The extra reinforcements arrived without sound.

  No horns. No shouted announcements. Just the weight of more boots on ground already pressed thin, the line tightening as fresh bodies folded in with practiced efficiency.

  Vern stepped into the space Garland vacated as if it had always been his.

  No one objected.

  Orders didn’t change volume. They changed direction. What had been reactive became deliberate. Movements shortened. Pressure redistributed. The fight steadied—not because it was won, but because it was being held by someone who knew exactly how much could be spent without breaking the structure.

  Lysara felt it immediately.

  She didn’t wait.

  She crossed the rear of the formation at a diagonal, weaving through the wounded and the working lifewards without slowing. Someone reached for her sleeve. She shook them off without looking.

  Vern saw her before she reached him.

  He lifted a hand—not to stop her, but to clear the space.

  “Speak,” he said.

  “There’s a corrupted kill zone east,” Lysara said at once. No preamble. “Layered. Wolves. Other beasts. Human remains mixed through it. Scavengers feeding freely.”

  “Distance.”

  She gave it. Terrain. Slope. The way the ground dipped and failed to settle.

  “It’s being fought over repeatedly,” she continued. “Every engagement compounds it.”

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  Garland frowned. “You’re saying the ground—”

  “How long has this been active?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Long enough to change behavior.”

  That was enough.

  Vern turned slightly. “Send for Professor Hale. Immediately.”

  A runner was already moving.

  “Lock the perimeter,” Vern continued. “No further engagement inside that zone. Hold only.”

  Then he looked back at Lysara.

  “You’re leading us there.”

  She nodded once.

  He selected the group without discussion—Xyrion, Garland, one other unit leader, a shield pair, and two scouts. No more. Enough to see without disturbing what they were walking into.

  They moved fast.

  The forest changed as they crossed the boundary Lysara had marked. Not dramatically. Subtly. The ground grew darker, packed in places it shouldn’t have been, loose in others where roots had been torn free too often.

  Bones appeared first.

  Not in piles.

  Fragments. Cracked lengths half-driven into soil. Teeth. Shards of horn. Pieces that should have been scattered by scavengers and weather, but weren’t.

  Crows lifted as they approached, wings beating once before settling again in nearby branches. They didn’t flee far. Instead, they circled back almost immediately, hopping closer, heads cocked, voices sharp.

  A Cindercrest vulture tore free from the canopy above, heavy wings beating as it rose from the ground. Something pale and curved slipped from its beak and struck the earth below with a wet sound before the bird vanished back into the trees.

  The crows descended at once—not together, but fighting. Wings snapped. Beaks struck. One crow shrieked as another drove it aside, both scrambling over the remains in a flurry of black feathers.

  No one spoke.

  They reached the center without meaning to.

  The graveyard wasn’t a single place. It was an overlap. Old kills layered with newer ones, trampled and disturbed, fought over until nothing had time to break down properly. Wolf bodies lay among other beasts, some torn open, others half-consumed, some already stripped to bone.

  One of them had not stayed dead properly.

  Its ribcage had split outward instead of collapsing, bone warped and pulled wide as if something inside had tried to grow where it shouldn’t. A socket had formed where no organ belonged—smooth, rounded, wrong—still wet, still unfinished.

  The ground was dark with it.

  Too dark.

  Vern crouched and pressed two fingers into the soil. When he lifted them, the earth clung longer than it should have.

  “This has been active,” he said quietly.

  “Yes,” Lysara replied.

  Vern stood.

  “We hold here,” he said. “No engagement. No disturbance.”

  His gaze cut to Lysara. “When Hale arrives, he comes here first.”

  They waited.

  The forest was very still.

  Above them, the crows watched.