The sky had turned the color of old bruises — violet, gray, with threads of red leaking through. Elias sat alone on the church steps of a ruined village they didn't plan to stay in. They never stayed anywhere too long. Not anymore.
The children were inside, huddled in what used to be a prayer hall. The ceiling had caved in, and snow dusted the stone floor like the ashes of old hymns.
Elias kept watch.
He didn't trust the silence here. It was too deep, too perfect — the kind of silence that followed massacres.
His gloved fingers moved over the rifle, checking the chamber for the fifth time. Not for practicality. For ritual. Something human in a world that kept peeling the skin off that word.
A sound — soft, shuffling.
He stood instantly.
A figure approached from the far edge of the village. No weapon visible. No coat thick enough to survive out there for long.
It was a man — tall, hollow-cheeked, eyes sunken but alert. His left boot was wrapped in rags. He limped like his bones remembered a different kind of terrain.
Elias raised his rifle. "Stop."
The man did.
"My name is Ilik," he said, voice dry and cracked like old bark. "I came from the mountains."
Elias didn't lower the weapon. "Why come here?"
Ilik smiled faintly. "Because everywhere else is already dead."
There was no threat in his tone, but something in his eyes unsettled Elias — not madness, not malice… just a deep, aching familiarity. Like looking in a cracked mirror.
"Anyone behind you?"
"No. Haven't seen another living soul in six days." He looked past Elias to the church. "I heard music. Thought I imagined it."
Elias froze. "What kind of music?"
"A lullaby," Ilik whispered. "One my mother used to hum when I couldn't sleep."
The wind howled then, sudden and sharp, cutting off any words that might have followed.
Elias lowered the rifle — just a little.
"You can stay," he said. "For now."
Ilik nodded once, then added, "There was a soldier, three days north. Strung up on a radio tower. His hands had been replaced with rusted knives."
Elias said nothing.
They both stared into the falling snow, and for a moment, the silence was not empty — it was full of things neither of them dared to name.