The noise was everywhere.
Kira pressed herself deeper into the crevice, her back against the cold stone, her hands over her ears. It did not help. The sounds came through anyway, through rock, through flesh, through bone.
Shouting. Screaming. The crash of buildings falling. And underneath it all, the ring of steel against steel, the wet sound of blades finding flesh, sounds she could not identify and did not want to.
Her father was out there.
The thought came again and again, each time like a knife. He had pushed the bag into her hands. She had gone. She had run. She had left him.
The waterfall roared outside, muffling some of the chaos, but not enough. Never enough. Kira curled into herself, making the smallest target possible, and waited for the world to end.
Hours passed. She had no way to measure them. The crevice was dark, the same dark whether her eyes were open or closed. The sounds continued, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, never stopping.
She thought about her mother.
Mara, in her last days, holding Kira's hand with fingers that barely had strength left. "You are good, Kira. You are so good."
She thought about her father.
Tobin, kneeling in front of her, his face level with hers. "That is what we do, Kira. We keep going."
She thought about the ridge she had found at fifteen, where the whole valley spread below like a map. She thought about sitting there with her father, eating bread and cheese, saying nothing, being together.
The sounds continued.
At some point, she stopped thinking. There was only the dark, only the cold, only the waiting.
She woke to silence.
It took her a long moment to understand what was different. Her ears rang with the absence of noise. No shouting, no screaming, no crash of destruction. Just the waterfall, distant and steady, and her own breathing.
How long had she slept? She did not know. Hours? A day? More?
She stayed perfectly still, listening.
Her breathing. Nothing else.
No birds. No wind in the trees. Nothing.
She waited an hour. Maybe longer. Time moved strangely in the dark, without sun or stars to measure it. But she waited, and she listened, and the silence held.
They were gone. The soldiers. The noise. The destruction.
It was over.
Kira crawled toward the light.
The crevice narrowed in places, forcing her to squeeze through, but she had done it before, twice with her parents, once alone to memorize the way. She knew every twist, every turn, every handhold.
The light grew. From black to gray to white. From nothing to something.
She emerged behind the waterfall, onto the slick rocks she remembered. The spray hit her face, cold and clean. She stood there for a moment, letting it wash over her, then pushed through the curtain of water.
The world outside was still.
No soldiers. No movement. No sound except the falls.
She ran toward the village.
The trail was familiar. She had walked it thousands of times, with her mother, with her father, alone. But something was wrong. The trees were broken, some snapped in half, others hacked apart. The ground was torn, churned by boots and hooves and the wheels of wagons she did not recognize.
She ran faster.
The first houses came into view, or what was left of them.
The miller's house was gone, just splinters scattered across what used to be their yard. The mill wheel lay in the stream, broken and half submerged.
Kira kept running.
The testing hall, or where it had been. The walls were down, the roof collapsed, the stool where every child had sat now just kindling beneath a beam.
She passed more ruins. The baker's. The tanner's. The small homes of families she had known her whole life.
All gone.
She reached the center of the village and stopped.
There was nothing. No buildings standing. No people moving. No voices calling. Just wreckage stretching in every direction, and silence.
"Father!"
Her voice cracked against the emptiness. No answer.
"FATHER!"
Nothing.
She stumbled through the ruins, calling his name, listening for any reply. She overturned broken boards. She looked under collapsed roofs. She searched everywhere her eyes could reach.
No one.
No bodies. No bones. No blood.
Just empty ruins, as if the village had been picked clean and discarded.
Kira fell to her knees in the middle of what had been the village square.
She did not cry. She could not. There was something inside her that had frozen solid, a cold deeper than any mountain winter. She knelt there, in the wreckage of everything she had known, and tried to understand how the world could simply end.
Her father's voice echoed in her memory. "That is what we do, Kira. We keep going."
She did not know how.
She did not know how long she knelt there. The sun moved across the sky, indifferent to her grief. The shadows shifted. The silence held.
Then, slowly, she stood.
Her legs shook. Her hands trembled.
"Keep going."
She turned toward the edge of the village, toward the path that led to her home. Toward where her father had stood in the doorway, pushing a bag into her hands, telling her to run.
She walked.
The path was worse here, more destruction, more torn earth. The soldiers had come this way, had poured through this narrow corridor between forest and home. She stepped over broken branches, around deep gouges in the soil, past things she did not look at too closely.
And then she saw it.
Where her house had stood, the small house with one room for sleeping and one for living, the lean-to for drying herbs, there was nothing.
Just ruins. Broken beams. Scattered stones. Her mother's drying rack snapped in half, lying in what had been the garden.
No Tobin.
No body. No bones. No sign of him at all.
Kira walked through what remained of her home. She recognized pieces. The corner of their sleeping platform. The iron hook where her mother had hung herbs. The blackened stones of their hearth. She picked up a scrap of blanket, her blanket, the one she had had since she was small. It was torn and dirty, but she held it anyway.
"Father," she whispered. Just a word. Just a hope.
The ruins did not answer.
She stood there, in the wreckage of everything, holding a scrap of blanket, and felt the cold inside her grow.
"Keep going."
But where?
She looked toward the mountains. They were still there, patient and unmoving, the same mountains that had watched her grow, that had taught her to track and hunt and survive. They did not care about armies or destroyed villages or girls with one point of mana.
They just were.
Kira looked at the mountains. Then she looked at the blanket in her hands. Then she looked at the ruins of her home.
She did not know what came next, but her father had told her to keep going.
So she would.
She turned away from the ruins and began to walk, not toward the village, not toward anything she had known. Toward the mountains. Toward the only thing that had never left her.
The trail was steep. Her legs burned. Her heart ached.
She kept going.