The morning march was a slow, agonizing crawl.

  The vibrant, chaotic energy of the previous day’s battle had evaporated, leaving behind the bitter dregs of exhaustion, aching muscles, and a thick, simmering tension that you could almost taste in the ash-filled air.

  Liam was in the lead. His usual fluid grace was replaced by a limping, methodical caution that made my teeth ache. His left leg was tightly bound with a bandage Willow had enchanted, but the badger bite was deep. He tested every single stone with the butt of his spear before putting his weight on it, his eyes constantly scanning the ground for tunnels. He looked like a man expecting the earth to bite him.

  Behind him, Faelar was a thundercloud of wounded pride.

  He wasn't complaining. He wasn't singing. He wasn't even drinking. This silence was somehow worse than his usual booming tirades. He just stomped along the narrow ridge of rock, his face set in a furious, defensive scowl, staring daggers at Liam’s back.

  The silence lasted for nearly an hour. The pressure built until it had to release.

  “For the last time, it was a tactical probe!” Faelar suddenly boomed. His voice echoed off the rocks, making Willow jump and drop a handful of dried berries she had been snacking on.

  “I successfully located the enemy, engaged them, and tested their strength! It was a textbook dwarven reconnaissance-in-force! I found the nest, didn't I?”

  Liam didn't stop walking. He didn't turn around. He spoke in a dry, cutting monotone that cut through the wind.

  “A ‘reconnaissance-in-force’ is a planned military maneuver, Faelar,” Liam said. “What you did was the strategic equivalent of kicking a hornet's nest to see if it was angry, and then screaming for help when you discovered—to absolutely no one's surprise—that it was. The only intelligence you gathered was that being dragged into a hole by a six-legged badger is, in fact, unpleasant.”

  “I did not shriek!” Faelar roared, his face turning a dangerous shade of purple that matched the bruises on his arms. “I let out a tactical war cry! To draw their attention! I was buying you time while you were… counting pebbles!”

  “Your ‘war cry’ sounded suspiciously like ‘Get off my leg’,” Liam noted.

  “It is an ancient dialect!”

  “Now, now,” Willow said gently, stepping between them. She looked tired, her eyes dark-rimmed. “You were both very brave! And we did win, after all. No one was eaten.”

  “His bravery nearly got my leg chewed off,” Liam muttered, adjusting his bandage.

  “A minor flesh wound!” Faelar scoffed. “You elves are too fragile! You scratch a knee and act like you’ve lost a limb. In my clan, we use badger bites to exfoliate!”

  “An interesting semantic distinction!” Elmsworth chimed in cheerfully, striding past them with an energy that was entirely unearned given that he had spent the fight shouting at a tree.

  The wizard adjusted his spectacles. “While Faelar’s actions did not meet the classical definition of a ‘feint’ or ‘probe,’ one could argue that they achieved a state of ‘Involuntary Strategic Chaos.’ In our specific operational paradigm, this has proven to be highly effective! It was a masterclass in accidental tactical success! You are a genius of stumbling into victory, Faelar!”

  Faelar opened his mouth to agree, then paused, realizing he had just been insulted.

  Nugget, perched on Elmsworth’s shoulder, was a sullen, stormy grey color today. She looked at Faelar, tilted her head, and let out a single, critical-sounding cluck.

  “See?” Liam said, pointing over his shoulder. “Even the chicken thinks you’re an idiot.”

  Faelar grumbled something about “soup ingredients” and fell back to the rear of the line.

  The argument died down as we reached the crest of a high ridge.

  I held up a hand for silence.

  In the distance, breaking the desolate monotony of the grey plains, were the sharp, geometric lines of ruins.

  It was a town. Or what was left of one. It was a collection of skeletal, crumbling buildings, half-buried in the ever-present ash. They looked like the forgotten bones of some great beast that had laid down to die centuries ago.

  “Sunderwind,” I whispered, checking the map. “It’s marked as a trading post. Or it was.”

  It took us the better part of the afternoon to reach it.

  The closer we got, the more oppressive the silence became. It was different from the muffled quiet of the Forest of Whispers. That silence had felt expectant, like a predator holding its breath.

  This was the silence of absence. It was the sound of a place where life had once been and was no more. The wind howled through the gaping windows of ruined homes, a low, mournful flute song that was the town’s only remaining voice.

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  We walked down what was once a main street. Our boots crunched on a mixture of ash, shattered glass, and crumbled stone.

  As we moved deeper into the ruins, Faelar’s sullen mood began to lift. It was replaced by the focused, critical pride of a master craftsman inspecting shoddy work.

  He ran a rough hand over a crumbling stone wall. He frowned. He pulled a loose brick free and crumbled the mortar between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Hah! Just as I thought,” he grunted, dusting off his hands. His expression was one of profound, professional disapproval.

  “Shoddy craftsmanship,” Faelar declared. “Look at this—sand and grit, barely enough lime to hold it together. And the foundation stones are improperly set. All mismatched river rock. No drainage! No load-bearing arches! It’s a disgrace. No wonder the place fell apart. A dwarven city would have stood for ten thousand years against wind and ash. This is an insult to the very concept of masonry.”

  He sounded happier than he had all day. He had found something he was better than: the people who built this town.

  Willow, however, was deeply affected by the oppressive sadness of the place .

  She stopped in the middle of what might have been a town square. A broken fountain lay at its center, choked with dust. She closed her eyes, her face pale.

  “So many people,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “They were happy here, once. I can feel it. Children were playing right here, by this fountain. There was music. Laughter. And then… fear.”

