The knight rode in silence. His mount’s hooves crushed the brittle remnants of a once-thriving village—splintered wood, broken pottery, torn fabric fluttering like wounded banners in the cold wind. The air was thick with the acrid stench of charred flesh and decay. No voices, no cries, no distant sounds of life. Only the wind howling through the hollow ruins.
The bodies lay where they had fallen. Not in battle, not in flight—simply where they had stood, as if death had taken them in an instant. A woman still clutched a bucket beside the well, her face slack, her eyes clouded. A child lay curled in the dirt, as if merely asleep. A man sat slumped against a crumbling wall, his fingers still wrapped loosely around a cup. They had not fought. They had not even run.
The knight dismounted. He knelt beside one of the corpses, a middle-aged farmer, his skin pale and dry, his lips slightly parted as if he had drawn his last breath without realizing it. There were no wounds, no blood—only an emptiness, a hollow absence where life should have been.
He rose, his gaze sweeping over the silent carnage. The same terrible stillness stretched over every body, every house. The village had not been raided, nor burned to the ground by human hands. No torches, no arrows, no signs of a struggle. Only lifeless forms, abandoned by the very essence that had once animated them.
Then, on the ground, he noticed something else. The dirt was disturbed in places, not by the shuffle of desperate feet, but by something heavier, more deliberate. He crouched, running his gloved fingers over the deep impressions in the soil. They stretched away from the village, trailing into the mist-cloaked hills beyond. Wide, sunken footprints. Spaced too far apart for a man. Too uneven for a beast.
He followed them with his eyes. The path led away, vanishing into the distance like a scar upon the land.
Then, something stirred.
Far beyond the hills, beneath the thick veil of clouds, a darkness moved. A shape—indistinct, shifting, impossibly large—crawling toward the horizon.
The knight’s grip tightened around his sword.
The next village lay beyond those hills.
And whatever had done this… was already on its way.
