The smell came first.
Not to the guards, not to Brune, not to the refugees—but to the children.
Specifically, to Rune, who declared, loudly and without warning, that the air "smelled like dead soup."
Maverick looked up from his sharpening stone, pausing mid-stroke. Elira froze as well, mid-jar. Torren didn't move, but his eyes slid open beneath the soot-dark arch of his brow.
"It smells," Rune repeated. "Like something dead that tried to be dinner."
Ren sniffed. "I don't smell anything."
"That's because you eat weird things," Rune countered. "Your nose is broken."
"I smelled that rat that one time."
"That was Dad's jerky!"
Torren's voice, dry as frost, interrupted: "Out. Both of you."
They left the forge half-muttering.
Maverick returned to his whetstone. The scent hadn't reached him yet, but Rune wasn't wrong often when it came to what didn't belong.
Elira stepped toward the door. "I'll check with the apothecary. She might've spilled something again."
"She's too far for that," Torren murmured.
Elira paused.
Maverick met his father's eyes.
No one said it, but the silence shared between them said enough: something was wrong.
By late afternoon, the smell had reached the lane.
It wasn't strong. Not yet. But it clung—thick in the nostrils, caught in the throat. A mix of spoiled meat and sour copper, like something organic was trying to rot but kept getting frozen midway through.
Near the granary, people covered their mouths.
Children pointed.
Someone whispered the word "plague."
That night, Brune and Alric dispatched three scouts and a medical hand to inspect the livestock pens in the eastern fields.
They returned pale.
Maverick was off shift, but Alric had him summoned anyway.
The east pens were near the original edge of Eldenhold—before the second wall was extended. They were older structures: wood and rope, some with stone bases. There had once been dozens of animals here—cattle, sheep, even two donkeys. Not much was left.
No bodies.
Just blood.
Frozen smears in strange arcs. Claw marks in the packed ice, but no familiar tracks. The gate to one pen had been torn off and flung several feet—not pushed, hurled. Several barrels of feed were crushed inward from the top, as if something heavy had landed directly on them.
And that smell.
Closer now. Thicker. Clinging.
Brada, the grim-faced medic who had been helping the refugees behind the inn, crouched beside one of the troughs. He ran gloved fingers along the frost-caked rim.
"No fur," he said. "No skin fragments. No clean breaks. It's like they were pulled inward."
"Inward?" Alric repeated.
Brada stood. "I'm not saying they were swallowed whole, but... look at this."
He pointed to a gouge mark along the post—vertical, narrow, and deep.
"Something pierced the wood cleanly. Not clawed. Drove through it. Then pulled."
Alric exhaled. "A weapon?"
Brada shook his head. "No steel I've seen. And nothing was left behind."
Maverick stood apart from the group, facing the forest line beyond the field.
He listened.
Not to the men.
To the silence.
No wind. No birds. No insects.
Not even the creak of old trees.
The forest watched.
It did not sway. It did not whisper.
It waited.
The next morning, the gates remained closed longer than usual.
Brune argued with the outer guard for a full ten minutes before Alric gave the nod to let him through.
He didn't look happy.
"People are asking questions," Brune said to Maverick as they walked the mid-lane. "They're talking about disappearances. About things in the woods. About guards covering for—"
"They're not wrong," Maverick interrupted.
Brune stopped.
"They're not wrong," Maverick repeated, voice quiet. "But they're not right either."
Brune sighed. "I've known this town longer than you've been standing guard. And I know what panic smells like."
"Do you know what it sounds like when it's hiding?"
Brune didn't answer.
Elira sent the twins to stay with her cousin near the baker's row.
"They don't need to be here when it starts," she told Maverick.
"When what starts?" he asked.
She looked at him.
And said nothing.
That night, Maverick stood on the wall again.
He didn't take the lower post, even though Alric offered it. He chose the high ridge—the place where the wind cut deepest and the snow piled highest.
He stood there long past his shift's end.
Because something had begun watching back.
He could feel it.
Not just beyond the gate.
Below.
Within.
Like the cold had moved inside the walls.
And it was listening to them breathe.