The firelight cracked behind her, casting shadows over tired faces. Tar remained motionless on the log, his posture calm but unreadable, and though he said nothing, Nyra could feel it: the subtle tension in the way his hands rested on his knees, the angle of his head still tilted toward the place Thal had vanished.
Nyra rose slowly, brushing dirt from her leggings.
"I'm going after him."
Valen looked up from the salvaged supplies. "You sure that's a good idea?"
"He's not that far," she said without turning. "And he's not going to talk to any of you."
Elira arched an eyebrow but said nothing. She'd learned by now when to keep out of things. Luken just offered a slow nod.
As Nyra passed, Tar didn't move, but one ear rotated to follow her. She gave his arm a small nudge.
"I'll be careful."
She followed the trail of scorched footprints into the deeper part of the ruined field. The footprints were scorched, not burnt, but glassed, the earth fused into brittle black ceramic that crunched like frost under her boots. Thal's trail. She'd seen him fight before, but never like tonight. Never with that particular silence, the kind that swallowed sound instead of making it.
She passed a Kruul blade half-buried in the mud. The metal was twisted into a spiral, like a corkscrew. Thal's handiwork. Usually he left bodies, not weapons. The fact that he'd stopped to bend steel meant he'd been angry, or careful. She couldn't tell which was worse.
The smoke changed as she walked. Near the camp, it had been wood-fire and cook-smoke. Here, it turned chemical, sweet and wrong, clinging to the back of her throat. The kind of smell that came from burning flesh that wasn't quite natural. She pulled her collar up over her nose, but it didn't help. The scent had already settled into her hair, her clothes, the sweat on her palms.
The battlefield quieted as she walked. No wind, no flies, not even the groan of dying trees. Just the crunch of her boots and the distant pop of cooling embers.
She found him crouched near a cluster of bodies.
Thal's back was to her. Broad. Still. One hand braced on his knee, the other resting lightly on the chest of a fallen soldier.
"Thal?"
"Don't step there." His voice was low. He gestured toward a snare vine coiled near the roots of a dead tree.
The vine twitched.
Not wind. The air was dead still. It was sensing, the way a tongue tastes air. She saw now how a corpse's ankle was twisted near it, not broken by trauma, but rotated, the bone showing white where the vine had corkscrewed it tight. A slow death. The Kruul soldier had been caught trying to retreat, or advance, and the vine had taken its time.
She stopped short, glancing at the body Thal was examining. She expected blood. Wounds. Mutations.
She didn't expect the size.
The Kruul was small. Thin limbs. Armor cobbled from scraps that didn't fit, hanging loose on narrow shoulders. The helmet had rolled off, revealing jagged implants along the skull, metal fused to bone, the growth plates still open.
Nyra's breath caught.
"Thal." Her voice came out thinner than she intended. "How old?"
"Old enough to hold a blade." He didn't look up. "Young enough to break her fingers on the grip."
Nyra swallowed. The child's hand was visible, curled near the mud. The fingers were twisted, white-knuckled, shattered.
"She didn't land a hit," Thal said.
Silence pooled between them. Nyra became aware of other bodies nearby, not just Kruul, but the twisted shapes of Threshen, their limbs distorted, their faces wrong. But Thal's hand rested only on the child.
"They're running out of soldiers," Thal said. "Lions Gate has them starved against the mountains. So they're making them. Forcing growth. Splicing tissue." His thumb brushed the child's shoulder plate, almost absently. "Some volunteer. Most don't get the choice."
Nyra took a tentative step closer. "And you? Did you get the choice?"
His hand paused over the child's broken fingers. "I'm not Kruul."
"That's not what I asked."
The silence stretched. Somewhere in the dark, a crow called and was answered by another. Thal's thumb traced the rim of the child's helmet, a gentle, absent motion.
