Sous kept her pace steady, her shoes eating the dirt trail in long, measured strides. The walking path cut through old forest that had once belonged to every species the Apex pack later decided were "problems." She passed a toppled mile-marker carved with elvish runes, half-buried in moss. Someone had scratched a crude wolf head over the original script and then pissed on it. The Alpha laughed at it.
First ghetto: Olfen. Three days' march if she didn't stop, two if she pushed. She was pushing; once her wings were rested, she would take to the sky. She had spent about four hours flying and simply needed a rest and since she didn't have the exact coordinates for the ghetto, she wasn't able to teleport there.
Her mind ran faster than her feet.
Olfen sat on what used to be the southern vampire holdings: blackstone caverns, moonlit orchards, underground rivers that glowed soft silver. Apex wolves had flooded the rivers with concrete, bricked over the caverns, and turned the orchards into guard posts. Now thirty thousand vampires lived stacked in concrete hives, rationed two pints of synthetic blood a week, daylight curfew enforced by silver-laced floodlights.
Sous pictured the gates coming down, the floodlights shattering under a single thrown spear of shadow. She pictured the first vampire who hadn't tasted real night in twenty years stepping onto soil that remembered their name. The image burned bright enough to keep her moving.
Next ghetto after that: Leenway, the elven quarter. Apex had clear-cut the ancestral groves, salted the earth, built barracks on the stumps. Ten thousand elves in barracks now, forced to grow row crops under floodlights because "pointy-eared bastards don't need trees to live." Sous imagined the first sapling pushed into reclaimed soil by elven hands that still remembered how to sing growth into being. She imagined the songs rising again, old and angry and beautiful. This elf clan was so different than the ones from the Island of Dimona. They seemed to rely on their artistical skills.
She passed a dried-up pixie circle (once a ring of mushrooms glowing soft gold, now just dead grass and a warning sign wired to a battery that would fry anything smaller than a wolf). Pixies had been hunted almost to extinction for sport once the fall of the Groken, like Apex was punishing them or something; the few thousand left were kept in Olfen's sub-levels, wings clipped, used as living flashlights in the mines. Sous flexed her fingers, already tasting the spells she'd use to burn the wire, regrow the wings, open the sky.
Goblins came to mind next. Ironspike ghetto, built inside their own mountain forges. Apex had taken the forges, melted the ancestral anvils into chains, forced the clans to make weapons for the pack that enslaved them. She pictured the chains snapping, the anvils ringing again under goblin hammers forging their own future instead of someone else's cages.
Fairies (what few survived) were scattered across every ghetto.
The trail bent west. Sous followed without slowing.
She rehearsed sequences in her head the way other people counted steps.
Olfen first: breach the east gate at moonrise when vampire strength peaks. Collapse the floodlight grid: simple overload rune, she'd carved it on a pebble in her pocket weeks ago. Open the caverns, drain the concrete rivers, let the orchards breathe. Then south to Leenway before Apex reinforcements could mobilize from the capital. Trees grow fast when elves sing; by the time wolves arrived there'd be a forest again, and forests favored archers who'd waited centuries for payback.
Ironspike after that. Goblins loved explosives; she'd bring the detonators, they'd bring the enthusiasm. One mountain becoming a crater full of freed forges felt poetic.
Pixies and fairies last, because they were fastest and also knew the most magic. Once the big ghettos fell, then they would take to the sky.
Sous stepped over a rusted chain that had once bound a dryad to her tree. The tree was long dead, the dryad almost certainly ash. Sous paused only long enough to snap the chain in half with her bare hands and drop the pieces in opposite directions. A promise.
The sun slid lower, bleeding red across the canopy. Somewhere ahead, Olfen's searchlights were already cutting the dusk into hard white bars. Sous adjusted the pack on her shoulders, light, because everything she needed was either magic or rage, and picked up speed.
She thought of every species the Apex pack had tried to erase, every border they'd drawn in blood and concrete, every child taught that some people were born property.
Then she thought of the moment those borders would burn.
Sous smiled, small and sharp, and walked faster.
The first ghetto was waiting, and each step, she was closer and and closer to Zhiliary.