I’m not exactly drowning in ways of keeping time, and maybe I’m just feeling the strength bleeding out of me, or maybe it’s all about time relativity, but I really do think we’re reaching the twelve-hour markat leastwhen light starts to grow.
It starts at the head of the unit, about fifty or so warriors ahead of me, then ripples its way down.
The torches that were lowered, then carried upside-down, are lifted… just lifted… and the flames reignite with that, and that alone.
Those flames are unnatural.
Another thing in this unit not of our world.
The flames don’t look different, but the upside-down angle extinguishing them, then reignited by being raised back up again, that’s not exactly normal.
But that’s what happens, all around me.
A dozen of those torches lift, and their flames explode crimson light all through the unit—
I instantly recoil.
I throw my pinned hands up to my face and shield my eyes from the angry red glare attacking me from all angles.
The slender rope bound around my wrists digs that bit deeper into my skin, silky ribbons cutting apart my flesh, but it’s an afterthought, just another ache and pain and sore to add to my collection.
Slowly, I lower my shield against the light and squint around the burning gleams of crimson.
The red starts to soften against the darkness, starts to blend, and I see where we are, where the unit has paused.
Huddled by trees.
Nothing more than trees.
Trees and trees and trees just yawning on—until I crane my neck to peer around the solid muscle of the warrior, and I can make out a winding road that splinters into a tiny town.
Burrowed away in the depths of the forest, this town is like those ones that are only a few streets big.
Back home, we would call it a village.
Here, I think it’s just a settlement. Looks like it came out off the screen of an old western, only it’s powdered in winter, not scorched under the sun.
The other town, the one we left behind and trekked away from for so long, the one that is a city compared to this small outline in the distance, was left untouched.
This dark unit snubbed that town.
They didn’t attack anyone in it, didn’t burn it down, and now that I think about it, now that I let that niggle in my mind blossom, I realise that this unit neverenteredthe town.
Only the cold one did.
The others stayed camped beyond the highway, over the barriers, on the woodland outskirts, but never wentin.
So that town wasn’t theirs to burn.
It was just a place to stop and camp out.
There is order here.
Conformity. Obedience.
Other units will take down the town we left behind—but this unit has come for this town.
A handful of streets and a few rows of buildings.
