15^th Illumis, 460 AG, 20:40PM, Heodal Kingdom

The three new arrivals slammed into the fight like true saviors. Xyron had never seen men move like that, no yelling, no frantic terror, just the math of violence. The way Captain Jaros angled his body to never face more than one wolf at a time, or the way his sword found their throats at the same speed as they attacked.

Then there were the other two, his personal guards sent by the king himself. Xyron had forgotten their names but that did not stop him from admiring the way their swords cut through the beats like butter. Jaros didn’t raise his voice too much, but the words cut through anyway.

“Hold the children behind you. Don’t chase.” There was no question about it, just an order coming from someone with decades of experience. Katyl was sitting on the ground with blood slicking her forearm and pooling at her boot, only managed to make a nod and rolled to one knee. She caught the sword up in her right hand and guarded the children, eyes locked on the next wolf that dared get close, even though there weren’t many left.

The creatures bunched up and feinted at the flanks, but the royal knights didn’t give them space to react. The tallest one, Dervin, Xyron guessed as he tried to remember their names, planted his feet as he took a wolf’s charge straight on the shield. Before the animal could leap away, he slammed its mouth shut with the edge of the shield, then finished the job with a stab to its side.

The other knight, Hannek. was more brutal in his style. A wolf got his ankle, the teeth closing over boot leather and drawing blood, but the man did not stop or even scream. He just twisted and punched the wolf in the ear with a mailed fist until it let go. Then Dervin grabbed the wolf by the scruff and opened its belly with a single and precise slice of his belt knife. A truly terrifying duo.

Xyron lost sight of the details as he realized a fresh small group of wolves collapsed around the children. His mother tried her best to scare them off, but they outnumbered her greatly. He saw one go for Luzia’s head; she shrieked and leaped to her side and out of the bite’s way. The wolf’s teeth snapped on the empty air, but before it could attack again, Kai brought his sword down across its spine. The impact was so loud it sounded like firewood splitting in flames. The wolf flopped around with legs kicking in spasms, but Kai didn’t stop until he struck once more, making sure it was dead.

A second wolf sprinted towards Aolyne, the force of it throwing the boy off his feet. Xyron couldn’t remember running, He leaped onto the wolf and they tumbled together, feeling the cold, wet fur in his face. The fangs of the beast snapped shut on his shoulder, but the angle was bad so only a few pierced into him. It mostly just hurt, and the pain cut through the panic. Xyron grunted and drove the sword up under the wolf’s ribs. The animal’s blood spilled over Xyron’s chest. He rolled it off and lifted himself up to a crouch, watching Aolyne crawling away, alive.

For the first time since the carnage started, Xyron looked up and took in the whole battlefield. A few men had tried to fight, but none held weapons worth mentioning. The ground looked like a slaughterhouse. Muddy, trampled, red streaks everywhere, and the bodies, human and wolf alike, already attracting flies even as the last sunlight died.

But at the core of it, Jaros and his guards were winning. Dervin and Hannek worked in full synchrony, each watching the other’s back. When a wolf tried to slip in between, one would turn it with a bash from their shields, then the other would finish it in a quick and brutal swing of the sword. Katyl guarded the wedge of children, never letting a wolf come closer than her blade’s reach. Kai and Xyron anchored the other side, and behind them Luzia kept the orphans tight and low, murmuring to them in a litany of nonsense and prayers. Xyron saw her cheek pressed to the scalp of a child, and for a second, she looked more like a girl her own age rather than the church’s calm and unshakeable Luzia.

The wolves pulled back all at once after seeing their losses and increasing disadvantages. For a second, nothing happened. The air went quiet, the wind fell silent, and the only noise was the groan of wounded people and the sobbing of scared kids.

Jaros stood at the center of the kill zone with his sword held down in the earth. He took a single measured breath, then turned to survey the field. His eyes swept the group, but he said nothing for a moment. Then, to the sky more than to anyone, he asked.

“How many can walk?”

No one answered. Katyl, still clutching her ruined sleeve, stood up and walked over to Aolyne. She checked his face, then grunted in approval and scooped him up, setting the boy on her hip as if nothing had changed. She looked at Luzia, who trembled.

Dervin spat, wiped his blade on a wolf’s fur, and shrugged. “We get to Zakria now, or not at all.” His eyes were wild and almost feral, but his movements were precise, like a muscle memory that didn’t require belief.

“Line up. If you can’t walk, say so now.” Jaros barked loud enough for everyone in the field to hear. He moved from group to group, checking wounds with an honesty that resembled cruelty. To a man with a ripped bicep, he pressed a strip of wool to the gash, then used the man’s own belt to tie it off. To a woman with a child on her back and a bite on her calf, he slapped the leg above the wound to check for broken bone and said “Move.” He did not explain, and no one asked him to.

Hannek limped on his bitten ankle but never slowed. He helped the rearmost survivors, shoving one dazed man upright and steering another by the collar of his coat. Xyron, now that the adrenaline was fading, felt every bruise in his body, every pulse of the bite on his shoulder, but he gritted his teeth and kept up as best as he could. He glanced over at his mother who looked at him with that flat, unblinking stare that always meant she was hurting bad. She shifted Aolyne to her hip and grinned without humor.

“You did fine.” She said to Xyron. “If your father could see you, he’d…” She trailed off, and Xyron filled in the words himself; He’d have done the same. He nodded, not trusting himself to speak, and followed her through the gruesome sight of bodies into the open grass.

Luzia and the orphans made up the center, every child holding onto another. The youngest girl, Beatrix, the one who’d nearly been taken, now clung to Luzia’s waist with both hands and her face mashed against her dress. Luzia glanced at Xyron and Kai, then at Jaros, as if waiting for an order.

