The Gray Stone ports did not feel like part of Eldoria.

  Fog clung low over the water in long, torn strips, as if something had dragged claws across the mist and left it scarred. The sea itself pulsed wrong. Waves rolled in their ordinary rhythm, yet every few breaths a second current shuddered beneath them, a heartbeat not born of tide or moon.

  Luucner walked the length of the pier with his hood down, white hair damp with salt. His short swords were crossed along his back, bow over his shoulder. Ziif advanced ahead of him, cloak parted just enough to show the dull gleam of the ARK pistols holstered at his hips. Hajeel remained close, one hand resting by instinct on the hilt of his flame-blade, green eyes sweeping every shadow.

  The smell was the first warning, a mix of salt, fish, and tar alongside burnt oil, bitter herbs, and something sharp and metallic that had no business near seawater.

  “Ports are usually loud,” Hajeel murmured. “Laughing. Bargaining. Someone singing terribly.”

  “People sing when tomorrow looks like today,” Ziif replied, eyes never still. “Look around. No one here believes that anymore.”

  He was right.

  Dockworkers moved too fast and too quietly, like noise might draw something from the deep. Nets were folded and hidden rather than spread to dry. Crates were unloaded and whisked indoors with no markings, no calls of price, no usual arguments. Everything carried the frantic hush of people afraid to be noticed.

  A cart groaned past them. The tarp covering its load was stained with a dark, powdery residue that wasn’t blood or ash, something else entirely that looked like crushed stone mixed with soot.

  “Do they know we’re here?” Hajeel whispered.

  Ziif didn’t slow.

  “They know someone came,” he said. “Soldiers, scouts, council eyes—for them it’s all one shadow. A hand that signs orders and leaves.”

  Luucner forced himself to stop staring at the warped pull of the ocean. Certain patches of water looked too still, as if something beneath them was drinking the movement from the sea. When the wind shifted, he almost imagined a faint humming under the waves.

  He shook it off.

  “We start with whoever still talks,” he said. “Before silence becomes law.”

  ?

  They found an old fisherman sitting on an overturned barrel, pipe unlit in his hands, gaze fixed on the horizon like it might bite him.

  Ziif crouched in front of him. “Anything strange these last days?”

  The man swallowed. His eyes flicked toward a nearby alley before he answered.

  “Strange? Aye. The sort that makes a man wish he were deaf.”

  Luucner stepped closer. “Speak plainly.”

  “I saw elves,” the man whispered, “but not like any I’ve known. Marked head to toe in glowing runes. Moving in groups. Not speaking. Not blinking.”

  Hajeel exchanged a tense look with Luucner.

  “And you followed them?” Ziif asked.

  The man shook his head, fast and violent. “I’m old, not suicidal. But they went toward the old smuggler’s quarter. Down where the sea caves run under the port.”

  Ziif rose. “Thank you.”

  The old man grabbed his sleeve with bony fingers. “If you’re smart, boys, you didn’t hear a thing.”

  ?

  They followed the directions through narrow alleys where seawater pooled black between the stones, reflecting nothing. Rotting ropes hung from rusted hooks. The further they went, the fewer voices they heard, until only the creak of old wood and the distant knock of waves against stone remained.

  Then they saw them, two elves, or at least that’s what their bones had started as. Their skin had become a tapestry of runes, spiraling and angular, some glowing faint blue while others were seared into flesh. The marks crawled over bare arms, necks, and cheeks, disappearing under robes etched with the same symbols.

  “Those aren’t tribal marks,” Ziif whispered. “Those are—”

  “Scripts,” Hajeel finished quietly. “Old ones. Older than the ARK.”

  The pair moved with silent purpose toward a reinforced door set into stone, iron rings bolted across its surface. One of them tapped a rhythm against the metal, slow and intricate. Locks clicked open in sequence. The door shifted, heavy as a vault, and the three disappeared inside.

  Ziif glanced at the others. “We take them quietly,” he said. “We don’t know what else is down there.”

  Luucner nodded once. Hajeel swallowed and tightened his grip on the flame-blade’s hilt.

  They slipped through the door before it could close.

  ?

  The room beyond was not Eldorian.

  Crystals pulsed in glass tubes. Iron scaffolds grew like vines over massive stone tablets carved with symbols older than any archive. The air stank of sulfur, copper, and something sweet and rotten, the kind of smell that came from fruit left too long in the sun.

