[One week after departure. The Inner Sea of Helcar]
[Selas POV]
The world broke open before us.
Water. To the horizon.
Helcar — the Inner Sea — so wide it hardly looked real. Water and starlight, all the way to the edge of sight, until the line between them blurred into a single pale band that could have been either and was neither.
"Is that the Great Sea?" a child whispered from the nearest wagon.
"Not the Great Sea," her mother said softly.
The child stared, trying to fit that into her head.
All along the column, the same scene repeated. Avari stopping in their tracks. Staring. Struggling to comprehend a scale they'd never imagined, because for thirty years the lake had been the largest body of water any of them had known, and the lake was a puddle beside this.
Good.
Let them see how vast the world is. How small we are. How much we don't know.
The ones who stayed humble lasted. The ones who didn't learned humility the hard way, sooner or later.
We followed the southern shore, water always to our left, steppe stretching endlessly to the right. Celestia's scouts ranged ahead and behind and along both flanks, probing the dark like the feelers, never more than two hours from the column at any point.
Watching for threats.
[Ten days after departure. Scout report]
[Selas POV]
They came in at dawn — five scouts at a hard run, faces grey with exhaustion and something colder underneath.
Fear.
I met them at the column's edge before the forward guard had even registered their approach. "Report."
The lead scout — a young Lindar named Círyon — pulled up short, breathing hard, and bowed. "Chief. The orcs reached the settlement two days after we left."
"And?"
"They found the ashes." His voice tightened. He swallowed, like he was trying to force the memory back down his throat and it wouldn't go. "They didn't understand at first. They searched. Prowled through the ruins, ripping apart what little stood, digging through blackened beams, shoving one another aside to reach empty storage pits."
He stared past me, eyes unfocused. Still watching from the treeline.
"And then it hit them. There was nothing. No food. No tools. No shelter. Nothing to take. Just smoke and cinders."
"They started screaming. Not like battle cries. Like something inside them was breaking. They kicked over burnt frames, smashed what they couldn't carry, tore down posts that were already half-charred. And when there was nothing left to break…"
He exhaled, ragged.
"They turned on each other."
The other scouts shifted uneasily. One of them looked away.
"It wasn't a fight," Círyon said. "It was a frenzy. They piled into it, weapons rising and falling until the ground went slick. They fell into the ruins and kept going. Crawled over bodies just to reach someone else."
{Image: Blood in the Ashes}
He paused, and for a heartbeat I thought he was done.
He wasn't.
"When some finally dropped, the rest didn't stop." His voice lowered. "They dragged the dead into the open. Opened them up. Like carcasses."
Mireth, standing behind me, drew a sharp breath.
Círyon's gaze flicked to her, then away.
"We watched it happen, Chief." His face was grey. "They fought, and when the fighting ended, they fed. Like the rage just turned into hunger with no line between."
Silence spread around us. Even the wagons felt quieter. Somewhere near the back of the column, a child laughed at something, and the sound was obscene in the stillness.
"Did they pursue?" I asked, keeping my voice level by force.
"Not immediately." Círyon's mouth tightened. "The frenzy burned itself out over a day. They wandered among the ashes afterward, panting, stumbling, shoving the wounded aside. Some crawled away and were dragged back. Others tried to run and were beaten down."
He hesitated. Then continued, and his voice changed. Harder.
"But then someone ended it. A large one. Bigger than the rest. He walked into the circle of blood like he owned it. Challengers came at him, one after another, and he killed them fast."
Cold settled in my chest.
"And when he finished," Círyon said quietly, "the others stopped. Like a cord had cinched tight around their throats. They fell in line."
Organized orcs. Led by something strong enough to dominate thousands through sheer violence.
I'd known about the warchief from earlier reports. But hearing it described — the casual brutality, the instant obedience — made it real in a way that numbers on a scout's map never could.
"And their equipment?" I asked.
"Better than before." Another scout spoke up — Tarandor, the most experienced of the five. "Some had bronze, Chief. Taken from what we left behind or forged in their own camps."
Bronze. They had bronze now.
They learn. They adapt. And every generation that hatches learns faster than the last.
"They're not pursuing?"
"Not yet." Círyon met my eyes. "The warchief is consolidating. They have no organization for a long march, no supply lines, no discipline beyond fear of the leader. They'll raid each other, fight for dominance, maybe send scouts to track us. But a real pursuit?" He shook his head. "Weeks at the earliest. Months, more likely."
I nodded slowly. "That doesn't mean they've forgotten us."
"No, Chief."
"It means we have a window." I raised my voice so the gathered Avari could hear.
I turned to address the crowd that had formed around us, drawn by the scouts' arrival, by the smell of bad news that carries faster than any runner.
"You've heard the report. You know what waited for us if we'd stayed." I gestured back the way we'd come. "Death. Destruction. Worse than death."
