Smoke rose on the southern horizon. It wasn't the soft gray of cooking fires or the slow, lazy wisps of harvest season. This smoke was thick—dark and angry. It clawed at the sky. It screamed.
Ethan stood atop the wall of Ashen, squinting through the haze. A gust of wind brought the faintest smell of ash and something worse: burned flesh.
They'd been expecting it.
But not so soon.
Not like this.
They arrived before noon: three riders on gaunt horses, armor scorched and torn. One of them a boy no older than seventeen collapsed the moment he crossed into Ashen's gate. The others dismounted and dropped to their knees.
"They're coming," one gasped. "The Court… they've taken Halden's Rest. Burned it. Everyone. No one left."
Lyra rushed forward, pulling the boy up while Mira shouted for a healer.
Ethan stood frozen.
Halden's Rest was a day's ride south. A farming town. Peaceful. Unarmed.
"Did they bear a banner?" Ethan asked, voice low.
The older rider nodded, his face pale.
"A serpent," he said. "Wrapped in chains. Red as blood."
The Serpent Court had declared open war.
Until now, their attacks had been shadowed assassinations, silent raids, pressure through fear and letters. But this was different.
This was a message.
Ethan called a council that night. Lyra. Joren. Mira. Tavren. The three riders. Ashen's elders. The leaders of neighboring villages who had trickled in with warnings of their own.
He laid out maps across the long table inside the town hall and marked the line of burned towns with red chalk.
"This isn't just conquest," he said. "They're drawing a perimeter. Encircling the inner valleys. When they close that ring, there'll be no way in… or out."
Joren leaned forward. "They mean to choke us."
"Not just us," Lyra said, grim. "Everyone who resists."
"They're cleansing," Tavren added, voice cold.
The room went silent.
Ethan looked at the wall he helped build. At the village he had rebuilt from ash. It was finally safe.
But safety wasn't enough.
If they stayed behind their walls while others burned, they'd be no better than the nobles who sold their loyalty for silence.
He looked to the council.
"I won't let Ashen become a fortress of cowards."
No one spoke.
He continued. "We have resources. We have weapons. We have knowledge no one else does. If we wait, we die later. If we act now we give others a chance."
"What are you proposing?" Joren asked.
Ethan rolled out a new map. One he'd drawn by hand.
"I want to form a coalition. A real resistance. Ashen will be the heart of it. But we'll need outposts, scouts, messengers, allies in the hills. If the Court wants war then we fight."
Lyra didn't hesitate. "I'm with you."
One by one, hands were raised. Heads nodded.
Tavren finally spoke, slow and heavy. "Then we raise our own banner."
Three days later, it flew over the gates of the village: a white field, two suns above a black tree its roots wrapped around a sword pointing down into the earth.
A symbol of balance.
Of defiance.
Of unity.
And beneath it, Ethan and Lyra stood as refugees arrived from surrounding lands some on foot, some with carts, many with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
They were scared. Hungry. But they were alive.
And they came with purpose.
Ashen was no longer a village.
It was a spark.
The start of something greater.
That night, Ethan returned to the forge and sat alone, staring into the embers. He could feel the weight of time pressing on him again visions flickering at the edge of his thoughts.
He saw a battlefield under twin moons.
He saw Ashen engulfed in light then darkness.
He saw himself, older… standing at the foot of a tree taller than mountains, its leaves made of stars, its trunk covered in runes pulsing like veins.
And at its roots: a door.
Behind it: something waiting. Watching.
He blinked, heart racing.
The God of Creation's voice echoed faintly in his mind:
"Guard the Tree. Or lose the world."