The search began the second the soldiers could see again.
At first, the assumption was tactical. They thought the light had been a flash-working, a final trick by a hidden mage, and that the Emperor had moved during the confusion. They checked the nearby structures, the supply wagons, the shadows of the bell tower.
"He was just here!" the sergeant shouted, his voice high with a rising panic. "He was standing right there in the mud!"
By the second day, the search had expanded to every inch of the host city. They tore through collapsed tunnels, overturned mass graves, and scoured the woods for miles in every direction. They found his sword, dropped in the slush, but there was no sign of the man who had carried it.
Three days passed. Then five. The silence from the Emperor's camp became a physical weight that pressed down on the Northern Reaches.
