Months passed. Then a year. Then two.
The raids continued. The humans sent more soldiers. The survivors killed them, buried them, took their supplies. It became a cycle—fight, hide, fight again. The valley became a fortress, defended by warriors who had nothing left to lose.
But the cost was terrible.
More people died. Good people. Brave people. People Kaelen had come to love. Rial fell in the third year, cut down by a stray bullet during a raid. Her body was given to Eyva, her spirit added to the growing chorus of the dead.
Kaelen felt each loss like a wound. He carried them all—Anya, Tarsem, Ash, Rial, a hundred others—in his heart, in his memory, in the weight that never left his shoulders.
He stopped smiling. Stopped laughing. Stopped feeling anything except the cold, hard necessity of survival.
Seri watched him fade and couldn't stop it.
"You're dying," she said one night. "Inside. Where it matters."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're a ghost wearing my lover's face." She grabbed his arm, forced him to look at her. "Kaelen, I'm losing you. And I can't—I won't—lose you too."
He looked at her—really looked—and saw the fear in her eyes. The love. The desperation.
"I don't know how to stop," he said. "I don't know how to feel anything except the next fight, the next raid, the next death."
"Then let me help you remember." She pulled him close. "Remember the forest. Remember Hometree. Remember the night you bonded with Ash, and the first time you flew, and the way you laughed when you fell off that log into the river." Her voice cracked. "Remember who you were. Who we were. Before all this."
He closed his eyes. And slowly, painfully, he remembered.