Before leaving, Kayn cut down one of the dark trees with a few clean strokes of his blades, and the team assembled the logs into a rough standing pillar, driving it upright into the frozen ground and packing snow around its base so it wouldn't topple. It stood tall enough that the falling snow wouldn't bury it.
The tree served as their anchor point. A fixed marker in a wasteland that erased everything else, so that no matter how far they wandered, they would always have one place they could navigate back to.
They headed north.
Five minutes in, they found the first sign of humans.
A war hammer, buried head-down in the ice, only its haft protruding from the frozen ground. A few meters further, a shield, half-swallowed by a drift, its face scored with deep gouges.
The team quickly looked around the vicinity for corpses, but found no bodies.
Moon crouched and inspected the hammer, then the shield, running his eyes over the forge marks and the construction.
