Lore moved because stillness meant death.
"Seris—left street! Bram—hold the square!" he shouted, his voice raw with smoke and screaming.
The creature lunged. Its jaws snapped shut where his head had been a heartbeat before and smashed through a market cart, flinging splintered wood and sacks of grain across the cobbles. Firelight crawled over its warped body, painting torn muscle in red and gold as it turned back toward him.
Lore slashed across its arm. Flesh split. The thing shrieked and raked at him with claws that screeched against his guard, the impact numbing his shoulder.
"Captain!"
Bram crashed into the creature's flank with his kite shield. The blow rang like iron struck underwater. He slid back a step, boots grinding as earth magic surged up through the stones to brace him.
Seris cut past Lore in a blur of wind and steel. Her blade opened the creature's neck. It reeled, limbs jerking as if its bones could not agree on how to stand.
Behind Lore, Nessa lifted her staff. Light burst outward over his shoulder and burned into the creature's back. It howled and collapsed.
Not dead.
Just broken.
Lore drove his sword into its chest and ended it.
For a moment, the square held.
People fled past them toward the inner streets, coughing and sobbing. Guards formed a shaking line near the well. Someone rang a warning bell that had not been used in generations.
"We can hold this, Captain," Bram said, planting his shield.
Lore almost believed him.
Then another shape burst through a bakery door.
Then another dragged itself out of an alley, limbs scraping stone.
"Too many!" a guard screamed.
Smoke rolled through the street, stinging Lore's eyes. Oil spilled from shattered lanterns and crawled across the stones in burning veins.
"Fall back!" Lore shouted. "To the well—keep them off the civilians!"
They moved together.
A woman stumbled into Lore, clutching a bundle of cloth to her chest. Her face was gray with ash and blood.
"Please—"
Lore seized her shoulders and shoved her toward Bram. "Behind the shield. Run when he tells you!"
The creature lunged.
Its claws shrieked across Bram's shield instead of tearing into the woman's back. Bram dropped to one knee with a grunt, muscles trembling as the blow drove him down.
Seris took the creature from the side, blade flashing. It collapsed in pieces.
Another replaced it.
"They don't stop, Captain," Nessa called from just behind him. "But they're slow when they climb. We can funnel them—two streets left, then the well!"
Lore's mouth tasted of copper. "Then we make a line!"
They did.
And for a time, it worked.
They drove the creatures back from the square, step by bloody step. Guards joined them, swinging pikes with shaking hands. Windas training met raw terror and somehow held.
Lore felt the rhythm return.
Strike.
Brace.
Cover.
Advance.
Hope crept in with the pattern.
The market square was lost eventually.
Not taken—
emptied.
They pulled back through side streets with what people they could gather, kicking in doors and shoving bodies inside.
"Inside! Bar it! Stay quiet!"
A man grabbed Lore's arm. "My wife's still near the warehouses—"
Lore hesitated.
Smoke swallowed the far end of the street. Steel rang somewhere out of sight. Something howled.
Seris watched him.
Bram waited.
Nessa swayed but did not fall.
"We can't split, Captain," Bram said. "Not yet."
Lore swallowed hard.
"We'll circle back," he said, though the words felt thin even as he spoke them.
They moved on.
The promise stayed lodged in his chest like a blade.
Smoke rolled low between the buildings, thick enough to taste.
Lore led them down a narrow street where fire crawled along the rooftops and burning cloth drifted down like ash. The creatures were fewer here, but the screams were louder.
A timber house had collapsed inward, its front wall crushed beneath fallen beams. Flames licked through the gaps.
"There!" Seris said. "Inside."
Lore saw movement—hands beating weakly against a half-buried door.
"Captain," Bram said, already bracing his shield, "we don't have time—"
Lore hesitated.
The river was still ahead.
The quay was still unbroken.
But the screams were now.
"Break formation," Lore said. "Seris, clear the roof. Bram, shield the door. Nessa—light inside."
They moved.
Seris vaulted upward, wind snapping loose burning shingles. Bram planted his shield against falling debris as Lore and Nessa pulled at the buried door.
The wood gave way.
Three people tumbled out—a man, a girl, and an older woman with blood in her hair.
"Run," Lore ordered. "Don't look back."
They barely made it ten paces before the creatures came.
Two dropped from the far end of the street. Another crawled from beneath a cart, its limbs dragging through soot.
"Captain!" Bram shouted.
Lore turned back into the fire.
He cut the nearest creature down, felt heat wash across his face as the house behind it collapsed fully inward. Seris split the second from shoulder to hip. Nessa's light burned the third until it stopped moving.
But the delay had cost them.
