The only movement in Draymar Valley came from the dozens of buzzards circling the husk of a deserted Dominion cargo ship. For two days, they had gorged themselves on a feast of human carrion, picking the bones of the slaughtered clean.

The ship itself had gone cold, its energy cells drained. Now it sat abandoned, its hull reeking of decay, the air around it thick with the rot of human remains and the metallic stench of blood baked under an unforgiving sun.

Ninety miles south, across the borderline of the Emberdeep, a fire burned with quiet steadiness. Its flame shifted gently with the wind that drifted in from the east, casting restless shadows across the faces gathered around it.

Phessra sat cross-legged on a worn square of canvas, her black dress gathered neatly around her legs like pooled ink. She held her book in both hands, not reading it, but letting her fingers rest along its spine with the intimacy of a lover’s touch. Her pale skin seemed to absorb the firelight rather than reflect it, and her dark eyes watched the flames with the patience of someone who had learned to read meaning in their dance.

Across from her, Uncle Jel tended a pot of stew with slow, deliberate circles. His wooden spoon scraped softly against the iron sides, keeping rhythm with the melody he was humming. His round face beamed with grandfatherly warmth, cheeks flushed red from the fire’s heat. When he stirred, he did so with the careful attention of someone who genuinely cared about the quality of his work, tasting the broth and adjusting the seasoning with the practiced eye of a man who took pride in feeding people well.

It was this very authenticity that made him so dangerous. Uncle Jel wasn’t pretending to be kind. He actually was kind, in his own corrupted way.

“This stew smells divine,” he said cheerfully, stirring the thin broth with obvious satisfaction. “Nothing quite like a good meal shared among friends.”

His eyes twinkled as he spoke, genuine warmth radiating from his voice. No one responded. They had learned that engaging Uncle Jel’s conversation was like stepping into quicksand. The deeper you went, the harder it became to escape with your sanity intact.

Phessra’s gaze stretched northward, past the battered ridge, into the vast scar of the Emberdeep. Once, that stretch of coast had shimmered with salt and silver, kissed by wind and tide. Now, it was as if everything beneath had long since rotted and risen to cloud the waves from below. Its surface was a sheet of dull grey, the horizon choked by its own decay.

No gulls circled overhead. No boats broke its skin. The old fisheries and salt-cradle towns that once clustered along the shoreline had been razed or abandoned, their remnants left to sink into the sand.

Where the water met land, the jagged edges of deteriorated Dominion machinery cut ugly angles into the surf. Once the rebellion was squashed, there had been no need for them anymore. So they were left abandoned to collapse inch by inch with every passing tide.

Phessra watched it all with a quiet, thoughtful expression. She didn’t mourn it. This world belonged to someone else. All she saw now was the shape of what came after, the Dominion’s gift to people like her. Empty, desolate, quiet and lonely.

She liked it better that way.

This was the furthest south Rulv had ever taken them. Normally, his camps hugged the fringe of the Fold, skirting just beyond the edge of the Fracture fallout. It was safe enough there. Too sparse for trouble, no real Dominion presence, and the surrounding mountains offered shelter from the wind.

But for some reason, this time he had pushed them into the heart of the Emberdeep, a plain scorched to the bone, the life beaten out of it by tanks and pulsefire. What flora had once clung to its hills had blackened and shriveled, reduced to skeletal branches that clawed at the wind like they had died screaming. The wind here was a foul thing. Dry and sour, it reminded her of what it might feel like to be buried alive inside someone else’s corpse.

“Would you like some stew, dear?” Jel asked gently, his voice soft and sweet, like a lullaby.

Phessra didn’t answer. She didn’t trust Jel’s cooking, and she trusted his sweetness even less. It was easier to pretend he hadn’t spoken at all.

About that time, the sound of heavy footfalls crunched across the beach, rising from the dark edge of the tide. Uxx, the tall one, had spent the better part of an hour standing alone at the shoreline, staring out into the sea like he expected it to answer for itself.

Now, apparently, he had decided to grace them with his presence. Phessra didn’t mind him much. At least, she was more tolerant of him than the others were. There was a calm in the way he rarely spoke. Witty banter was not the reason Rulv kept him around.

As he approached, the firelight caught him in strokes, painting lines of flickering gold across the waxy surface of his skin and the black stitching that bound his throat together. His face, already skull-like, seemed hollowed further by the light, with eyes that devoured the fire and gave nothing back.

Phessra looked up, briefly. Her eyes moved over him with the same calm curiosity she might offer a distant storm inching its way across the horizon. She didn’t speak, didn’t shift, only observed.

Uxx came to a stop just beyond the fire’s outer glow, and without urgency, raised one long arm and pointed toward the gulf. His movement was like a mechanism winding into place.