  And on the tables—

  Hajeel gagged softly.

  Humans. Orcs. Their bodies twisted, limbs elongated, bone plates fused through their skin. Some still twitched as if trying to remember how to breathe. Others stared with empty, animal eyes. Tubes had been sunk into arms and necks, feeding shimmering liquids into veins that already glowed faintly from within.

  “Alchemy,” Luucner whispered. “But not ours.”

  “First People work,” Ziif said. “Forbidden work.”

  A shape moved in the shadows.

  The two tattooed elves stepped forward, palms lifting. Runes blazed across their arms, brighter and sharper than before. Their eyes lit with the same wrong glow.

  Ziif’s hands hovered near his pistols. “Get ready.”

  A deeper shadow detached from the back wall, tall and robed, face hidden inside a hood that seemed blacker than the room around it.

  “Enough,” the voice said, cold and smooth. “Fall back.”

  The two marked elves obeyed without a word.

  A rift tore open behind them, violet-edged and pulsing. The robed figure stepped through first, followed by the rune-marked elves. The portal snapped halfway shut and left their creations behind.

  The mutated creatures lunged.

  ?

  The first twisted orc hit the stone where Luucner had stood a heartbeat before. The floor cracked, chips of rock exploding upward. Luucner dodged past its shoulder and slashed twice in a tight cross. Black-red blood sprayed, steaming where it struck the ground.

  A heavier creature thundered toward Ziif. He planted his feet and drew both pistols in one smooth motion. Bolts of blue ARK energy punched into a half-human thing’s chest. It staggered but didn’t fall.

  “It’s still coming!” Hajeel shouted.

  “Then cut deeper!” Ziif snapped.

  Hajeel’s flame-blade roared to life, a line of fire along steel. He stepped into the path of a lunging creature, body low, and carved a burning arc from hip to shoulder. Flesh parted, sizzling. The thing collapsed, twitching, the wound cauterized before it could bleed.

  Another mutated body slammed into him from the side, claws ripping at his arm. Hajeel cried out as hot pain tore across his bicep. He stumbled, blade dipping.

  “On your right!” Luucner called.

  He was already moving. His first sword knocked the creature’s claws wide while the second sliced through its exposed throat. It dropped, limbs twitching on the stone.

  “I had it,” Hajeel hissed through clenched teeth, pressing a hand to his bleeding arm.

  “I know,” Luucner said, not unkindly. “Keep having it.”

  One of the bulkier mutations, a thick-shouldered orc-thing with plates of bone protruding from its spine, charged Ziif. He fired twice, once into its shoulder and once into its face.

  The pistols clicked empty.

  “Out,” Ziif breathed.

  The creature kept coming.

  Luucner grabbed his bow and loosed an arrow at point-blank range. The shaft buried itself up through the creature’s open jaw and into the skull. It staggered three more steps, then toppled.

  “On me,” Luucner barked. “No gaps.”

  They tightened by instinct into a rough triangle, with Luucner ahead, Ziif covering the side with empty pistols now treated like clubs, and Hajeel dragging his injured arm close to his body while holding the flame-blade one-handed.

  Another creature crept along the wall, half-crawling and half-sliding, eyes wet and black. Luucner met it halfway. He pinned its hand to the stone with one sword while the other punched straight through its eye socket, then yanked sideways.

  Hajeel faced two smaller mutants. Pain made his movements ragged, but his blade work stayed disciplined. He cut low at a knee, then high at the throat, a fast and ugly pair of strikes that left one body collapsing over the other. The second staggered. Ziif stepped in and smashed the butt of a pistol into its temple, once, twice, until the skull gave.

  The room fell silent except for the faint hiss of dying flame and the trembling of Hajeel’s breath.

  ?

  “Let me see,” Luucner said.

  Hajeel tried to wave him off. “It’s just a scratch.”

  “Show me.”

  He did. Four slashes raked across the upper arm, shallow but ugly. Blood had soaked through his sleeve and dripped across his hand.

  “You’re lucky,” Ziif grunted. “Another inch and you’d be fighting left-handed for the rest of your career.”

  Hajeel forced a crooked grin. “Better than not fighting at all.”

  Luucner tore a strip from his own undershirt and bound the wound tight. The heat from the flame-blade had cauterized part of it. The rest still bled, but slower now.

