The night wind carried dust across the outer watch posts.
Dean was on guard duty when he saw them.
Shapes in the dark. Not warriors. Not traders.
Women. Dozens of them. Some carrying bundles, some holding small hands, some with nothing at all.
Dean narrowed his eyes and signaled the archers to stay alert without raising his voice.
As the group stepped into torchlight, the truth of them became clear. Exhausted. Clothes torn. Faces hollow in the way only real hunger and real fear could hollow a face. Children clung to legs that could barely hold their own weight anymore.
Dean stepped forward. "Stop there."
An older woman raised both hands slowly, palms open. "We seek shelter." Her voice was dry, cracked from days without proper water.
Kael was called from the inner camp. When he arrived and took in the scene, he froze slightly.
Nearly sixty women.
And only seven children.
Seven.
Kael noticed it immediately. "Where are the others?"
The women exchanged uneasy glances between themselves. Finally, one younger mother spoke.
"They are gone."
"Taken?"
She shook her head slowly. "We do not know."
The air in the courtyard grew heavier.
Another woman stepped forward. "In our village… children began disappearing."
"How many?" Dean asked.
"At first, one in a month." Her voice thinned as she continued. "Then two. Then three in a week."
Murmurs spread through Kael's watching warriors.
The mother holding a small boy tightened her grip on him without seeming to notice she'd done it. "No blood. No screams. No bodies." Her voice cracked. "Just empty sleeping mats."
Kael's eyes darkened. "And your chief?"
The older woman looked ashamed. "He said spirits were angry. He forbade us from speaking of it."
Another woman added quietly, "But it was not only children."
Kael frowned. "What do you mean?"
"Younger men… began dying. Healthy ones. Fever without cause. Breathing stops in the night."
Dean looked toward Kael. This wasn't random.
This was a pattern.
"How many people remain in your village?" Kael asked.
"Four hundred women remain," the elder answered.
"And the young population?"
She swallowed hard before answering. "Very few. Most who survive are old… or small children."
Kael's mind raced through it. Missing children. Young adults dying without cause. Population collapse that had nothing to do with war or starvation.
Something else entirely.
"Why did you leave?" Dean asked.
The younger mother's voice trembled as she answered. "Because some women… started acting strange."
Silence settled over the group.
"They walked at night. They whispered near the forest. They tried to take children from sleeping mothers."
A child behind her began crying softly at the memory.
Kael stepped closer. "Did you see their faces?"
The mother nodded slowly. "They were… normal. But their eyes—" She struggled to find the words. "Empty. Like someone else was inside."
A cold silence spread across the courtyard.
Dean muttered under his breath, "Not animals."
Kael's thoughts moved carefully through the possibilities. Disease. Poison. Cult activity. Or something far worse hiding inside this primitive world's rules.
"Did you confront them?" Kael asked.
The elder shook her head. "Those who accused them disappeared next."
That settled it. This was organized. Or controlled by something that didn't want to be found out.
Kael looked at the seven children standing among the group — too few, far too few for sixty women. If the numbers were true, that village hadn't just been struggling.
It had been dying from the inside.
Dean spoke firmly. "You will be given shelter tonight. But tomorrow, we investigate."
Some of Kael's villagers shifted nervously at that. Taking in refugees meant risk — unknown disease, unknown enemy, a threat none of them had a name for yet.
Kael raised a hand, silencing the doubt before it could spread further.
"If something hunts children," he said, "it will not stop at one village."
The torches flickered violently as wind passed through the courtyard. For a moment, Kael felt something watching from beyond the treeline.
Not a beast. Not like the mammoth.
Something patient. Something intelligent.
The youngest refugee child looked toward the dark forest and whispered, so quietly it barely carried—
"It sings at night."
The wind stopped.
No one spoke.
Kael slowly turned his gaze toward the forest line, and for the first time since founding Titanblood Tribe, he felt something close to real unease settle into his chest.
Civilization was growing. Copper. Weapons. Trade. Currency.
But now a different kind of threat had entered the story — not hunger, not rival tribes, but something that seemed to be attacking the future itself.
The children.
And if that was true, this wasn't survival anymore.
This was a war against something no one could see coming.