Chapter 199

It arrived on a gray morning, carried not by horns or scouts, but by smoke.

Caleb saw it first from the watchtower—a thin, deliberate line rising from the eastern lowlands. Not wildfire. Too controlled. Too intentional.

“Signal fire,” Tomas said beside him. “Not ours.”

Kaia felt the mark stir—not sharply, not in warning, but in recognition. Something old responding to something practiced.

“They’re burning the border villages,” she said. “Not to destroy them. ...