The horizon had begun to change. Not dawn yet — something before dawn, the sky shifting from black to a grey that had warmth buried somewhere inside it, the stars thinning at the edges where the light was coming.
Nyra sat with her knees drawn up and said nothing. The Spine was still there, vast and unchanged, its peaks catching the first suggestion of colour from the east.
Behind them, the cave stirred.
Tar woke the way he did everything — without announcement. One moment still, the next upright, his eyes open and already reading the entrance. He rolled his shoulders once, found his axe, and was done with waking. He stepped out into the grey morning air, looked at the scorched clearing, looked at Nyra, and sat down a few feet away from her without a word. His presence settled beside her like a wall finding its footing.
Nyra smirked slightly, glancing over her shoulder. "Morning, big guy. "
Tar blinked once, still waking, then nodded toward her.
Valen took considerably longer.
Nyra heard him from outside — a sharp inhale, a groan of profound personal grievance — and walked back into the cave to find him rolled onto his stomach, face buried against the cave floor as if the ground might take him back.
"Go away," he said. Muffled.
"You're already awake," Nyra said.
"No I'm not."
She kicked some dirt toward him.
"Why does the sun exist," Valen said, to no one. "Who allowed this."
"Get up," Thal said.
Valen got up. Slowly. With the energy of a man carrying a great injustice. "Just know," he said, dragging himself upright, hair wrecked, eyes still mostly closed, "that I hate everything right now."
"Good to know," Nyra said.
He emerged from the cave, squinting at the grey light like it had personally wronged him, and dropped down beside Tar with a grunt. He looked at the scorched clearing. At the treeline. At the blackened earth where the Threshen had been. He was quiet for a moment, which was unusual enough that Nyra glanced at him.
"We actually did that," he said.
"We did," Nyra said.
Valen turned to look at Tar. "You caught an axe mid-swing. A Threshen's axe." He paused. "I was there and I still don't fully believe it."
Tar looked at him with the expression of someone who had not invited commentary.
"I'm paying you a compliment," Valen said.
Tar looked away.
"He says thank you," Nyra said.
Tar huffed once through his nose. Which was, for Tar, essentially a standing ovation.
Valen opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Nyra. "Did he just—"
"Yes."
"Right." He settled back, marginally more at peace with the morning.
Luken came up last and quietest — a muted grunt, the slow blink of someone reassembling themselves from the inside out. His hand lifted almost before his eyes were fully open, the incantation barely audible, and the illusion settled over him with the ease of long habit. It flickered once, responding to his exhaustion, then held. He rubbed his face. Yawned. Said nothing.
He stepped out of the cave and stood for a moment looking at what was left of the clearing — the scorched ring, the blackened soil, the place where Luken's fire had eaten through the corruption down to bare earth. He had built that. Maintained it all night. He looked at it the way you look at something you made under duress and aren't sure yet whether to be proud of.
"How's the eye?" Nyra asked.
Luken glanced at her. "Fine."
"It was flickering last night."
"I know."
She held his gaze for a moment. He didn't look away, which was its own kind of answer. Then he sat down and picked up his staff and turned it over in his hands, examining the grain of the wood like it might tell him something useful.
Valen looked at him. "Good. Suffer with me."
Luken didn't answer. But something at the corner of his mouth moved, almost imperceptible, and he didn't tell Valen to shut up either, which was the closest thing to solidarity he was offering this morning.
They sat like that for a while. Not talking, mostly. The particular quiet of people who have run out of the kind of exhaustion that needs to be spoken and arrived at the kind that just needs to be sat through. The Shadowfern creaked around them. The scorched earth steamed faintly where the cold air met the still-warm ground.
"I need food," Valen announced, to the sky.
"We all need food," Nyra said.
"I need it more."
"You were asleep for six hours."
"Traumatic sleep." He gestured vaguely at the treeline. "Do you know what I dreamed about? Fernstalkers. More Fernstalkers. An endless corridor of Fernstalkers." A pause. "And then somehow it became a tax dispute with a merchant in Vel Sarath, which was honestly worse."
Nyra stared at him. "A tax dispute."
"He was very aggressive about it."
Tar made a sound. Low, short. Gone before it became anything.
Valen pointed at him. "See? Even Tar thinks that's unreasonable."
"Tar thinks you're unreasonable," Nyra said.
Tar said nothing. Which was confirmation enough.
Thal had already moved away from them. A few paces toward the treeline, far enough that the sound of the group fell behind him. He stood at the edge of the scorched clearing and looked at the road south and let the memory come.
A ridge. Bright morning. A boy barely shoulder-height, wrapped in a cloak two sizes too large, hands too small for the blade he was gripping.
I'll protect them all. Shouted into the wind. You'll see.
Beside him, a girl. Older by a few years, a cracked horn curving from her temple, her right eye clouded at the edges. She didn't look at him when he said it. She was looking at the horizon.
You can't even swing it straight, hero.
The boy had spun around, chin up, the cloak slipping off one shoulder. She'd already been grinning. The argument collapsed into shoving, into noise, into something that didn't need words.
Thal had watched from the edge. Said nothing.
The girl's voice went first. It thinned over years and then one morning it wasn't there — a scream in the distance, a body held in still arms, the boy sitting very still with his face turned away from everything. The cloak had still been too large for him. He'd stopped noticing it after that.
The boy grew quieter. The fire didn't go out. It just changed direction.
He blinked the image away and turned back to the group. "Let's move."
Nobody argued. Valen stood with the exaggerated effort of a man twice his age, Luken picked up his staff, Tar was already upright. Nyra was last, rolling her shoulders once before falling into step.
The morning came with them as they walked, the sky brightening at their backs, the Shadowfern falling behind one twisted tree at a time. The sun had not yet crested the Spine. But it was coming.