Far from the village, the smoke was visible between the trees — a dark column rising into the night sky, orange at the base where the fires were hungriest.
A girl stood on a high branch and watched it.
She was around twelve — the same age as Lina —, but she held herself differently. Still. Patient. Like someone who had learned a long time ago that the world moved better when she didn't rush it. In her right hand, she held a sword unlike anything made by ordinary craft: the blade was long and impossibly thin, tapered to a point sharp enough to split a breath of air, the edge catching the distant firelight in one clean line. The handle was dark wood wrapped in alternating strips of black and deep red, and at its centre, where the grip met the guard, a triangle was carved — and inside the triangle, an eye.
She watched the village burn without expression.
Footsteps behind her. A figure emerged from the trees below — a traveller, by the look of him, wrapped in a hooded cloak of deep indigo so heavy it swallowed the light around him. A broad crimson border ran its full length like a river of dried blood, framing him in something between regal and threatening. He had the look of a man who had walked a very long way from a very old place.
"Miss Jezebel." He stopped beneath her branch. "Are they burning?"
Jezebel didn't look at him.
"Yes." Her voice was quiet, almost reverent. "They are dying. Their blood is raining. Their screams are rising like incense — every tear, an offering. Every cry, a prayer." She tilted her head slightly. "The true lord is watching. And he is pleased."
The man was silent for a moment. Then: "And Barnabas? Where is he?"
"Walking the path." Jezebel finally looked away from the fire, her eyes finding something further away than the forest. "The prophecy is in motion. He is the one who will retrieve the piece of Caradel."
She dropped from the branch. Landed without a sound. Sheathed the sword in one smooth motion and walked deeper into the dark.
The traveller watched her go, then looked back toward the glow between the trees.
The screaming had gotten louder.
In Amelia's house, Alice and Amelia were bent over a spread of parchment on the table, Amelia tracing the village layout with one finger.
"It's changed a lot since you would have heard about it," Amelia said. "We used to be one thing. Now there's a clear division — the eastern quarter is the marketplace and commons, the western side is residential. People live and sleep here. They trade and gather over there. Now we have more sources of living besides hunting."
Alice looked at the map with genuine interest. "You have maps now."
"We have maps, crafting records, a hunting technique library—" Amelia paused, allowing herself a moment of quiet pride. "A lot of it came from outside. My expeditions. Things we learned and brought back. It's made survival a real thing instead of just a hope."
"Amelia." Alice looked up from the map. "Tell me about Charles."
Amelia kept her eyes on the parchment. "What about him?"
"Did you ever actually tell him? How did you feel about him?"
"I felt fine about him. I led this village through everything that came after, and I led it better now than—"
"How did he die?"
The room went quiet.
Amelia's finger stopped moving on the map. She was still for a moment — the kind of still that comes from choosing words carefully, or choosing not to choose them yet.
"Why do you want to know that?" she said.
"Amelia."
"One day, the raiders came." Her voice had gone flat, stripped of its usual authority, the way voices go when they're reciting something painful from a safe distance. "A different kind than we'd seen before. Stronger. More organised. From somewhere we couldn't trace." She stopped.
CLANG — CLANG — CLANG!
The emergency bell.
It rang three times — short, hard, urgent — and kept going. Not the festival bell. Not the meal bell. The only bell that made every person in Southwoult stop what they were doing and look up.
Amelia was on her feet before the third strike had faded.
She crossed to the ladder outside and climbed — fast, practised, not pausing to look down. Alice followed.
At the top of the tree, above the canopy level, Amelia could see the eastern quarter.
Or rather, she could see the smoke.
It rose in thick black columns from multiple points, lit orange and red from below, spreading as she watched — too fast, feeding on the dry timber of the market stalls, climbing the trees, jumping between branches on the wind. The village sounds that had been warm and ordinary an hour ago had become something else entirely. Even from here, she could hear it.
She climbed back down. Her face, when Alice saw it, had changed.
Not angry. Not commanding.
Scared.
Alice had never seen a drop of fear in Amilia's face. But this fear means the raiders are not just dangerous, they are way more brutal than she can imagine.
"The raiders." Amelia's voice came out low and controlled. "They're back. But last time was—" She stopped. Swallowed. "They are not normal. They don't fight like raiders. They fight like something sent."
Alice grabbed her arm. "Where are Lina and Nina?"
Amelia looked at her.
"They went to the eastern quarter," she said. "After dinner. They went for a walk."
For one second, Alice was completely still.
Then her fingers snapped.
