The Second Horn: Not a Call, but a Condemnation
Flame unrolled across the grass like a banner dipped in oil. The Wolffire riders advanced behind it, their torches smoldering low and thick so sparks crawled instead of leaping. The wind leaned and the fire obeyed, bowing where the ditch still held damp. Between two red walls, a single corridor stayed black—the wolves' door.
"Buckets to the doorways! Wet the mats!" Luo Chen's mother's voice cut cleanly through the crowd. Women moved in pairs, sloshing water, slapping sodden reed mats against lintels. Smoke already scratched throats raw. Chickens exploded from under carts; goats hammered posts with their horns. The elder stood before the totem, not to stop fire—no prayer ever stopped wind and want—but to square the village's breathing. "Flame remembers," he sang, and voices braided around his.
On the walkway, the watchman set three boys to fetch spare spears, three more to carry stones in baskets for throwing. "You two," he told Luo Chen and Jun, "stay by me. Your legs are quick, your heads quicker. If a gap opens, you run the message."
Jun nodded, jaw set. Luo Chen felt his mouth go dry. He could taste the oil in the air now, slick and rancid.
The first flight of arrows hissed. Most struck roofs; a few thudded into the palisade at knee height, where boys would think to duck and then stand again. A horse screamed where a misfired torch caught mane. The Wolffire laughed, a hard, barking sound that had no room for music.
Luo Chen's father took the ladder with his axe balanced across his back like a third shoulder. He did not speak when he reached them. He looked once at his son, once at Jun—who had eaten at his table when bread had allowed—and then to the gate. That was consent enough.
"Hold," the watchman said again. He timed the word to the wind, release to breath, as if the village could become a single chest.
The riders flowed left, then right, testing. When their circle tightened, the watchman lifted his hand. "Now."
Stones rose in an arc. Two riders ducked too slow, and jawbones snapped hollow as gourds. Spears jabbed through the logs. A rider leaning far to hook the palisade with an iron crook to pull it down caught a spear through the shoulder. He howled. Another stood in the stirrup with a torch, trying to pour fire through a gap; Luo Chen's father's axe came down, shearing the torch in two and biting deep into the man's forearm. Blood sprayed black in firelight.
For a heartbeat, cheer dared to rise. Then the Wolffire showed the lesson they had polished: they did not hammer the wall where it was strong; they breathed with the wind and pressed where wet mats hissed and dulled. They sought the seam between readiness and fear. Torches found that seam. Flame crawled along reed roofs; smoke thickened into a living thing that pushed hands and eyes back from the places they were needed most.
Arrows again—lower, meaner. One took the bell of a water jar and shattered it to clay teeth. Another ripped a strip from Jun's sleeve and left his upper arm bleeding in two clean lines.
"I'm fine," Jun snapped at concern that had not yet reached its words. He tied the ripped cuff with his teeth, breath short, and shoved a basket of stones into Luo Chen's hands. "Throw high. Let gravity be the cruel part."
Cracks spidered across the palisade where two posts had rotted under last spring's flood. The riders had found it. Hooks bit, men leaned, ropes went taut. The wall moaned. The watchman swore softly, a prayer's inverse. "Brace it!"
Luo Chen and Jun jammed spare posts between crossbeams while the men heaved. For an instant the wall held. Then a hook tore free of rotten wood and the gap yawned wider, a mouth opened by hands that wanted to feed it. Three Wolffire surged for the opening.
Father moved first. He did not roar; he simply arrived where he was required. The axe bit the first rider's knee, turned bone to splinters. The second lunged with a short spear; Father took the shaft on the beard of the axe, twisted, and the spear went wide. A backhand chop smashed into the man's helm; he fell as if the earth had pulled him by the ankles. The third rider hesitated, and in that half-breath the watchman's spear found his ribs.
"Close it!" Father barked. It was the first time he had given the boys a soldier's order. They obeyed like ropes under strain, shoving a spare beam across the gap. Jun wedged it with a mallet while Luo Chen braced with his shoulder so hard his teeth sang.
A torch arced over the wall and burst on the grain shed's thatch. The wet mats hissed but not enough. Smoke boiled.
"Doorways!" Mother again, her voice now hoarse. Women formed a chain, hauling water from the well, passing jars hand to hand. A girl slipped; Mother shoved her clear and took a spray of sparks across her hair. She slapped them out with her sleeve and kept moving.