“We go west?” She said, with her voice steadier than her legs.

“Yes, we must reach Zakria.” Jaros replied. “We move now.”

The moon was already up in the sky by the time they picked a way through the carnage. There were less than twenty-five survivors after the brutal ambush. Some limped, some were bandaged with strips of whatever fabric had survived, and a few others didn’t stop muttering to themselves.

Every so often, Xyron looked back at the field. The remaining wolves had already vanished into the trees, but the grass was covered with red and the dead were spread around like coins that dropped on the floor.

Katyl strengthened her grip on Aolyne, whispered something into his ear, and for the first time in what felt like a year, Xyron heard his little brother laugh. A high, simple giggle that turned into a cough, but a laugh nonetheless. The sound kept Xyron moving when his legs wanted to give out on him.

Kai walked alongside Xyron in silence as he tried to take in everything that just happened. Those who looked at his armor could clearly see how the wolves’ bit down on him many times over, but thanks to all that metal he was still standing. As they made their way through a low hill, Kai nudged him and said:

“I didn’t think we’d make it past that…” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Dad always said, ‘You’ll be a man when you survive something you don’t want to remember.’” He gulped down in disgust. “I think I’ve had enough manhood for one day…”

Xyron didn’t know what to say. His mind kept replaying the moment the wolf’s fangs clamped down, the way Katyl took the wound and never stopped moving and the look in Jaros’s eyes as he weighed life and death with every step. Xyron could not make sense of it, so he held his sword tight and kept walking.

They traveled through the night, the march broken only by Jaros’s occasional “Stop.” to let the limping villagers and the smallest ones catch up. At each halt, Jaros walked the line, checking for anyone who’d collapsed. Sometimes, if someone couldn’t move, he gave them a look, no anger, just a flicker of understanding, and left them a knife. “You may need it.” He said, once, to an old woman whose leg wouldn’t stop bleeding. She smiled at him, and Xyron understood something about the world that he hadn’t before. Sometimes, sacrifices must be made. At least he tried to convince himself of that, still imagining whatever happened to his father back at the village.

Around midnight, they paused in a small valley where a trickle of water cut through the grass. Katyl set Aolyne down and went to clean the blood from her arm. The skin had split all the way to the bone in one place, and Xyron almost puked at the sight, but his mother never even flinched. She rinsed it with the cold water, then tore a piece of cloth off her shirt and bound it tightly around the arm. Luzia offered to help, but Katyl shook her head.

“Save your strength for the little ones.” She said. “I’ll live.”

They didn’t build a fire. Too dangerous, Jaros said, but also unnecessary. The wolves wouldn’t return, not after what they’d lost. It was still far too mysterious why such a large pack of wolves attacked in such moment, but Jaros knew that the large shadowy wolf the Argo soldiers brought with them during their siege had to be the reason. Had he stayed there, he and his guards would have suffered the same fate as all the other soldiers.

They sat on the grass and let the wind dry their wounds. The moon kept moving through the sky, and Xyron finally let himself collapse into a patch of dead grass, sword across his chest, eyes blinking but never quite closing.

He woke just before dawn because of every muscle fused with pain. The group quickly returned to their march, Jaros in the lead, all the people in the middle, and the two royal knights Dervin and Hannek in the rear in case some unexpected dangers arose. Xyron saw Kai, still walking, but with a new stiffness in his legs.

The towers of Zakria were finally visible on the horizon, a thin, gray line against the pale blue of the night. Luzia felt a surge of hope, knowing they would soon reach the church where she could find peace in her prayers. Xyron wanted to run and make the distance in a sprint, but his legs said no. With no other choice, he followed the rest as they slowly made their way like dead men walking.

As the sun crested, Jaros looked back at the group and nodded at the new day. No one said anything, they just walked.

Even as the sky bled out its last color, even as the wolves’ howls faded and were replaced by the shallow rasp of wind and birds over the grass, everyone’s hopes kept getting higher. Jaros set a pace that was slow enough to spare the dying, but quick enough that no one questioned his reasons.

Katyl walked up front. She didn’t volunteer, but nobody else could have set that kind of example. Every dozen steps, she looked back, not at the line of people, but specifically at Xyron and Aolyne, as if to check that their presence was still real.

Xyron should have been exhausted beyond moving, but his soul disagreed. Maybe it was the cold, or the pain in his shoulder, or the way Aolyne’s weight cut into his back when the little brother couldn’t walk anymore. He took turns with Kai, whose beaten up armor clanked whenever he moved, and whose breath came in thin and irregular puffs

Luzia kept comforting the orphans. Every so often, a child would start to drift, or freeze, or cry, and she would close the distance instantly. Her voice was quiet, barely more than a whisper, but still a constant, “Almost there. You’re doing well. Just a bit more and then we rest.” Xyron didn’t know if she even believed herself, but her words kept everyone motivated, not just the kids.

They weren’t alone anymore. The survivors from the rest of the column that had scattered off, mostly women, a few men, some teenagers younger than Xyron, had merged into the group. Some walked with arms wrapped around their own bellies, trying to hold in the worst of the pain. Others simply stared straight ahead like the world behind their eyelids had shut down.

Zakria was just a smudge at first. Xyron saw it when the fading moon crested above the trees. A dark shape crouched at the edge of the world, its outer wall covered with dim, orange lights. It looked impossibly far, as if every step brought it no closer. Still, the sight of it made the line straighten, people began talking to each other normally, and even the children took a breath that wasn’t all fear.