Wings tore open across her back, spreading to their full width in the narrow space between trees, scattering bark and leaves. She grabbed Amelia without asking and launched.
The eastern quarter was on fire.
Not in one place. Everywhere. The market stalls, the gathering platforms, the homes built between the trees — the dry wood had caught fast, and the flames were moving faster, leaping between branches, climbing ropes, consuming everything that had been built here slowly and carefully over the years. The dried leaves in the canopy above were going up like paper. The fire generated its own wind, and the wind fed the fire, and the whole eastern side of Southwoult was becoming one single terrible thing.
Alice flew through the smoke with Amelia in her arms, searching.
Then she saw the portal.
It hung in the sky above the marketplace — dark at the edges, wrong in the way that things are wrong when they shouldn't exist, a tear in the air that looked through into somewhere else. From the portal in a steady and merciless rain came the silver spears. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Falling without aim. Without hesitation.
"What is that—" Amelia began.
A figure below looked up at them.
He wore the same deep indigo and crimson as the traveller in the forest — hooded, unhurried, standing in the middle of the chaos with the calm of someone supervising rather than fighting. He found them in the air with his eyes, and his expression shifted into something that wasn't quite a smile.
He raised one hand.
SNAP!
An orange mana sphere formed above his palm — the colour of a coal fire, pulsing at its core. He pulled his arm back.
"Alice—" Amelia shouted.
He threw it.
The sphere crossed the distance in less than a second.
BOOM!
The explosion hit them mid-air — a wave of heat and force that had no interest in direction, only destruction. Alice lost her wings. Lost her grip. The world became noise and orange light, and then the treeline came up fast—
They fell into the forest.
In the eastern part.
The spears had done their work.
The marketplace was quiet now in the worst possible way — the silence of a place where the sound has been taken out of people rather than leaving on its own. Bodies lay where they had fallen: men, women, children, some still holding what they'd been carrying when the rain began. A vendor's cloth. A water jug. A child's carved toy, dropped mid-run. One or more spears through each of them, clean and indifferent, the silver shafts still glowing faintly with residual mana.
The ones still alive were the ones who could fight back.
A handful of villagers had managed to raise mana shields in time — pale domes scattered across the marketplace like bubbles, each one containing a small cluster of the living: two people, five people, a family pressed together with their arms around each other, not looking at what lay outside. The shields were already dimming. Nobody could hold them forever.
Nina was holding three.
She stood with her back against a market post, one arm locked around the little girl from the flower stall — the child's face buried in Nina's shoulder, hands knotted in her clothing — and her other arm extended, fingers spread, maintaining a dome around a cluster of eight survivors twenty feet away while simultaneously keeping her own shield solid. The mana burned through her like standing in a current. Her teeth were clenched. Her extended hand was shaking.
"What do I do?" It came out flat, not quite a question. She was thinking out loud. "What do I do—"
Lina hadn't moved.
She was standing just inside the dome, and she might as well have been made of stone. Her eyes were open but not seeing. Her heart was doing something she had never felt before — not fast exactly, more like enormous, like it was taking up space in her chest that lungs needed. The sounds around her — the crying, the distant fire, the moaning of someone wounded nearby — came in through her ears and didn't stop there. They bounced. They built on each other. Every scream layered over every other scream until they filled her head so completely that there was no room for thought.
She closed her eyes.
It got louder.
She closed them tighter.
Still louder.
Above the marketplace, the portal pulsed — and the spears stopped.
Nina felt it before she saw it. The rhythm of impact against her shields, the steady drumbeat of silver hitting mana, simply ceased. She opened her eyes and looked up.
The portal was still there. Dark and wrong and patient.
But the spears had stopped.
For perhaps five seconds, the marketplace was perfectly still. The fires crackled. Someone sobbed quietly inside one of the distant shields. The little girl's breathing was loud and fast against Nina's shoulder.
Then the portal's edge shifted.
And through it — not spears this time, but people — came the raiders.
They dropped into the marketplace the way water finds every crack: everywhere at once, filling the space with motion, with dark indigo cloaks and drawn weapons and an absence of urgency that was somehow more frightening than rage would have been. They moved through the debris and the bodies with purpose. They knew what they were here to finish.
Nina grabbed Lina's wrist.
"Move."
She pulled her — Lina's feet found themselves, some survival instinct overriding the paralysis — and Nina half-carried, half-dragged her and the girl behind a market stall, ducking behind the heavy counter, pressing them both down into the narrow dark space between the wood and the floor.
"Don't make a sound," Nina breathed.
