The farmhouse sits crooked against the wind.

  Bruno sees it first through the skeletal line of trees—stone walls intact, thatched roof sagging but unburned. Smoke does not rise from its chimney. No bodies hang from the fence. No carrion birds circle overhead.

  That alone makes it suspicious.

  The front door swings inward and outward with each gust, tapping against the frame in a hollow rhythm. Not broken. Not barricaded.

  Open.

  He raises a hand and the others stop behind him. Oscar sways slightly on his feet. The big man’s breathing is louder these days, thinner. Hunger is carving him from the inside out.

  “Search,” Bruno says quietly.

  No one asks how.

  They move.

  Inside, the air is stale. Old ash in the hearth. The faint sourness of livestock that once slept nearby. But no fresh rot. No corpses.

  The table has been overturned. Cupboards hang open like empty mouths. A clay jar lies shattered on the floor, its contents long scraped out.

  Bruno goes straight to the pantry.

  Empty shelves.

  He runs his fingers along the wood anyway, as if food might appear under his touch. Dust coats his fingertips. Nothing else.

  Behind him, Oscar is already ripping open storage chests. The wood cracks under his strength. He doesn’t bother with hinges. He tears.

  Mara kneels near the hearth, sifting through cold ash with trembling hands, as if someone might have hidden something beneath it. Raúl limps from room to room, face pale, holding his forearm close to his body.

  Elisabete doesn’t speak. She checks corners. Under beds. Inside a flour bin that has been scraped so clean the wood shows through.

  Refugees have been here before them.

  Desperate ones.

  Oscar lets out a low, animal sound from the back room. Not triumph. Frustration.

  Bruno steps in.

  The root cellar hatch is open. The ladder broken. Someone had climbed down and up in haste. On the dirt floor sits a small sack, torn at one corner.

  Oscar lifts it and tosses it to Bruno.

  Grain spills into his palm.

  Dark. Clumped. A thin bloom of green-white mold threads between the kernels.

  “Still edible,” Oscar mutters, but his eyes flicker.

  Bruno rubs a few grains between his fingers and brings them to his nose. Rot. Damp. But not fully gone.

  He nods once.

  Oscar finds something else wedged behind a beam—a cloth bundle. Inside are dried apple rinds, curled and hardened to the texture of wood. Chewed by mice at the edges.

  Bruno counts silently.

  Five people.

  He weighs the sack in his hand. Feels its miserable heft.

  He does the math automatically.

  If they eat normally, it lasts three days.

  The river crossing and the forest detour already cost them two. The main roads are impossible; the demons patrol them in disciplined lines, horns glinting beneath helmets, methodical as tax collectors. To avoid them, they move through bramble and marsh and rock.

  Ten days to the southern hills. Maybe more if Raúl slows further.

  Three days of food.

  He closes the sack.

  They gather in the main room.

  The wind pushes the door again. Tap. Tap.

  “We eat once a day,” Bruno says.

  No preamble.

  “Half rations.”

  Oscar’s jaw tightens. His eyes drop to the sack, then back to Bruno. For a second, something feral passes through them. Calculation. Distance. The space between his hands and Bruno’s throat.

  Bruno holds his gaze.

  “Complain,” he says evenly, “and you can leave.”

  The silence stretches.

  Oscar looks away first.

  Raúl sinks onto a stool. His shoulders shake, but no sound comes out. He presses his infected arm against his stomach as if to hold himself together. The wound is small—a scrape from the river rocks—but the skin around it has gone angry red. Bruno noticed the smell this morning. Sweet. Wrong.

  Mara stares at the sack as if she can will it to multiply.

  Elisabete just watches.

  Bruno unties the sack and measures out portions by hand. Equal. Exact. He ignores Oscar’s size, ignores Raúl’s weakness. Fairness is the only structure left.

  He hands each of them a share of the grain and two apple rinds.

  “This is it,” he says. “Make it last in your mouth.”

  Oscar shoves the grain into his mouth immediately. His teeth grind. He doesn’t bother to hide the desperation.

  Raúl hesitates before eating, eyes glassy.

  Bruno puts his own portion between his teeth.

  The grain is damp and bitter. Mold blooms across his tongue. He forces himself to chew slowly. It tastes like dust scraped from a grave. The apple rind is worse—fibrous and tasteless, leeching what little moisture he has left.

  He swallows anyway.