The Wolffire horn blared a third time—closer, impatient. Hooks bit again. Ropes tightened. The beam Jun had wedged shuddered.
"On me!" Father dropped from the walkway through the half-made gap and met the next rush in the ditch. Two riders tried to trample him under, but the ditch's angle changed their charge into a stagger. He rose into their mistake, the axe head whistling, and one horse collapsed with its throat laid open. The other reared; Father stepped in under its belly and chopped the rider from the saddle. He was making a wall out of bodies because wood would not be enough.
Jun stared, lips parted, as though he was watching a story made flesh. Luo Chen felt something far more jagged: pride and terror braided too tight to separate.
Then the giant came.
The man was taller than most by half a head, broad as the gate itself. He wore a boar-tusk crest and a coat of scales blackened with oil, his shield the size of a doorway. His horse thundered heavier than the others, iron shoes biting sparks from the ground. Where lesser riders darted and circled, he simply advanced, inevitability in motion.
"Brace!" the watchman shouted. But bracing was not enough. The giant dropped his shield and drove like a ram. The impact rattled teeth along the wall. Posts split. Two defenders toppled. Father stood his ground, swinging once, twice—each blow enough to fell a man. Still the giant pressed.
The axe struck sparks from the great shield, bit shallow into its rim, but the weight behind it lifted Father from his stance. He staggered back, boots gouging earth, yet his jaw was clenched, eyes refusing to yield. He hacked again, carving into the horse's shoulder, drawing a scream from the beast, but the giant's bulk slammed into him all the same. The collision sent him rolling into the embers at the base of a burning rack, his clothes spitting sparks.
He rose. He always rose. But now blood poured from his arm, and his grip on the axe shook as if the haft itself weighed more than iron.
"Father!" Luo Chen's cry tore out before he could bite it back. Jun seized his wrist, dragged him down behind the beam.
"Don't!" Jun hissed. His voice had no tremor, only urgency. "If you stand, you're dead before him."
Smoke rolled in waves. The giant rider wheeled his horse, snarling something guttural, and pointed at the weakening wall. His presence made the other Wolffire bolder. Hooks flew again. Torches arced.
And all around them, Mother still shouted orders, her hair scorched, her sleeve blackened, but her voice refusing to falter. "Doorways! Keep the chains! Wet the mats!"
She moved like someone who could not be broken until her people were broken first. And Luo Chen, even through the blur of smoke and panic, understood that both his parents were turning themselves into walls—the only kind of walls that could hold.
The palisade groaned a final time. A hook tore a rib from the gate. The opening widened like a wound rediscovering how to bleed. Three riders poured through.
Father met the first with a cut that should have split a stump; it split a man. The second thrust; Father caught the spear on the haft and shoved, and the point went left of any heart worth keeping. The third rider raised a torch to pour it like a jug into the square. Father's axe shattered the torch. Fire arced harmlessly into mud.
"Run!" the watchman shouted—at whom, it no longer mattered. Lines had broken; the village had become a dozen small battles and a single larger loss.
The giant rider forced his horse into the gap, his boar-tusk helm glinting in flame. Shield lowered, he thundered forward, scattering men like stalks of millet. Father stood his ground one heartbeat too long—long enough for love, not for survival. The impact lifted him clear, flung him into burning timbers. Embers feathered his shoulders with cruel light.
He dragged himself up. He always dragged himself up. Blood sheeted down his arm; two spears struck him near-simultaneously, one in the shoulder, one in the flank. A third nailed his palm to the earth through the axe haft. His lips moved. Luo Chen could not hear the word, but he read it: Go.
"Father—!" Luo Chen lunged. Jun's grip clamped his wrist like iron. "Don't look, don't stop," Jun rasped. His voice was flat, steady, like rope keeping a drowning boy afloat.
Mother appeared through the smoke, her hair singed, her sleeve scorched to black lace. She hammered the blue cloth pouch into Luo Chen's palm, then forced the pendant itself into his hand when the thong tangled. The stone was colder than death. "Take it. Past the dry river. Do not look back."
Her hand, trembling and swift, rose to smooth his soot-clotted hair from his brow—one last gesture of morning tenderness. The spear struck as she moved. It punched through her chest into the post behind. Her eyes widened but never left her son. Blood filled her mouth, but she forced one word past it, practiced and stronger than pain: Go.
