The sun never rose. Only a dim, sickly light seeped across the wasteland, coloring the world in bruised shades of gray. Guts trudged onward, his armor clanking with each step, weighed down not just by the steel but by the unseen hands of everything he had killed — everything he had lost. In the corner of his vision, the shadows moved when they should not. Shapes curled at the edges of the dead trees, watching him without eyes.
At the crest of a crumbling ridge, he stopped. Below, nestled between broken hills, a village — or what remained of one. Roofs collapsed under their own rot, fences swallowed by creeping fog. No fires burned. No dogs barked. Only the stillness of a grave. Guts narrowed his eyes. He knew this smell too well. Not death. Something worse. Something wrong. The kind of wrong that stirred the Brand on his neck into a low, throbbing scream.
He descended, Dragonslayer dragging a furrow behind him. With every step, the mist thickened, swallowing the world until only the ruined shapes of buildings flanked him. Then — a sound. A brittle, broken laugh, so soft it might have been mistaken for the wind. Guts turned. Out from the mist stumbled a figure: a child, no more than ten, barefoot and filthy, eyes empty like glass dolls. Around the child’s neck, a rosary of bones clattered softly. Guts said nothing. He knew better than to speak to the dead.
Echo Beyond the Code 