A spear was jutting out with smoke still sizzling off it. A boy was sprawled right in front of it face down. His eyes never going to know if his choice to step out was enough to change the outcome.
Charred ashes remained all around him. A final thought that was forming as he breathed his last air was 'oh…I won't be able to keep my promise to-?'
In another part just shy of three kilometres away from him, a woman in her mid forties grabbed onto the ankle of a soldier ransacking the village in the Territory of Sevenren. Her children frightened, but half were dead unbeknownst to her, she could only see the scared expressions lodged in the darkness falling on their faces. A cooing melody she had told them that their mother will not let harm come to them.
A crudely made wooden signboard with words "8, Yunera village, Severen" written with shaky hands or more so hands that were of a child, was uprooted and used for simply caving the woman's brother's skull in.
This were merely the two outermost homes of Yunera village, or whatever was left in the bloodied burned clumps of ground in between the two with bodies that had no one left to give them a proper funeral.
"Sir! Sir, please, don'-!" The slap by an armoured wrist broke off five more teeth of the man begging for his business to not be destroyed. The soldiers had their own orders at least they were told they had. So, they did not stop.
An older, more experienced knight shushed the man. "As I said, this is no more a governed part of the Confederation of Tarna until we have surmised there are no more threats to its citizens. Understand this order."
The man was truly confused, 'what has happened?' He knew that the Territory of Sevenren is considered the safest in regards to doing business that you are less likely to be caught in a war. Yet here he was.
In the heart of the Territory of Sevenren, away from the capital Sevenren by kilometres that make even riding from there to here a three day journey. The very business city being developed to make the Territory freer from reliance on other Territories of the Confederation. His wasn't the only business being ransacked.
'WHY HASN'T THE ARMY MOVED TO STOP THIS??!!!' He wanted to scream but did not.
"And if you wish to blame someone? Blame the neon jacketed bounty hunter Anapahol." The older knight of knight's squad stated.
"Anapahol? Neon jacketed?" The man whispered under his breath. He knew of a neon jacket wearing bounty hunter named Anaphol, but not of many others who used neon mostly as their choice of clothing colour. He considered asking about it, his lips half way there to ask a truth about the lies the knight may have spoken. But the knight hit him in the head before the man spoke.
"Idiot! I told you before not to speak until told to!" The knight was scolding an already knocked out young man. If the young man had heard the last sentence, he may have asked 'when?'
The child's hiccups didn't stop but he kept his mouth shut.
"Find that rascal! Find him!" Screamed a voice so rusted under deceits hidden in honest orders handed to him.
Footsteps echoed. The boy still didn't pull his hands away from his mouth, not wanting to see the red that he can't smell.
He was simply coming from a church of The One who Walked. A teaching of the basics of history with simple mathematics were the subjects for today. He was too young to be taking a knight's course in sword wielding, but he still had a wooden sword with him back when he went to the church.
Now? That sword was broken. Split in half. The hilt jabbed into the eye of an unarmoured knight while the other half crushed under the wheels of a war carriage.
"Find the church! Find it and burn it down! If they are teaching a child to wield a sword, then they are all insurgents making more insurgents!" Thundered the same voice. "Find this despicable church in Etun city."
Cyn woke up from her being knocked out.
"What?!" 'How was I asleep?!' She tried getting up pushing with her right hand. It slipped.
Her head hitting the ash mixed bloodied stone pavement. 'It doesn't even hurt anymore.' She wanted to whisper it, but she had used her last strength to say aloud a single word.
"Useless girl." A soldier sitting atop her said. Pieces of clothing in his hand as he wrapped them around his arm.
'I-I didn't even notice him on me.'
She tried turning her head. When she did, she saw the colour, the simple thread patterns of the threads of those cloth pieces. She knew them.
She knew them because she wore them.
"You shouldn't turn." The soldier in his mid thirties said, "I have done plenty by now, and I won't hesitate to satiate me further." His teeth gripping one end of a tore cloth piece as he tied it.
Cyn's eyes widened. She felt the winds where she believed she should not have been last she remembered.
But before she could scream out, irrespective of the energy she could muster from within, the soldier became a porridge of red mist and viscera.
All falling upon her as a scream went over.
The scream wasn't hers. It was of the same Worm of worms.
Fear gripped her again. It felt more of an old accomplice than a dangerous stranger to her. Still it did its job of pushing her body to go beyond what it had the capacity for.
'How long?' That was her first question with her first push off the ground into another alleyway.
The place she was lying down plastered with worm shells.
"How.. long.. until.." She gasped and gasped. But her mind thought of the dreams she had of Yunera village and Etun city.