The morning mist hung heavy outside White Stone Town. The Holy See's defensive line lay silent, the entire position like a mire heaped with corpses. That stillness chilled the heart.
On the mill's top floor stood a long-forgotten ventilation chimney.
It was a safety feature from an earlier age, built to prevent flour dust explosions. By now, it had long since lost its purpose.
A thick layer of old soot coated the flue's inner walls, mixed with deposits of moldy flour, its color like festering scabs.
Old Hans was wedged inside that narrow flue.
This was somewhere the Holy See's search parties would never spare a second glance.
First came the smell: the sourness of fermenting, rotten grain, the stench of dead rats, and a nauseating reek of grease mixed with soot. It concealed the scent of a living person perfectly.
Even the hounds with the keenest noses would turn away irritably after catching that smell.
To be safe, Hans had smeared his entire body with soot and waste oil, leaving only his eyes exposed.
Through a barely perceptible crack in the chimney, he watched the wasteland outside town. He wanted to see this little town's fate with his own eyes, whatever it might be...
Now Old Hans was trembling, because he was witnessing hell.
Across the muddy clearing north of town, defensive structures formed from all manner of thorns made up an enormous line of flesh and blood.
Several hundred children had also been planted neatly in the earth. Some were from their town; others had come from places he did not know.
The spacing had been deliberately kept to a uniform stride, their arrangement almost reverent.
Only their upper bodies were exposed, like crops waiting to be harvested, or offerings carefully laid out.
Hans began counting almost instinctively,