The snow no longer ruled the land.
It clung to shadows and corners, curled in ditches and hollows, but it no longer buried the tribe. In its place, mud churned underfoot, and the sharp scent of thawing earth filled the air. Above it all, smoke coiled lazily from dozens of fire pits—signs of life rebuilding.
The Ikanbi moved with quiet purpose.
Civilians hauled woven bundles of dried reeds and bamboo. Marked laborers stacked stone, carving them into crude but steady blocks. Shelter frames rose like bones across the land—wide enough for families, simple enough to share. In the center of each cluster, a fire pit glowed—not with open flame, but with the slow warmth of Twa Milhoms.
They did not burn wood for heat.
They channeled him.
The newly accepted Red Clawed and Duru worked as well. Not as prisoners—but as contributors. Some hesitated. Others found rhythm. They followed the instructions of older Ikanbi and learned quickly: how to stack reed tiles, how to bind thatch, how to carve stone grooves to direct runoff water.
No one gave orders with pride. No one shouted. Each task was passed with patience.
And the shelters grew.
—
Near the center of the settlement, the militia began to stir.
Each of the four divisions—led by Kael, Mala, Jaron, and Enru—had resumed training. Slowly at first, testing strength lost during winter's siege. Now, after weeks of drills, they moved with form again. Two-hundred warriors in each unit practiced footwork, formation, and spearwork in the morning chill.
The sounds of effort and discipline returned to the land.
New recruits, marked and eager, watched from the sidelines. Some trained with sticks and stone clubs. Others were evaluated silently by their leaders, waiting for the nod that meant entry.
Above them, on the high ridge behind the village, something quieter stirred.
Hidden in the thickets behind Twa Milhoms' home, a circle of bare ground had been cleared—no fire, no markings, no camp sounds.
It was the Shadow Blade training ground.
There, Khol moved among his chosen silently—young men and women, most with no rings, a few with one. Their lessons were not in brute force but in stillness. In patience. In vanishing.
Those recruited spoke little. They rose before dawn and returned after dark. The tribe rarely saw them, but their presence was known. Where the militia drilled openly, the Shadow Blades watched from the edges.
And learned.
—
Not far from the granary, stone chips scattered across a cleared worksite. Druel stood with legs braced, his beard tied back, eyes squinting in the pale light. Beside him, a boy no older than twelve copied each motion—careful, focused, silent.
They were cutting stone blocks with sharpened bones and thick hide-wrapped hammers. Not for weapons—but for support. These blocks formed the cornerstones of the larger shelters—homes that would resist the next winter.
"Watch the vein," Druel said, tapping a line across the stone. "Strike outside it, and the block splinters. Strike on it, and it splits clean."
The boy nodded, mimicked the angle, and struck.
The block split.
Druel grunted, pleased.
—
Ben watched it all.
He stood on a rise at the edge of the village, arms folded, cloak fluttering in the wind.
Below him, life unfolded.
Children carried reeds. Women spread woven mats. Warriors trained. Ex-enemies worked side-by-side with those they once fought.
There were no cheers. No songs. No banners.
But there was peace.
And work.
And from that work—something new was taking shape.
The Ikanbi were no longer just a tribe of survivors.
They were builders now.
While Ikanbi built, the forest beyond remembered something older than warmth.
Out past the last fire pits, past the thickets and frozen ridges, winter's grip had loosened—but what it released was not peace.
It was hunger.
The snowmelt exposed more than roots and earth. It revealed bones—scattered, stripped clean, frozen where they had fallen. It revealed paths where feet had once run but never returned. And it stirred the old instincts in every creature still breathing.
The other tribes, those without gods as present or strong, had weathered the cold like wounded animals. Now, with the return of air that didn't slice the lungs, they emerged from their holes—ragged, lean, wild-eyed.
There were no greetings. No alliances. Only hunt or be hunted.
Fingers clutched stone blades. Children were hidden. The weak were left behind without words. Among some tribes, the first order of spring was simple:
Kill someone weaker. Take what they carried.
No camps were safe unless guarded by warriors. And even then, the cold had stripped many of strength and numbers. Whole bands moved through the woods like ghosts—scavenging, ambushing, fighting over fallen deer or the warmth of a dead beast's den.
The forest itself seemed aware.
And it responded.
From the caves and hollows, from frozen lakes and sleeping rivers, the beasts returned.
Huge, fur-matted things with black tongues and yellow eyes. Sinewed serpents with scaled necks and slow hearts that beat only in spring. Packs of tusked scavengers, smarter than they looked, with memories of where blood had spilled before.
They awoke not with rage.
But with hunger.
And in their minds, there was no difference between man or deer.
Everything was meat.
—
Ikanbi did not yet know what watched from the far edges of the forest.
But the forest remembered them.
And it was waking.
The forest had no memory of kindness.
It knew only cycles—of sleep, of hunger, of death.
As the thaw spread, the deeper parts of the wild revealed their true shape. Rivers cracked open like wounds. Caves exhaled ancient rot. Trees, blackened by storms and frost, stood as towers above the undergrowth, sheltering things too large for light.
Among the lesser tribes, fear returned quicker than fire.
They had no gods who walked with them.
No warmth that burned without wood.
No place to build.
They had bones. Blades. And instinct.
And so they turned on each other.
Fires were stolen. Food stores were raided in the night. Wounded elders were left behind—bait for beasts or obstacles to shed. Whole families vanished between dusk and dawn, swallowed not just by cold—but by other hands. The old code had returned: the strong eat, the weak are eaten.
And worse still… the true lords of the forest began to stir.
The giants.
Beasts shaped like nightmares, scaled and fanged, with hides like bark and breath like sulfur. Creatures that slept beneath the roots and rose only when the world grew warm again.
One awoke in the far west—its limbs covered in stone moss, eyes sunken and blind, yet it moved toward sound with terrifying purpose. It crushed a settlement by walking through it—never roaring, never hunting. Just passing.
Another emerged from beneath a lake, its shell cracked from frost, revealing rows of jagged spines that clacked together as it dragged itself onto shore. No one escaped its crawl—human, beast, or bird.
These were not gods.
They were older.
They were wild.
And they did not care if a tribe had prayers or order.
To them, everything was food.
And yet… even in the face of such ruin, people still tried to live.
They wrapped their babies in leaf and bark. Dug out shelters from mud and stone. Shared scraps of dried roots like treasure. They clung to the idea that home could be carved, somehow, from a world that bled at the edges.
They had no fire pits gifted by divinity.
No militia to guard their sleep.
No leader like Ben.
They had will.
And it would not be enough for all of them.
But still—they tried.