“Something is wrong,” he stated, voice raw and cavernous.

Jel started stirring the pot again, completely unfazed. He glanced up into Uxx’s hollow eyes, and asked, “Would you like some stew, big fella?”

Uxx cleared his throat and spat directly into the pot. Jel paused mid-stir, let out a long, tired sigh. Then, without a word, he reached over with his spoon, scooped the glob of mucus from the surface, and let it drip onto the sand beside the fire. He resumed stirring as if nothing had happened.

Phessra smiled.

Uxx did not.

He stood silent for a moment, watching the spoon circle. Then he turned his head, just slightly, and warned, “We shouldn’t be here.”

His hollow eyes tracked the movement of waves against the distant shore with the mechanical focus of a targeting system. The sound seemed to fascinate and irritate him in equal measure, as if he couldn’t decide whether to study it or destroy it.

“Too exposed,” he continued, his voice raw and hollow. “No cover. Ocean at our backs.”

His fingers flexed around the haft of his war hook, the weapon’s serrated edge reflecting fragments of firelight. He called it his Gravemaker, and the name was well earned. It had opened more than its share of throats.

“If someone comes down from that dune, we don’t retreat,” he observed, head tilting slightly as he processed the tactical situation. “We drown.”

Phessra’s lips curved into the faintest suggestion of a smile, like she had just heard a private joke whispered by the flames themselves. “So dramatic, darling,” she murmured, her voice soft as cotton.

Uxx didn’t respond. His attention had already shifted back to the waves, drawn by their endless, repetitive rhythm. His head cocked at an odd angle, like a dog hearing sounds beyond human perception.

“The water makes noise,” he muttered, more to himself than to the others. “Constant noise. Never stops.”

“That’s what water does,” Kivven snapped from her perch on an overturned crate. She was cleaning her blade with aggressive strokes, the steel singing against the whetstone with each pass. “It’s called waves, you walking corpse.”

Her dark hair fell in tangled waves around her shoulders, and her tank top clung to her lean frame with sweat and grime. She moved with the restless energy of someone always ready for a fight, fingers never far from the hilts of her daggers. When she looked at people, it was with the calculating gaze of a predator measuring distance and weakness.

“Waves,” Uxx repeated slowly, as if testing the word. “Yes. Waves make noise. Don’t like noise.”

“Then go somewhere else,” Kivven muttered, not looking up from her blade.

“Can’t. Rulv says stay.”

“Then shut up about it.”

Uxx fell silent, but his fingers continued to flex around his weapon’s handle. The waves kept calling to him, an endless distraction he couldn’t quite ignore or understand. After a few more moments, the stitched ruin of his throat shifted slightly. With a dry swallow, he muttered, “He’s getting reckless.”

Phessra tilted her head slightly, smoke curling from between her lips. “She’s not broken,” she coaxed softly, speaking to no one in particular.

“What?” Kivven looked up sharply.

“The girl. She’s not broken like the others. Different.”

Kivven’s eyes narrowed. “What girl? The green-eyed brat?”

“Different how?” Uncle Jel asked, his cheerful voice carrying genuine curiosity.

Phessra’s fingers stilled on the spine of her book. “She thanked him. When he gave her food. Actually thanked him.” Her smile turned predatory. “Most of them are too scared to speak by then.”

“So?”

“So maybe that’s why Rulv kept her.”

Uxx didn’t respond right away. He reached down, grabbed a piece of driftwood from the pile, and tossed it into the fire. Sparks jumped, flared, then faded.

“He should’ve handed her over,” he demanded at last. “Same as the others.”

“Well. He’s the boss,” Kivven replied, not defending, just stating.

“He logged her as withheld,” Uxx complained. “Swapped her out for that scrawny Velari boy. Figured no one would notice.”

Kivven let out an abrupt laugh, and scoffed, “They noticed.”

Uxx nodded.

As an afterthought, Phessra added: “Twelve is a bad number.”

The salt wind off the coast rolled across the dunes in dry snarls, tugging at the tattered banners mounted to the Syndicate’s rusted haulers. The convoy moved in silence, five trucks long, their engines coughing through grit and corrosion as they crept along the southern shelf of the Emberdeep.

Atop the lead vehicle, a man stood with one boot braced against the cab. He was thick through the shoulders, wrapped in a fur-lined vest and belts of ammunition that clinked with every movement. His face was a roadmap of scars, each one earned and repaid in kind. They called him Kessler. Once a chain handler for the Bone Markets east of the Fold, now a commander of his own mobile unit. A man who believed in two things: strength, and the consequence of weakness.

His second-in-command climbed up beside him, goggles pushed to her forehead, eyes squinting against the glare.

