NORTH ROAD — TWO HOURS BEFORE DAWN
We rode hard enough that the horses hated us by the second hour and respected us by the fourth.
Bellwake lay ahead under a cold gray morning sky.
No smoke.
No fire.
No visible attack.
That made it worse.
Violence was easy to identify.
Civic collapse never looked dramatic at first.
It looked like closed doors.
Shuttered windows.
People who had known each other for twenty years suddenly standing on opposite sides of a square pretending they were enemies by logic instead of fear.
Sera saw the town before any of us did.
Not physically.
In the way she saw things now—through the pressure in a place, the emotional weather of a living system under strain.
She slowed her horse.
"It's already split," she said quietly.
"How bad?" I asked.
She exhaled once. "Bad enough that if someone dies publicly in the wrong place, the town divides permanently."
Mira rode beside us, windburned and alert. "Then nobody dies publicly in the wrong place."
