Days passed like shadows, slow, creeping, quiet. The camp had become a graveyard of silence and half-buried memories. The scent of burnt canvas and scorched bark still clung to the air, too stubborn to leave.
Iralious lay in what remained of the elders' tent, his body thin and broken beneath a patchwork blanket. The attack had not only scorched his flesh, but it had taken something deeper. His breath came in rattled, shallow pulls, like the wind struggling through broken flutes.
Malious sat at his bedside every morning. He didn't speak much. Just sharpened old weapons or cleaned the few usable tools that had survived. Kalious handled the rebuilding of what little he could salvage and looked after their remaining siblings, all of them shaken, clinging to routine like a lifeline.
One evening, the sun bled into the horizon, casting a crimson hue across the clearing. Kalious was tending to the cooking fire when Iralious's voice rasped from within the tent.
"Boys."
Kalious dropped the bark pot and rushed inside. Malious was already kneeling beside the cot, eyes locked on the old man's face.
"Under the dining table," Iralious wheezed, his voice almost swallowed by the wind. "Rip up the floorboard. Bring me... the box."
Kalious blinked. "What box?"
"The one your fathers left me... when we boarded the ARC"
Malious stood in a flash and disappeared into the ruin of the central hut. Moments later, he returned with a small wooden box, stained dark with age. The edges were wrapped in old iron bands, and a faint symbol was carved into the top two crescents crossing at the tips.
Iralious placed a trembling hand on the lid. "You are both old enough. The world won't wait any longer."
He opened the box. Inside was a long, polished staff of darkwood, etched with faint markings that shimmered faintly in the firelight. And beneath it, a folded map and a sealed letter.
Malious reached forward, but the moment his fingers brushed the staff, the carvings pulsed.
Kalious felt it too, a hum, not a sound, but a vibration deep inside the bones.
"What is this?" Kalious asked.
Iralious closed his eyes. "Your inheritance. And the beginning of the truth."