The girl pressed her face into Nina's arm and went silent with the terrible obedience of a child who understands, at six years old, that the noise will kill them.
The raiders moved through the marketplace in a loose line, working methodically. A survivor tried to run — a young man, fast, weaving between the wreckage — and a raider caught him in four steps, drove him to the ground, and drove a blade down between his shoulder blades with the flat efficiency of someone completing a task. He didn't struggle long.
A woman who had held her shield through the entire rain finally let it collapse from exhaustion. She raised both hands. She said something — a plea, maybe, or a name.
A raider drove a spear through her palm and kept walking.
Two children who had been sheltering under an overturned cart were found and dragged out by their arms. Nina pressed herself harder against the counter and stared at the gaps in the wood and did not let herself breathe.
A raider walked directly past their stall. Close enough that Nina could see the worn leather of his boots through the gap at the base of the counter. He stopped.
He didn't look down.
He moved on.
Nina let the breath out in a thread, controlled and silent.
She looked at Lina.
Lina was looking back at her. Her eyes were dry — too dry, the dry of someone who has gone somewhere past the point of tears. Her face was white. Her hands, pressed flat against the floor, were shaking.
Nina reached over and covered one of Lina's hands with her own.
"Lina." Her voice was barely breath. "I'm scared." She swallowed. "I'm scared of losing you. I — when I think about you not being—" She stopped. Her jaw tightened. "I just need you to know that you—"
THWACK.
In a fraction of a second, a sword pierced through the wooden wall.
Protruding from Nina's chest.
The little girl looked up.
"NINA!" Lina screamed.
Then the raider entered. He wore the same hooded cloak as other raiders. Covered his face, but his eyes are visible.
He looked down at Lina. Then he grabbed a fistful of her hair and dragged her outside.
"NINA!" Lina is still screaming.
The marketplace was chaos around her — fire everywhere, smoke, other children being pulled from hiding places. She couldn't get her feet under her. She clawed at the hand in her hair and screamed Nina's name over and over.
"NINA—"
The raider holding Lina snapped his free hand.
Silver-blue mana hit her face like cold water. Lina immediately became unconscious.
Another raider came beside him and asked, "Master, Barnabus, what do we do with them?"
"Master Barnabas. What do we do with them?"
Barnabas didn't rush his answer. He looked at the children with calm, empty eyes. He opened the cover. His face was nice but cold.
"They are offerings," he said. "For our lord."
He snapped his fingers.
Six red mana pillars burst from the ground in a perfect circle around the children. Each one was thick as a tree trunk and carved with the same symbol — a triangle, and inside it, an eye.
The same symbol Lina had seen on the portal in the sky.
The raiders tied each child to a pillar, working quickly and quietly. Lina was last.
Nina was tied to the pillar right beside her.
She was barely standing. The wound in her chest had soaked through her whole dress — dark red spreading outward from the centre, heavy and wet.
She breathed in short, careful sips, as each one cost her something. Blood ran from the corner of her mouth. Her head was down.
But her eyes were open.
"Nina." Lina pulled at the ropes. "Nina, look at me. Keep looking at me—"
Nina found her. She tried to speak. What came out wasn't words.
Around them, the children were screaming.
The raiders didn't react. They moved through the circle, piling dry branches and dead leaves around the base of each pillar. When the piles were big enough, they stepped back.
Barnabas looked at the circle and nodded once.
Two raiders snapped their fingers. Fireballs appeared in their hands. They threw them.
The kindling caught immediately.
In seconds, the fire had climbed to the pillars. The circle is filled with heat and orange light.
The children screamed louder.
Lina could feel the heat on her face and legs. The fire was getting closer. The ropes were tight. Nina wasn't moving.
Something cracked open inside Lina.
Not fear. Not grief.
Rage.
It had been building for days — her father's death, her mother's curse, the man from the flower stall collapsing in the street, Nina's blood on the ground. All of it. Everything.
It came out as a scream.
Not the scream of a frightened child. Something rawer than that. Something that had been decided.
It tore out of her and echoed off the burning trees and the red pillars and the open sky above.
Jezebel came beside Barnabus and watched the circle of fire.
"They were born for this," she said quietly. No cruelty in her voice. Just certainty. "Their ashes will be the road he walks on. Their suffering is the door."
She watched Lina's scream rise into the smoke.
"Baal is coming," Jezebel said with a wicked smile. "Their ashes will pave the way for his arrival. They must either abandon their faith or perish."
Suddenly, Lina's eyes became red.