Dawn came like a reluctant servant, gray and grudging, offering light without warmth. The fire had died to a circle of black ash that the wind was already scattering. Frost had formed on their cloaks during the night, tiny crystals that caught weak sunlight and turned their huddled forms into glittering statues. They rose in silence, movements stiff from cold and the aches that came from sleeping on frozen ground.

  Breakfast was a mockery of the very concept. The strips of wolf meat were so cold that that any nourishment was pulled and sucked, not bitten. They gnawed at the meat with mechanical determination, congealed fat coating their mouths with grease, forcing their bodies to accept the fuel. Handfuls of snow relieved unbearably dry mouths, burning their throats with cold as it went down. It was sustenance reduced to its most basic function: keeping death at bay for another day.

  Kaelen was reaching for his pack when the first scream lanced through the morning air.

  It was high and sharp, the sound of someone who had just discovered that all their assumptions about safety and civilization were lies. It cut off abruptly, replaced by another one, deeper, more guttural.

  "Half a league," Kaelen said, his head tilted like a dog as he calculated distance from the sound. "Maybe less. The wind's carrying it."

  More screams joined the first, a chorus of agony that painted a clearer picture of what was happening beyond the rise. Lyraleth was already headed for higher ground, her movements liquid despite the snow. She belly-crawled to the top of a small hillock, peered over, then slid back down.

  "Merchant caravan," she reported, her voice focused and alert. "Three wagons, two overturned. Bloodfang scouts are on the survivors."

  The name brought a slight tension to the air. The Bloodfang tribe had been pushing south for months, fleeing the killing cold of the uttermost north. They left nothing but corpses and ash in their wake, taking what they needed and destroying anything left out of pure savage joy. Their scouts wore armor of human bone and painted their faces with the blood of their victims.

  "How many?" Kaelen asked, already knowing he would calculate the odds, weigh risk against reward, make the cold decision that had kept them alive this long.

  "Seven scouts that I can see,” Lyraleth replied “Three merchants resist, but not for long. Goods being loaded onto pack horses - furs, preserved food, trade weapons."

  "Worth the risk?" Seraphine's question was rhetorical. They all knew the arithmetic of survival. Dead merchants paid nothing, but their goods might buy supplies in the next settlement. Bloodfang scouts were dangerous but not impossibly so. Seven against three were acceptable odds if the enemy didn’t know they were coming.

  Kaelen nodded once and they moved without another word, spreading out to approach from three angles. The snow muffled their steps, and the screams from the caravan blanketed any other sound that might give them away. They had done this before. Violence was violence, whether you were defending or taking.

  They crested the rise together, taking in the scene with crystalline clarity. The caravan had been hit as it was breaking camp, the merchants caught with weapons stowed and their guard down. Two wagons lay on their sides with goods spilling out like entrails. Bodies littered the ground, some still moving, most not.

  The Bloodfang scouts were everything their reputation promised. They wore mismatched armor scavenged from a dozen dead warriors, decorated with finger bones and teeth. Their weapons were crude but effective - timber axes repurposed for chopping flesh, spears with barbed heads designed to tear as much as pierce. They plundered with brutal efficiency, stripping the dead and dying of valuables while their leader, identifiable by the skull helmet he wore, supervised loading the horses.

  One merchant, an older man with gray in his beard, was on his knees in the bloody snow, hands pressed to his stomach where red seeped between his fingers. A Bloodfang scout stood over him, laughing as he raised his axe for the killing blow. Another , barely more than a boy, was trying to crawl away dragging a leg bent at an impossible angle. The scouts let him crawl, finding amusement in his desperate, hopeless struggle.

  The third surviving merchant wasbacked against one of the overturned wagons, a broken spear shaft in her hands. Two scouts circled her like wolves, making feints, drawing out her terror. Her eyes wide with the terrible knowledge that this moment was her last.Kaelen felt nothing looking at this tableau of human suffering. The only thing on his mind was a cold calculation of angles and distances, of who to strike first for maximum advantage.

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  He gave the twins a look and they nodded in return. They attacked without war cries or warning.

  Kaelen came in low and fast, using a snowdrift to mask his approach until the last second. The scout standing over the gut-wounded merchant never saw him coming. Kaelen's blade took him in the kidney, angling up to pierce the lung. The man's laughter became a wet gurgle as he toppled forward, his axe falling harmlessly into the snow.

  Lyraleth struck from the opposite side, her twin blades whispering death. The first scout to see her had just enough time to see her full form before her right-hand blade opened his throat in a spray of arterial red. Her left-hand blade was already moving, targeting the gap in the next scout's armor just below the armpit. He spun, trying to bring his spear around, but she was already inside his reach. Her knee drove into his groin, doubling him over, and her blade finished the work.

