The caravan did not stop because it wished to.
It slowed because the road demanded it.
Clouds had gathered as evening fell, stacking low and heavy until the moon became a rumor rather than a presence. What little silver light might have guided the way was swallowed whole, leaving the world pressed flat beneath shadow. Lanterns burned along the wagons, their halos small and easily consumed by the dark beyond the road's edge. Wheels creaked. Harness leather whispered. Footsteps sounded too loud, as they echoed throughout the silent night.
They were still moving when Aluna broke the silence.
"We should keep going," she said, voice calm but set. Not a suggestion. A decision offered to be agreed with. "Another few hours and we'll be close enough that daylight finishes the rest."
Several heads turned. No one answered immediately.
The Song shifted uneasily around the caravan. It stretched thinner with every step taken into the dark, its guidance constrained by what could not be seen. It still smoothed pacing, still kept wagons from drifting too close—but it no longer reached outward. Beyond the lanternlight, it found nothing to anchor to.
Kristaphs was the first to speak.
"That's exactly why we shouldn't," he said. He didn't raise his voice. He never did. "Night travel cuts our vision in half. Clouds covering the moon ahead removes the rest. If something hits us now, we won't see it until it's breathing on us."
Aluna glanced at him, then ahead—toward the unseen road, toward the destination that felt just out of reach.
"Stopping makes us a target," she said. "We're already exposed."
"Moving tired makes us worse than stationary," Bran added, adjusting the strap across his shoulder. His tone was blunt, practical. "Fighting while tired and blind makes us worse than exposed. If we get attacked now, we scatter. If we camp, we at least choose the ground."
The words settled heavier than the clouds overhead.
Sawyer felt it in the way the caravan breathed as one—shallow, measured, waiting. Fatigue had crept in quietly over the last hour, the kind that dulled reaction time without announcing itself. Civilians walked closer together now. Conversations had thinned to murmurs. No one laughed.
Aluna exhaled slowly through her nose.
She looked skyward once more, as if daring the clouds to part. They did not.
"…All right," she said at last. "We camp. Tight perimeter. Arrange the wagons to surround us. Leave only one entrance. No fires beyond what's necessary."
Relief moved through the group—not loud, not grateful, but real.
The caravan turned off the road soon after, lanterns bobbing as wagons were guided into a shallow clearing. Bedrolls were unstrapped with practiced speed. Stakes went into the ground. Guards took their places without being told.
Above them, the clouds held fast.
And somewhere beyond the reach of lanternlight, the night listened.
The night thinned without ever truly lifting.
Gray bled slowly into the black, not as light but as subtraction—the dark losing certainty, edges softening just enough to lie. Fires had burned down to coals. Breath fogged in low plumes. Somewhere in the camp, a child turned in their sleep and did not wake.
Sawyer felt the change before he understood it.
The Song tightened.
It started to grow louder.
Not sharply. Not suddenly. It drew in on itself, pulling its threads closer, compressing guidance into shorter, faster corrections. Footfalls aligned where no one walked. Muscles tensed where no order had been given. The resonance stopped reaching outward entirely and began bracing inward instead. Then like an avalanche, it descended.
Something was here.
No.
More.
He rose from his bedroll in one smooth motion, already scanning the perimeter. The guards were still at their posts. Too still. Lanternlight wavered against wagon wheels and canvas edges. Beyond that—nothing. Just fog and the suggestion of trees.
Then the sound came.
A wet scrape. Wood against bark. Too many points of contact moving at once.
Kristaphs heard it a heartbeat later he rushed out of the foliage shouting.
"CONTACT—!", voice cutting clean through the half-sleeping camp. "PERIMETER! UP—UP—"
The world exploded into motion.
Figures burst from the fog in a rush of limbs and breath and metal that caught no light. Small bodies, fast and low, spilling forward in numbers that did not bother with subtlety anymore. Crude blades flashed. Hooks caught on canvas and tore. One lantern toppled, spilling oil that flared and died in the same breath.
"GOBLINS!" Kristaphs roared, already moving, blade out, stance wide. "ALL HANDS—FORM UP!"
They came from three sides at once. All funneling towards the sole opening.
The Song snapped taut.
Sawyer stepped into it without thinking, the resonance shuddering as it rerouted around him. He caught the first shape mid-lunge, shoulder driving forward as his arm hooked under its center of mass. Bone cracked. The body hit the ground and did not rise. Another took its place immediately, shrieking as it leapt.
Too many.
They weren't probing.
They weren't testing.
This was a rush.
Civilians screamed as bedrolls were abandoned. Bran planted himself near the wagons, shield up, forcing a choke where the horde tried to slip between axles. Aluna's voice rang out in sharp, cutting commands—anchors in the chaos—her prayer breaking into fragments as she redirected it on the fly.