  Across the room, Raúl begins to cry in silence as he chews.

  Oscar’s breathing grows heavier, unsatisfied.

  Bruno feels the hunger already clawing back, angry at the insult.

  He hates them for looking so broken.

  He hates himself more because he is already calculating which one will slow them enough to justify leaving behind.

  Outside, the wind shifts.

  Far off, faint but steady, a drumbeat carries across the fields.

  It was nothing.

  That’s what he keeps telling himself.

  A briar caught his leg the night they fled the riverbank. He remembers the sting, sharp but shallow. He had torn free without looking back. They had been running. There hadn’t been time to care about scratches.

  Now it feels like something is chewing on the bone.

  The heat is constant. It radiates from just above his ankle, spreading up his calf in slow, pulsing waves. Each heartbeat drives a fresh surge of pain through the wound—throb, throb, throb—like a fist knocking from inside his leg.

  He walks anyway.

  The forest floor is uneven, slick with frost that hasn’t yet melted in the morning light. Every step sends a tremor through him. When his right foot touches down, it feels as if the skin will split open entirely. He bites the inside of his cheek to keep from making a sound.

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  Ahead of him, Bruno moves at a steady pace. Not fast. Not slow. Measured. Efficient.

  Oscar lumbers beside him, shoulders hunched, axe resting across his back. Even starving, the man is immense.

  They do not look back often.

  Raúl knows why.

  If you cannot maintain pace, you compromise the group. If you compromise the group, you are removed from it.

  Soldier logic.

  He tries to match their stride lengths, stretching his steps so the limp is less obvious. The motion sends white-hot pain up his spine, but shortening his gait would be worse. Visible.

  Sweat trickles down his back despite the cold. The air is sharp in his lungs, but his skin burns. His vision feels slightly… off. Too bright at the edges.

  He tells himself it’s just hunger.

  He does not look at the wound often, but he saw it this morning when they stopped briefly by a stream. The scratch has swollen. The skin around it is red and shiny, stretched tight as if something underneath is trying to push out. The center is darker. Wet.

  When he presses near it, pus beads at the surface.

  He had wiped it away quickly before anyone could see.

  Now, as they walk, he feels the dampness spreading under the cloth wrapped around his calf. It sticks to him.

  Mara slows to fall in beside him.

  “You’re sweating,” she whispers.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re shaking.”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  She reaches toward his leg anyway, her fingers tentative, academic even now—as if this is a problem to be studied.

  He jerks away so violently he nearly loses his balance.

  “Don’t touch it,” he snaps, louder than he intends.

  Bruno’s head tilts slightly at the sound, but he does not turn.

  Mara recoils, hurt flashing across her face.

  “I was just—”

  “I know what you were just,” he mutters. “Leave it.”

  If she pulls back the cloth. If she exposes it. If Bruno sees the redness, the swelling—

  He imagines the calculation in Bruno’s eyes. The same one he saw in the farmhouse when the rations were divided.

  Ten days. Five mouths.

  Four would move faster.

  The thought makes his stomach twist harder than the hunger.

  He used to spend nights bent over manuscripts, tracing sigils by candlelight. He memorized incantations that required perfect breath control and layered concentration. He had shaped fire in his palm. Bent light. Held a barrier against a training construct for nearly a minute once.

  He had been proud of that.

  Now he cannot summon a spark.

  He reaches inward as he walks, not even for a spell—just for warmth, for something to dull the pain.

  There is nothing.

  The well is still dry stone.

  He almost laughs.

  A mage brought low by a plant.

  Not by a demon blade. Not by dark sorcery. By a thorn and dirty cloth.

  His foot catches on a root and he stumbles forward, barely catching himself before he falls. Pain explodes up his leg, blinding and immediate. For a second, black creeps into the edges of his vision.

  Oscar glances back this time.

  “Keep up,” the big man growls.

  Raúl nods quickly.

  “I am.”

  The word tastes like a lie.

  His heartbeat pounds in his ears now, louder than the distant wind. Each pulse drives another wave of heat through him. The forest smells sharper than before—sap, wet earth, the faint rot of fallen leaves—but it all feels distant, as if he is smelling it through cloth.

  He forces his foot forward again.

  Step.

  Throb.

  Step.

  Throb.

  His vision wavers. The trees seem to lean slightly, as though the world itself is unsteady.

  He tells himself it’s just exhaustion.

