Aldric tried to negotiate. He walked out with a sack of silver and a salted ham. Skadi laughed—a dry, barking sound. “Silver is for merchants,” she said. “We are hunger.” She pointed her broken sword at the grain silos, the smokehouse, the blacksmith’s anvil. “These we take. The rest we burn. You have one hour to leave the old, the sick, and the stubborn. The young and the strong may run. We will not chase. We do not need slaves. We need space .”
It began with a change in the wind. One autumn evening, the familiar scent of woodsmoke and baking bread was overlaid by something acrid: campfires burning damp pine, and the sharp, coppery smell of unwashed hides. Then came the drums. Low, rhythmic, like a heartbeat trying to escape the earth. a village targeted by barbarians
The Vale had always been a place that time forgot—a scatter of thatched-roof cottages huddled around a stone well, their smoke rising in gentle gray ribbons against a spine of blue hills. To the farmers of the Vale, the worst danger was a late frost or a wolf taking a lamb. They knew of the barbarians, of course. The elders spoke of them in the same breath as bad harvests and winter fevers—as something abstract, a story to frighten children. Aldric tried to negotiate