They left before first light.

  No fanfare, no farewell just the hush of bootsteps over hoarfrost, the muffled rattle of gear, the steady breath of men stepping into danger with eyes set hard. Martin led a strike force of twenty. Veterans with cold eyes and worn armor. Younger volunteers with tight jaws and trembling hands. And two woodsmen—silent, sharp-eyed men who had once ranged with the Empire’s scouts during the last bitter border wars. All bore the weight of steel and silence.

  Each man carried a short blade, a bow, and three days' worth of dried meat, hard bread, and bitter root for tea. They moved in disciplined quiet across the eastern clearing, where snow had melted to reveal a scarred plain of mud and black grass. Ahead loomed the trees: tall, pale, unmoving.

  The locals called it the Ash-Wood, though no maps dared name it. It was not ash in color—no fire had claimed it in living memory. But the trees grew strange there: trunks pale as ivory, bark smooth and cool to the touch, their branches whispering in breezes that never seemed to reach the forest floor. Leaves shimmered silver in the half-light. No birdsong. No animal cries. Just the sound of wind between old limbs, like breath caught between teeth.

  Even the underbrush seemed subdued, crushed under some forgotten weight. Every step snapped twigs like breaking bones. Every sound echoed.

  They did not speak unless they had to.

  On the second morning, they reached a cold ravine and paused for rest beneath an ancient fallen tree. Mist clung low, hugging the earth in thin skeins.

  Theodore knelt beside a gully, bare feet pale and callused, a hunting spear slung across his shoulder. He pressed a hand to the soil, breathed in deeply, then stood.

  “They pass through here,” he said. His voice was soft, but the weight in it was iron. “Often. The soil’s bruised. Prints go both ways—boots, bare feet. Heavy loads. They avoid the ridgelines—too exposed. They favor gullies. Low trails. Harder to track, easier to vanish.”

  Martin nodded once. His eyes scanned the treeline with the unspoken calculation of a man who had watched too many friends fall to traps and ambushes. He signaled with two fingers. The column scattered, melting into trees like shades. They would move slow now. Eyes wide. Ears open. Breathing shallow.

  Caution was survival.

  By noon, they found signs: frost-bitten bootprints veering off the trail, the edges already softened by wind. A snapped branch bent at the wrong angle. Droppings that stank of cooked meat and sickness. The woods had been used—and not long ago.

  Then came the smoke.

  A thin, gray thread rising over the trees like a whisper against the sky—visible only from the ridge. A league, maybe less.

  Martin crouched low in the brush. His fingers brushed frost from a stone as he watched the distant column of smoke.

  “They’re burning something,” muttered one of the younger scouts.

  “Or someone,” Martin replied, not looking away.

  Stolen story; please report.

  They moved as one—no command needed. Feet soft. Arrows nocked. Blades ready. The silence grew deeper as they drew closer, broken only by the soft hiss of breath and the crunch of snow beneath careful steps. The smoke thickened as they climbed the ridge, wreathing their cloaks in the acrid scent of burnt flesh.

  Then they saw it.

  Below them, in a narrow ravine, hidden from the high trails, sprawled a crude camp. Tents cobbled from sailcloth and fur, leathers lashed between splintered trunks. A watchtower—half-collapsed—leaned over a clearing where fires crackled high and hot. In their light, meat turned slowly on spits, casting shadows across the muck.

  And in the far corner—beneath tarps and behind crude fencing—huddled prisoners. Men. Women. Children. Wrapped in rags, their skin pale, bruised, some barely upright. Two dozen, maybe more.

  There were at least forty bandits. Rough and wild. Some wore fragments of old armor—looted from soldiers, stolen from the dead. Others were bare-chested despite the cold, their bodies smeared with soot and scars. They moved with the ease of men who feared nothing. Fires roared at the camp’s heart.

  Martin’s eyes dropped to the ashes beneath one of the flames.

  Bones. Charred and cracked. Human.

  “They’re eating them,” whispered a soldier, his face twisted with horror.

  “Not always,” Theodore replied, voice hard. “Sometimes they just burn the dead to stay warm.”

  Martin felt the slow burn of rage in his gut. His orders had been clear: Observe. Report. Do not engage.

  But this was no raiding party.This was something else.A seed. A sickness.

  If left to grow, it would devour everything.

  He watched the prisoners for a long moment. One child was shaking uncontrollably. Another stared upward, eyes blank, unblinking.

  Martin stood.

  “We strike.”

  They used the ridge.

  Dusk fell like a curtain of blood, staining the sky with fire. The camp below grew louder—men laughing, shouting, drunk on their own invincibility.

  Martin split the force in two. Ten archers circled west, slipping between stones and fallen trunks to take position on higher ground. The rest—swordsmen, woodsmen, and the quiet fury that had followed them from the fortress—gathered at the slope’s edge.

  Bows were drawn. Arrows dipped in pitch. Flames sparked to life.

  Martin raised a fist.

  The air held its breath.

  Then—he dropped it.

  The first volley fell like judgment.

  Flaming shafts screamed down from the ridge, striking tents, packs, bodies. Fires bloomed. Screams tore the silence apart. One tent caught instantly, lighting the sky with orange fury. A man staggered from it, clothes ablaze, and fell shrieking into the mud.

  Martin charged, blade drawn, his voice rising above the roar.

  “NO MERCY!”

  The descent was chaos—snow and blood, firelight flashing across steel. Bandits scrambled to their weapons but the surprise was absolute. The guards cut through them like reapers in a field. Martin was the first to strike, cleaving into a wild-eyed brute whose rusted blade barely cleared its sheath before he fell.

  Theodore roared, his spear a blur. He fought with the wrath of old blood—a man who had lost kin to fire, to chains, to hunger. He drove his spear into a shrieking bandit’s gut and didn’t stop pushing.

  A leader—a broad man in scale mail—rallied a knot of fighters. He surged toward Martin with a spiked mace raised—

  —and took an arrow through the throat.

  The momentum died with him.

  It ended quickly. Messy. Brutal. But quick.

  When dawn broke, the ravine was quiet. Smoke drifted up, mingled now with the scent of blood.

  Martin stood amid the wreckage.

  They freed the prisoners. Most were from nearby villages—places thought long lost. Some wept, their voices gone. Some simply stared. A few—wordless and grim—took up fallen weapons and helped bury the dead.

  Martin lost four men. Five more were wounded—one badly.

  He walked the camp’s edge slowly, eyes scanning the fires, the ash, the broken faces of the freed.

  Then he gave the order.

  “Burn it all. The tents. The tower. Every bone, every rope, every nail. We leave no ghosts behind. Only ashes.”

  They lit the fires before noon. The wind carried the smoke east—away from the fortress.

  They did not look back.