Fooled
The procession wove through the grim remnants of slaughter, an uncanny silence blanketing the ruin. Soldiers shepherded the two children forward, hands clamped over small eyes to shield them from the horrors strewn across the ground.
Corpses, twisted and torn, sprawled in grotesque poses. The mayor's grand building, once a symbol of order, now lay in a heap of rubble, indistinguishable from the chaos around it.
Some soldiers knelt to examine the fallen, their faces hardening at the signs of savagery. The injuries weren't clean cuts or bullet wounds—they were ragged, as though inflicted by jaws. Beasts. It had to be the forest animals.
The Peliotus tribe had always been intertwined with the wild, their bloodlines bound to creatures of the shadowed woods. This... this was their work, their curse.
The group pressed onward, leaving the shattered city behind, its cracked stone streets giving way to the softer paths of the farmlands.