“Campfire up ahead,” she observed, pointing toward the bluff. “Tucked against the cliff. Looks like one of ours.”

Kessler narrowed his eyes, studying the thin line of smoke curling lazily into the sky. “Dask’s crew,” he muttered.

“You sure?”

“I never forget the stink of betrayal,” he growled. “That bastard sold half my stock three winters back, claimed it was lost to a Fold storm.”

His second grunted. “Could be a coincidence.”

Kessler snorted. “No such thing. Not out here.”

He turned and pounded twice on the truck’s roof. “Circle wide. No engine lights. I want eyes on them by nightfall. If Dask’s still breathing, I’ll be the one to fix that.”

His voice dropped as he looked out across the shattered plain. “Time to settle accounts.”

Talon Veyr flew alone.

The wind was sharp this far south, dragging like a blade across his wings. Below him, the Emberdeep came apart at the seams where desert and sea bled into each other. Salt flats shimmered under distorted light, but their glimmer was hollow, more mirage than promise. The dunes rose in warped, unnatural contours, and the land looked scoured clean.

He didn’t know where they were. The trail had gone cold days ago. The wind scattered tracks, and Syndicate crews didn’t linger where they weren’t welcome, which was most places. Still, he felt their direction like an internal compass, an unexplainable force pulling him south. Somewhere out there, Kaela was waiting.

His body had begun to fray at the edges. Meals were little more than handfuls of bitter berries scavenged from the fringes of the Fold. Sleep came in harried snatches, stolen only when the throb in his shoulder became too intense to fly. His instincts, once razor sharp, now flickered like a lantern burning the last of its oil.

But he knew rest was a luxury he could no longer afford. Every minute spent grounded was a minute Rulv Dask slipped further south, dragging Kaela deeper into the dark.

Talon’s eyes scanned every crease in the sand for patterns that didn’t belong. Every ridgeline looked like it had been carved by violence, and every hollow whispered the memory of footsteps long since swallowed. He moved slower now, not because his body demanded it, but because he couldn’t risk missing anything. A bent reed. A torn scrap of canvas. A smear of oil where no machine should have been.

He checked each shallow ravine, each outcrop of wind-battered rock, sometimes landing just long enough to kneel beside a faint impression in the dust. Most were nothing. Animal prints. Debris. The wishful tricks of a mind unraveling under too many days of heartache. But still, he searched. There was no question in his mind that she was out here. The doubt was in himself. In whether he could get to her in time. Whether there would be anything left to save.

The sun had begun to tip westward when he caught it. A reflection that was out of place in the rust-colored sprawl of a dead basin. He dropped, wings pulling tight against his sides as he landed. It was half-buried in the sand, no bigger than his palm.

He knelt and brushed it free.

A shard of blue glass, curved and thick, the kind used in field optics. It was Dominion made, long since discontinued. It meant nothing. A piece of trash caught in the drift. Just one more relic in a world littered with them.

Unless it had been placed, not dropped.

And suddenly, that’s how it felt. Like he was meant to find it.

There was a thin groove etched into the grit beside where the glass had been buried. Too straight to be wind-made. Too deliberate for an animal. A single dragging line carved into the earth like a whisper of intent, and it pointed due south.

Talon rose slowly, slipping the shard of glass into his pouch. He spread his wings and launched into the sky. Dask was heading south, which meant he was running out of road. The coastline would soon become a dead end, and Talon would make sure that’s exactly what it was.

The fire burned low but steady, casting flickering amber light across the makeshift table where four figures hunched over a filthy spread of cards. The table wasn’t a table at all, just a steel panel pried off an old carrier truck and set across a pair of stacked crates. Empty bottles littered the sand around them. The air stank of spilled spirits and sweat.

Meera was leaning forward, one elbow propped against the table, counting tokens with a gloved hand. Her expression was unreadable as always, but the slight twitch in her left eye betrayed her bluff. Bale was already half-drunk and twice as loud, laughing so hard at his own joke he nearly toppled backward off his crate. Kivven rolled her eyes and tossed a card onto the pile with deliberate flair. Rulv said nothing. He never did when he played. Just drank, smoked, and stared at his cards like they were war maps and someone’s life depended on them.

“Look at that,” Bale snorted, slamming his bottle onto the table with enough force to slosh sour liquor across the cards. He flipped over a pair of bent queens and grinned. “Two sisters, both prettier than Meera.”

“That’s a better hand than what usually jerks you off,” Meera retorted, nodding toward the grimy fingers still wrapped around his bottle.

Kivven barked a laugh. Bale scratched at his stomach and grinned. “Still got more coin than you.”

“Because you cheat,” Kivven muttered, not glancing up from the cards concealed in her fist. “Or maybe the cards just feel sorry for you.”