"Hold the line!" she shouted. "Don't chase—don't chase!"
A goblin vaulted a wagon tongue and nearly vanished beneath it, only to reappear behind a guard with a hooked blade raised high.
Sawyer was already there.
He moved faster than thought allowed, crossing the space in a single burst that tore the Song sideways. The goblin never finished its swing. Sawyer's strike sent it skidding across the dirt, limp before it stopped moving.
Dawn crept closer, thin and colorless.
And the horde did not slow.
The line bent.
Inch by inch it was pushed back. Paid in blood and sweat.
Goblin bodies crashed into the perimeter without pause, a living tide that cared nothing for its own losses. They came low and fast, slipping through gaps too small for human frames, scrambling over fallen kin, teeth bared in ugly, eager grins. Blades flashed in frantic arcs. Hooks bit into wood, cloth, flesh.
"Back—slow!" Kristaphs shouted, parrying a downward slash that rattled his arm to the elbow. He kicked the attacker away, but another took its place immediately, then another. "Don't break formation!"
Formation was already fraying.
A guard went down near the left wagon, dragged screaming into the fog before anyone could reach him. The sound cut off abruptly, like a rope snapping. Someone swore. Someone else retched and kept fighting anyway.
Sawyer moved constantly.
Not charging.
Not retreating.
He flowed where the pressure spiked, where the Song screamed its sharpest corrections. Every step tore at him—too fast, too forceful—like running against a current that hated being redirected. He struck, turned, struck again. Elbows. Knees. Blunt, efficient motions that dropped bodies faster than blades ever could.
It wasn't enough.
They kept coming.
A goblin leapt for his back. Sawyer twisted, caught it midair, and slammed it into the ground hard enough to knock the breath from both of them. Before he could rise, three more swarmed over the body, shrieking, stabbing downward. He rolled, pain flaring as something scraped his ribs, and came up with dirt in his teeth and blood on his sleeve.
The Song buckled.
It no longer guided—it reacted. Short, violent tugs. Emergency corrections layered on top of each other until movement became instinct instead of intention. Sawyer felt it strain, threads snapping and reweaving faster than thought.
"Right side's collapsing!" Bran yelled, shield arm shaking as another impact rang through it. His feet skidded backward, boots carving lines in the dirt. A goblin hooked the rim and yanked, nearly pulling him off balance. Bran headbutted it hard enough to stagger it—but two more filled the space immediately.
Aluna's voice cracked as she shouted another command, hands slick with blood that wasn't all hers. Her prayer flared briefly, a pulse of warmth and resolve—but it was swallowed almost instantly by the press of bodies.
They were being pushed.
Step by step, the perimeter folded inward. Wagons became barricades by necessity rather than design. Civilians were herded back, eyes wide, clutching whatever they could grab—knives, poles, bare hands.
Kristaphs took a cut across the thigh and barely flinched, planting his blade in a goblin's chest and using the body to shove back the next.
"We can't hold this!" he shouted, breath ragged. "They're too many!"
A horn sounded from the fog—low, wet, triumphant.
The goblins surged as one.
The line broke another half-step.
Dawn finally touched the clouds, pale and indifferent, just as the camp was forced inward—corner by corner—toward the heart of the wagons, with no clear end in sight.
Agnes made the first opening they'd had since the charge began.
She appeared on the left flank without announcement, already moving, already loosing. Her bow sang once—twice—three times in quick succession, each arrow placed not for kills but for space. A shaft punched through a goblin's shoulder and pinned it to a wagon wheel. Another took a thigh, dropping its target screaming and clogging the rush behind it. A third buried itself in the dirt at an angle, forcing a cluster to stumble as they tried to leap it.
"LEFT—NOW!" she shouted.
She never stayed still. Shot, step. Shot, roll. Shot again from a new angle. Her aim wasn't to thin the horde; it was to break their rhythm. Goblins tripped over their own. Hooks missed. Momentum stuttered.
For the first time since contact, the pressure eased—just a breath.
Sawyer took it.
He drove into the gap Agnes carved, shoulder-first, scattering bodies like thrown tools. The Song shrieked as he crossed it again, but this time it held, snapping into a tighter weave around the movement. He struck once, hard, sending a goblin skidding into two more. He seized another by the collar and hurled it backward into the fog, buying space that didn't immediately collapse.
Faust's voice rose behind them—sharp, precise, strained.
"Clear—clear the front!"
Blue-white sigils burned into the air around his hands, etched fast and imperfect, sweat streaking through the chalk lines on his fingers. He thrust both palms forward.
A wave of force rippled outward.
Not fire.
Not lightning.
Pressure—compressed and released. The front rank of goblins folded as if struck by an invisible wall, bodies slamming into each other, weapons torn from grips. Canvas snapped. A wagon lurched on its axles.
