The girl hesitated, her small hands tightening around the bundle of herbs. Her scarred face hardened, the wound over her eye pulling her expression into something harsher than a child’s should be. She crouched beside the shaman, though her voice trembled.

“You waste your time, old mother,” she muttered. “He will die like the rest. Let the crows take him.”

The shaman did not answer. Her fingers pressed against the man’s chest, not only to still the bleeding but to feel the spirit within him. Faint, flickering, yet stubbornly burning against the pull of death. The old woman’s lips parted in a whisper—words in no tongue the child understood. The air around them shifted, as though the crimson fog itself listened.

The girl shivered and turned her eyes away, staring at the broken field. She hated that sound. Hated the dead, the warriors, the blood. But most of all, she hated the way the shaman seemed to find hope where none should exist.

The man’s breath rattled. His lips moved, shaping broken fragments of words. “…no… chains…”

The girl leaned closer despite herself. His eyes opened for the briefest moment—clouded, unfocused, yet burning with a strange fire. She pulled back with a hiss, clutching her bundle tighter.

“He is a slave,” she spat. “I know that look. I’ve seen it before. He has killed, same as the rest.”

The shaman finally lifted her gaze to meet the girl’s. Her voice was soft, yet it carried the weight of stone.

“No,” she said. “This one was taken. His chains were not of iron, but of fate. He does not belong here.”

For the first time, a flicker of doubt crossed the child’s face. She looked again at the warrior bleeding into the soil, then at the sky stained red by dawn.

The shaman’s hands did not stop. She bound wounds, pressed herbs, whispered words that turned the air heavy with unseen presence. The earth around the warrior grew still, as though waiting to see if he would rise—or be claimed by the silence forever.