The smell of smoke and burning flesh is always the same.
It is the smell of failure.
The smell of loss.
The smell of home.
The General's last words were a curse that clung to Adrian like a burial shroud.
"You… are just like him…"
He stumbled back from the cooling corpse, the words echoing in the sudden, deafening silence of the pass. The victory was ash in his mouth. He had killed the Iron Bull, but the ghost of his father now felt closer, heavier, than ever before.
He had to move. To stay here was to invite death. Or worse, to linger in his own failure.
His ribs screamed with every breath, a fire stoked by the cold mountain air. He ignored it. Pain was an old friend. A constant companion in a world that had taken everything else.
He forced himself to kneel beside Tiberius's body. Not with respect. With cold, grim purpose.
His mission required information. And the General, even in death, would provide it.
With methodical detachment, Adrian began to search the corpse.
His fingers, stained with the General's blood, moved with an efficiency that bordered on desecration. He checked the pouches on the man's belt. Military orders. A flint and steel. Nothing. He ran his hands inside the armored breastplate, feeling for hidden pockets.
He found only a small, silver locket on a chain.
Curiosity, a flicker of an emotion he thought long dead, made him open it. Inside was a miniature portrait, exquisitely painted. A woman with kind eyes and a gentle smile, holding a small, laughing child.
The General's family.
For a fraction of a second, a flicker of something—pity? empathy?—threatened to surface. A ghost of the boy he used to be.
He crushed it without mercy.
This man had a family to love. And he had still chosen to ride out and burn Adrian's to the ground.
He snapped the locket shut and tossed it aside into the mud, its silver face staring up at the unforgiving sky. It was worthless.
His search continued. His fingers found a hidden pouch stitched into the thick leather of the General's boot.
Inside, there was no gold. No jewels.
Just a map, drawn on a piece of treated, waterproof leather.
Adrian unrolled it. It was a detailed map of the surrounding region. There were markings on it, military positions, patrol routes. The work of a careful, strategic mind.
And one location, not five miles from the pass, was circled in stark red ink.
A small village.
Silvercreek.
What was this? A planned stop? A supply depot? A target for future "pacification"?
It did not matter.
It was close. It might have food. It might have a place to rest, to bind his wounds, to disappear for a day while the Order searched the pass for their lost General.
His body screamed for it. His hate demanded he push on.
A compromise. He would go to Silvercreek. He would resupply. He would be a ghost again by morning.
Then he would find the next name on the list.
He limped away from the carnage, leaving the dead to the carrion birds that were already beginning to circle overhead. He did not look back.
The past was a tomb. The future was a pyre.
All he had was the next step. And the step after that.
The journey to Silvercreek should have taken two hours for a healthy man.
It took him four.
The pain in his ribs was a constant, grinding agony. With every jarring step, he could feel broken bones grating against each other. He leaned heavily on a sturdy branch he had ripped from a dead tree, fashioning it into a crude walking stick.
The forest grew thicker as he descended from the high pass. The air grew still. The normal chatter of birds and squirrels was gone.
The silence was absolute. Unnatural.
A primal instinct, the wolf inside him, screamed that something was wrong. This was the silence of a land that had witnessed something terrible.
Then he smelled it.
At first, it was just a faint, acrid tang on the wind. Easily dismissed.
But it grew stronger.
Smoke.
It was not the clean, fragrant smoke of a dozen cooking fires.
It was the foul, greasy stench of a village burning. The smell of scorched wood, of burning thatch, of cooked meat.
Of death.
Adrenaline, cold and sharp, cut through the fog of his pain. He forgot his ribs. He forgot his exhaustion.
He began to run.
He burst through the tree line, his body a symphony of pain, and stopped dead.
His heart, a cold, hard stone in his chest for six years, seemed to stop with him.
Silvercreek was not a village.
It was a funeral pyre.
The houses, once quaint and peaceful, were now just smoldering, blackened shells. Wisps of gray smoke curled lazily into the sky, like departing souls.
There was no sound. No screams. No crying. No panicked shouts.
Only the soft, whispering crackle of dying embers, a sound like dry leaves skittering across a tombstone.
He saw the first body near the village well. A farmer, his chest pierced by a crossbow bolt. His hand was still outstretched, as if reaching for the bucket, for one last drink of water.
Then he saw another. A blacksmith, slumped over his anvil, a war hammer still clutched in his hand. He had died fighting.
He saw a mother, her body shielding two small children who would never grow older.
Men, women, elders. Lying in the street, in their doorways, where they had been cut down without mercy.
This was not a battle.
It was an extermination.
He walked through the silent, smoldering streets, his daggers now in his hands. A useless precaution.
There was no one left to fight.
He saw the banner of the Adamantine Order, a golden eagle clutching a sword, trampled in the mud. Discarded after the work was done.
This was their work. This was their answer to his landslide.
They could not catch the ghost, so they had slaughtered the sheep instead. To send a message.
A cold, logical fury filled him. This was what they were. This was why every last one of them had to die.
Then, a new thought, a blade twisting in his gut.
This was my fault.
His attack on the caravan had signed this village's death warrant. These people had died because of him. The weight of it settled on his shoulders, heavier than any mountain.
He moved deeper into the village, his senses on fire, his mind reeling.
And then he saw it.
The sight that broke the world.
In front of what was once the baker's shop, its window shattered, its sign burned, lay a small shape.
A child. A little girl, no older than seven. Her dress was singed, her face covered in soot. Her eyes were open, staring blankly at the gray sky.
And in her small, lifeless hand, she clutched a crudely carved wooden doll.
A doll of a wolf.
The world tilted on its axis.
The walls of ice around Adrian's heart, walls built over six years of pain and hate, did not just crack.
They shattered into a million pieces.
The smell of burning wood was suddenly the smell of his own home burning. The sight of the dead girl was the sight of his own lost innocence, a ghost from a past he had buried under an avalanche of rage.
The cold, calculating ghost of Ravenport was gone.
All that was left was a ten-year-old boy, standing in the ashes of his life, helpless and alone.
A sound escaped his throat, a raw, ragged gasp that was half-sob, half-scream.
He stumbled forward, his legs no longer able to hold his weight.
He fell to his knees in the mud and ash, before the small, silent body.
The strength that had carried him through battles, through pain, through endless nights of loneliness, abandoned him completely.
The void inside him, once a cold emptiness, was now a roaring inferno of grief, of guilt, of unbearable loss.
His father's last command echoed in his mind, no longer a blessing, but a mocking, impossible curse.
"Live."
How could he live, in a world like this?
How could he live, when he brought death to everything he touched?
The sky spun. The ground rushed up to meet him.
His vision narrowed, tunneling into darkness. The last thing he saw, the last thing he would ever see as the boy he was, was the small wooden wolf, lying in the ashes. A toy. A dream. A memory.
And then the past, the monster he had kept chained in the dark for six long years, broke free.
And it devoured him whole.