The day had begun with ughter.

  Alice strolled through the bustling merchant quarter, her hand gently resting on little Annabel’s shoulder. Emma darted between stalls, marveling at brightly colored ribbons and polished wooden toys. Heinrich trailed just behind, ever alert, his backpack slung low, a protective eye on his sisters even as he half-smiled at their antics.

  They had pns tonight. Dinner with Reinhard in their favourite tavern, once he returned from his mission. Just one more day of normalcy before he went back to work.

  Alice wore her soft blue cloak and a pendant that shimmered faintly at her colrbone—a seal of her power, unassuming, but deadly. She hadn't needed it in years. Not like that. The streets were safe. They were safe.

  Until the sky cracked open.

  A fsh of green-white light, then the thunderous roar of an explosion shook the world. Stonewatch groaned as though struck by a divine hammer. The merchant stalls erupted in a wave of shrapnel and fme. Gss shattered, masonry crumbled. One moment the city thrummed with life, the next, it was a howling ruin.

  Alice instinctively flung a barrier of ice over her children, shielding them from flying debris. She screamed for Heinrich—only to find he was already pulling Emma and Annabel to cover behind a fallen column. A second explosion rolled through the streets like a tidal wave of sound, then came the cries—panicked, pained, dying.

  Alice stood, eyes scanning the ash-choked air. “We need to move. Now.”

  Heinrich, ever composed, had already unzipped his backpack and chambered a round into his M4 SBR 5.56. “Toward the keep?” he asked.

  Alice nodded once. “Stay close.”

  They moved like a unit—Alice leading with bursts of frost to freeze debris and carve a path, Heinrich behind her, clearing vermin and scattered cnrats. The children ran between them, terrified but silent, knowing better than to scream.

  The first wave was manageable. Cnrats—vicious and fast, but predictable. Alice froze one mid-lunge, and Heinrich shot another through the eye. Emma and Annabel clung to each other, moving when told, surviving.

  They reached the old aqueduct near the square before the second wave descended—Nethergunners, their rifles glowing with votile green veins, and beastmen berserkers, roaring down the alley like a tidal wave of horns and muscle. And worse: behind them, a single robed figure stood tall on a crumbled balcony—a shaman, Gruth’Kal, his staff pulsating with sickly energy, chanting in the guttural tongue of the Thrakar.

  Heinrich turned to his mother. “We can’t outrun them.”

  “We don’t,” Alice said, her voice calm. “We make our stand.”

  She pnted her boots and lifted both arms. With a flick of her pendant, the cobblestones beneath the berserkers turned to bck ice. The charging beasts slipped and skidded—one crashed headlong into a wall, breaking its own neck. Heinrich fired clean shots into the chaos. Three shots, three kills.

  But then Gruth’Kal raised his staff.

  The ground shook again—but not from another bst. Instead, a low, groaning sound echoed from above. Alice’s eyes shot upward.

  “Move!” she screamed.

  The building beside them—already cracked from the explosions—began to colpse.

  The shaman had targeted the structure with a spell of ruin. Stone cracked. Wooden beams splintered. The wall above them buckled.

  Heinrich grabbed Annabel, hurling her toward the alleyway. Alice threw her hands skyward, summoning an arcing dome of frost to shield her family from the falling masonry. It wasn’t enough.

  The upper floor came down in a deafening crash. The ice shattered under the weight. Dust and stone swallowed the world.

  When the debris cleared, a section of the street was buried beneath shattered beams and broken stone.

  A half-frozen spear of ice jutted from the ruins, the st gasp of Alice’s protection. Smoke curled upward, mingling with a thin flurry of snow as her pendant y cracked beneath the rubble.

  The alley fell silent, a graveyard of shattered stone and twisted bodies.

  Dust settled over the colpsed building — a once-bustling corner of the Merchant Quarter now reduced to rubble and blood. Only the crackle of small fires and the distant screams of the city remained.

  At the edge of the destruction stood Gruth’Kal.

  Still. Unmoving.

  His bnk gaze lingered on the mound of debris, as if ensuring nothing stirred. The corrupted Netherstone atop his staff dimmed slowly, pulsing with one final wave of residual energy. His beastmen subordinates gathered around him, victorious grins spreading across their savage faces.

  He raised one hand in silence.

  A signal.

  The remaining berserkers and verminthar gathered, and with synchronized discipline that belied their savagery, they began pulling back. Their mission in this quarter was done. The shaman did not speak — he only turned, robes trailing over the blood-slick cobbles, and began walking toward the main street.

  Toward the walls of the inner keep to regroup with his commander, Ghorvak.

  He did not look back.

  The enemy tide ebbed from the ruins, and with them, the presence of life seemed to drain from the air.

  And for a few long moments, there was only silence.

  Only the faint blue glimmer of shattered ice, trapped beneath a colpsed archway.

  Waiting.

  For him.