  He tells himself he can make it another mile.

  Then another.

  He does not allow himself to think beyond that.

  He keeps walking, even as the forest begins to blur.

  The rain starts after dark.

  Not a storm. Just a steady, needling fall that soaks through cloth and leather and patience alike.

  They shelter beneath a cluster of low pines where the branches are thick enough to break the worst of it, but not enough to keep them dry. The ground is already mud from last week’s thaw. It sucks at Oscar’s boots when he shifts position.

  They cannot light a fire.

  The demons patrol the roads in disciplined sweeps, horns glinting beneath hooded cloaks. Even out here, off the paths and deep in brush, a thin column of smoke could carry for miles in the cold air.

  So they sit in the dark.

  Oscar’s armor, never meant for days of rain, clings to him like a wet animal. The leather straps have stretched. The padding beneath is soaked. Cold seeps through metal and into bone. His fingers are stiff around the haft of his axe.

  His body is eating itself.

  He can feel it.

  The hunger is no longer a hollow ache. It’s a cramping, twisting violence under his ribs. His stomach knots so hard he has to press a fist against it sometimes to steady the spasm. Saliva pools in his mouth at random, phantom anticipation of food that isn’t coming.

  He is too large for this.

  Every movement burns more fuel than the others. Every mile costs him more.

  He tries to lie still, conserve heat, but the shivering comes anyway. Deep, bone-rattling tremors he cannot suppress. His teeth click together softly.

  Across the small clearing, Bruno sits upright against a tree, eyes open, sword across his lap. Even in the dark, Oscar can sense the man’s awareness—counting breaths, measuring sounds.

  Mara is curled on her side, silent except for the occasional hitch of breath.

  Elisabete does not move at all. She lies on her back, staring upward through the branches as rain dots her face.

  Raúl is the problem.

  The boy is on his side near Oscar, wrapped in his damp cloak. His breathing is wrong. Too fast. Too shallow.

  Then the sounds start.

  A low whimper at first.

  Then a thin, broken moan that rises and falls without rhythm.

  Oscar squeezes his eyes shut.

  It continues.

  Raúl mutters something unintelligible. His voice cracks. The fever has him now. Even in the dark, Oscar can smell it—the sour heat of infection, sweet and rotten.

  Another moan.

  Louder.

  Oscar’s jaw tightens.

  “Stop,” he mutters under his breath.

  The rain answers, pattering on needles.

  Raúl’s leg shifts against the mud. A wet sound. He gasps and lets out a thin cry, barely contained.

  Oscar’s vision sharpens.

  Each sound feels like a knife scraping along his nerves. They are hiding. They are prey. Noise is danger.

  Another broken whimper.

  Something in him snaps.

  He moves before he thinks.

  He crawls the short distance and grabs Raúl by the front of his cloak, yanking him onto his back. The boy’s eyes are open but unfocused, pupils blown wide in the dark.

  Oscar clamps a massive hand over his mouth.

  Raúl thrashes weakly.

  “Shut up,” Oscar hisses, leaning close enough that their foreheads nearly touch. Rain runs down his nose and onto the boy’s face. “Shut up or I’ll silence you.”

  He means it.

  In that moment, he means it.

  Not out of cruelty. Not even out of anger.

  Out of calculation.

  One life for five minutes of quiet. One weak link removed.

  Raúl’s eyes try to focus. Panic flickers there, then confusion. His breath burns hot against Oscar’s palm.

  Oscar tightens his grip.

  A hand seizes his shoulder and wrenches him backward with surprising force.

  Bruno.

  “Enough,” the veteran says quietly.

  Not loud. Not dramatic.

  Just final.

  Oscar resists for half a second. His arm flexes. The thought flashes—He’s slowing us. He’s dead weight.

  Bruno’s grip does not loosen.

  Their eyes meet in the dark.

  There is no accusation there. No moral outrage.

  Only recognition.

  You almost did it.

  Oscar releases Raúl abruptly and shoves himself back. The boy curls onto his side, coughing weakly, then sinks into another delirious murmur.

  For a few seconds, no one moves.

  The rain keeps falling.

  Oscar sits back on his heels, chest heaving.

  He almost killed him.

  Not in battle. Not in self-defense.

  For silence.

  For five minutes without that sound scraping his skull.

  He looks at his hands.

  They are shaking.

  Bruno returns to his tree without another word.

