Interlude: Ash and Thread
They carried Yohan to the tent before the field remembered how to breathe.
Theron took the lead without asking. His hands shook only when he stopped moving. Reva cleared a path. Mira walked backward, eyes never leaving Yohan’s face, one hand pressed hard against the wound in his side, the other guiding them around bodies and dropped weapons and men who could not yet stand.
Skarn moved ahead of them.
He did not bark. He did not snarl. He paced the path twice before they stepped onto it, nose low, reading the ground. Where the mist had touched deepest, he refused to cross, forcing them to angle wide. No one questioned him.
The mist did not follow.
It thinned at the edge of the canvas as if it knew it had lost the right.
Skarn stopped there, just outside the tent, and sat.
Inside, the air was close with smoke and old linen. They laid Yohan on the low table meant for maps and salves, not men broken open. His breath was shallow but steady, each rise of his chest a small argument against the dark.
Theron stripped the ruined cuirass away piece by piece. Bone plates clattered softly as they fell. The marks beneath—old scars, new blood, the places where the mist should have taken hold and had not—left him silent.
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“Hold him,” Mira said.
They did.
She cleaned the wounds without ceremony. Resin stung. Cloth darkened. When she pressed her palm flat against Yohan’s chest, the blood slowed—not stopped, but persuaded.
Outside, Skarn lay down across the threshold, head on his paws, broad back blocking the opening. Anyone who approached too quickly found themselves checked by a low, wordless growl that did not rise or fall. It did not threaten.
It warned.
Outside, the camp shifted. Orders were given and forgotten. Fires were banked. Men spoke in half-voices, as if sound itself might be startled into returning.
The sigil began at dusk.
Theron drew it first, charcoal and ash mixed with rendered fat, the lines careful but not rigid. A circle to gather. A spiral to hold warmth and breath. No binding. No claim. Only a shape to remind the world that this place was watched, and that someone was wanted back.
Skarn lifted his head when the first line was drawn. He did not cross it. He would not.
They would keep it for two days.
Not to bar the dark. But to give Yohan something to come back to.
Toren sat near the tent flap, knees drawn up, hands blackened with soot and blood that was not his. He stared at nothing. When he spoke, it was barely sound.
“The boar fell,” he muttered.
No one answered.
“Not by law,” he went on, voice rough, as if the words cut on the way out. “Not by gods.”
His breath shuddered.
“By something smaller,” he said. “Something that wouldn’t break.”
The fire shifted. The sigil darkened as it set.
Skarn exhaled slowly and laid his head back down.
Inside the circle, Yohan breathed—slow, stubborn, real.
And for two days, they watched
not to see whether he would die,
but because they believed
he might return.