The capital began vanishing behind the hills from the first hours of the march, giving way to a narrower road, its edges worn, crossed by more military carts than Oren had ever seen at once.
Nearly every cart carried something; crates of ammunition, sacks of flour, silent soldiers looking in the opposite direction without turning toward the passing convoy.
They passed three checkpoints during the first day, each stricter than the one before.
At the second, a soldier inspected every cart with slow care, asking for papers and checking them against a list he carried, while Silen watched with clear interest.
“Why do they check this way, exactly here?” Daren asked in a low voice, more to himself than as a question directed at anyone.
“Maybe because this is the last line before everything becomes fully military,” Oren answered.
Silen said nothing for a few minutes, which Oren noticed more than any answer his friend might have given.
He was looking at the soldier who’d inspected the cart, then at the road stretching ahead of them, an expression on his face Oren wasn’t used to seeing there, closer to caution than to his usual curiosity.
On the second day, the signs began to change further.
A cart carrying wounded passed them going the opposite way, one of them groaning faintly while a companion tried to fasten a bandage on his arm.
No one stopped, but everyone in the convoy looked, then looked back ahead in a silence longer than usual.
Hours later, the smell of smoke reached them before they saw its source; faint at first, then clearer the closer they came, mixed with another smell Oren couldn’t quite place, but he felt his stomach clench when he realized he knew it from the previous front.
The group reached a gathering point outside what remained of a small village, where a middle-aged officer waited for them, holding a carefully folded map, and stood before them as nearly twenty soldiers from different units assembled, among them two men carrying weapons unfamiliar to Oren, and a woman whose bearing suggested she followed a path in observation or tracking.
“The village ahead of us was under our control until five days ago,” the officer said, without a long preamble.
“Enemy forces withdrew after a brief clash, but left behind a storehouse used to hold signal equipment and important medical supplies.
The task is to reach the storehouse, secure what can be moved, and get it out before enemy forces return to retake the position, which is expected within the next few days.” One of the soldiers asked about the expected size of enemy forces in the area, and the officer answered that the latest reports indicated a full withdrawal, but added, in a tone not without caution: “The reports are a day and a half old.
Keep that in mind.” Oren said nothing, but noticed the gap between the order’s confidence and the caution of that last sentence, and felt that this small contradiction told him more than the words themselves said.
The group began advancing toward the village, the officer dividing them into small teams, and placed Oren, Daren, and Silen within a group of six, alongside an older soldier named Taren, silent most of the time, and two women from another unit.
The village was smaller than Oren’s own, and more scattered among low hills, but the traces of what had happened there showed from the very first house they passed.
An open door, hanging on a single hinge, swaying slowly with the wind.
Inside the house, on a simple wooden table, a bowl of food remained untouched, dry now, beside it an overturned chair no one had righted.
In the street, a small cart lay overturned on its side, its wheel still turning in slow, intermittent motion whenever the wind gusted, goods scattered around it, some entirely intact, as though time had stopped in the middle of an ordinary day.
They passed an abandoned well, its bucket hanging halfway down, beside it a wooden fence with a piece of cloth caught on it, perhaps once a garment, now moving slowly with the air.
On one wall, a dark burn mark stretched from a lower window to a damaged roof, while the wall facing it stood entirely intact, without a single scratch, as though the fire had chosen only one side to devour.
Daren stopped before a small workshop, its door torn off entirely, metal tools scattered on its floor, some still arranged on a wooden shelf, others strewn as though someone had walked out mid-task and never returned.
“It was a blacksmith’s workshop,” he said quietly, looking at the tools without touching them.
Daren looked at the metal barrels lying about and said in a low voice: “My father hates making parts for these guns…
He says a single bore in the iron takes a whole day, and then gives you nothing but a single shot before you have to draw your sword again.” He added nothing else, but Oren saw his eyes moving among the tools in a way resembling how he used to check over his father’s own.
They heard the crying before they saw its source.
It was a faint, broken sound, coming from behind a house half-collapsed, its front walls intact but the roof partly fallen in the back.
Oren hurried toward the sound, followed by Silen and Daren, and found a child, no older than five, sitting on the ground beside a woman lying motionless, his hands on her arm as though trying to wake her.
“Mother won’t wake up,” the child said, in a voice like a repeated whisper, as though he’d said the same sentence many times before they arrived.
“I told her to wake up.
Why won’t she wake up?” Oren stood a short distance away, his body frozen for a moment, not knowing whether to approach, or step back, or do something else.
He tried to think of a word to say, and found nothing that seemed sufficient or right.
Silen moved first, with slow, unhurried steps, and sat a short distance from the child, not quite beside him.
“What’s your name?” he asked, in a calm voice, entirely different from his usual tone with the soldiers.
The child didn’t answer directly, so Silen repeated the question in a slightly different form, simpler, until the child finally murmured his name, in a faint voice.
“All right,” Silen said.
“We’re going to help you, agreed?
But I need you to hold my hand first.” He extended his hand, and after a brief hesitation, the child took it with his small fingers.
Only then did Oren move, approaching from the other side, while Daren went to help lift part of the nearby rubble, trying to find a safe way out with the child that wouldn’t take him directly past his mother’s body.
No one said much after that.
Silen carried the child in his arms, and walked him away toward a small group of survivors gathered at the edge of the village under the supervision of one of the soldiers, while Oren stayed a moment looking at the motionless woman, then signaled to another soldier to see to it, and continued on.
