A charred hand reached out to him, its facsimile of desperation and fear echoing in booming notes even from beyond the grave. Karl couldn’t move, petrified in the path of the ashen and pointing finger, the emaciated and hooked appendage flaking off, turning to dust in the rain and winds of the storm before him.

The men had taken to picking through the wreckage looking for... Something, more survivors hopefully, at least that was what seemed to give reckless energy and a nigh religious fervour to their searching, Karl was more pessimistic about their chances. If anymore had survived the assault why had they not come forth with the rest of the weeping, starving throng. Regardless the search had continued through the last few hours of the afternoon and now persisted deep into the night. Their trawl through the poorer, residential areas toward the keep had, in all this time, turned up nothing. No sign of any other survivors amongst the ruins. And no dead enemy bodies either, the host long since having given their own proper rites, whilst leaving the citizens of Martibeliard to rot and fester in the sun and rain. The enemy had torn through the city, butchering all in their path, an unstoppable wave which had struck hard and fast and disappeared much the same. Leaving naught but catastrophe and shattered hopes in their wake.

Fuck, Karl thought, fists clenching until his knuckles turned white beneath his gloves. Fuck this. He moved past the swirling cloud of the quickly dissolving man, pointedly looking away as he disappeared into the howling wind. Instead of mourning he tore past. He had to see, if the city had been attacked then surely the people would have retreated to the keep. The ruined, ashen, razed keep, he had to see what, if anything, had survived there. The men had been so far reluctant to enter through the stone circle of blackened walls, fearing what lay within. It would be Karl to first break that morbid sanctum.

He moved up the winding and zig-zagging streets which wove like arteries toward the reinforced and beating stone heart of the city. They had been built this way for defensive purposes, labyrinthine as they were and often bordered with large, overlooking buildings, pockmarked all over with places to hide defenders. They were sure hidden well now, submerged in a torrent of cyclopean, rent stones, the ruined mounds interposed with the occasional grasping limb of the untrained civilians who had taken up arms with whatever they had at hand to defend their homes.

Karl picked up his pace, hustling his way past stricken men to tired to give a salute, some had wives clinging to their arms, weeping in a mixture of relief in the spouses return and pain that it had arrived in such a disagreeable manner. Fewer still had the skinny, fragile bodies of children hanging onto their legs, too hungry to cry as the parents attempted to force the few stale rations which remained through their chapped lips.

The vast majority were alone, tearing through the foundations of what had once been their homes, kneeling before the burnt out remains of their families, wondering in silent morbidity to themselves if they had gone nobly into that final end, or if they had begged beneath the wickedly grinning curves of the invaders swords.

It hadn’t been the Coalition who attacked, that much they had gleaned from what few words the survivors had parsed. No, it had simply been another raid by the mountain clans to the far north, to whom civility and culture were still foreign constructs. They had been tempted from their icy hovels of manure and thatch by the Hegemony’s failed campaign into the southern coalition. Sacking the northern cities now devoid of both fighting men and the promise of a punitive attack, their atavistic avarice fuelling a demonic crusade of slave taking and slaughter which had carved a crimson swathe through the northern forts and forest citadels.

He rushed his way up the great hill around which the city was built as a crown. His arms periodically swiping away the rain from his eyes as he tried not to stumble on the cobbles now made slick with a slurry of rotten gore and purest rain.

He passed the bakery in which him and his sister had sat and ate sweet cakes whilst listening to the singing which so often carpeted the main streets, flooded with buskers of all trades as it usually was. Next did he pass the smithies, their great pluming chimneys now still and empty, the roaring and clanging sounds of industry which often resounded within now silent.

Harlen, one of the smiths whom they had taken with them to make repairs had had a son, the boy had stayed behind as a member of a trade necessary to maintaining the city. He was now nailed to the load bearing column of his fathers store, the handle less arming sword he had presumably grabbed to defend himself having long ago slipped from pallid hands. He would join his father now; the man having caught an arrow to the eye in one of numerous camp raids of the campaign’s initial stages.

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He passed through countless memories of his childhood, the nostalgic wash he had longed for during his great retreat cut down into the uneasy stillness of death by the scenes of slaughter which now tainted and made dark these once innocent vistas.

He rounded the crest of the hill, sharp face poking above the scattered stones to be met with the half closed and bent inward inner gate. Shattered remnants of it scattered and waterlogged, their pale slivers of short spear sized splinters carpeting the path up toward it with an air of destruction and wrongness.

He slowed as he walked the grey stones toward the yawing gate and courtyard beyond. His eyes were downcast, the stones had been cleaned of bodies, devoid of the mess of the city below, and yet in-between them, in the grout, one could see where the blood had seeped through, staining the rock like wine. Even in death the men and women who had defended this last vestige of Martibeliard refused to be taken from it, their lifeblood refusing to abandon the stones that they had been cut down defending.