Bale rolled his eyes. “Shut up, bitch.”

“She’s not wrong,” Meera muttered, tossing a card toward the pile. “You pull from the bottom one more time, I’ll snap off your damn finger.”

“Careful,” Uncle Jel warned cheerfully, approaching with a cup of tea in hand. “Violence at the table means no dessert.”

No one responded. They had long since stopped trying to figure out if Uncle Jel was joking, or if he was the joke.

“Your bet, Chainfather,” Bale said, smirking.

Rulv leaned back in his chair, silent as ever. His expression was unreadable as he shifted his eyes across the table. Then he placed two tokens into the center. “Raise.”

That’s when Kivven froze, mid-reach, her eyes narrowing toward the horizon.

“Hold up,” she muttered, slowly rising to her feet. “We’ve got company.”

Across the flat, emerging from the dunes in a loose semi circle, came more than a dozen figures wearing ragged armor and blackened gear. Their movements were casual but confident, like predators who had already cornered their prey.

At their center walked a man that Rulv recognized instantly. An old partner turned enemy. Kessler.

Slightly younger than Rulv, his smile was that of someone who believed he held all the cards. He wasn’t an enormous man, but the bulk he carried was solid muscle earned through years of breaking people who disagreed with him. The two could have passed for brothers; similar in build, similar in hunger. But the blood between them had curdled long ago.

And that history was walking straight toward them.

“Rulv Dask,” he called, arms spread wide like they might embrace. “The infamous Chainfather, all the way out here in the Emberdeep.”

Rulv swept the horizon with a cautious glance, noting their numbers, their spacing, their angles of attack. “Kessler. This isn’t your territory.”

Kessler chuckled. “My territory’s wherever the Crown needs order restored. Or did you think we wouldn’t hear about your little accounting error?”

The two men stood face to face now, tension stretching between them like wire ready to snap.

“We delivered,” Rulv said. “What’s your concern?”

“You delivered eleven,” Kessler replied.

“Count again. We delivered twelve.”

Kessler burst into laughter. “We only count the ones that live, you know that, Chainfather. That sickly boy you handed off didn’t last the night. You owe us one more.”

Rulv said nothing, his face a mask of controlled indifference.

“Let me cut right to the chase,” Kessler hissed. “Where’s the cute little green-eyed thing? The one you withheld from the manifest?”

“I don’t answer to you,” Rulv said, his voice even.

“No, you don’t,” Kessler agreed. “But the people who sent me? They want the girl. And they want you to explain why you kept her.”

Phessra had remained seated on her canvas square, legs tucked beneath her. She glanced up at Rulv with a half-smile, whispering to no one in particular, “Twelve’s a bad number.”

Uxx stepped forward, silent and towering, his war hook resting against his shoulder like an extension of his spine.

Bale cracked his knuckles. Meera moved into position, just behind Rulv’s right shoulder.

Kivven stood, feet shoulder-width apart, spinning her blade from one hand to the other, and back again.

Rulv broadened his shoulders, fixing his gaze on Kessler.

“You want to finish this now?” he asked.

Kessler smiled wider.

“No. I want your crew. Yours is sloppy, undisciplined. But the bones are strong. They’ll thrive under my command.”

Rulv’s eyes didn’t blink. Kessler’s smile faded.

“I wasn’t asking.”

A long silence followed, broken only by the soft crash of water behind them and Uncle Jel’s continued humming.

Then Rulv spoke, low and cold.

“You made two mistakes, Kessler.”

Kessler cocked an eyebrow, amused. “Did I?”

The smirk hadn’t even finished forming on his face before Rulv moved.

The blade was already in his hand, with no flourish and no warning. Just a clean, brutal motion that split the air between them and buried itself deep in Kessler’s neck. It pierced true, angled to sever the jugular, and with each fading heartbeat, blood sprayed in a shallow arc.

Kessler staggered back, choking on his own blood, and crumpled to his knees.

Rulv shrugged, and muttered, “Okay, one mistake.”

With his boot, Rulv gave Kessler a nudge. As his rival slumped face first into the dirt, he turned and walked back to the card table. He sat down like nothing had happened.

The silence that followed was thick and final. Kessler’s crew stood frozen, eyes wide, waiting to see what came next.

Without raising his voice, Rulv said, “He was never your leader. Just a man with a loud mouth and bad instincts.”

He let the words settle.

“Now you ride with me. Or you don’t ride at all.”

No one argued.

Uncle Jel looked up from his tea with a beaming smile. “Wonderful! More mouths to feed means more joy around the fire. I’ll need to stretch the broth a bit, but love always finds a way.”

And just like that, the Chainfather’s crew went from six to two dozen.