  She opened her eyes, and they were filled with a profound sorrow.

  “It’s all just a footprint in the mud after the rain is gone,” she said softly.

  “A poetic, if scientifically reductive, assessment of entropy,” Elmsworth noted, taking a rubbing of a rune on the fountain.

  Liam, ever the pragmatist, had already slipped away to investigate the more intact structures. He wasn't looking for ghosts; he was looking for threats.

  He reappeared a few minutes later from a side alley. His face was grim.

  “I found something,” he said, his voice low. “Looks like our cultist friends were here. Recently.”

  He led us to a large, squat building on the edge of the town. It might have once been a stable house or a barracks. It was more fortified than the others, its stone walls thicker.

  The air inside was cold. It smelled of old iron, rust, and a faint, lingering animal musk that made the hairs on my arms stand up. It smelled like a zoo that had gone bad.

  The interior was mostly empty, except for them.

  Lining the far wall were three large, heavy-duty iron cages.

  They weren't bird cages. They were built for monsters. The iron bars were thick as my wrist. But they were bent and warped outwards, scarred with deep, gouging claw marks that could only have been made by something of incredible power trying to get out.

  The stone floor was similarly scarred. And in the thick layer of ash and dust that coated the floor, the tracks were unmistakable.

  Wide, multi-clawed prints.

  The tracks of Grave Badgers.

  We stood in silence for a long moment, the implications settling in like a stone in the gut.

  “They’re not just using them,” I said, my voice grim. “They’re trapping them. Caging them. Transporting them.”

  “The logistical challenges would be immense!” Elmsworth mused, examining the bent bars of a cage with academic interest. “These creatures are notoriously territorial and aggressive. You would require specialized handlers, magically reinforced cages, a constant supply of… well, I hesitate to imagine what they eat. It presents a fascinating problem in Monstrous Husbandry.”

  “An army doesn't travel with its own pack of burrowing monsters for fun,” Liam said, his eyes scanning the cages for weaknesses. “They’re not just guard dogs. They’re a siege weapon. Sappers. A way to bypass walls and fortifications entirely. They can drop a castle wall in an hour.”

  “A cowardly weapon for cowardly gits,” Faelar spat on the floor. His earlier good mood was gone, replaced by a cold fury. “Digging under a man’s house? It’s not war. It’s extermination.”

  I looked at Elmsworth’s shoulder.

  Nugget had refused to even enter the stable. She stood silhouetted in the doorway, her feathers having shifted to a solid, defensive black. She stared at the cages, utterly still. For the first time, the chicken looked genuinely menacing.

  That night, we made our camp in the ruined shell of what might have been an inn.

  For the first time in days, we had four solid walls around us—a small, crumbling bastion against the howling wind and the endless, oppressive ash.

  Faelar built a fire in the remains of the hearth. The light flickered on the broken stone, casting long, dancing shadows. The mood was different from our usual boisterous camps. The silence of the dead town, combined with the grim discovery in the stable, had settled over us.

  We ate our rations—Elmsworth’s glowing stew having finally been finished—in a low murmur of conversation. We pieced together the terrifying puzzle of Malkor’s army.

  “So if he’s moving them in cages,” I reasoned, sketching in the dust on the floor, “he’s moving them to a specific location. To Vorash.”

  “To what end?” Liam wondered aloud. He was cleaning his dagger, the metal gleaming in the firelight. “To dig under the walls of the capital city? To unleash a plague of these things inside their borders?”

  “An effective terror tactic,” Elmsworth nodded gravely. “But also, perhaps, for a larger excavation. Malkor is a student of forbidden histories. What better tool to unearth a long-buried temple or a demonic artifact than a creature that can chew through solid rock? Perhaps he is digging for something old.”

  “A fine plan,” Soul-Drinker whispered to Liam, its voice dripping with admiration. “Elegant in its brutality. I’m beginning to respect this Malkor. He understands that the earth is just a lid on a box of screaming.”

  Liam grimaced and sheathed the weapon.

  Later, as the others settled down to rest, the conversation died out.

  Willow stood up. Before curling up in her bedroll, she walked to the center of the room. She placed her hand on the cold, stone floor.

  “Sleep well,” she whispered to the ghosts of the town. “May your memories be peaceful.”

  Faelar, his pride seemingly restored by his architectural critiques earlier in the day, was already snoring. It was a low, rumbling sound that was a strange comfort in the profound quiet.

  Liam was tending to his leg, unwrapping the bandage to check the wound. It was healing nicely, thanks to Willow. His movements were slow and deliberate.

  Elmsworth was sitting by the fire, engaged in a battle of wits. He had drawn a chessboard in the ash and was using a collection of mismatched pebbles as pieces.

  Opposite him sat Nugget.

  “Check,” Elmsworth muttered, moving a pebble.

  Nugget stared at the board. She turned black. She pecked a white pebble, knocking it off the board.

  “You can’t just eat the Knight!” Elmsworth exclaimed. “That’s against the rules!”

  Nugget clucked dismissively.

  “Fine,” Elmsworth sighed. “I concede. You have a ruthless endgame, my dear.”

  I took the first watch. I stood in the gaping maw of a collapsed wall, looking out at the silent, ruined streets of Sunderwind.

  We were safe, for a night. Sheltered.

  I looked back at my team. At this small, strange, chaotic flicker of life in a world that felt like it was already dead and buried.

  The ward-stone was warm in my pouch, a promise of the war to come.

  But here, in the ruins, surrounded by my dysfunctional family, the cold of the ashen plains felt, for the first time, very far away.