The valley they stumbled into was veiled in fog.
Low-hanging ash floated like dust motes in a forgotten room. Trees were blackened skeletons. No birds sang. Only the crackle of fire in the distance — faint but steady — reminded them that something still burned.
The trio followed a rocky path down into the basin, half-hoping it led nowhere.
But someone had been here recently.
Charred bodies lay stacked like offerings, bones picked clean by the heat. Symbols carved into bark. A sigil on every tree: a flaming eye over an inverted mountain.
Not Ember Saints. Something else.
The Scattered Ones
They found the survivors three hours later — a ragtag group of six hiding in a stone hut covered in ash blankets and dead moss. At first, the people mistook them for Ember acolytes and raised crude weapons.
But then they saw Rui's face — exhausted, human — and lowered their blades.
"We thought no one made it out of Hollowpath," a woman said, her voice raw with soot.
"Most didn't," Li Wei answered quietly.
A man limped forward, cradling a child whose left arm was melted to the bone. "Are you with the Covenant?"
"No," Rui said. "We're not with anyone."
That seemed to calm them more than any explanation.
That night, they sat around a burn barrel lit with scraps of mutant wood. It glowed a strange, teal-blue.
The man introduced himself as Konu — once a miner, now a scavenger and reluctant leader of the broken.
His voice cracked when he spoke, and his right eye twitched, a wound left by flame-blindness. But his mind was sharp.
"They call themselves The Flameborn Covenant," he said. "Not just Ember Saints. That was just one cell."
Li Wei leaned forward. "How many?"
"Too many."
He gestured toward the map he had scrawled on the dirt floor — smudged, but recognizable. Circles marked several old towns and bunkers.
"They've spread through the west, south, and even east of the old capital. Every place with survivors. Every camp of mutants or altered humans. They see them all as impure. Zombies. Us. Even children born after the rain."
Chen Yu raised a brow. "So… a bunch of cultists trying to be post-apocalyptic crusaders."
Konu nodded. "They think the rain was divine punishment. They say the only way to cleanse the world is fire. Purge everything. Rebuild from ash."
Rui clenched her jaw. "And the creature under their chapel?"
"They call them Heralds. Each sect has one. Mutations they've raised or captured. Fed them. Worshipped them. Used them to judge."
Silence fell.
Until Chen Yu muttered, "Religion makes people mad."
Before they left the hut the next morning, Konu made a request.
"Take her," he said, gesturing to the burned child. "My daughter. I can't move fast. She won't survive here."
Rui stepped forward instinctively. "What's her name?"
"Bayo. She's strong. Smarter than me."
The girl said nothing, eyes dull from pain and trauma. But she clutched a rusted locket like it still meant the world.
Li Wei hesitated. "We don't do well with attachments."
"She won't slow you down," Konu said. "And if you leave her… she'll die here. That's the world now, isn't it?"
Rui looked at Li Wei.
He didn't speak — just gave a tight nod.
They took Bayo.
By dusk, smoke was rising again — this time from a hilltop.
The trio climbed toward it with caution. The smell of burning hair hit them first.
A camp — old military by the looks of it — was being purged. Flameborn warriors in red-tinted armor were dragging people from tents, chaining them to posts, and setting them alight while others chanted.
One of them wore a mask with the same eye-mountain sigil.
Rui whispered, "They're doing it again."
Chen Yu stepped forward. "I say we cut through them. One at a time."
But Bayo grabbed his hand, trembling.
"Not now," Li Wei said. "We're outnumbered."
He pointed to a side route — a trench from an old water line. "We go around. For now."
"But they're—"
"I know. But survival isn't always rescue. Sometimes it's just staying alive long enough to matter."
That night, far from the flames, they set up camp in a bunker ruin.
Rui patched Bayo's arm with herbs she'd learned to recognize.
Chen Yu melted down a mutant's tooth he'd taken from the Hollowpath creature, watching it dissolve into a glowing orb.
Li Wei stared into the dark.