Dawn broke gray and heavy, carrying the kind of silence that felt like a weight on the chest. Then, from somewhere above the ruins, came a strange cry — a coarse, rasping caw that didn't belong in this desert of stone where all life seemed to have been drained away.
A single raven circled lazily over the encampment. One might have thought it was searching for scraps, some leftover carcass, but its flight was too calm, too deliberate. It wasn't scavenging. It was watching.
The first to move was Tonar. The commander — a mountain of a man, two meters tall, whose mere presence steadied the soldiers — stepped away from the group. He climbed partway up a collapsed wall that gave him a vantage point, his silhouette cut sharp against the pale sky. He raised one arm, leather bracers glinting faintly in the weak light — a gesture that was both an invitation and an order.
