I should be dead.

The mud still clung to me, thick and black, the stench of blood still heavy in my nose. My ears rang with echoes of screams, of cannon fire, of the crack of steel against steel. I pushed myself up with arms that shook like twigs in a storm, and all around me the ground was nothing but torn earth and silence.

Where were the others?

“Kael?” My voice rasped, broken. “Ryn? Jorek? Where are you?”

No answer. Only crows picking at the heaps of bodies.

My battalion—gone.

I stumbled through the field, my boots dragging through mud that swallowed the fallen whole. Faces stared up at me, pale, slack, mouths still open in their last cries. My chest ached as I stepped over them, searching desperately for someone, anyone, still alive.

There was no one.

Hours later, or maybe days—I couldn’t tell—I found a road. My legs carried me forward without thought, my staff clutched tight in hand though I didn’t remember picking it up. The smoke faded behind me. The screams fell away into memory.

And then… laughter.

I froze.

Children ran through a village square up ahead, chasing each other, their voices shrill with joy. Merchants called out their wares, a baker pulled steaming loaves from an oven, and women sat together weaving in the sun.

I stood there, filthy and bloodstained, staring like a ghost at the living.

Didn’t they know? Didn’t they feel it?

“Why are you laughing?” I whispered, my throat tight. “Why are you smiling when your husbands, your sons, your brothers are rotting in the mud?”

No one turned. No one met my eyes. They moved around me as if I weren’t there at all, as if the blood and ash that clung to me didn’t exist.

I wanted to scream at them, shake them, force them to remember. But my voice caught in my chest, and I walked on.

By nightfall, I had collapsed in the ruins of an old barn. The wood creaked under me, the roof open to the stars. My body begged for rest, but my mind would not be still. I thought of the battalion, of the songs we sang by firelight, of Kael’s crooked grin as he teased me for never hitting the target with my spear.

Gone. All of it.

I pressed my palms to my eyes, forcing back tears. My brothers were dead, and the world… the world laughed.

At some point, exhaustion dragged me under.

When I woke, my heart stopped.

Something lay in the straw beside me.

A letter.

Its parchment glowed faintly in the dark, a soft shimmer as though it were alive.

My hand trembled as I reached for it, fear crawling cold through my veins. The wax seal was cracked with mud, the edges torn by weather and time.

I stared at it, my breath shallow, my chest tight.

“What… what is this?” I whispered to no one.

The letter pulsed faintly, waiting.