The retreat was a blur of shadows and pain. Dylan pulled a nearly unconscious Elisa along, his own body just a collection of aching muscles and raw nerves. Alka's cries and the roar of the energy gradually faded, replaced by the ragged gasp of their lungs and the rustle of tall grass.

They covered a distance that felt like an eternity, until Dylan, feeling his legs give way, made them collapse behind a rocky outcrop marking the edge of the Karthak plain. They fell side by side, panting, empty stares fixed on the starry vault, now visible between the clouds torn apart by the storm they had fled.

In the distance, the violet light still pulsed, sinister and threatening, but no silhouettes emerged in pursuit.

"She... isn't coming," Elisa managed to articulate, the phrase interrupted by fits of coughing.

Dylan turned his head, his profile hardened by frustration and fatigue. "She doesn't need to. She's marked us. She knows she won this round."

There was a deep bitterness in his voice. He had fled. Again. And this time, when he was so close.

"The round, yes," Elisa whispered, struggling to sit up. She massaged her temples. "Not the war. She showed her true face. And we are alive to tell the tale. That's a victory, Dylan. Bitter, but a victory."

He didn't answer, staring at his hands covered in dirt and dried blood – his own, the beasts', and a little of Alka's. It felt meager.

Suddenly, a low, rhythmic whistle cut through the night – Zirel's rallying signal. Elisa responded with a weaker, but recognizable whistle.

A few minutes later, two figures emerged from the darkness. Julius, imposing and silent, and Zirel, his piercing eyes scanning the surroundings to ensure they hadn't been followed.

"Maggie?" Dylan asked immediately, standing up abruptly, a pain shooting through his ribs.

"Asleep. Or unconscious. It's hard to tell," Julius grumbled, pointing towards a small mound further away where the young woman lay wrapped in a blanket. "She held on, that's what matters."

His gaze then settled on Dylan, then on Elisa, assessing the damage. "And you?"

"Alive," Elisa summarized dryly.

Zirel crouched, his face grave. "Alka?"

"Wounded. Furious. But she let us go," Dylan reported, disgusted by his own conclusion. "She's preparing something bigger. What she unleashed from the ground... it wasn't meant to kill us, the two of us. It was a... test. A warning."

A heavy silence fell. The cold wind of the plain seemed to carry the echo of Alka's laughter.

"Then the game has changed," Julius declared, his arms crossed. "She's no longer just an enemy commander. She's a scourge. And she has a personal interest in you, kid."

Dylan held his gaze without flinching. "I know."

Elisa stood up unsteadily, leaning against the cold rock. The retreat was a wise decision, but it left a taste of ashes. They had saved Maggie, but they had also lifted a corner of the veil on a much vaster and more personal danger. Alka was an open wound in their past, and now, she was a sword hanging over their future.

"We're going back to camp," she announced, her voice regaining a hint of its usual authority. "Maggie needs care. And we need to report what we saw."

Dylan finally nodded, his gaze lost towards the dying lights of Pilaf's camp. The battle was over, but the war had just taken an intimate and terrifying turn. Alka had offered them a retreat. He knew, with an icy certainty, that it was only the first page of a much darker chapter.

——

The march that followed was slow, almost funereal. The stars, hanging in a sky washed clean by the storm, watched them unblinking, like so many impassive witnesses to a ridiculous flight.

Each step seemed to weigh an eternity.

The sodden ground sucked at their boots with a wet sound, rhythmically marking their silence. Only Maggie's breathing, irregular under the blanket Julius carried on his back, reminded them that they had saved something—or someone—from that nightmare.

Zirel walked as point, senses taut, his eyes gleaming faintly in the night. He said nothing, but his entire body radiated vigilance.

Elisa, slightly behind, staggered from time to time. Dylan caught her with an automatic gesture, without a word. Their exhaustion had surpassed the physical: it was a fatigue of the soul, a burning weariness lodged behind their eyelids.

The wind sometimes carried a smell of ashes, a vestige of the conflagration they had fled. The whole world seemed to creak in its sleep.

"You feel that?" Julius murmured without turning.

Dylan looked up. The sky to the east was lightening with an indefinable hue, a grey tinged with violet.

"The mist is returning," he replied.

Julius nodded slowly. "Or it never left us."

He was right. Even after their flight, the air remained saturated with a strange tension. Something in the ground seemed to breathe—a dull, almost imperceptible beat, but very real. As if the earth itself held the memory of the fight.

