One Week Earlier.

  Ilaria’s group was still stuck in the mountains. Scouting had become extremely important as undead started showing themselves in increasing numbers. The camp they threw together could barely be considered a camp, just a small patch of flattened ground tucked between two broken shelves of rock where the wind could be managed and the line of sight was not completely hopeless. No fire could be seen. It was too dangerous. The group moved with the slow, sour rhythm of people who were exhausted. Packs and inventories were opened for cold jerky. Boots were loosened, and they lay down. A few of them took turns at the edge, keeping eyes on the ravine line below where mist sat heavy and the dark never fully cleared. Sarah lay on a bedroll near the centre with a cloak pulled up over her face, still unconscious, still breathing, still making the silence feel crowded. Ilaria stayed close enough to hear the thin catch in Sarah’s breath whenever it shifted, close enough to grab her if the ground gave way or the camp had to move in a rush. When Arj finally pointed down the slope and spoke about scouting a path before the next descent, nobody pushed back. Daylight was the only advantage they had left, and even that felt like something the mountain might take away if they got careless.

  “Ilaria,” Arj said, and there was no softness in it. “Stay with her. If she wakes, you make the call. If fighting erupts, you’re on protection duty.” He glanced at the others as if daring them to disagree, then looked back at Ilaria, expression tight. “The rest of us will be gone a few hours at most. We come back. If we do not, you move. You understand?” Ilaria nodded once, truthfully, she needed the time alone. Guard duty was a perfect opportunity to get her thoughts in order. She didn’t see Sarah as her responsibility, yet, Ilaria would die before she would allow her to be hurt. She crouched beside Sarah, checked the bandage again, adjusted the cloak higher to keep wind off her face, then shifted her own blade so it would draw cleanly from the angle she was sitting. She made sure her bow was always within reach, with arrows still in her quiver. The group filed out into the pale dawn, weapons in hand, boots quiet, and the moment they vanished around the bend the camp felt smaller, the silence sharper, the air colder in a way that had nothing to do with altitude.

  Ilaria sat with her back to the rock shelf and listened, she wouldn’t let anyone catch her off guard. Sound would give away any undead. They weren’t exactly known for being stealthy. Water made one sound. Loose stone made another. Footsteps could be counted if you stopped trying to hear everything at once. Below the camp, the ravine held a steady hush that never matched the rest of the wind, and that mismatch had been bothering her for hours. She watched it now, eyes narrowed, tracing the edge where rock fell away into grey and shadow. A long minute passed. Another. Sarah’s breathing stayed shallow and even. Her vision into the ravine was poor but she noticed something shift. Ilaria leaned forward, muscles tensing, and the next sound confirmed it. There were too many impacts, too close together, rising, closing, climbing. Since when did undead minions climb?

  The first head broke the rim of the ravine ten metres downslope, and for a heartbeat it looked almost human, until the shoulders followed and the body dragged itself up with fingers that dug into stone without pain or hesitation. Another appeared beside it. Then three more. They climbed in a loose wave, joints bending wrong, faces pale and slack, eyes fixed with the kind of hunger that had no emotion behind it. Ilaria did not wait for them to reach the camp. She grabbed Sarah under the shoulders and hauled her up with a grunt, forced her weight across her own back, then moved sideways into the narrow notch between the two rock shelves where shadow sat thick and the angle hid them from the ravine line. She lowered Sarah onto a bed of cold grit and folded the cloak tighter around her, then pressed herself into the corner with blade drawn and breath held. The undead kept coming. Their climbing made the ravine sound alive. Somewhere ahead, around the bend where Arj and the others had gone, a shout snapped through the air, sharp with surprise, followed by steel striking bone.

  Ilaria’s grip tightened until her knuckles ached. She wanted to stand. She wanted to sprint toward that sound and take the pressure off them, because that was what she had been trained to do, because that was what her body demanded when her people were in trouble. She did not move. She listened instead, forced herself to count distance and direction, forced herself to accept that charging blind into a fight on a mountain path would get her killed and would leave Sarah alone for the undead. The fighting ahead got louder, then fractured, as if the group had been hit from more than one side. Arrows hissed. Something heavy fell. A voice yelled Arj’s name and then cut off mid-word. The undead below the camp started to spill upward onto the flatter ground, their movement clumsy but relentless, and Ilaria’s stomach clenched as she realised what was happening. The five year halt had clearly driven the dead out of the deeper mountain routes, and now they were rising in numbers, funnelled by terrain, spreading like rot across every path that led down.

