Thornwall is safe. The warlord’s army retreated when the kingdom collapsed. The entrance is sealed — 500 feet of rubble. Nothing is getting through.
The villagers are celebrating. They don’t know what we lost. The books, the schematics, the machines — all buried. Aldric is grieving. He spent weeks studying those texts.
I don’t regret it. The alternative was the warlord turning those machines into weapons. A siege engine that fires itself, walls that repair their own damage — the warlord would have conquered the continent in a year.
But the Ashwood is still changing. The forest hasn’t stopped shifting. And the merchant’s warning echoes: the Ashwood is waking up. The clockwork kingdom was built on top of something. Something old. Something that doesn’t care about kingdoms or wars.
I’m heading into the Ashwood tomorrow. Alone. If the forest is truly waking up, someone needs to understand why before it swallows everything.
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