The fire had done its work well.
Ian stood at the edge of what used to be his home and counted the bodies. Three. His mother near the door, which meant she had tried to run. His younger brother by the storage shed, which meant he had tried to hide. His father in the center of the yard, which meant he had tried to fight.
None of it had mattered.
He was seventeen, and he had been in the forest when the soldiers came. He had heard the screaming from two ridges away and had run. He had arrived in time to watch the last man in sect armor wipe blood from a blade and walk away without looking back.
Ian had not called out. He had not charged forward. He had stood in the tree line and watched, and when the soldiers were gone, he had walked into the yard and stood where he was standing now.
The village of Greyveil was small. Forty families, maybe less. It sat on the southern border of the Thornwall Province, close enough to the wastelands that no major sect bothered to claim it as territory. The people here were farmers and hunters and nothing else. They paid their taxes to whoever collected them and kept their heads low.
Ian's father had done something to change that. Ian did not know what. He suspected he would not find out by standing here.
He went inside the burnt shell of the house and found what the fire had missed. A hunting knife, iron, nothing special. A change of clothes that smelled like smoke. Three silver coins he had hidden in a crack in the floor beam, and the beam had not burned all the way through, so they were still there. He took all of it.
He did not look at his mother's face when he passed her.
He did not allow himself that.
Outside, one of the neighbors had come out of hiding. Old Maren, who was sixty and had bad knees and had survived three raids in her lifetime by knowing exactly when to disappear. She stood at the fence line and watched him pack.
"They had sect colors," she said. "Black and gold. I don't know which one."
"How many?"
"Eight. One of them gave orders. The others just followed."
Ian tied the bundle closed. "Did they say anything?"
"The one who gave orders said it was sanctioned. Said your father had interfered with sect business." She paused. "I don't know what that means."
Ian didn't either. His father had been a hunter. He had gone into the forest and come back with animals and occasionally with spirit herbs that he sold to the traveling merchants who passed through twice a year. He had not been a cultivator. He had not had any rank at all, as far as Ian knew.
"You should leave," Maren said. "If they sanctioned it, they might come back to check that the job was finished."
"I know."
"Where will you go?"
Ian looked at the tree line to the east. The wastelands began three hours of walking in that direction, past the last of the farmland and into the dead grey expanse that no sect patrolled and no merchant traveled through willingly. People went into the wastelands and did not come back, as a rule.
"East," he said.
Maren looked at him like he had said something stupid, which was fair. He probably had. But going west meant going toward the province, toward the sects, toward the people who had just killed his family and would finish the job if they found him. East was dangerous in ways he didn't understand yet. West was dangerous in ways that had already proven themselves.
He chose the danger he didn't know.
He left before noon.
The walk to the wasteland border took him past fields that were just beginning to show the first green of early spring. He passed two other farms and kept off the road. No one saw him, or if they did, no one called out. Greyveil had learned a long time ago that being invisible was how you stayed alive.
He crossed the border as the sun touched the tops of the trees behind him.
The wastelands were not dramatic in the way that stories made them sound. There was no sudden change in the ground, no line of dead earth that announced itself. The grass just got thinner and the trees got more sparse and the color of everything shifted from green and brown to grey and pale yellow, and at some point Ian looked back and the familiar treeline was far behind him and everything ahead was empty.
He walked until dark, then found a shallow depression in the ground near a dead tree and lay down in it. He did not sleep for a long time.
He thought about his father in the center of the yard. The way a man stood when he chose to face something he knew he couldn't beat. Ian had seen that posture before on animals he had cornered while hunting, and he had thought, at the time, that it was something all living things knew how to do. Stand straight. Face forward. Let what comes come.
He had not understood, until now, what it cost.
He closed his eyes and made himself stop thinking. Grief was a weight he could not afford yet. There would be time for it later, in the moments when survival was not the immediate problem. Right now, in the dark of the wastelands with nothing around him and no plan beyond moving east, survival was the only thing that mattered.
He was good at surviving. He had grown up on the edge of the wilderness, had been hunting since he was eleven, could track and trap and move quietly through terrain that would lose most people. His father had taught him that skill because it was the most useful thing a man in their position could have.
Ian wondered now if his father had known, even then, that those skills would matter more than he let on.
He didn't have an answer.
He slept.
In the morning he woke up to grey sky and the distant sound of wind moving across dead ground. He ate the last of the dried meat he had taken from the house, drank from a thin stream that cut through the earth nearby, and kept walking east.
He was alive. His family was not. Somewhere, a man in black and gold sect armor had given an order and considered it finished.
Ian filed that information away in the coldest part of his mind and kept his feet moving.
The wastelands stretched on ahead of him, empty and vast and indifferent.
He walked into them without looking back.
* * *