  “Keep pressure on it,” Luucner said. “And stay behind me if we run into anything else.”

  “Haven’t you heard?” Hajeel said. “I’m getting very good at being where the trouble is.”

  “Apparently,” Ziif muttered.

  He wiped a smear of black fluid from his cheek and looked around. The lab still pulsed with runes glowing faintly on the walls, crystals throbbing with inner light, and half-filled vials trembling from the recent chaos.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  “We weren’t sent here to fight abominations,” Ziif said.

  “No,” Luucner answered, gaze lingering on the stone tablets and twisted bodies. “But someone wanted us to see this.”

  Hajeel nudged a shattered vial with his boot. The liquid inside shimmered, then dimmed as it touched air. “Whatever they’re doing, it’s not Eldorian. And it’s not just experiments.”

  “It’s preparation,” Luucner said quietly.

  Ziif holstered his empty pistols. “The question is, for what?”

  Luucner looked at the still-glowing runes, at the alchemical rigging, at the shadows where the portal had torn through reality and sealed again as if pretending it had never been opened.

  His voice came low.

  “For a war that doesn’t follow our rules.”

  ?

  The southern forests were wrong, too still, too neat, too watchful.

  Birdsong had abandoned the branches. Wind skimmed the treetops without a whisper. Even the river beside the path ran low and slow, as if reluctant to make a sound. Leeonir walked at the front, jaw tight, eyes sharp, every sense strung taut. Saahag moved at his flank with the loose grace of a seasoned predator. Louren followed close, restless and coiled, carrying that dangerous hunger of someone young who had already buried too much.

  Smoke drifted on the wind, thin and acidic, clinging to the back of the throat.

  Saahag stopped first. “That’s not cooking fire,” she said. “That’s ruin.”

  Louren crouched, running fingers through ash-smeared soil. “Someone died here. Not long ago.”

  Leeonir nodded. His left hand pulsed beneath the black leather glove. Heat throbbed there, deep and steady, as if something slept underneath and resented being ignored.

  They reached the first village at midmorning, or what was left of it. Burned beams. Collapsed roofs. Doors hanging from twisted hinges. No bodies. Just drag marks in the earth and dark stains where people had been and weren’t anymore.

  The second village was the same. So was the third.

  Each settlement felt less like a ruin and more like a wound, fresh and raw, with the scab torn away again and again.

  Louren touched a blackened wall. Soot came away on his fingertips. “No scavengers,” he said quietly. “No wolves. No birds pecking at the edges.”

  Saahag’s blades slid free with a soft scrape. “Means whatever passed through here scared everything else off. Or plans to come back.”

  The forest answered with silence.

  Leeonir tasted iron in the air.

  They kept moving.

  ?

  By sunset, they reached a place that still clung to life.

  Shadows moved behind makeshift barricades. Roofs were patched with whatever wood hadn’t burned. Elders sat in a ring near the well, faces hollowed by exhaustion. Archers held bows that seemed to weigh twice as much as they should. Children huddled behind a cracked stone wall, a cluster of small shapes staring out with eyes too old for their faces.

  Leeonir approached the smallest girl, a soot-faced child clutching a broken wooden horse. Her eyes lifted to him cautiously, as if she feared any sudden movement would make the world shatter again.

  “They took my brother,” she whispered. “They took all of them.”

  Her knuckles were white around the toy. The leather glove on Leeonir’s left hand tightened, seams creaking with the pressure of his grip.

  A warrior stepped forward from the edge of the square. Blood crusted his collar. His leather armor was torn and hastily strapped back together. He moved as if each step had to be bargained with.

  “An ogre led them,” he said. “Baargol. The Ivory Ogre.”

  The name hit harder than a blow.

  Baargol. Ivory skin. Heavy club. Arlin’s ragged breath. A little girl’s scream cut off too soon. A promise, made over a sharpening stone, that Leeonir had failed to keep.

  “And the children?” Leeonir asked. His voice came out lower than he expected.

  “They dragged them toward the stone gorge,” the man replied. “And Baargol’s wrong now. The magic twisted him. Black tusks. Veins that burn under his skin. He hits harder than before and moves faster.”

  Saahag’s gaze sharpened. Louren’s jaw clenched until the muscle jumped.