  A flicker of orange light cut through the grey to her left, fast and controlled, and the next moment a line of undead stumbled into view between the trees and rock, already burning. The fire did not roar. It crawled and clung to dry cloth and rotten flesh, turning them into silent moving torches. Behind that burning line, a black cat pounced through the chaos with a clear path in mind. It was small enough to vanish in shadow, but it didn’t try. Interestingly, the fire was doing well enough as a distraction. It moved in a straight line, tail lifted, ears forward, eyes fixed on the only gaps that mattered. A human followed it, stumbling and running in uneven bursts, face pale, breathing hard, trying to keep his feet under him with the frantic focus of someone surviving by obedience alone. Beside him, a dragonkin woman moved with more purpose, hands lifted, heat gathering at her palms before snapping forward in short bursts that pushed the undead away from the path the cat had chosen. The fire magic was precise, tight enough to avoid setting the whole slope alight, violent enough to turn the nearest dead into obstacles for the ones behind them.

  Up close, Ilaria could see the discipline in it. The dragonkin did not throw fire like rage. She laid it down like a tool, cutting the line of advance, forcing the dead to bunch in the wrong places, turning bodies into stumbling blocks so the ones behind tripped and piled. Each burst was shaped to the terrain, low and angled to burn what was already dry, short enough that it died on stone instead of climbing into scrub. She was making a corridor out of panic, and the corridor moved with the cat as if the two of them had practised it. Ilaria did not know who the dragonkin was, but she recognised the look on her face when the fire flared, the look of someone holding grief so tight it became fuel.

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  Ilaria’s throat went dry. Dragonkin. A stranger. In the middle of this. Her first instinct was to raise her blade and prepare to fight them too, but she remembered the message in her village.

  Dragonkin are heading west to new lands. Nothing could be done here. Any survivors or people seeking refuge, seek us out.

  Perhaps this was one of those dragonkin along with a human survivor. Maybe there was hope for members of her family after all. Ilaria’s second instinct hit half a heartbeat later when she saw the dragonkin’s face as the fire flared. She recognised something in the way she moved, rage held under control. Purpose sharpened into function. These people were running for their lives. The black cat paused, head turning slightly, eyes locking onto the shadow notch where Ilaria had hidden, and it made a sound that was not a meow and not a growl, a sharp chirp that cut through the noise. The human heard it instantly. His head snapped toward the notch. He didn’t hesitate. He pointed at Ilaria’s position and yelled, voice cracking, “There, Layla, there’s someone there, follow her, follow the cat, move, move,” and the way he shouted made it clear he was not making a suggestion. He was relaying an order he had learnt to trust.

  Peter’s panic was there if you looked for it, sitting in his shoulders and the whiteness of his knuckles, but he kept it leashed by giving himself jobs. He watched the cat’s tail and ears like they were a language. When the cat slowed and chirped sharp, Peter repeated it out loud, the way you repeated directions while running so you did not lose them. When it darted toward a gap, he called it before Layla’s eyes landed there, and when Layla hesitated, fire ready in her palms and uncertainty on her face, he surged into her space and shoved her forward with both hands, turning her pause into motion. “Now, now, that one, it wants that line,” he gasped, and he sounded ridiculous and terrified and useful all at once, surviving by following cues he had already decided were real.

  Layla’s eyes flicked in the direction he pointed, confusion and suspicion flashing across her face for a fraction, then she saw Sarah’s pale hand beneath the cloak and something hardened in her expression. She threw another burst of fire low across the ground to cut the nearest undead off at the knees, then grabbed the human’s sleeve and shoved him forward in the same motion, forcing him to keep running when exhaustion began to freeze him. The black cat darted ahead, claws flashing once, a thin crescent of force ripped through the air and split the skull of an undead that had tried to lunge into their path. The human didn’t stop to stare. He just kept moving, breathing ragged, feet slipping and catching, repeating the cat’s cues back to Layla in broken, urgent phrases. “Left, left, no, that gap, it wants that gap, don’t stop, don’t stop,” and Layla followed with the slight delay of someone still learning how to read a creature that did not speak, hands firing again when the undead pressed too close.

