The North has this peculiar way of swallowing its own history. Give it a blizzard and forty-eight hours, and it'll bury a blood-soaked battlefield under a pristine, glittering blanket of white as if the violence were merely a fever dream. Apparently, the human heart works much the same way. Or at least, that's what Cherion kept telling himself as Day 12 dragged into an annoyingly quiet evening.
A week. Seven whole days.
In that time, the subjugation had practically folded in on itself. The Velkyn were thinning out. The Hearth Stones, once terrifying beacons of corruption, had been repurposed with a sort of grim efficiency that would have made whoever messed with them weep. They were bait now. Lures. And the Velkyn were biting. The camp didn't smell like panic anymore; now it smelled like campfire and "we might actually survive this.". Not the hysterical, "we're all going to die" kind of laughter, more like the careful, "let's not jinx it" kind.