  Leeonir stared into the line of trees at the village’s edge. The sky above them had gone the color of old bruises.

  “We hunt him,” he said.

  ?

  Night thickened around them as they followed the trail into the woods.

  Massive footprints pressed deep into the earth. Rope fibers clung to torn bark. Here and there, a scrap of cloth snagged in thorns. Louren found a sandal small enough to hide in his palm.

  He held it up, throat working. “They didn’t even pretend to cover their tracks.”

  Saahag laid a hand briefly on his shoulder. “They want us to come. So we do. We just don’t die the way they want.”

  The first corpse lay twisted at the roots of an old oak, ribs caved inward. The second was half-eaten, face gone. Leeonir looked away from the third too late.

  A child. Left in the open. The pose deliberate.

  His left hand vibrated. Heat flared beneath the glove until a faint thread of smoke curled up from one seam.

  Saahag’s voice came softer. “We’ll stop them,” she said. “We don’t walk past this and do nothing.”

  He didn’t answer. He couldn’t, not with the weight in his throat.

  They pressed on.

  ?

  Torchlight flickered at the bottom of the gorge, turning rocks into jagged teeth.

  Cages sat in the center of the clearing, small ones packed with children. Thin hands clutched the bars. Wide eyes watched everything and nothing.

  Five orcs guarded them. Two lesser ogres leaned against stones, sharpening blades. Their laughter bounced off the walls, low and ugly, making the air feel thinner.

  Leeonir’s fingers locked around Ecos’s hilt.

  Saahag whispered, “Fast. Silent as we can manage. Louren left. I’ll cut the center. You—”

  But Leeonir had already moved.

  He slid down the slope and hit the ground running. Ecos’s blade tore through the first orc’s spine from behind. The body dropped in two lifeless halves before it knew it was dead. Louren came down after him, driving his sword clean between an orc’s ribs and out the other side without wasting breath on a shout.

  Saahag flowed through the chaos, twin blades flickering. She cut a tendon at the back of a knee here, opened a throat there. One ogre reached for her. She pivoted, let the grab slide past her shoulder, and opened his hamstring in a single, decisive stroke.

  The second ogre tried to run. Louren caught him, sword punching through kidney and twisting. The scream cut short.

  When the last body fell, the only sounds were the crackle of torches and the choked sobs of children.

  But Baargol was nowhere in sight.

  Louren wiped his cheek with the back of his hand, shoulders heaving. “If this was just the guard post…”

  “Then the monster is close,” Saahag finished.

  Leeonir stared into the deeper dark beyond the cages, past the torchlight. The massive shape shifted there, just beyond what the eye wanted to focus on.

  He started forward.

  The darkness laughed.

  ?

  “That’s far enough,” a voice boomed.

  Baargol stepped into the light, his ivory flesh now threaded with pulsing black veins. His tusks had turned obsidian, and his eyes burned yellow with a cruel intelligence that hadn’t been there before. ARK energy crawled under his skin, tracing patterns along his chest and arms.

  “You brought more little ones for me?” he mocked. “How thoughtful. I love when they scream.”

  On the cliff above, villagers who’d followed as backup screamed and charged. Orcs surged from the shadows to meet them, steel and bone colliding. Saahag dove into the fray, blades carving space where there had been none. Louren slid in beside her, sword work tight and vicious, every strike finding a joint or a gap in armor. They fought together with the practiced rhythm of those who had lived this moment a hundred times in nightmares.

  Leeonir barely saw them.

  The world narrowed to the giant walking toward him.

  Baargol rolled his thick neck until it popped. ARK veins flared with each crack. “Still weak, elf?”

  Then he moved, far too fast for something that size. His fist hit Leeonir’s ribs with the force of a battering ram, lifting him off his feet. The world turned over. Stone slammed his back. Dust exploded around him.

  Breath fled his lungs. Pain flared sharp and white along his side.

  He pushed up anyway.

  Baargol grinned. “Good. I’d hate this to be quick.”

  The club came next, whistling through the air. Leeonir rolled. The ground where he’d been standing erupted in a crater, stones flying.

  He came up on one knee and slashed. The blade bit into Baargol’s hip, drawing a heavy line of black blood.

  The ogre looked down at the wound, then at Leeonir, and laughed.

  He kicked.

