He found six pieces of jewellery in the first hour. He did not know if any of them were valuable — he was not someone who had spent significant time around jewellery — but they were small and light and the kind of thing that could be exchanged for something more useful in a city that dealt in tangible goods. He put them in a cloth pouch and kept moving.
The smell was the hardest part. Not the fire smell from Erina's altar — that was clean, in its way, the smell of something concluded. The other smell. The one that had been building since yesterday morning and would continue building regardless of what he chose to do about it. He kept his sleeve pressed to his nose and breathed through his mouth and kept his eyes on the task.
Reyner's forge yielded better. The old dwarf had kept a personal dagger on the workbench — short, heavy, practical, the kind of blade made for use rather than display, its edge maintained with the consistency of someone who believed that a tool not kept sharp was not kept at all. Kael wrapped it in cloth and packed it alongside the jewellery. He found food in three separate locations: dried provisions in Reyner's back room, sealed jars from the market stall at the north end, a partial sack of grain that had survived a collapsed wall by falling in exactly the right direction. Five days, rationed carefully. Six if he was honest about what careful meant.
He also found a backpack — canvas, reinforced straps, sized for someone who was going to be carrying things for a while. He transferred everything into it and cinched it down and stood in the middle of Nimbra with his inventory and his situation and gave himself thirty seconds.
He looked around at the ruins one more time. The place where Erina's house had been was a pile of stone and timber. He could identify the balcony beam from the angle it had landed at. He did not look at it for long. His gaze moved across the street to Reyner's forge, to the market stalls, to the community hall where Nimbra's people had gathered for festivals and disputes and the ordinary business of living together. All of it the same rubble now. All of it the same weight.
He did not have the capacity to feel everything this required him to feel. He noted this the way he noted other things — filed it, moved on. There would be time later, or there would not be, and either way standing still was not going to produce anything useful.
"I think I'm robbing the dead," he said aloud, to no one.
A pause. His own voice sounded strange in the silence of the ruins.
"But the dead don't own anything... unless it's inherited."
He adjusted the straps. Checked the weight distribution. Picked a direction.
He kept moving.
✦ ✦ ✦
He heard the horses before he saw them.
Eight riders, armoured, moving in the formation of people who did this professionally. He was behind the remains of a standing wall before the sound had fully resolved — instinct moving his body before his brain had finished processing the information. He pressed flat against the stone and waited.
The insignia told him what he needed to know even from this distance: the griffin holding a burning flag and a book, the High Concord's mark, the Ashen Host's operational arm.
They came through the northern approach and fanned out without needing to be told. Experienced people in a situation they had protocols for.
"This place is a disaster... what an eyesore," said one of them, surveying the wreckage with the detachment of someone encountering evidence of a catastrophe rather than a catastrophe itself.
The helmetless one — the commander — spoke with the efficiency of someone accustomed to being heard the first time.
"Call for backup, Henry. We need to properly bury the dead." He scanned the ruins with careful eyes. "We also need to determine the cause of this destruction."
"Yes, Commander Harwick."
"Gilbert, Plen, Varrik, Corbin, Guhm, Boxer — gather the bodies and give them proper burial rites. Search for survivors."
They acknowledged and dispersed.
Kael watched from behind his wall and did his calculation. Being the sole survivor of a Rift event that had killed an entire settlement was not a circumstance that produced quiet outcomes. The Host would have questions. The questions would have a location — a registration office, a holding facility, somewhere that was not the direction he needed to be moving. And Raiven, which he had not yet thought carefully enough about, was not something he could explain.
He adjusted his pack and began moving — low, slow, using every standing structure between himself and the soldiers as cover. No combat training. No formal survival education. Just the specific observation that had been his primary skill since he was old enough to apply it: read the environment, read the people in it, find the route that keeps you out of both.
He was doing well until his boot caught a piece of debris he had not seen.
"Clink!"
He froze. Hand over his mouth. Did not breathe.
Gilbert turned.
"What was that?"
"I'll check it," another soldier replied, drawing his sword with the practiced smoothness of someone who found this reflex comfortable.
Kael's heart was very loud in his own ears. He looked at the stones around his feet. Picked up three — small, enough weight to carry, light enough to throw without accuracy compromising the outcome. He threw the first to the left. The second further left. The third behind him and to the right.
Clink. Clang. Clunk.
The sound scattered. Gilbert paused, tracking the multiple sources with the confusion of someone whose sense of direction was suddenly unreliable. Kael moved. Not running — not yet. The specific controlled pace of someone who understood that the sound of running is louder than the sound of walking fast.
He was fifty meters south before Gilbert reached the spot where he had been.
✦ ✦ ✦
Gilbert knelt in the ash from Erina's altar. He was a demi-human with the enhanced sensory range that demi-human lineage sometimes produced — he lifted the ash to his nose and read it the way a practitioner reads a Resonance impression.
"Dwarven remains... and..." He paused, nostrils working. "Up north... a hybrid — elf and human."
"Someone survived?" Harwick's attention sharpened immediately.
"Yes, Commander. These remains were recently burned — whether alive or dead, I cannot confirm." He turned, reading the air in a different direction. "There's more."
"Another burned body?"
"No." The pause was short. "One individual is moving south. Slowly."
He frowned at the space between himself and the horizon.
"I suggest we locate them quickly. The Nimbra Ruins are interfering with my sense of smell."
"Everyone, stop what you're doing!"
The order went across the ruins like a stone across water.
"Ready the horses. We move south — fast."
✦ ✦ ✦
Kael heard the horses change direction and understood immediately that he had underestimated them.
"Shit... shit... shit..."
He was running now. The backpack bounced against his spine with every stride, heavier than it had seemed when he was packing it. He ran the calculation while he ran the distance: the horses were faster than him on open ground, the terrain between him and the ruins was not open ground, and there was exactly one place within range that the soldiers would not follow him into.
He had been avoiding it. Every instinct he had said to keep avoiding it.
But instinct was a tool for situations with better options, and he was out of better options.
He turned toward the Nimbra Ruins and ran.