flickered in those dead eyes—memory? Regret? Hunger?
"I saved myself. You just happened to be underneath." She turned to leave, then paused. "Your daughter has strong life force. Keep her away from things like me."
She walked away, leaving footprints of dead grass in the dirt.
Marta's family gathered what they could from the ruins. Some coins from the till that had somehow survived. Eva's doll from her bedroom that now opened onto empty air. Tomás's sword from his soldier days, rusty but real.
They joined the stream of refugees fleeing north. Behind them, Millhaven burned with colors that shouldn't exist. Ahead, uncertainty.
"Will we be okay, Mama?" Eva asked.
Marta looked at her daughter, at her husband, at the old cobbler who'd become family through shared terror. At the hundreds of others walking the same road, all small people caught in the wars of the powerful.
"We're mice, little one. We're very good at surviving."
Eva nodded, clutching her doll. Already learning the refugee's lesson: home isn't a place, it's the people you hide in the dark with.
They walked north, another family in an endless stream, their individual tragedy swallowed by the larger horror. Heroes and villains fought above them, gods and monsters decided their fates, but down here, at the human level, there was only the next step, the next breath, the next day survived.
The epic war would be remembered in songs and histories.
The refugees would just remember the smell of turnips and fear, and the day they learned that even being saved could feel like loss.
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