  The impact crashed into Leeonir’s chest, half armor and half bone. He flew, skidded across gravel, and came to a halt on his side. His ribs felt like shattered glass. Warmth trickled from his mouth.

  His fingers dug into the dirt. He forced his legs under him.

  Baargol’s footsteps shook the ground.

  “Do you want a story?” the ogre asked, almost conversational. “You remember the human? The father?”

  Leeonir’s head snapped up.

  “When I crushed him,” Baargol went on, “he made the sweetest sound, almost musical in how bones break.”

  Leeonir’s heartbeat roared in his ears.

  “And the girl,” Baargol smiled, tusks gleaming black, “the little one? Her screams still ring in my head. Pure music.”

  The rage that had been simmering in Leeonir’s chest ignited all at once, white-hot and consuming.

  ?

  His heartbeat slowed.

  His breathing deepened.

  The edges of the world sharpened into painful clarity. He could see the way Baargol’s pupils narrowed, the tremor in his right knee, the faint hitch in his breath on the left side.

  Heat surged up Leeonir’s left arm, boiling under skin and scale. The leather glove smoked as seams pulled apart. Flames flickered between cracks. The glove burned away in shreds, falling to the ground in curling strips.

  Underneath, his hand was no longer an elf’s. Dark scales layered over one another, hard as stone and shot through with molten lines. Heat shimmered off them, warping the air. Claws flexed at his fingertips, black and curved.

  Baargol took a half-step back without meaning to.

  Leeonir rose and began moving forward. Each step hurt, but by the third, the pain had become just another sound in the background.

  ?

  Baargol swung the club with desperation this time. Leeonir slipped under it by a hair’s breadth, feeling the wind comb his hair back. Ecos’s blade flashed up and opened the ogre’s forearm from wrist to elbow. Black blood sprayed, hot and oily.

  Baargol roared and drew back, but Leeonir was already inside his guard. The blade carved across the chest through flesh and ARK-veined muscle. Light flickered in the wound. The next strike went low, slashing across the thigh where armor didn’t quite meet.

  Baargol staggered, balance shot, breath coming rough.

  “What are you?” he demanded, voice frayed.

  Leeonir didn’t answer.

  He drove his scaled fist into Baargol’s jaw. Bone cracked with a sound that echoed through the gorge. Pain jolted all the way up Leeonir’s arm, fire racing along the scales, but the strike landed. Another punch hammered into ribs and broke them. The third crashed into the collarbone with a sharp, clean snap.

  Every hit sent agony screaming through Leeonir’s own limb. It felt as if the power rushing through his arm was tearing it apart from inside, muscle fiber by muscle fiber. Each time he struck, a new line of molten heat crawled a little farther up his wrist, threatening to spread past the boundary of scale and flesh.

  He kept going.

  Baargol reeled, swinging wild now, more animal than fighter. A backhand caught Leeonir across the shoulder, spinning him. For a moment his vision blurred and his knees buckled. He almost dropped.

  Saahag’s voice cut through the chaos, sharp and distant. “LEEONIR!”

  He tasted blood. Straightened.

  Baargol limped forward, chuckling breathlessly. “You burn nice,” he wheezed. “Maybe I’ll keep a piece.”

  Leeonir stepped in, low and vicious.

  His sword slammed across the first knee. Bone cracked. Tendons snapped. The leg folded sideways at a sickening angle. Baargol screamed, dropping to one side. The second knee went soon after, a brutal horizontal cut that sheared through joint and muscle. The ogre’s other leg gave way. He crashed forward onto his hands, then onto his chest, teeth snapping shut as he hit the dirt.

  He clawed at the ground, dragging himself forward with ruined arms while his legs twitched uselessly behind him.

  “No,” he gasped. “No—no—”

  Leeonir walked forward, each step setting new pain burning through his left arm. The fire licked up past his wrist now, threatening his forearm. The scales there glowed faintly at the edges. His fingers shook. His breath came ragged. The world narrowed to the broken shape squirming in the dirt.

  Baargol’s arm shot out, faster than dying things should move. His fist caught Leeonir’s ankle, yanking him down. The world tilted. Leeonir’s knee hit the dirt hard. The ogre’s jaws snapped toward his throat, tusks gleaming black in the firelight.

  Saahag’s blade punched through Baargol’s wrist from the side, pinning it to the ground with a wet crunch.

  “Not today,” she snarled.

