The chains whistled in the breeze—a fractured song of metal scraping against metal, interrupted by the creaking of wagon wheels sinking into the mud. They lay twisted in the blood-stained earth like snakes resting after a meal. The fields of Gobifrakan, once bright with summer wheat, had turned into a battlefield shrouded in smoke.
The scent hit first: the sharpness of gunpowder in the air, followed by the sweetness of burning thatch and the heavy odor of opened bodies. Men and women lay sprawled where musket fire had taken them down, their final positions contorted into forms that hinted at death too abrupt for prayer. Flies had already begun their grim task.
Amid the devastation, the wagons stood guard. Massive caged structures made of oak and iron, their barred sides turning them into moving prisons. The doors hung open—waiting patiently. Inside, the chains were also ready, fastened to floor beams smoothed by the weight of past loads. The metal shone dully in the mist, cold and unyielding like winter.
A child stumbled forward, her wrists tied with blood-slick hemp rope from her struggles. Barefoot. Six summers old, though she had stopped counting days when the soldiers arrived. Her name was Reerie. Soot marked her face in patterns resembling war paint, and her eyes—dark as the smoke that consumed her village—held something no child should possess: the knowledge that the world shatters people without explanation.
Behind her, the soldiers chanted. Their voices carried the casual cruelty of men doing familiar work. One held a standard high above the destruction—Sumeiyash's banner, King Adam's conquest made fabric: a black apple wrapped by a snake.
An officer shouted commands in accented Gobifraki, pointing at the wagons with a smoking pistol in hand. The line of captives moved forward—perhaps forty, maybe fifty, the last remnants of a village that had greeted the day with church bells. Now, those bells were silent in the debris, their bronze mouths filled with ash.
Reerie stepped onto the wagon's platform. The wood felt warm from the sun, oddly soothing against her battered feet. Inside, shadows loomed. The chains awaited. In tales, she recalled vaguely, heroes appeared. Riders with shining swords, or gods coming down in light to punish the evil.
But this was not a tale. This was Gobifrakan's last morning—the moment when a nation faded into history, leaving only chains behind.
The door closed with the finality of a coffin lid.
Behind them, the village was ablaze. Ahead, in the darkness of the wagon, iron clinked against iron: the sound of a future being created, one link at a time.
For Gobifrakan, dawn would never rise again.