"Clop, clop, clop."
The horse's white-wrapped hooves struck the charred road, kicking up a little ash.
Xia Lun sat in the saddle, reins in hand, silently surveying the apocalyptic devastation on both sides of the road.
The sedge had curled in on itself, and the fast-grown poplars had carbonized and collapsed in the flames. Corpses lay everywhere. Vultures wheeled through the darkness, while the Tree Shepherd Organization's tattered green-tree banners lay askew on the ground, stained with blood.
A lonely wind swept across the dark, burning remnants of the battlefield, wailing like a funeral horn. Mingled with the survivors' grief-stricken cries, it weighed heavily on the heart.
After the battle, the rush of adrenaline faded, and grief over the dead and fallen spread through the survivors once more.
Xia Lun looked up at the Obsidian Obelisk on the distant horizon and sighed softly.
After his narrow victory over Proud Sun, he had been in such a hurry to find White Line that he had forgotten to retrieve the Obsidian Obelisk. The Withered Dead had been too terrified to retrieve it either, so it still stood at the far edge of the sky.
Xia Lun looked away and glanced toward the roadside.
A woman who had once been a slave knelt before a burning funeral pyre, staring numbly at the dancing flames. She cradled the shattered remains of her infant in her arms. Within the fire, countless charred bodies lay twisted together.
"I'm sorry for your loss." A bald Tree Herder in charge of the pyre approached her and spoke gently. "Your husband was brave. He died charging the Light Wall alongside the Great Leader."
"Did his death... mean anything?" the woman murmured.
The bald Tree Herder fell silent.
Orange flames flickered, their light and the deep shadows at its edge