The alley behind them was gone.
A new wave surged into the street.
Bram slammed his shield into the ground. "We lost the west path!"
Lore felt it—the shape of the fight shifting in his mind.
"We go forward," he said. "To the river. Now."
They ran.
The river road became a killing corridor.
Wide streets narrowed into alleys tangled with rope, nets, and overturned carts. Shadows clung to the walls. The air smelled of salt, smoke, and burning grain.
One creature dropped from a rooftop behind them.
Another burst through a shuttered window in a spray of glass.
Lore spun, blade up. "Seris—roof!"
She leapt, wind lifting her beyond the stonework, and drove her sword through the thing's shoulder. It shrieked and crumpled into a heap of twitching limbs.
Bram planted himself in the alley mouth.
Two creatures hit him at once.
The shield bowed inward. Stone cracked beneath his boots.
"Captain!" Bram roared.
Lore hacked at the nearer one. It staggered, dragging a twisted leg behind it.
From between Lore and Bram, Nessa's light flared and burned through the creature's side. It collapsed, smoking.
The other tore at Bram's shield, claws screaming against metal.
Lore struck its wrist. Bone snapped. Seris finished it with a downward cut.
For a breath, the alley was still.
Lore looked up.
Three more shapes stood at the far end, half-hidden by smoke.
"Back," he rasped. "Slowly!"
They withdrew toward the river, step by careful step. Civilians fled past them, screaming, clutching bundles, carrying the wounded.
Nessa stumbled behind him, her staff dipping as the glow around them wavered.
Lore caught her arm. "You still with me?"
"Still seeing, Captain," she said weakly. "That's enough."
They reached a warehouse door where a knot of people huddled beneath an awning.
"Inside!" Lore ordered. "Now!"
The bar slid back just as a creature vaulted over a crate behind him.
Lore met it with steel.
The impact slammed him into stacked boxes. Pain burst through his ribs. He tasted blood.
Seris appeared between them in a storm of blades. The creature fell apart.
Bram hauled Lore upright.
"You're bleeding, Captain."
"Later," Lore said hoarsely.
They forced the civilians inside. Nessa sealed the door with light that flickered unevenly.
Lore leaned against the wall for a heartbeat.
Then the street shook.
The quay opened before them, wide and black with water.
Bodies floated at the river's edge. Burned shapes lay half-submerged in the shallows. Steam rose where Nessa's light still touched the surface.
Bram planted his shield at the lip of the stone and drove his earth magic deep.
The quay hardened.
Seris scouted ahead and came back with blood on her blade. "Less movement. They're thinning."
Lore looked down the river.
No shapes broke the surface.
No claws scraped stone.
"They're pulling back," a guard said behind him.
Lore's chest loosened.
"We can hold this," he said. "Get the wounded behind us. Barricade the streets."
They did.
For several long minutes, the river stayed still.
Lore began to believe.
Then the water bulged.
Not upward.
Outward.
Like something beneath it had exhaled.
The corpses at the river's edge began to slide.
Bram's shield groaned.
Seris stepped back. "Captain…"
The river erupted.
Creatures hauled themselves from the water in ones and twos, slick with mud and rot. They came apart when struck. They fell when burned.
Lore cut them down with steady, brutal rhythm.
"Hold the line!" he shouted.
For a few breaths, it worked.
Then the river surged again.
Not with water.
With bodies.
Something forced its way up from beneath the surface, dragging three other creatures with it as it rose.
They did not separate.
They merged.
Flesh folded into flesh. Limbs sank into one another and emerged again in the wrong places. Spines bent and knitted together. Faces pressed through its chest and neck, mouths opening in different rhythms.
It stood taller than the quay wall.
Six legs bore its weight. Two arms ended in fused claws thick as beams. Another pair hung half-formed from its side, twitching uselessly.
It breathed from more than one throat.
The smaller creatures clustered around it.
Bram took one step back.
"Captain…"
"That's not like the others," Seris said.
"No," Lore said quietly. "It isn't."
The amalgam lurched forward.
It did not climb.
It pushed.
Stone cracked beneath its weight as it drove into Bram's shield. The impact boomed like a hammer strike on a gate.
Bram cried out and dropped to one knee.
"Brace!" Lore shouted.
Seris leapt, wind lifting her high, and drove her blade into one of its shoulders. The cut opened—then closed again as muscle dragged itself back into place.
The creature answered with a sound like tearing meat.
Its chest split open.
From inside it, something hard and wet tore free.
Bone shards burst outward in a shrieking cloud.
"Captain!" Nessa cried.
Lore turned—
Too late.
The shards struck her face.
