The road arteries had become a snarled, groaning mass of bodies and carts and vehicles grinding bumper to bumper. Horns sounded their useless protest into the jam. Bundles were abandoned at the roadside where legs had given out. Heirlooms and children's toys left in the dirt by people who had run the calculation and found that speed outweighed everything else they had ever valued.
Silver Ridge had not been designated a target.
That was, in some ways, the worst of it.
The war did not need to point itself directly at a territory to take it apart. It worked along the veins instead. Supply lines choked at their nodes. Communications jammed into silence. Strike squads dropping into shadow and gutting the quiet infrastructure of council authority before anyone understood what had been struck.
