Strongest Family System

The valley was larger than any of them had expected.

Ringed completely by the cliff walls that enclosed it, with no opening visible from inside except the passage they had just emerged from, it sat in total isolation from the world outside.

The surrounding cliffs were high enough that direct sunlight would only reach the valley floor for a few hours each day at most, and the vegetation growing across the ground and up the lower sections of the walls had the pale, adapted quality of plant life that had learned to work with limited light over a very long time.

Stone structures occupied the valley floor. Ruins, though not the kind that came from sudden destruction. These had failed gradually, roofs collapsing inward over decades, walls leaning and settling slowly until sections had given way.

Watchtowers at two points along the valley's inner cliff wall had come down, leaving their lower sections still standing while the upper portions had fallen into piles of shaped stone that were now covered by moss and vines. A road of fitted stone ran through the settlement's center, its surface still largely intact beneath the layer of debris and encroaching vegetation, showing that whoever had built it had done careful work.

Weathered stone figures stood at intervals along what had once been the main road. They were old enough that the fine details of whatever faces they had once carried were completely gone, eroded into smooth general shapes that suggested a human form without depicting any individual feature.

They stood at even intervals, which suggested they had been placed with intention, though what that intention had been was no longer readable.

Sai walked slowly along the edge of the main road without stepping onto it, his attention moving across the settlement systematically. He said, after several minutes, that he had studied regional maps carefully before departure and had found no reference to this location. Not a ruin designation. Not a historical site marker.

Not even a notation in the oldest regional records the clan's network had been able to access. Whatever this place was, it had not been recorded anywhere that any currently active mapping effort knew about.

Eissa found the wagon wheel near the valley's northern edge, where vegetation had grown thick against the base of the cliff wall.

Most of it was buried. Several months of plant growth and settled debris had covered all but one curved section of the rim, which protruded from the earth at an angle that made it easy to miss unless you happened to be moving along the cliff base at that exact position looking at the ground carefully. She cleared enough debris to confirm what it was and called the others over without raising her voice.

Robert knelt beside it and looked at the wood. The wheel was from a full-sized cargo wagon, the type that commercial caravans used for heavy loads. The timber was not ancient. It had not been here for decades or centuries the way the stone buildings had. It was recent enough that the wood had not fully weathered, still showing the original construction grain beneath the surface mold.

Nearby, partially hidden under a collapse of vines against the cliff base, were fragments of broken wooden crates. The pieces carried sections of a merchant house symbol—the same symbol that appeared on the token Sai had found in the pass the day before.

The caravan had reached this valley.

They spent the next forty minutes conducting a systematic search of the area surrounding the wagon wheel and the crate fragments, working outward in expanding arcs and examining everything the vegetation had not fully reclaimed.

They found additional wagon components — a wheel hub, a length of harness leather, a metal fitting of the type used to secure cargo — distributed across a broad area as though the vehicles had been stopped and partially disassembled or had broken apart under some kind of load distribution.

They found no bodies. No blood or evidence of blood. No weapons or pieces of armor. No skeletons or fragments of bone. No signs that any kind of violent confrontation had taken place anywhere in the valley. The caravan's equipment was present, distributed across the valley floor in a way that confirmed arrival. The caravan's people were not.

Robert crouched in the center of the search area and asked the system the only question that seemed worth asking.

What happened here?

Investigation Progress is insufficient. Continue exploration.

He remained crouched for a moment longer, looking at the ground in front of him. Then he stood and turned to look at the rest of the valley, the section they had not yet covered, where the settlement's ruins extended further toward the valley's far end.

That was when he noticed it.

The valley floor was covered in a fine layer of dust and settled debris. Old. Undisturbed in the way that surfaces became undisturbed after years of accumulation without any interference. Around the ruins and across the open ground between the structures, that layer was consistent. Even. The kind of surface that built up when nothing moved across it for a very long time.

Except for one trail.

Starting from a point near the center of the settlement and running toward the valley's far end where the ruins were densest, a line of footprints marked the dust in a way that was immediately and obviously different from the caravan's evidence or the old prints they had followed from the pass. These prints had sharp edges.

Clean impressions. The surrounding dust had not yet settled back into them or softened their definition.

Someone had walked through this valley recently. Not weeks ago. Not months ago.

Days. Possibly less.

All six of them stood looking at the trail without speaking for a moment.

The footprints led toward the far end of the valley, where the ruined buildings clustered most densely together, and the shadows between them were deep enough that the interior spaces were filled with life.