I didn't rush to fill the silence that followed.
"We made the right choice. We left in time." My voice hardened. "And we will never — never — let such creatures drive us from our home again."
"Never!" someone shouted.
Others took up the cry. It spread through the column like a spark through kindling, wagon to wagon, family to family, until the sound of it rolled across the plain like thunder, and for a moment the steppe itself seemed to flinch.
I let them rage. Let the fear burn itself out. Some of it turned to anger. Good. Anger was fuel.
Then I raised my hand.
"We march. We train. We prepare." I met as many eyes as I could. "So that when we find our new home, we'll be strong enough to keep it."
They roared approval.
We marched.
[That night. The first major camp]
[Selas POV]
We made camp as stars emerged — thousands of them, brilliant and cold.
No fires yet. Too risky until Celestia's scouts confirmed we had a safe perimeter.
The wagons circled in the formation we'd drilled during the last weeks at Cuiviénen — outer ring tight, inner ring open, livestock in the center, warriors at the gaps.
Eventually Angrod brought word from the outer perimeter. Clear. Nothing moving for leagues in any direction.
Small cooking fires sprang up across the camp as families prepared their first hot meal since leaving Cuiviénen. The smell of it — grain and dried fish and herbs from the stores — carried through the cold air like a signal that the world had not ended yet.
I walked the perimeter. Checked the sentries. Made sure everyone had settled.
Families huddled close. Children asked endless questions about where they were going, the kind of questions that have no answers but need to be asked anyway. Warriors stood watch with eyes that had seen too much and would see more before this was over.
I could recognize every cluster by voice alone. Knew their habits after thirty years — who sat with whom, who kept to the edges, who always took first watch without being asked, who sang and who went quiet and who needed company and who needed to be left alone.
This was what I'd spent thirty years protecting.
Not the settlement. Not the walls. Not the workshops, the gardens, the neat streets I'd helped lay out.
Them.
These elves. These families. These children whose names I could recite in the dark, who deserved a future more than they deserved a place.
And I'd give it to them.
Whatever it took.
[Same night. Camp's edge]
I found a quiet spot away from the fires, away from the noise, and sat.
Pulled out the acorn.
It glowed softly in the darkness. Gold and silver wound together, and now something deeper, too — the lake's blessing, a presence that hummed against my palm like a second heartbeat.
"We did it," I whispered. "First step. We're on the road."
The acorn pulsed.
"Yeah. Long way to go. But we'll make it."
We have to.
I tucked it away and looked up at the stars.
The same stars that had watched us awaken at Cuiviénen. That had witnessed the Sundering. That had seen everything we'd built — and everything we'd lost.
For thirty years, I'd fought to protect our home. Poured everything into it. Sweat, planning, preparation. Thirty years of building walls and forging bronze and training warriors and burying the ones who fell.
And still we'd had to leave.
Leaving Cuiviénen should have broken me.
But sitting here now — cold, exhausted, with my people sleeping behind me and enemies far behind us — I understood something I hadn't before.
Cuiviénen had been our cradle. Our mother's arms. The place that sheltered us while we learned to walk, to speak, to be.
But children don't stay in cradles forever.
We outgrew it. Or perhaps it outgrew us. Either way, clinging to that sacred shore while orcs multiplied in the shadows would have been death — not just of bodies, but of everything we'd become.
Leaving made us stronger.
The thought sat heavy in my chest. All those losses, the battles, the choices that kept me awake at night — none of it had broken me. If anything, it had worn down the soft parts. Left something tougher underneath. Something that could carry more weight and keep walking.
I'd been a child playing at leadership when this began. Passionate, yes. Determined, certainly.
But naive. So naive.
Now I understood things that the boy at Cuiviénen couldn't have. That leaders fall. That they bleed. That they bury people and write their names in books and carry those names forever. And then they get up, because there's no one else to do it.
Someone has to make the choices nobody else wants to touch. Someone has to carry the weight so others don't have to.
The road ahead would be harder still. Mountains to cross. Unknown lands to navigate. Rivers wider than anything we'd seen. Enemies we hadn't yet imagined.
But for the first time since ordering the evacuation, I felt something beyond grim determination.
I felt ready.
The path wasn't clear. Victory wasn't guaranteed.
But the things that should have broken us had made us harder instead, and I had stopped being surprised by that. It was simply what we were. What we did.
The stars turned overhead. The same stars that would guide us west. That would witness whatever we became.
{Image: Starry sky}
We're coming, I thought, looking toward the distant mountains barely visible on the horizon. Ready or not.
We're coming.
[End of Chapter 13]
GLOSSARY
PLACES
Helcar (The Inner Sea) — A vast inland sea east of the Misty Mountains. The Avari encounter it during the first week of the March. Far larger than Cuiviénen, it gives many Avari their first understanding of the world's true scale.