The year was 163, but in the village of Emar, time wasn't measured by calendars. It was measured by the depth of the frost and the height of the woodpiles.
Callus adjusted his grip on the hickory handle, his palms sliding over the familiar grooves worn smooth by his own skin. With a sharp, practiced exhale, he brought the axe down. CRACK. The massive log of ironwood—a timber notorious for breaking cheap blades—split as cleanly as a sheet of parchment.
He didn't stop to admire the work. He couldn't.
For ten years, since the age of ten, this had been his world. While the high-born children in the southern citadels (if they even still existed) were learning the arts of rhetoric or the stroke of a pen, Callus had been perfecting the geometry of the swing. His shoulders had broadened into thick slabs of muscle, and his forearms were corded like the very roots he dug up. He wasn't a warrior, but he had spent a decade fighting the forest, and the forest had fought back, leaving his skin mapped with scars and calluses that felt like leather.
"Focus, Callus," he whispered to himself, the cold air turning his breath into a ghostly mist.
He looked up at the sky. It was that bruised, perpetual grey unique to the Northern Zone. According to the village elders, Germia was once a vast diamond of a continent, stretching to four cardinal points. But the Great Encroachment of 140 had changed that. Now, the East, West, and South were nothing but legends—zones lost to an encroaching "nothingness" that no traveler ever returned from. Emar was a cage, the last scrap of dirt where humanity still clung to life.
Callus began to bind the wood. He hoisted a bundle that would have required two grown men to lift, swinging it onto his back with a grunt of effort. As he trudged down the mountain path, his eyes instinctively drifted toward the Southern horizon. A wall of unnatural, swirling black mist sat there, miles away but always watching.
What's left out there? he wondered, a thought he usually strangled before it could take root. Dead kings? Gold? Or just more cold?
The outskirts of Emar were quiet, save for the biting wind. He reached a small, leaning shack that stood apart from the sturdier farmhouses. It was a miserable thing of mud and thatch, but it was his.
As his heavy boots crunched on the gravel, a small bell tethered to the doorframe tinkled.
"Callus?"
The door creaked open. A young girl, perhaps fourteen, stepped out. She wore a thin, patched shawl, and her hand remained firmly on the doorframe for guidance. Liana's eyes were a striking, milky silver—beautiful, but utterly blind to the world of grey around them.
"I'm here, Li," Callus said, his voice dropping an octave, losing the harsh edge he used with the village traders.
He dropped the wood with a heavy thud and stepped toward her, gently taking her hand. Her fingers were ice-cold. "You shouldn't be standing in the draft. The wind is turning."
"I heard the crows," Liana whispered, her head tilting toward the Southern mist. "They weren't cawing, Callus. They were screaming. They're flying North. All of them."
Callus looked up. Usually, the sky was empty, but today, thin black streaks of birds were cutting through the clouds, fleeing from the direction of the forbidden zones.
"It's just a storm coming," he lied, though his gut tightened. He had spent ten years reading the wood and the weather to survive. This wasn't a storm.
He led her inside, the smell of damp earth and old pine needles greeting them. He began to stoke the hearth, his movements mechanical. He was a commoner, a nobody in a dying world, a man whose only skill was breaking things apart with an axe.
He didn't know that the ten years of daily labor had turned his bones into iron. He didn't know that the Southern mist was finally moving. But as he looked at his axe leaning against the wall, Callus felt a strange, terrifying itch in his palms—the same itch he felt right before a tree was about to fall.
The "itch" in his palms grew into a dull throb. It was a sensation Callus had learned to trust—a primal warning that the balance of things had shifted. He turned away from the hearth and walked back to the doorway, squinting at the treeline he had just left.
High above the canopy of the Ironwood forest, the sky didn't just darken; it bruised. The wind, which usually howled from the icy peaks of the North, suddenly died. The silence that followed was heavy, suffocating, and smelled faintly of ozone and ancient, rotting things.
CRACK-BOOM.
It wasn't thunder. It was the sound of a massive tree splintering, but not from an axe. Callus watched in horror as one of the Great Oaks—a sentinel that had stood for centuries—toppled over. Then another. And another. Something was moving through the woods, not walking on the ground, but ripples of energy tearing through the roots.
"Callus? What is that sound?" Liana's voice trembled from the shadows of the shack. She gripped the edge of the table so hard her knuckles turned white. "The ground... it's crying."
"Stay down, Li!" Callus barked.
He lunged for his axe. As his fingers wrapped around the worn handle, a shockwave of cold air slammed into the village. It wasn't the natural cold of Germia; it was a soul-chilling frost that turned the puddles to solid ice in a heartbeat.
From the direction of the Southern mist, a single, piercing shriek tore through the silence—a sound neither human nor animal. A dark shape, blurred and flickering like a dying candle flame, emerged from the falling trees at the edge of Emar. It was a scout of the abyss, a creature that shouldn't exist in the 163rd year of the human era.
Callus stepped out into the snow, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He was just a woodsman. He was a commoner who had spent ten years simply trying to stay warm. But as he raised his axe, his muscles moved with a terrifying, fluid precision.
The axe felt light. For the first time in a decade, the tool of his labor felt like a weapon of war.
"Ten years," Callus whispered, his gaze locking onto the shadow. "Ten years of cutting wood. Let's see if your neck is any tougher than ironwood."
The creature lunged, and Callus swung, the silver edge of his blade whistling through the air with the weight of a decade's struggle behind it. The isolation of the North was over.