The orchard was dead.

  Once, the land had carried life in such abundance that even strangers spoke of it. Travelers knew these fields for their sun-plums, fruit that glowed golden in the autumn light, sweet as honey and filling enough to last a journey. Children had climbed the branches, their laughter carrying across the hills. Farmers had worked dawn to dusk, certain that tomorrow would always come with another harvest.

  Now, there was nothing.

  The trees stood skeletal, bark scorched black, branches curling like broken fingers against the gray sky. The earth was scarred and cracked, its once-rich soil pitted with fire. Even the crows were gone, leaving no sound but the restless scrape of wind.

  Through the ruin walked a man, or at least the visage of one. Barefoot, though the ash still smoldered, he moved without flinching. His robes dragged across the ground, frayed and burned at the hem. Their color was the sickly pale of parchment soaked through with blood and coal. Where his steps fell, embers stirred faintly.

  Nezzarod stopped before a tree that had once been proud, its branches bending each year beneath the weight of fruit. He placed his palm against its trunk. The bark cracked beneath his touch. A faint hiss sounded as heat crawled up the wood, a ghost of fire drawn from memory.

  “You dream still,” he whispered. His voice was quiet, but steady. “But nothing sweet grows from your dreams anymore.”

  The tree groaned, and a single fruit fell. Once, it would have been golden and heavy with juice. Now it was black, shriveled, brittle. It hit the ground and broke open, spilling nothing. Only ash.

  A thin smile touched his lips, but it was not joy.

  “They call it life,” he murmured. “A trick of breath, and warmth, and hope. But even tricks end.”

  For a long moment he stared at the broken fruit. In his mind he saw more than this orchard. He saw himself younger, walking among humans who had never welcomed him. He had built for them, healed for them, shaped wood and stone and flame for their comfort, and still they had turned away. They had looked upon his blood, drake and dryad, and found in it nothing but threat.

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  He remembered their eyes when they whispered about him. Not with awe. With fear. With scorn.

  To live, he had thought then, was to endure being unwanted.

  Now he knew better. To live was to burn everything that tried to stand against you.

  Behind him, ash shifted under light feet. A kobold knelt, scales dulled, and armor hung from his frame in jagged pieces of bone and bronze. His head bowed so low it nearly touched the ground.

  “Master,” the kobold rasped. “The rites are finished. We await your command.”

  Nezzarod did not look back. His hand pressed firmer against the dead tree. Not a sigh, not weariness. Release. As though a weight long carried had shifted slightly lighter.

  “The work is just beginning. The weight I felt for Elzibar, it’s still there, despite the village being gone. I feel the tug here, but also when I close my eyes.”

  He crouched. His fingers sifted through the ash around the broken fruit, lifting it, watching the powder slip between his hands.

  The kobold dared glance up. He saw Nezzarod’s eyes, dark, rimmed with a faint glow, alive with a fire that was not born of the orchard’s ruin but of something older, something rooted deep in his being. The kobold looked away quickly.

  Nezzarod pressed the fruit’s ash flat between his palms until it was nothing. The breeze caught the dust and carried it away. He studied the way it vanished into the air. He thought of how easily things were forgotten when the wind of time blew against them.

  “Something out there opposes us. We will find it yet.”

  He lifted his hands, still black with ash.

  The kobold dared not answer.

  He rose to his full height, and the ground seemed to resist him. Tiny cracks split in the soil beneath his feet. Even the orchard itself trembled faintly.

  The kobold pressed lower, tail curled tight against his body. He wanted to believe the silence his master spoke of would spare them. He wanted to believe they followed a prophet, not a destroyer. But when he looked at the trees, weeping ash from their twisted limbs, he was not certain.

  He walked forward and the orchard began to shift behind him. Black snow fell from the branches, coating the ground in gray. The trees looked as though they wept, but Nezzarod did not look back.

  The kobold watched as his master vanished into the distance, swallowed by the drifting haze. He felt pride to follow, yes, but also dread. The fire in Nezzarod’s words was not the fire of cleansing. It was the fire of endings.

  The orchard groaned one last time.

  From every branch ash fell steady and ceaseless, covering the earth. Not flame. Not smoke. Mourning. A lament from wood that could no longer bear fruit, from a land that could no longer remember spring.

  The orchard wept.

  And Nezzarod did not hear.