  Oscar rolls onto his back in the mud, staring up into the black lattice of branches. Cold water runs into his ears. He doesn’t care.

  His stomach cramps again, violent and twisting.

  He presses his forearm across it and waits for the spasm to pass.

  Raúl’s moans soften into faint, broken breaths.

  The rain does not stop.

  Oscar does not sleep.

  He lies there, listening to the steady patter on leaves and the hollow, endless growl of his own empty body.

  The rain stops before dawn, but the cold stays.

  Elisabete wakes with mud dried stiff against her cheek and her fingers numb inside torn cloth. For a moment she forgets where she is.

  Then Raúl coughs.

  Reality returns.

  They move again before the sun fully rises. No fire. No breakfast. Just stiff limbs and hollow stomachs.

  The muddy track appears an hour later—a narrow line of churned earth cutting through the trees. Bruno hesitates only briefly before following it. Roads mean risk. But they also mean direction.

  The cart is visible before the bodies.

  It lies on its side, one wheel broken clean off, axle snapped. A crate has spilled open beside it, its contents long gone. The horse is still harnessed, collapsed in the mud, ribs stark beneath hide.

  Then Elisabete sees the shapes scattered around it.

  Four.

  A man near the wheel, one hand still resting against it as if he had meant to push. An older woman slumped against a crate. A younger woman lying on her side in the track. A child curled beneath the cart’s shadow.

  No blood.

  No missing limbs.

  No scorch marks.

  They look… asleep.

  The cold preserved them. Faces pale, lips faintly blue. Eyes closed.

  Not like Keravos.

  Not twisted. Not broken open.

  Bruno approaches first, sword drawn out of habit. He nudges the man with the tip.

  No response.

  He crouches, presses two fingers to the man’s throat. Waits.

  Nothing.

  “They froze,” Mara whispers.

  “Or starved,” Oscar adds flatly.

  Bruno stands.

  “Check them.”

  No one argues.

  Oscar moves to the older woman immediately, already scanning for anything useful. He works efficiently, without ceremony. A thick wool cloak comes free from her shoulders. He shakes it once and wraps it around himself, not looking at her face.

  Mara kneels near the child but finds nothing worth taking.

  Raúl stays back, swaying slightly.

  Elisabete walks to the younger woman in the track.

  She cannot be more than thirty. Her hair is braided neatly, as if she had done it that morning. Her hands are folded beneath her cheek. Her expression is calm.

  Elisabete looks down at her own feet.

  The rags wrapped around them are stiff with dried blood from old blisters. The soles beneath are nearly gone. Each step sends cold straight into bone.

  She crouches.

  The woman’s boots are sturdy leather. Mud-caked but intact. Thick soles. Proper stitching.

  Elisabete hesitates for only a second.

  Then she reaches for the laces.

  The leather is stiff with cold. Her fingers, still numb, struggle to untie the knots. She works slowly, methodically. The woman’s ankle resists when she pulls, joints already rigid.

  Elisabete braces one hand against the woman’s calf and pulls harder.

  The boot comes free with a soft, tearing sound as fabric shifts against skin.

  She pauses.

  The forest is quiet except for the faint wind.

  In her mind, she builds a wall.

  Not stone. Not iron.

  Just distance.

  This is not a woman. Not anymore. This is leather. This is warmth. This is survival.

  She removes the second boot with more force, gritting her teeth as the stiffness fights her.

  When both are free, she sets them carefully on the ground.

  For a moment, she looks at the woman’s face again.

  “I’m sorry,” she thinks. Not aloud. Just once. Clear and simple.

  “Thank you.”

  She pulls off her rags and slides her feet into the boots.

  They are too big. Her toes do not reach the end. But they are dry inside. Lined. Solid.

  She stands.

  The difference is immediate. The ground feels less hostile. Less intimate. The cold does not bite as sharply.

  She stamps once to settle them.

  No tears come.

  She does not feel pride. Or shame.

  Only adjustment.

  Bruno glances at her feet and nods once.

  “Good,” he says.

  Oscar has already turned away from the cart.

  They leave the bodies as they are.

  No burial. No prayer.

  The forest swallows the track again as they move on.

  Elisabete walks behind Bruno this time instead of last. The boots thud softly against the mud, heavy but steady.

  Each step feels more certain.

  She does not look back at the cart.

  She does not need to.

  She is walking in the shoes of the dead now.

  And she walks a little faster.