  Ilaria stepped out of the notch with her bow at the ready and her shoulders squared, making the choice in a single breath. She could not hold the camp. She could not carry Sarah and fight a wave climbing out of a ravine. She had one real option and it was movement. “This way,” she called, voice cutting through the noise, and Arj’s group answered from ahead with a shout of their own, distant and strained. “Go,” someone yelled back, and it was not Arj’s voice this time. It was Rayleigh’s, sharp with panic and determination. “We can’t get back, they’re between us, get out, get out now, we’ll pull them off you.” Arrows flew again in the distance, and Ilaria caught a glimpse of the group retreating along the higher track, firing and backing up in a rhythm that was ugly and desperate but effective, drawing the densest cluster of undead toward them and away from the lower path.

  Peter reached Ilaria first, skidding to a stop when he saw her bow, then correcting himself instantly when the black cat bumped his ankle and chirped again. He swallowed hard and lifted both hands, palms open, showing he wasn’t armed in any meaningful way. “We’re not with them,” he blurted, words tumbling out too fast. “We’re running too. Cat says you’ve got a person down. We need to move.” Ilaria’s eyes flicked from him to Layla, taking in the fire on her hands, the ash on her sleeves, the way her gaze kept snapping back to the undead with a focus that was too tight for comfort. Layla didn’t speak. She chugged a blue potion, then threw more fire into the crowds. The weight settled and dragged at her spine. Sarah’s arm flopped against her collarbone. Ilaria adjusted her grip, locked Sarah in place, then pushed forward with the others as the black cat surged into the lead again, tail slicing the air with sharp signals that Peter repeated without question, turning instinct into action before Layla could argue with her own fear.

  They ran downhill into smoke and cold, fire lighting the path in small, harsh bursts, undead closing in from the ravine edge and the side slopes, their numbers thick enough to make the world feel crowded. Ilaria stored her bow and got he blade ready. She used her body as a shield for Sarah and used terrain as a weapon, stepping where loose stone would slide under undead feet, forcing them into awkward angles, cutting only when something got close enough that it would grab. Layla’s fire did not stop. It flared and cut and snapped in short, controlled releases that kept the group from being surrounded, and Peter stayed glued to the black cat’s movements, calling the turns before Layla could see them, keeping her from burning the wrong line and trapping them in their own heat. The sound behind them was a constant scrape and click and the wet slap of bodies hitting ground. The sound ahead was arrows and shouting, the retreating group buying seconds with every step. Ilaria didn’t look back to measure how far they’d come. She measured the next ten metres instead, and kept moving. Any hesitation now would just cost their lives.

  By the time the slope levelled into a narrow stretch of broken ground where the wind cut clean and the smoke thinned, Ilaria’s legs were shaking and Sarah’s weight felt doubled. The black cat slowed for the first time, ears pivoting, then chirped sharply and darted toward a split in the rock face that Ilaria would have missed if she’d been alone. Peter caught the cue instantly and grabbed Layla’s elbow, pulling her toward it before she could stop and try to burn the undead again out of instinct. Layla resisted for a fraction, eyes flicking back toward the chaos with something raw and furious in her expression, then she let herself be dragged into the split when another wave of undead surged up behind them and the air filled with the stink of rot. Ilaria followed last, shoulder scraping stone as she forced Sarah through, blade held tight to avoid catching the walls. The split widened just enough to swallow them, then tightened again, cutting the sound down to a muffled roar that made the silence inside feel unreal.

  They did not stop. They did not collapse. They kept moving through the narrow passage with breath rasping and hands shaking, because stopping on a mountain full of undead was how you turned into a body someone else found later. Behind them, the fighting continued, distant and strained, and Ilaria clenched her jaw hard enough to hurt because she knew what Rayleigh’s shout had meant. The others were buying time with their lives if they had to. The black cat padded ahead without slowing, and Peter followed it with the kind of desperate competence that came from listening properly when panic wanted to make you stupid. Layla stayed close, fire held tight in her palms, eyes scanning the dark for the next threat. Ilaria carried Sarah and kept her blade ready, and in the back of her mind a single thought kept circling without permission.

  She had just met strangers in a running fight, and for the first time in days she had been given a small ray of hope.