The spell burned out immediately.
Faust staggered, coughing, one knee hitting the dirt as the backlash caught him. He forced himself up anyway, already drawing the next pattern with shaking hands.
"That's all—give me a second—"
A goblin lunged for him through the thinning fog.
Agnes's arrow took it through the throat mid-leap.
"Second's all you get," she said, already drawing again.
The horde adapted.
They always did.
Goblin calls rose—sharp, barking signals—and the pressure shifted away from the blasted center. They flowed around it instead, spilling between wagons, climbing over fallen bodies, swarming the flanks where the ground narrowed and the light failed.
"Back!" Kristaphs shouted. "Back deeper into the wagons—use the choke!"
They gave ground in brutal increments. Bran was forced back step by step, shield ringing like a bell with every impact. One goblin slipped under his guard and slashed his calf; Bran roared and crushed its skull with the shield rim, but his stance faltered.
Sawyer felt the Song tear there.
He crossed the space in a single, reckless burst. The resonance buckled, then surged to compensate, threads snapping taut around him. He hit the cluster like a dropped beam, breaking bodies apart, forcing the goblins to recoil or be trampled by their own.
Agnes pivoted, arrows now fired almost straight down as goblins tried to scramble over a wagon tongue. She kicked one away, drew and fired again without looking, the shaft finding a wrist and pinning a blade uselessly to wood.
Faust finished the second spell.
This one screamed.
Heat rolled outward in a jagged cone, not a clean flame but a tearing wave that blistered skin and ignited cloth. Goblins shrieked and scattered, some collapsing as the magic scorched deeper than flesh. The smell of burned hair and pitch filled the air.
Faust sagged, vision swimming.
"I—can't—again—"
"I know," Aluna said, already there, gripping his shoulder, steadying him. Her prayer flared weakly, just enough to keep him standing.
The space they'd gained began to close.
Again.
The goblins pressed in with renewed fury, bodies piling into the gaps, screams of the wounded driving the rest forward. The wagons loomed closer now—too close. The camp's heart was only a few steps behind the line.
They were losing ground.
Not breaking.
Not yet.
But the horde was learning—and dawn, pale and useless, offered no mercy as the pressure mounted once more.
Sawyer caught the pattern a heartbeat too late.
The goblins weren't pressing the line blindly anymore.
They were wrapping it.
He saw it in the way the pressure shifted—not forward, but sideways. In how bodies slipped past clashes instead of committing to them. In how hooks were no longer aimed at killing, but at pulling. The Song tried to warn him, threads tugging at his awareness, but there were too many signals layered at once.
Then he saw the wagons.
Not as cover.As cages.
Goblins were already crawling beneath them, circling behind, rising where the light thinned and the guards were thinnest. Hands reached through gaps in canvas. Shapes darted between wheels.
And there—by the third wagon from the rear—
A mother.
Sawyer recognized her instantly. Brown shawl. Dirt-smudged cheeks. The same woman who had thanked him earlier for saving her daughter. Her child clung to her leg now, eyes wide, silent in that way terror forces on the very young.
Three goblins broke from the fog, low and fast.
Sawyer moved.
He didn't think. Didn't shout. He tore himself out of the line and crossed the distance in a single violent surge that made the Song snap around him like overstretched wire. Pain flared in his joints as he hit the first goblin shoulder-first, crushing it into the dirt. The second barely had time to turn before his elbow caught its skull with a sickening crack. The third tried to dart away—
Sawyer caught it by the collar and flung it hard enough that it skidded beneath the wagon and did not emerge.
The mother screamed—not in fear, but desperation.
"Please!" she cried, voice breaking as she shoved the child behind her. "Please protect her!"
Sawyer turned back toward them—
And the horde surged again.
A wave slammed into the line, goblins pouring through the gap he'd left, shrieking, blades flashing. Bran shouted his name. Agnes loosed arrows desperately to cover the breach. Faust tried to raise his hands and failed, spell guttering out before it formed.
Sawyer was forced to turn.
He met the wave head-on, driving into it with everything he had, each strike buying seconds at the cost of ground. Bodies piled. The Song howled, threads tearing and reweaving around the violence. He could hear the mother behind him—hear her pleading—but he could not turn back without letting the line collapse entirely.
Through the chaos, shapes slipped past.
Hands seized the woman's arms.
She screamed once—raw, tearing—as goblins dragged her backward into the fog, her heels carving lines in the dirt. The child cried out then, a thin, piercing sound that cut through everything.
Sawyer struck harder.
Faster.
Too late.
By the time the immediate pressure broke and he tore free again, the space behind the wagon was empty—canvas swaying, dirt torn up, silence where voices had been.
Only the child remained, sobbing in the dirt.
And the goblins were already regrouping for another rush.
It was then when a soft hum brought the world to its knees.