I glance back at the soldiers.
“Go,” I say. “Carefully.”
They move immediately.
No hesitation.
I stay where I am, watching the group slowly emerge from hiding, their movements cautious, uncertain.
“It’s alright,” I repeat, softer now. “You’re safe.”
For now.
When we return,Verr is already moving through the village, issuing orders with a precision that’s sharper than before, more focused, less contained by the structure he came from.
He looks up when I approach.
“What did you find?”
“Survivors,” I say. “Not many. Some injured.”
His jaw tightens slightly.
“Good work,” he says.
I nod once.
Then—
“They’ll need structure,” I add. “Food distribution, shelter organization, someone coordinating movement so they don’t scatter again.”
He watches me.
“Then do it,” he says.
22
VERR
By sunset the village smells like wet ash, blood, and boiled grain.
The smoke from the cookfires hangs low because the air has gone still, flattening everything beneath a sky streaked copper and bruised violet, and the whole settlement feels like it’s holding itself together by habit more than strength. Broken fences lean at bad angles. One roof has been patched with a cart tarp and tied down with rope that used to harness a mule. Someone is crying in one of the houses, not loudly, not theatrically, just with the dull, exhausted rhythm of a body that has run out of places to put its grief. My soldiers move through it all in dark shapes and sharpened steel, too clean against the ruin, too hard-edged for a place built by hands that plant more than they fight.
And in the middle of it, somehow, the humans are reorganizing themselves.
Not waiting.
Not begging.
Not collapsing into the chaos they should by every reasonable measure be collapsing into.
They are moving.
I stand near what used to be the village well and watch Lyria turn the remains of panic into structure with nothing but her voice, her hands, and the kind of authority that doesn’t announce itself before it takes hold. She’s dirt-streaked from the knees down, hair half-freed from her scarf and catching the last light like a banked coal, but none of that softens the precision of what she’s doing. She points once, and three women carry water toward the house nearest the tree line. She says something low to an old man with one arm bound against his chest, and he nods, then redirects two boys hauling broken planks toward the larger central shed. She touches the shoulder of a young mother whose face is gray with shock, speaks too quietly for me to hear, and the woman gathers herself enough to hand her child to someone else and join the others sorting grain from debris.
It doesn’t look efficient.
That’s what bothers me first.
