The world came back in grey.
Not the soft grey of early morning or the silver grey of rain — the flat, total grey of things that had burned and settled and gone cold overnight. Eli opened his eyes to a sky that had lightened without quite becoming blue, and for one unguarded moment he simply looked at it, registering nothing beyond the fact of its existence above him.
Then his body made itself known, and with it, everything else.
He lay where he had fallen, still tethered to what remained of the post — charred now, reduced to perhaps half its original height, the rope that bound his wrists scorched dark and brittle. When he moved his hands apart, the fibers separated with almost no resistance, as though they had been waiting for the smallest permission to give way. The pain of returning circulation was its own particular education. He sat with it, breathing through his teeth, and let his eyes adjust to the ruin of the world around him.
The farmhouse was gone. Not collapsed, not gutted — gone, reduced to a low field of debris that the night had finished cooling into uniformity. The fence posts were black stumps. The crops, which had caught somewhere in the middle hours and burned with the dry efficiency of drought-seasoned grain, existed now as an expanse of ash that shifted faintly in the morning air, the lightest things always moving first.
He turned toward his mother and sister the way a man turns toward something he already knows.
The fire had been both cruel and absolute. What it left behind wore the shapes of who they had been only vaguely, the way shadows cast at certain angles suggest forms without fully committing to them. But their faces — the fire had spared enough of his mother's face, and all of Mara's, and what he saw there would live in him with the permanence of scar tissue rather than memory.
His mother's expression held the particular exhaustion of someone who had fought past the point where fighting makes sense and then kept going anyway. Mara looked the way she had always looked when she was frightened — not panicked, but small, her brow slightly furrowed, waiting for someone to explain that it was going to be all right.
Eli lowered himself to his knees in the ash.
He said he was sorry. The words came out barely formed, more breath than sound, and he said them again, and then a third time, because repetition was the only tool available to him and no amount of it was going to be sufficient and he knew that and kept going anyway. He told his mother he should have moved faster. He told Mara he should have been something other than what he was. He told the grey morning sky and the black field and the cooling ruins of everything they had built and tended and lived inside that he was sorry, and his voice climbed and broke and climbed again, and the ash took all of it without response.
They had been all he had. That was simply true — not a dramatic truth, not an embellishment, but the plain arithmetic of his life on this farm in this field with these two people who had constituted his entire world. He was aware, distantly, that grief of this scale had a shape that would take years to fully comprehend, that what he was experiencing now was only the first edge of it, the leading wave. He was also aware that he did not have years. He did not have days.
He pressed his forehead to the ash between them and stayed there until the shaking passed.
The burial took most of the morning.
He found the shovel in the ruins of the tool shed, its handle burned away but the iron head intact, and he fashioned a replacement from a beam that had survived at the eastern wall's base — thick enough to grip, long enough to work with. The ground at the field's edge, just beyond where the fire had reached, was soft from last week's rain, and he was grateful for that in the numb, automatic way he was grateful for anything that made the task marginally less impossible.
He did not let himself think while he dug. He focused on the work with the same focused attention he'd brought to the crops that morning, the morning that now existed on the other side of some fundamental division in time — before, and this. His hands blistered and bled and he ignored them. His back seized twice and he straightened and kept going.
When it was done, he stood before the two mounds of turned earth for a long time without moving.
He had no words left that felt adequate, so he stood in silence instead, which felt more honest. He looked at the smaller mound and thought about the wooden animals arranged in their private configuration on the kitchen floor, and whatever had been holding him composed came apart very simply and without warning, the way structures sometimes fail — not with drama but with a quiet, sudden surrender to forces that had been present all along.
He cried without sound. The tears cut clean lines through the ash on his face.
It was the masks that brought him back.
The image arrived without invitation while he stood at the graves — seven figures in carved demon faces, eating his family's food with the ease of men who had no reason to hurry, because nothing in their experience suggested that consequences followed them. The way the leader's voice had carried when he spoke to the man beside him, unhurried and certain. The capital. That's where it begins.
Said in the tone of someone describing a destination, not a reckoning.
Eli's hands closed at his sides.
The grief did not leave — he understood now that it would not leave, that it would simply become one of the things he carried, like the scorched skin along his forearms and the hearing in his left ear that had gone partially wrong after the explosion. But something moved through it the way weather moves through landscape, not displacing it but occupying the same space, filling the same volume. It was quieter than he would have expected. Colder. The kind of cold that has no interest in warming.
He looked at the graves once more. He did not say anything this time.
He walked with one hand pressed to his ribs, which had at least two fractures he could identify by the specific quality of pain each breath produced. His feet had burns along the left sole that made him favor it, distributing weight to his right in a gait that would cost him later. His left eye had swollen to a narrow slit from a wound above the brow that had bled and dried and bled again overnight. He inventoried these things not with self-pity but with the practical attention of someone assessing resources before a long journey.
What he had: the clothes on his back, scorched and barely holding together. The iron shovel head, which he had dropped back into the ash before leaving — it would not serve him where he was going. A cut on his left palm that had already begun to close. Two functional legs and enough oxygen moving through him to sustain forward motion.
What he needed: to reach the capital.
The road north ran past the elm tree at the farm's boundary, the one his father had planted the year before Eli was born and which had survived the fire by virtue of standing just far enough from the fence line. Eli paused beneath it, his hand on the bark, and looked back at the farm one final time.
The ash was already shifting in the morning wind, the lightest particles lifting and dispersing, the field slowly becoming indistinguishable from the grey sky above it. By next season, if anyone passed this way, they would find only a fallow plot and two small mounds at the tree line, unremarkable, unannounced.
He turned north and walked into the glare of the climbing sun, one careful step and then another, each one carried forward by the single, cold, unwavering thought that had taken up residence in him somewhere between the fire and the morning.
They did not expect to be followed.
That was the only advantage he had, and it was enough.