  Leeonir rolled clear, gasping. His ankle throbbed where the ogre’s grip had nearly crushed bone. He pushed to his feet, scaled hand trembling, and limped forward.

  He set his clawed hand on the back of Baargol’s skull. The talons dug into thick skin. Blood ran hot between his fingers.

  Baargol froze.

  Leeonir leaned down until their eyes met, the ogre’s face half-turned in the dirt, one yellow pupil blown wide with fear.

  “You are nothing,” Leeonir said softly. His voice didn’t sound entirely like his own. “No one will remember you.”

  Baargol tried to speak.

  Leeonir didn’t let him.

  Ecos’s sword drove down, straight through bone and brain and stone beneath. The impact shuddered up his arm, clashing with the fire already there. For a second, the pain became so bright it washed everything white.

  Baargol twitched once, then went still.

  ?

  Sound rushed back in pieces.

  Saahag shouting orders. Louren cursing between gasps. The clatter of chains falling as children were freed from cages. The wet cough of an ogre dying somewhere on the edge of the fight.

  Leeonir’s breaths came shallow and harsh. Blood dripped from his nose, warm against his upper lip. The arm that had crushed Baargol’s skull trembled, fingers still sunk into gouges in the dead ogre’s scalp.

  He forced them to unclench.

  The claws retracted a little, but the scales remained, thick across his hand, climbing his wrist, stopping just short of his forearm. The molten lines between them dimmed but didn’t vanish.

  He tried to straighten fully and nearly blacked out. His knees hit the dirt before he knew they were giving. The sword clanged as he used it to prop himself upright.

  Saahag reached him first, blades already sheathed, hair stuck with blood and sweat to her temples.

  “Leeon.” Her hand hovered near his shoulder, not quite touching. “Look at me.”

  He did.

  Her gaze flicked down to his hand, then back up to his face. For a heartbeat, fear crossed her expression, not of him but for him, deep and old and impossible to hide. Then she schooled it away, jaw tightening.

  “How bad?” she asked.

  He followed her eyes.

  The glove was gone, burned to scraps. His left hand looked as if it belonged to something forged in fire rather than born under sky. Scales thick as stone covered his fingers, knuckles, and the back of his hand, creeping up over the pulse of his wrist. The skin above that point was still his, pale and elven and slick with sweat, but the border between them was ugly and raw, as if the flesh couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.

  He flexed his fingers. Pain lanced through bone and tendon. The strength that had filled the limb moments before had drained away, leaving it heavy and clumsy.

  “It stopped here,” he said, voice hoarse, nodding at his wrist. “For now.”

  Louren approached from the side, sword still in his hand, that strange and quiet focus lingering in his eyes. Behind him, children clung to one another, watching with the wary stillness of those who had seen too much.

  “You killed him,” Louren said. “The Ivory Ogre. After what he did, that matters.”

  Leeonir’s arm shook harder. He forced his fingers to close around Ecos’s hilt, and even that felt like lifting stone.

  “It cost something,” Saahag murmured, eyes still on the scaled hand.

  He nodded once. Every heartbeat sent a faint throb of heat through the scaled flesh, a reminder that this was not a victory’s mark but a warning.

  He tilted his head back, looking up at the narrow slice of sky the gorge allowed them. A few cold stars stared back.

  “Arlin,” he whispered, voice cracked but steady, “your suffering is avenged. Your daughter’s cries are avenged. Rest now, my brother.”

  The words left him with more strength than he’d expected. Hollowed him out.

  Saahag hooked her arm under his uninjured side.

  “Up,” she said. “We still have to get them home.”

  He let her take some of his weight. His legs obeyed, but there was no power left in them, only habit. The scaled hand hung slightly heavier at his side, fingers twitching as if an echo of the earlier fire still crawled beneath them. His ankle protested with every step, a dull ache where Baargol’s grip had tried to shatter it.

  Behind them, Louren started cutting the last of the cage bars, voice low as he soothed frightened children. The gorge smelled of blood, smoke, and something else now, as if stone had been burned from the inside.

  They had won, but it didn’t feel clean. It felt like the opening of a door he hadn’t meant to touch.

  Leeonir tightened his grip on the sword with his right hand, the normal one, and tried not to think about the other.

  They left the gorge under a sky that did not care, leading survivors back toward a world that was changing in ways none of them fully understood.????????????????