They skirted the remnants of an ancient aqueduct, ruined for centuries, its broken arches carving the night like stone jaws. Drops of water fell from its heights, echoing like ghostly footsteps.

Elisa stopped for a moment, her forehead pressed against a moss-covered pillar.

"Rest," Dylan said softly.

She shook her head. "If I stop, I'll fall."

Her fingers trembled. The effort she had exerted to counter Alka had drained her, more deeply than she wanted to admit.

"What she did, that link…" she murmured. "It wasn't ordinary control. It was older. A hold forged in blood."

Dylan remained silent. He hadn't forgotten the sensation of a foreign will creeping into his mind—that metallic cold seeping into his thoughts, until he was nothing but a manipulated body.

He would have preferred to die than to experience that again.

Zirel whistled low, pulling them from their thoughts. "Movement, to the right."

Instantly, Julius set Maggie down and drew a knife. Dylan stepped forward, muscles tensed despite the pain.

But it was only a herd of nocturnal creatures—small herbivores with phosphorescent eyes—that fled, bounding away as soon as they sensed their presence.

Zirel released the tension with a sigh. "We're jumpy."

"With good reason," Julius replied.

They resumed their route, faster this time. Fatigue had become a silent, almost familiar companion.

Their shadows stretched across the plain, distorted by the nascent light of dawn.

⸻

At dawn, they reached the low hills marking the neutral zone between Pilaf's lands and the road to the old camp.

The wind rose, carrying a smell of earth and salt. The morning light bathed the grasses in a sea of pale gold, and yet nothing held the shine of victory.

Julius stopped on a promontory and observed the valley.

"If Alka had wanted to, she would have caught us before the border," he said, his voice grave. "She let us go. Voluntarily."

Elisa nodded, without even trying to contradict him.

"She's protecting her cover. Or she's waiting to see how far we'll go."

Zirel sniffed, a bitter smile at the corner of his lips. "Classic. The cat letting the mouse get away to follow it better."

Dylan, however, remained silent. His gaze was fixed on the horizon—not on what pursued them, but on what awaited them.

Every step towards the camp felt like both a deliverance and a condemnation.

He knew the questions would come: the leaders, the strategists, all those who wouldn't understand half of what had happened that night. And above all, he knew that Alka would return in their dreams, their reports, their doubts.

She had planted her shadow in their heads.

⸻

At noon, they stopped near a stream. The water was icy, but clear.

Zirel took charge of filling the canteens while Julius set up a makeshift shelter with a frayed tarp.

Elisa cleaned her hands, scrutinizing the filaments of blue light still pulsing under her skin—residue of the psychic effort.

"This shouldn't be there," she said softly.

Dylan approached. "Is it dangerous?"

She shrugged, attempting a smile that convinced no one. "It's not supposed to last. But I… pushed. Too hard."

"You saved me."

She looked up at him, surprised by the simplicity of his tone.

He added, lower: "If you hadn't resisted, I would have killed her. Or worse."

"Or she would have broken you," she completed.

The silence that followed wasn't awkward, but dense, as if they shared a secret impossible to translate.

Dylan finally looked away. "She said something about my father."

Elisa froze.

"I know."

"You knew?"

"No. But I felt it. She wanted you to hear it."

"And now?"

"Now, you don't let her write the story for you."

Her voice had regained that cold authority he knew in her—the one used to hide fear.

⸻

The return to camp proceeded without major incident. But as they approached the fortifications of wood and iron, a sense of unreality gripped them. The familiar sounds—hammers, shouts, engines—seemed to come from another world.

They passed through the south gate without a word, greeted by a few stunned guards at the sight of their condition. Julius took the lead, imposing silence on the curious with a single look.

They reached the medical tent where Maggie was deposited into the arms of the healers.

Dylan remained outside, unable to enter.

The evening wind swept through the camp's smoke, bringing whiffs of meat, oil, and sweat—the returned mundane, indifferent to the night they had just endured.

Elisa joined him, her eyes ringed with dark circles but strangely luminous.

"You should sleep."

He let out a short, joyless laugh. "If I close my eyes, I still see her."

"Then let her haunt you. Nightmares, at least, don't lie."

He looked at her for a long moment.

In the falling cold, there was something inflexible, almost beautiful, in her face.

Then he looked away, observing the lights in the distance.

"It wasn't finished back there."

"No," she said simply. "It was only the beginning."

Their shadows lengthened on the tent canvas, merging briefly before dissolving into the night.