Chapter 2: Ashes and Refugees

Raina's pov

I don't know how long I stayed in that cellar. My sense of time had stopped working properly sometime around when the ceiling fell in. It might have been hours, or days.

My throat was dry enough to crack, and my left arm had swollen to twice its normal size, the skin stretched tight and purple-black with bruising. The pain had stopped being a thing I experienced as an external stimulus and had become, instead, the baseline of my existence.

When I finally forced myself to climb back up the stairs, it was because I realized that staying in that cellar until I died of thirst wasn't actually a survival strategy. It was just slow suicide, and I'd always been too stubborn to do anything slowly.

The house was still standing, mostly. That seemed like a small miracle until I realized it was standing precisely because nothing had considered it important enough to completely destroy.

The creatures had passed through, taken what they wanted, or what they thought they wanted—and moved on to easier prey. My mother's scream had probably been the last thing of value in the house as far as they were concerned.

I didn't bother to go and look for them, both my stepfather or mother. Some part of me already knew what I would find, and I wasn't ready to make that knowledge real.

Instead, I found our supply bag. My mother had started packing things weeks ago, making little preparations in case things got worse — Dried meat, a water flask, a knife, some clothing. The leather bag was still in the closet of her bedroom, untouched.

I filled it with whatever else I could carry. Fresh water from the well, surprisingly, the well still worked, as if the creatures had decided to leave at least one source of life intact. Matches wrapped in cloth. A blanket. The small amount of silver my parents kept hidden in a loose stone behind the fireplace.

I avoided looking at the blood on the floor, I was good at avoiding things.

By the time I made it to the town square, the sun was already beginning to set again. I'd lost an entire day without realizing it. The events of the previous night felt simultaneously fresh and impossibly distant, like a dream I'd had about someone else's nightmare.

Millbrook was gone, not completely gone. Buildings still stood, streets still ran in their familiar patterns. But what had been a town of maybe two thousand people was now a necropolis, a place of ghosts and ash.

Bodies lay in the streets, some still recognizable as human, others reduced to something that suggested they'd been touched by something beyond comprehension.

The smell was incredible—smoke and blood and something else, something rotten and ancient.

There were survivors, though. Not many, as I could see them moving through the ruins, picking through wreckage with the dull deliberation of people who'd moved past grief into something beyond it. An old man sat on the remains of a wall, staring at nothing. A woman knelt beside what might have been a child, though it was hard to tell.

In the distance, I could hear more movement, more people trying to salvage what they could from the catastrophe.

"There's another one," a voice said nearby.

I spun around, my hand immediately going to the knife at my hip. I'd never had to fight anyone before, but right now, the blade felt like the most honest thing in my life.

A boy stood about ten paces away from me. He couldn't have been much older than I was, maybe eighteen or nineteen, with dark hair matted to his skull and clothes that had once been fine before they were covered in soot and worse.

His left eye was swollen, nearly shut, and he held a wounded arm close to his body. But his eyes were sharp, intelligent, and they were studying me with something like curiosity.

"Are you hurt?" he asked.

I almost laughed. Was I hurt? My arm was broken, I'd lost everything and everyone, and the world had ended. But somehow, that didn't seem like the right answer.

"I can walk," I said instead.

He nodded slowly. "Good. You shouldn't stay here. They might come back, and if they do, we need to be gone. There's a group gathering near the old mill—people who survived, people who are trying to figure out what happens next. You should come with us."

"Why?" I asked. "Why would I trust anyone right now?"

The boy smiled, and there was something both sad and genuinely kind in that smile. "Because staying here alone is dying, and this town has already killed enough people. My name is Marten, by the way. What's yours?"

"Raina."

"Then come on, Raina. The night's coming, and I don't want to be out here when it gets dark. I don't think any of us do."

He was right. The sun had moved further across the sky while I'd been standing there in shock, and the shadows were growing long and deep. More than that, I could feel something in the air—that same psychic pressure I'd felt during the attack.

It wasn't close, but it was out there somewhere, watching, Waiting. The thought of being alone when whatever came next arrived was enough to override my caution.

"Okay, lead the way" I said.

The mill was an old structure on the outskirts of town, used primarily for grain processing. I have been there a handful of times with my parents, though it had never been a place we lingered. Now, it served as a temporary shelter for what remained of Millbrook's population.

There were maybe forty people there, gathered in small clusters throughout the mill's open space. Some were injured, being cared for by others who at least had some knowledge of medicine. Some were just sitting, staring at nothing, their eyes hollow and their faces gray with shock. A few were engaged in low, urgent conversation, probably trying to figure out what to do next.

The moment we walked in, a woman stood up from one of the clusters and made her way toward us.

She was tall, with gray threading through her dark hair and bearing, and she had the bearing of someone used to giving orders. But her face was haggard, her eyes carrying the weight of terrible decisions already made.

"Marten," she said, her voice careful. "Good. You found someone?"

"This is Raina from the south side of town, Raina, this is Magistrate Corvin. She was helping oversee the town council before, and now she's... well, she's trying to help keep everyone together." Marten said.

Corvin studied me with the same sharp intelligence I'd seen in Marten's gaze. "You're hurt," she said.

"My arm, I think it is broken" I admitted.

"Mira will look at that. We need to bind it properly, keep it stable. After that, we need to talk about what we're going to do." She nodded and gestured to a woman sitting nearby.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"We can't stay here," Corvin said simply. "The creatures destroyed the wall and moved on, but there's no guarantee they won't come back. And even if they don't, this town is finished. We don't have enough supplies to maintain this many people for long. We need to move, to find somewhere safer."

"Where?" I asked. The world beyond Millbrook was mostly unknown to me. There was supposed to be a larger town to the north, Karenthel, but it was days of travel away, through territories that weren't always safe even before the Scourge had broken through the walls.

"There's a fort," a younger man said from across the mill. "In the Reaching Mountains. Stronghold Keep. If we can reach it, the walls there are supposed to be stronger. And it's far enough from the Scourge's entry point that we might have time to get there before they think to come looking for survivors."

"That's a death march, days of travel, with the wounded and the children. We'll lose half our people to exhaustion before we even reach the foothills." Another voice said sharply

"And we'll lose all of them if we stay here," Corvin countered. "I'm not saying it will be easy. I'm saying it's necessary."

They argued for another hour, as I sat with Mira and let her examine my arm. She was gentle despite being efficient, and by the time she finished wrapping it in cloth strips and fashioning a sling from more cloth, I had to admit that it felt slightly better. Not good, but better.

Around me, the debate continued, but I wasn't really listening. I was thinking about the night before, about the screaming, about my mother's scream cutting off into silence. About the creatures that had dropped through my ceiling like something from a nightmare.

About how the world had changed, and I was still alive.

I didn't know if that was a blessing or a curse. But standing there in that mill surrounded by other survivors, surrounded by people who were trying to figure out how to keep living despite everything, I thought maybe it was worth finding out.

"Raina. Are you going with us? To the fort?" Marten said, sitting down beside me.

I looked at him, at this boy who'd found me in the ashes and brought me somewhere warm, and I nodded.

"Yeah, I am coming with you" I said.

It was perhaps the most important decision I have made for a long time. Though I didn't know it yet.