When they reached the group of survivors, they found about twenty people, some sitting on the ground, some standing in silence, a woman asking in a tired voice whether anyone had seen a certain neighboring village, and an old man clutching a small bag refusing to let it out of his hand.
Silen approached one of the younger men, and began speaking to him at his usual quick pace, asking his name, his village, exactly what had happened, while offering him some water from his own flask.
“They came at night,” the man said, his voice still carrying the shock of the event.
“There was hardly any time to do anything.
Some ran, some tried to hide.” “Do you know if there’s a storage building near here?
Something the army uses?” Silen asked, in a tone more serious than before.
The man pointed toward a certain direction behind a small hill, and added that the soldiers had used an old building meant for grain before the war.
Silen thanked him, then sat beside him for a moment, asking nothing further, only sharing the silence with him before returning to the group, carrying with him the information they needed, smiling at the child still close to him, and telling him something simple, that he’d be all right now, without promising him more than he could actually promise.
The group headed toward the old building the man had pointed to, through a narrow path between the damaged houses, until they reached a low stone building, its roof partly intact, its heavy wooden door flung wide open.
But as they approached, the officer in charge of the small group stopped, and looked at the building with narrowed eyes.
“This isn’t as described in the report,” he said in a low voice.
The building was supposed to be surrounded by a simple wooden fence, but the fence now remained only in scattered fragments, and the left side wall bore a large hole, apparently recent, with irregular edges.
Taren went in first, carrying his heavy powder rifle with its long iron barrel, bracing it against his shoulder, giving off a faint smell of sulfur, followed by Oren, Daren, and Silen, while the two women remained at the entrance.
Inside, the shelves meant for storage still stood, but nearly half were empty.
A few crates remained in place, most of them medical supplies as the officer had described, but other crates seemed entirely missing, their places left empty on the shelves with clear dust outlines marking where they had once been.
“Part of the stock’s already been taken,” Taren said, in a voice calm but slightly tense.
“When?” Oren asked.
“No way to know exactly.
But the hole in the wall’s recent.” The group began working quickly, checking the remaining crates, separating what could be moved from what had been entirely damaged.
Oren began using his path on the smaller crates, moving them carefully toward the entrance where they were gathered in order, trying to hold his focus despite the surrounding noise and the sound of someone speaking tensely through a hand signal with another group outside.
He succeeded in moving the small medical crates without trouble, but when he tried to move a slightly heavier crate, he felt that familiar scattering, his focus splitting between the crate and the sounds around him, and the crate shook midway and struck the edge of a nearby shelf before he managed to steady it and set it down safely.
“Slowly,” Taren told him without looking his way, focused on another crate in his hands.
Later, Daren found a damaged metal lock preventing one of the last crates from opening, tried to break it by force first, then stopped, and placed his hand near it, trying to soften the metal slightly from within until the lock loosened enough to open without destroying its contents.
Silen used his path to fasten a part of a shelf that had nearly collapsed onto one of the soldiers while the crates were being moved, linking its motion to that of a nearby post in a way that kept it steady for the minutes needed until the shelf was fully emptied.
While they were busy arranging the last of the crates, Oren noticed, without meaning to search for it, a small page lying near one of the shelves, appearing to be part of an old military report, some of its words erased by damp.
A village’s name written on it caught his attention, its spelling slightly different from the one he’d seen on the lists at the camp days before, a single letter shifted in position for no clear reason.
He looked at it a moment, feeling that old alertness he knew from his work at the Archive, when his eyes would catch a small error between two documents before his mind grasped why he’d stopped.
He had no time to think further.
He folded the page and put it in his pocket without comment, and returned to moving the remaining crates.
The officer was checking the last of the crates when a soldier arrived running from the edge of the village, his breath broken, his face carrying that expression every soldier who’s spent enough time in war knows.
“Movement at the northern edge,” he said quickly.
“A group advancing.
Not large, but armed, and closer than we expected.” Everyone paused a moment, and the silence that settled over the building seemed heavier than any sound before it.
“How far?” the officer asked.
“Less than half an hour, maybe less.” The officer looked at the remaining crates, then at the entrance, then at his group.
“Hurry loading what’s left.
No time to wait for the safe route we planned.” The movement began to quicken, the sound of crates being lifted faster, fingers working with more tension than they had minutes before.
Silen carried a crate in his arms, and looked at Oren as he passed beside him.
“If this village at least grew onions, we’d have one good reason to be here,” he said, with a light attempt at a joke that didn’t quite reach his usual smile.
Oren didn’t answer, but felt a certain gratitude for that small sentence amid the rising noise.
Taren stepped out of the building for a moment, then hurried back in, his face more tense.
“The road we came in by isn’t safe anymore,” he said.
“There’s movement on both sides of it.” The officer looked at him, then at the folded map in his hand, searching for an alternate route with quick eyes, while the group continued moving the last of the crates toward the entrance.
Oren paused a moment at the threshold of the door, a crate in his hands, and looked at the road they’d come from, where a distant sound, not entirely clear, had begun echoing among the damaged houses, the sound of footsteps, or human voices, or both together.
Then they heard it more clearly; the crack of a single gunshot shook the place, followed by a sharp smell of smoke rising behind the houses, followed by a brief silence, then a shout from the edge of the village.