She screamed and fell backward, her staff clattering across the stone. Blood ran between her fingers as she clawed at her eyes.
"I—I can't see!"
The amalgam surged.
Bram's shield shattered.
Metal split with a scream and hurled him backward into the river.
"Bram!" Seris shouted.
Lore dragged Nessa across the stones as the creature slammed into the quay where they had stood. Rock exploded upward in shards.
"Seris—get him!" Lore ordered.
She leapt without answering.
Lore knelt beside Nessa.
Her hands shook violently.
"It hurts—Captain, it hurts—"
Lore tore a strip from his cloak and pressed it over her eyes.
"Don't touch them," he said. "Breathe. Stay with me."
The smaller creatures poured around the larger one now.
Lore turned back toward the river.
Fire gathered along his blade.
He struck the amalgam full across its chest.
The blow burned deep—
but did not stop it.
It answered with its full weight.
Lore was hurled into the street beyond. His sword skidded from his grip and vanished beneath broken crates.
He pushed himself up on shaking arms.
The amalgam dragged itself fully onto the quay.
Behind it, more shapes rose from the water.
Seris staggered back with Bram, soaked and bleeding, his shield arm hanging uselessly.
"Captain," Bram rasped. "We can't hold this."
Lore looked at the river.
Then at the streets.
Then at Nessa, curled against the wall, hands pressed to her ruined eyes.
The pattern was gone.
The rhythm was gone.
And Waycrest was still burning.
"Retreat!"
Lore's voice cut through the smoke and screaming.
"To the south gate! Get the wounded moving—now!"
The order spread fast.
Not in panic.
In survival.
Guards dragged civilians from shattered doorways. Those who could still walk were pushed toward the road. Those who could not were lifted onto wagons or carried on doors ripped from their hinges.
Lore stayed near the rear, striking down anything that pressed too close. Fire crawled through the streets behind them. Shapes still moved within it—slow and deliberate, as if the city already belonged to them.
"Captain!" Bram shouted. "They're closing the river road!"
"I know," Lore said. "Keep them moving!"
Seris cut ahead, opening a path through smoke and rubble. Lore followed with Nessa in his arms, her eyes bound in blood-dark cloth, her fingers clenched into his cloak.
They reached the southern road as the bells fell silent.
Not because the danger had passed.
Because no one was left to ring them.
From the rise beyond the outer wall, Lore looked back.
Waycrest burned.
The market district was gone.
The river quarter was gone.
The bridge lay broken in the water.
Fire climbed the glass towers and painted the smoke in colors no dawn should hold.
Within the walls, the creatures still moved.
Not chasing.
Not hunting.
Holding.
Lore turned away before the sight could hollow him out.
They gathered the survivors along the road—hundreds of them, wrapped in ash and blood and shock. Healers moved among the wounded. Guards counted heads. Mothers called names that did not answer.
Bram sat against a fallen stone, his shield shattered beside him, his arm bound in dark cloth. Seris stood watch at the edge of the road, blade still wet, eyes fixed east. Nessa lay on a stretcher near the wagons, her face pale beneath the bandages.
Lore knelt beside her.
"We'll take it back," he said quietly, though he did not yet know how.
She did not answer.
The wind shifted.
Smoke rolled across the road and hid the city from view.
Windas had not fallen.
But Waycrest had been taken.
Not by accident.
Not by chaos.
By design.
Lore rose and turned to the gathered refugees.
They looked at him with soot-dark faces and hollow eyes. Some clutched children. Others held nothing at all.
He felt the weight of them settle onto his chest.
"I won't lie to you," Lore said, his voice hoarse but carrying. "Waycrest is lost."
A murmur rippled through the crowd.
"But you are not."
Silence followed.
"We fought until there was nowhere left to stand. We pulled you from fire and shadow. We carried you out because your lives mattered more than walls and stone."
He swept his gaze across them.
"This is not the end of your home. It is the wound before the healing."
Some lowered their heads. Others watched him as if afraid to hope.
"They came to break us," Lore went on. "To teach us fear. To make us scatter."
His jaw tightened.
"They failed."
"We will shelter you. We will bury the dead. And when we are ready… we will take Waycrest back."
Not loudly.
Not fiercely.
But with certainty.
"You are not refugees," he said. "You are Windas. And Windas does not forget its own."
The road was quiet when he finished.
Then, slowly, someone bowed their head.
Then another.
Lore turned away before they could see his hands trembling.
Smoke rolled across the road and hid the city from view.
The war had not taken Windas.
But it had taken its first ground.
And Lore knew, standing among the burned and the broken, that this was no longer about holding the line.
It was about pushing it forward.