Smoke rose in thin, lazy columns from the campsite ahead.
People passed by as they entered the camp's periphery. Some with direction, some without. Scattered along the ground were others who weren't moving much at all, bearing injuries that ranged from bad to worse, while those still on their feet tended to them with the practiced calm of people used to this kind of aftermath
Injuries everywhere. Cuts, burns, bruises. Limbs bound in rough splints. Faces pale with pain or hollow with shock.
Atama slowed without realizing it, his eyes moving from one person to the next, each worse than the last.
"What happened here?" The question came out quieter than he intended.
But the three companions didn't answer. Rather, they kept moving forward, weaving between the growing chaos with practiced ease. Sydney led, her steps unhurried, her gaze fixed ahead. Callidus followed close behind, his earlier curiosity tucked away behind a mask of focus.
Atama had no choice but to follow.
Around them, the camp swelled with activity. More wounded were being carried in from the edges of the treeline, their cries rising above the murmur of voices. Someone shouted orders. A child wailed somewhere out of sight. The smell of blood thickened, mixing with the smoke until it clung to the back of Atama's throat.
He wanted to stop. To ask. To understand what had happened here, what was still happening. But Sydney did not slow, and neither did the others.
They passed a woman slumped against a wagon wheel, her hands pressed to a wound in her side, her face grey with pain. A man rushed past them carrying a bucket of water, sloshing dark liquid across Atama's shoes. Two children huddled beneath a canvas tarp, their eyes wide and empty, watching the chaos with the stillness of prey. But among them, there's a girl who was around seven or eight years old, trying to cheer up her friends.
Why won't they stop? Why won't they help?
But the companions moved on, through the chaos, past the wounded, until the noise began to fade behind them.
They reached a cluster of tents set back from the main camp, quieter here, the wounded fewer, the activity more controlled. Sydney stopped before a tent larger than the others, its canvas stained dark at the edges. She turned to Atama, her face still unreadable.
"Wait here, " she said.
Before Atama could respond, she disappeared inside, the creature slipping in after her like a shadow finding its home.
Callidus settled onto a crate nearby, pulling his knees up to his chest. The fat one leaned against a tent pole, arms crossed, eyes scanning the camp with flat disinterest.
Atama stood in the center of it all, He had found the others. He had found the camp. And still, he had no answers, only more questions, and the growing certainty that whatever came next.
At the center of it all stood firm Atama, he found others. He had found the camp, but never had the answer, only more questions, and the growing certainty that whatever came next.
"A storm, " Callidus said simply, his expression cold and still.
Though if Atama looked closely enough, and he did, there was something underneath it. Not anger. Not indifference. Something that had been sitting quietly behind his eyes for a long time.
"It took people away. Destroyed and reshaped everything in its path." He didn't look at Atama when he said the last part. "A punishment. To this land and everyone living on it."
Silence sat between them. Atama broke it.
"What kind of stor, "
A woman's shriek cut him off, high, wet, the kind of sound that came from a throat already raw. Then another. Then a dozen.
The camp didn't just get loud. It broke. A man sprinted past Atama, shoulder checking a tent pole, sending canvas collapsing behind him. A child scrambled under a wagon, hands over her ears. Someone's cooking pot clattered across the ground, spilling whatever had been inside, and no one stopped to pick it up.
Atama spun. Bodies moved everywhere, away from the tree line, away from something he couldn't see yet, their faces not panicked but certain. The certainty of prey.
Then he saw the edge of the camp where the smoke hung thickest. The wounded who had been sitting there moments ago were gone. Not fled. Dragged. A trail of disturbed earth led into the grey, scattered with torn cloth and something darker.
Sydney stepped out of camp without announcement. A creature followed at her left, its lean, elongated silhouette cutting against the pale light, head tilted in that sharp, avian way, one red eye gleaming from a face. The crest along its spine burned red. Its forearm smoldered orange from elbow to wrist, heat rising off it in faint, visible waves.
Atama watched them go.
Every nerve in him fired at once. His feet moved one step forward, then stopped.
He stood there for a second, breath held, before letting it out slowly through his nose. Not your problem right now.
The noise pulled him the other way.
He found the other side of the camp in pieces. Not metaphorically. Supplies scattered, shelters collapsed inward, the ground torn up in jagged patterns like something had been dragged, or thrown. People lay where they had fallen, some groaning softly, some not making any sound at all. One figure still stood, barely, leaning against a root with a pistol dangling from two fingers, the chamber empty, eyes fixed on a point that didn't exist anymore.
Scorch marks everywhere. The residue of spells cast fast and desperate, not measured or trained, the magic of people buying seconds, not victory.
It hadn't been enough. Not even close.
A piercing cry tore through the chaos, sharper and more desperate than any before. It was the unmistakable wail of a child.
Atama's head jerked toward the sound. The camp around him was a shattered mess: people groaned, others hauled the wounded toward battered tents, faces ghostly with shock and streaked with blood. He had been helping, hands clamped over a stranger's shoulder, trying to stop a wound he barely understood.
The child screamed again.
Atama let go. The wounded man's companion took over without a word, and Atama was already moving, pushing through the smoke and the scattered debris, following the cry like a thread through the dark.
He rounded a collapsed shelter. A wagon lay on its side, its wheels still spinning. And there, crouched in the hollow between two broken crates, A girl lay on the ground. She was around seven or eight years old, but her fate was too cruel for her.
It was that girl that trying to cheer her friend; her right hand was gone from the wrist, torn, not cut, the wound ugly and without mercy.
Her left hand was still outstretched, reaching toward the crates where her friend was hiding, fingers slightly open.
She had been trying to reach them. Even then.
A shard of broken wood had gone through her stomach. It hadn't gone all the way. That was somehow worse.
Her chest still moved. Small, shallow rises and falls, each one costing more than the last.
Atama's legs stopped working.
He had seen injuries today. He had pressed his hands against wounds and looked at faces hollowed out by shock. But this, this was different. This was a child who had spent her last strength trying to comfort someone else.
He couldn't find a single word that was worth saying.
"Please don't go…" Her voice cracked, barely a whisper. She was still looking at the torment friend, her eyes half-lidded, already drifting somewhere he couldn't follow.
In her fading gaze, Atama glimpsed something very familiar. No recognition. Not an accusation. Just the same quiet, exhausted surrender he had seen once before, in another face, another moment, he had failed to stop.
His chest caved inward. He felt utter hatred toward himself, raw, useless, a fire that consumed but gave no light. But there was no time to drown in it. He had to move.
He lifted her body, careful, trembling, and carried her toward the center of the camp. Each step was heavier than the last. Her blood soaked into his sleeve, warm and then cooling.
"Syd, take her," he said, his voice flat. "There's another I need to rescue."
He didn't wait for a response. He turned and started back toward the wreckage, toward the broken crates and the hollow where the child had been hiding.
SCREECH…
The sound split the air behind him. Not from the camp. From the direction he was heading. A scream he knew, not the child's, not any human throat. It was the Dyviak.