  Seraphine announced her arrival with more authority. Her greatsword caught the morning light as it descended, taking a scout's head clean from his shoulders. The body stood for a moment, blood fountaining from the stump, before collapsing in a pointless surrender. She pivoted, using the momentum of the swing to bring the blade around in a horizontal arc that caught another scout across his abdomen. His bone armor offered a feeble defense against Winterheart steel.

  The skull-helmeted leader reacted faster than his men. He barked orders in the guttural Bloodfang tongue as he moved toward the horses. The two scouts who had been tormenting the woman with the broken spear turned to confront the new threat, but their moment of distraction cost them. Seeing her chance, the woman drove her broken shaft into the back of the nearest scout's knee. He screamed and stumbled before Kaelen's thrown knife took him in the eye.

  The last scout made a desperate charge at Lyraleth withhis axe raised high. She flowed around his attack like water around a stone, her blades gracefully painting red lines across his arms, his legs, his torso. No solitary cut was fatal , but there were so many of them. He took three more steps before the blood loss dropped him to his knees. She ended it with a thrust through the base of his skull that looked merciful.

  The leader was already swinging up into the saddle of his horse. Two more mounted scouts that had been loading the far side appeared from behind one of the wagons. They didn't stop to understand what had happened,just put spurs to their horses and fled. The leader followed, but not before turning in his saddle to fix Kaelen with a stare that promised retribution.

  Then they were gone, the thunder of hooves fading into the distance, taking with them horses laden with the caravan's goods.

  Silence fell over the killing ground, broken only by the whimpers of the dying.

  The woman with the broken spear stood frozen, staring at her unlikely saviors. Her face and clothes were splattered with blood that wasn’t hers. Her hands shook as the adrenaline began to fade, and the spear shaft fell from nerveless fingers. She opened her mouth to thank them perhaps, but no words came.

  Kaelen ignored her to check the bodies. The scouts had nothing worth taking. Their bone armor was more decoration than protection, their weapons crude and poorly maintained. The merchants' goods were gone with the horses. His lip curled in disgust. Wasted effort, wasted energy, wasted risk.

  The gut-wounded merchant stopped trying to hold his insides in place. He lay on his back, surrendering to the gray sky with eyes that were beginning to glaze. The boy with the broken leg stopped crawling, shock and blood loss finally claiming him.

  Other bodies nearby told their own stories - a guard who died trying to protect his employers, a young woman who might have been the merchant's daughter, her throat opened in a red smile.

  "Nothing left worth taking," Kaelen announced, his voice flat. "Waste of time."He spat on the bloody ground with all his contempt for the scouts who had taken the valuables, for the merchants who had died so uselessly, for himself and his companions who had risked themselves for nothing.

  The twins separately turned away, each silently resigned to the empty results of a monumental effort and an immediate return to the heartless rhythms of survial. They cleaned their blades with practiced motions, using handfuls of snow to remove the blood before it could freeze to the steel. Seraphine’s eyes darted over the destruction around them, a sigh escaping her. Lyraleth kept her eyes on her blades as she cleaned them off only to glance up at Kaelen once for just a second, as if she had ventured deeper into his mind and was disappointed at what she found.

  The woman finally spoke. "Thank you," she whispered, then louder, "Thank you!"

  Kaelen glanced at her, his gray eyes as cold as the morning air. "We didn't come for you," he said simply.

  He turned and walked away, the twins falling into step beside him. Behind them, the woman stood alone among the dead, her salvation as meaningless as their deaths. She called after them, begging them to escort her to safety, but her words were lost to the wind.

  Seraphine looked up at Kaelen and opened her mouth to speak but he gave her a harsh look.

  “No.” He grunted. “We’re going.”

  They didn't look back after that. There was nothing there for them but corpses and lost time. The arithmetic of survival was simple and merciless. Energy expended must be rewarded by resources gained. This morning's violence had been a loss on that ledger.

  As they departed, Lyraleth spoke. "The Bloodfang grow bolder. That's the third caravan this month."

  "They flee the cold," Seraphine added with a small shiver. "Like everyone else."

  Kaelen said nothing. The Bloodfang were another factor in the equation of survival, no different from the wolves or the weather. They would deal with them if their paths crossed again, or they wouldn't. Nothing made any difference except the next meal, the next shelter, the next dawn.

  The sun rose higher, offering its pale light to a world that had forgotten what warmth meant. Behind them, the woman had fallen to her knees among the dead, weeping for people who were beyond caring. Ahead, the wasteland stretched on, endless and indifferent.

  They continued, three figures dark against the white, carrying nothing but their weapons and the knowledge that they had survived another morning. It was enough. It was all there was.