In his trance the boy had nearly crashed into the heavy gate, he caught himself and slipped into the gap and through to the barren courtyard, it too being bare but for the maroon spiderwebs which stubbornly lined the floor. Before him were the shattered ruins of his childhood home. The once stout and indomitable towers having crumbled days before, falling into themselves in a cascading waterfall of terrestrial death.

They would have most likely set fires in the cellars and basements, that or mined them, anything to erode the great foundations, the roots of his people that had long since bored themselves deep into the bosom of the earth. Whatever they had done it had been successful for there was not a tower, keep or room left standing, the once striking feat of engineering thrown down into a heap on the floor and pissed on by filthy dogs who revelled in their own barbarity.

“I burnt her hair.” Karl wheeled as he drew his sword, the pockmarked, chipped and weary blade once more answering the martial call of its master. Framed just beyond the end of its gleaming and now glistening tip was a girl, a willowy thing of tangled hair and tanned skin, the shine of her dark eyes wavering as they passed over both the armed figure and the shattered keep.

“Siobhan.” He said as he slowly lowered the blade, he did not re sheathe it.

“They killed them here, and I came and burnt their hair and buried the bodies. Does no good to have a curse follow you into the afterlife. No good.” She bit her fingernails as she spoke the last few words. Circling him too as she spoke, as if she were a carrion bird and he a corpse.

“Who?” He pivoted along with her, brown eyes following the girl as she picked her way up and down the peaks and valleys of the keep’s rubble.

“The old, the infirm, the babes, and the men too strong to be held down or not yet broken enough to be otherwise chained. Your mother was old. I burnt her hair... She was kind, does no good to be followed by a curse.”

“You were here?”

“Are you the lord now Karl? I saw your lot waddle out of the woods, and you walked alone.” She said after a pause, Karl flinched; his sword lowering further.

“Were you here?” He said eyes down.

“Aye, I was here, I watched as they were clapped in chains those who had spat witch and thrown stones.” She plucked a pebble from the floor and lobbed it lazily toward him, it bounced off his gambeson.

“And yet you weren’t taken.” The sword perked up slightly, the violent glint of its inherent promise rising to the surface of the conversation. A beat passed before them before a sneer stole its way across the girl’s narrow face.

“You call me traitor?” She spat. “A druid is seen when they want to be seen, not before. Besides, we would rather die then betray the men of the woods. Even if they have forgotten themselves.” She spat again, to ward of evil spirits. The Hegemony practiced a rigidly enforced cult of atheism, one which, despite the crowns best efforts, had only ever had middling success here in the northern forests. Where if one were to look, truly look, they could still, in those shadowed and hidden places at the edges of the world, find some who practised the old cult of ancestry native to the region. Persecuted yet persistent. A weed in the Hegemony’s garden of secularism.

A pause passed between them, Karl narrowed his eyes and spat as well, more habit then belief, you did it before you were about to trust someone, something about avoiding bad luck. He sheathed his sword. Siobhan smiled wide and white like the crescent moon and approached the young lord, striding ethereal across the grim expanse between them, as if she were a step removed from the pervasive suffering.

“Did you see where they went?”

“Aye, north. They’re northerners, where else would they take their spoils.” Her smile dropped when she caught a peak at the still downcast eyes and the question barely contained within the mind behind.

“Was she with them?” Very quiet, naught more than a whisper. Another pause passed.

“Aye.” She matched his tone; they both knew the only reason noble women were taken north.

“How was she?”

“Brave faced, befitting a Lords daughter.”

Karl looked up to the sky and let the remaining downpour wash clean his eyes as he imagined his sister, that grim determination of hers written across her face as she was led off in chains by a leering procession.

“Are you going after them?” Karl didn’t meet her eyes and instead looked back the way he had come, to the shattered gate and the starving army which pawed around in the cold and the dark beneath, lost and alone. He remembered his responsibility, like it or not he was their lord now, their well being was his to assure.

“Not in winter, not while they’re starving. Do you know where we can find shelter and food?” Said Karl as he turned back the girl, the oncoming autumn breeze of icy daggers punctuating his statement.

“Aye.” She said coyly.

“Will you take us?” He half laughed in a melancholic warbling. The girl leant back and sucked at her teeth, thinking.

“Yes, I think I will.” Karl stared at her for a moment in disbelief.

“A druid is going to help a Hegemon Lord?” It hadn’t happened in centuries, not since the sacred groves were burnt and the last forest kings had bent the knee. The girl simply cackled out a full bodied and racking guffaw.

“Did you not fight in the war Karl, the Hegemony burns, she bleeds her last into the ether! And you…” She leant forward and sniffed the sceptical boy. “Stink of providence.” She smiled wide once again. He had not the energy nor mind to join her. He simply looked back to where his men ambled and realised he would once more have to march them back through the woods. It would be a long few days.