The town was silent.
Not peaceful. Not resting.
Just silent—like the hush before a blade falls.
No one was asleep. Not even the children. The fires were lit in every corridor, torches staked into frozen ground. Iron pots of oil sat simmering. Salt lines glowed faintly where lanterns caught them.
Above it all, Zareena stood on the watchtower, cloaked in black, her breath ghosting in the cold.
She watched the tree line.
Waiting.
Below, her people moved like shadows—careful, quiet, tense. No one spoke unless they had to. They all knew what they were doing. They become less afraid of it. She'd told them the plan twice.
"It is not a monster. It is a hunter," she had said.
"We bait it. We trap it. We burn it."
The plan was simple.
One path cleared through the outer yard—lined with flammable pitch and ashwood soaked in oil. A single torch at the end. Just one.
The bait? Herself.
She would stand in the path, alone, unarmed, exposed.
She didn't tell them, but she had seen the pattern. It went after the ones who didn't scream. Who met it with silence.
So she would give it that—a target who did not run.
And when it came, the archers hidden in the frostbitten balconies would drop flame from above.
A ring of fire. A burning trap.
Midnight came.
And the quiet deepened.
Even the wind had stopped. No howling. No creaking gates. Just breath, and waiting. Just like the calm before the storm
Then—
A single crunch in the snow.
She didn't turn.
Didn't blink.
She felt it before she saw it—like a thought crawling up her spine.
Then it stepped into view.
Tall. Pale. Eyes like boiling ink. Its limbs were wrong, joints bending too far. Its smile split too wide.
But it came closer.
One step. Two.
Closer.
Then the signal came.
Flame dropped.
Pitch ignited.
A roar of heat and smoke as fire circled around them both.
Zareena didn't move.
The thing screamed.
A sound like glass shattering in blood.
It tried to leap away, but the salt lines held. The oil clung. And the ashwood spears snapped upward from the hidden trap in the snow.
It burned.
And for the first time, the fortress saw the creature bleed.
Not blood—black smoke that hissed as it fled, half-shattered, into the woods.
It was not dead.
But it was wounded.
And the people of Fort Vireloch had seen it fall. They understand that they can wound it and bleed it