Chapter 253: Among the Ashes
The sun rose early outside the Valley of Mists, casting a soft golden light over a scene of devastation that stood completely at odds with the serene sound of birds chirping to welcome the dawn.
Ollie, Milo, and their companions arrived near Milo’s late the night before and built a simple camp on an adjacent hillside so they could search the village for any surviving carvings first thing in the morning. Despite Ollie’s excellent cooking and a comfortable camp, none of them had slept well that night.
They’d deliberately chosen a spot far enough from the village that the smell of ash and char wouldn’t reach them on the evening breeze. Still, the knowledge of what lay less than a mile away had kept them tossing and turning beneath their blankets. Milo had spent most of the night sitting beside the campfire, his tail curled protectively around his legs while he stared into the dying embers long after everyone else had gone to bed.
When the first hints of dawn began to paint the sky, they broke camp without speaking. There was nothing to say, even during the simple breakfast of bread and cheese that Ollie passed around.
Breaking camp didn’t take long and by the time the sun had begun to rise above the eastern hills, Ollie, Milo, Harrod, and an additional pair of soldiers sent under Commander Bassinger’s orders greeted the rising sun with somber expressions as they surveyed the remains of Milo’s village.
The burned husks of several pyres littered the area near the center of the village. Charred bones could be seen among the remnants of the great fires, though whether they were human or Eldritch was difficult to say from this distance. The ash had settled into a thin gray blanket that stirred with each breeze, carrying the acrid scent of burned wood and something worse that none of them wanted to name.
The once clear pond that had nurtured the village had drained almost completely away when Milo and his brother shattered the dam. Now, all that remained was a murky, muddy puddle at the bottom of a muddy basin that curved around the village. Dead fish dotted the shoreline, their silver scales dulled by a coating of silt, while broken pieces of the village’s dam poked up from the mudslide like ghastly arms trying to free themselves from the muck.
The burrows of the Heartwood clan, once elaborate works of art buried almost completely underground, stood out like black, smoldering pits, as though a giant flaming hand had poked holes in the soft earth, burning anything it found within. Here and there, the mouth of a burrow still released thin wisps of smoke, suggesting that deeper within, embers might still be consuming the intricate carvings that had made each home a priceless treasure to the people living within it.
Fragments of everyday life lay scattered everywhere. Near one of the pyres, a child’s doll had been reduced to little more than charcoal, Elsewhere, the shattered remains of a cart used to haul firewood into the village from deeper into the forest lay near a pyre constructed of it’s final load of timber. At the edges of the village, pieces of storage baskets that had survived the flames only to be crushed underfoot by the raiders greeted Ollie’s group like a mockery of welcome mats.
"Ollie," Milo said, his voice pained and distant. His whiskers and tail drooped low and his eyes swam with unshed tears as he surveyed the devastated ruins of the place he’d once called home.