Luo Chen froze. The world narrowed to the spearhead's notch, the burn of the thong knot, the curl of ash at his mother's sleeve. He could not move; he did not know how to make legs remember the meaning of step.
Then the elder came. Smoke wreathed him, but his staff glowed with grooves of fire traced by his own blood. He drew a circle in mud with fingers red to the bone, and the earth shivered. His voice rose—not louder than the fire, but truer.
"Ancestor flame, take back what walks unasked."
The circle flared. Fire ran up his staff, up his arms, out in a red wave that drowned ten men and their mounts. Torches blew backward as if the night itself exhaled. The elder stood burning but unbowed, a thin candle inside a pyre. His eyes, last of all, fixed on Luo Chen until they too were ash.
The Wolffire reeled. Horses screamed. The village square collapsed into a furnace.
Luo Chen stood frozen, pendant cutting into his palm, ash and grief pressing him into stone. He could not breathe. He could not move. He could not exist beyond the ringing in his head.
Jun moved for him. He pressed his soot-streaked forehead briefly to Luo Chen's temple, voice a taut rope: "Two and two. Left foot, right foot. Count with me. Breathe on my hand. North."
"I—" The sound broke from Luo Chen's throat like glass.
"You can after the next step," Jun said, firm. His narrow shoulder shoved under Luo Chen's arm, dragging him. "We don't stop here."
They stumbled through smoke and blood. No one called Jun's name; no doorway waited for him. The village had always bent him toward this family, and now he followed its last curve.
Behind them the elder's circle guttered to black glass, the axe haft glowed one last time where embers licked it clean, and his mother's hand hung unfinished from the spear shaft.
Jun did not let Luo Chen look. He hauled him forward, whispering like a curse, "Left, right, left—count with me. We finish outside the wall."
They reached the last yard before the palisade. The wall had collapsed where fire had chewed halfway through, logs split and blackened. The gap yawned like a wound that would not close. Beyond it lay only night—cold, endless, filled with wolves and men alike.
Behind them the village was no longer a place but a sound: screams layered on steel, prayer bound in fire. Luo Chen staggered, his legs heavy with ash, his chest a hollow furnace that wanted only to collapse inward.
He slowed. He wanted to stop, to turn, to go back into the fire and become one more ember among the rest. His father's axe flashing, his mother's hand frozen mid-gesture, the elder's staff burning upright—all of them called him back louder than any living voice.
Jun would not allow it. He seized Luo Chen by the collar and yanked forward, voice cracking with terror and fury: "Don't you dare! If you stop, they all burned for nothing!"
Luo Chen's mouth opened but no words came, only a hoarse cry. The pendant cut into his palm until blood wet the thong. It seemed heavier than his whole body.
"Left, right, left—count with me!" Jun dragged him like a man hauling a drowning boy from river mud. "We finish outside the wall. That's the promise!"
They plunged through the broken logs, fire clawing their backs, sparks kissing their clothes. A spear scraped the stones at their heels, throwing off a brief shower of light. Jun shoved through first, then hauled Luo Chen after. Both tumbled into the ditch outside.
Night struck them like cold water. The sky was smoke-blotted, only a few shreds of stars visible. Grass bent low in the wind, whispering of pursuit. Behind them, riders cursed, trying to funnel horses through the wreckage. Arrows hissed, one splitting earth beside Jun's hand. He rolled and pulled Luo Chen farther down the slope.
"North!" Jun gasped. "Remember—the dry river! Keep north!"
Luo Chen turned his head once more. The village was a bowl of fire tipped into its own grave, beams collapsing, cries fading into the roar. He wanted the fire to reach them, to burn them too, so choice would end.
Jun shoved him again, hard enough to bruise. "Not yet! You carry them now!" His voice cracked but held, steady as hammered stakes. "Run!"
And so they ran—not in rhythm, but in survival. One stumbling, the other pulling. Their shadows broke and rejoined in the firelight until night swallowed both.
Above the ditch, the giant rider reined in his horse, tusked helm catching the glow. He raised his shield like a wall against sparks and pointed north with his spear. The Wolffire did not need words; the order was clear.
The hunt had begun.