The wind returned first.
No longer thick with smoke, no longer carrying screams—just a still, hollow breeze drifting through what had once been a village.
Tikshn stepped back into **Rihn** three days after the attack, bones aching, ribs still cracked, eyes dry from crying until they couldn't. Saren walked beside him, silent. She hadn't left his side since that night. The only reason he could stand was because of her.
But now, he walked alone.
Even with her near, something inside him had closed off—shut behind a wall he didn't know how to climb back over. Words stuck in his throat like glass. Every footstep felt like trespassing on a memory.
The village was unrecognizable.
The well had collapsed. The kiln was shattered. The homes were either burned to the ground or looted to bone and frame. Crows circled lazily overhead, watching. Waiting. Some pecked at the dirt.
The bodies had been left.
Not all—but enough.
Tikshn found **Aram** first. His father's hands were still curled, fists clenched around nothing, face down in the dust. There was no sword in his grip, just stubborn defiance in death. Tikshn knelt beside him and touched his back.
The same back he used to climb on as a child. The same back that carried the weight of a family with laughter and love.
He buried him under the acacia tree beside the kiln.
He didn't speak.
---
They found **Leeya** later, by the river. Her arms were wrapped around **Kirin**, as if even in death, she was still trying to protect her daughter.
Tikshn's hands trembled when he saw them.
The earth was cold and wet. He dug with his bare fingers until the skin peeled away. Saren helped him, tears streaking down her soot-covered face. No words passed between them—grief had long ago drowned language.
He placed Kirin's favorite doll in the grave before covering it.
Saren placed a blue ribbon over the mound.
It was silent when they finished.
Just wind. Just flies.
And memory.
---
Of **Pell**, there was no sign. Nor of half the village.
Whether they'd escaped or were taken… they didn't know. And that haunted Tikshn more than the bodies.
What was worse—death or not knowing?
He stood at the center of the broken square where he had once practiced sword swings and made childish boasts about saving the world.
He drew his wooden sword—the only thing he'd recovered from the fire.
Cracked. Burned. Split down the middle.
He threw it.
It hit the dirt with a soft, pitiful sound.
Then he screamed. Loud and ragged and full of all the things he couldn't save. He screamed until his voice gave out.
Saren stood behind him, unmoving.
When he turned, she was watching with eyes full of something worse than pain.
Love. And fear.
"I couldn't protect them," he whispered.
"No one could."
"I had a sword."
"That wasn't enough."
"I'll never be weak again."
Those words hung between them like a blade.
Saren reached out. "Tikshn—"
He stepped away. Just one step.
And that was the step that would become a thousand more, taking him farther from her… and farther from who he once was.
---
That night, under the stars, Tikshn sat alone on the hill where he had first seen the smoke. His hands were bandaged. His ribs ached. But inside, he was colder than the wind.
He had nothing left. No home. No family. No future.
Only the question:
**What now?**
And in the dark, his answer came—not from a voice, not from a god, not from any master…
But from the silence.
**You become stronger.**
**Strong enough that no one can ever take from you again.**
That night, Tikshn left Rihn for the last time. With a blade taken from a dead bandit's hand and a hunger in his soul deeper than any wound.
He would find strength.
He would find power.
And he would never be helpless again.
Even if it cost him what remained of his heart.
---