"I was older," he said finally. "Old enough to understand what I was born to. We see beyond the veil. Heralds, Harbingers, the things that devour worlds. It's in the blood. Not forced. Not spliced. Just what we are. But I was old enough to choose how I carried that weight. She didn't even know she was being turned into a weapon."
"The Harbingers..." She stopped, the sentence unfinished, but Thal nodded anyway. He understood. He'd been born to face cosmic horrors. This child had been made to face him.
He stood slowly, towering over the small body. When he turned, his eyes caught the dim light, flat, golden, and terribly empty.
"Go back to the others," he said.
Not angry. Not cold. Just finished.
She should have argued. Should have asked if he was alright, if he needed help, if he intended to stay out here among the dead until the frost took him. But the look in his eyes, not grief, not rage, but a weight so heavy it had burned through both, stopped her.
She nodded once.
She made it three steps before she stopped and looked back.
Thal had knelt again. He lifted the child's body with both hands, cradling it against his chest with a gentleness that looked impossible from a man who had slaughtered half a dozen of her kind not an hour before. He turned toward the tree line, where the earth looked softer, and began to dig with his bare hands.
She should keep walking. She knew she should. But her feet stopped at the tree line, hidden in shadow, and she watched.
Thal worked methodically. He laid the child down first, arranging the too-big armor so it didn't look so absurd, so pathetic. Then he moved to the Threshen.
The creature was massive, twisted, all wrong angles and exposed bone. Thal handled it with the same care he'd given the child. He turned the head, what was left of it, and Nyra saw, even from a distance, the flash of metal at the throat. A collar. Not armor. A restraint.
He dug with his hands. No shovel, no knife. Just fingers tearing into the earth, the muscles in his back bunching and releasing. He dug four graves. Five. She lost count. The moon rose higher, silvering the sweat on his bare arms.
When he lifted the last body, a Kruul soldier full-grown with a captain's insignia, he paused. Said something she couldn't hear. A name? An apology? The wind carried it away.
She left before he could turn around and catch her watching.
The walk back took longer. Her legs were steady, but her hands shook, delayed reaction, the adrenaline finally bleeding out. She kept seeing the child's hand, the broken fingers. She kept seeing Thal's hands, broad and scarred and impossibly gentle, closing the child's eyes.
She stopped halfway and was sick in the bushes.
When she straightened, wiping her mouth, the battlefield looked different. The Kruul bodies weren't enemies anymore. They were evidence. The Threshen weren't monsters. They were witnesses.
She took her time returning. She needed to wash her face. She needed to scrub the smell of the chemical smoke out of her clothes. She needed to bury the image of Thal kneeling in the dirt, burying children he'd been forced to kill.
When she returned to the campfire, Tar was still sitting on the log, tail flicking slowly. Elira had moved closer to the flames. Valen and Luken watched her approach, waiting for news.
Valen raised a brow. "Well?"
"He's checking something out," Nyra said. She didn't look at them. Her eyes stayed on the ground. "He'll be back soon."
Elira frowned. "Is he alright?"
Nyra sat down beside Tar. She didn't lie. But she didn't tell the truth either. She just nodded once and said nothing more.
The others didn't press. But none of them missed the look in her eyes, or the dirt under her fingernails, or the fact that whatever she saw out there had changed her silence.
Tar shifted beside her. When she leaned her shoulder against his, she felt the low vibration of his purr, not comfort, but acknowledgment. His tail wrapped once around her ankle, a warm, heavy pressure, and when she looked down, she found his gaze fixed on her face, unblinking and knowing.
She didn't need to explain. She didn't need to tell him about the child, or the graves, or the way Thal had handled the bodies like they were something precious. Tar already knew. She could see it in the set of his ears, the stillness of his posture, the way his tail tightened slightly against her leg as if anchoring her to the earth.
They sat together in silence, waiting for Thal to return from the grave he was digging, and Nyra understood, finally, that the war they were fighting had no sides anymore. Only survivors, and the dead they carried with them.