The forest smelled different now.
Not of moss or blood — but of smoke.
Senja stared into the canopy where the scent thickened. It wasn't an accidental fire. It was lit with intent, controlled and fed carefully along dry brush corridors. The Kalyan had stopped chasing shadows.
They were trying to burn them out.
A runner approached her through the trees, half out of breath. "South ridge line is lit. The fire's being funneled east. They mean to flush us from cover."
Senja's expression remained unreadable.
"Let them try," she said.
She motioned to her second team. "Shift to the ravine. Take the low stone path beneath the flame. If the wind favors us, the fire will leap past."
"And if it doesn't?" Kenu asked.
She glanced upward. "Then we walk through it."
In the Kalyan war camp, General Kael'Thar stood before a scorched wooden map carved into a slab of bark. His eyes followed the burn patterns drawn with char lines.
"She won't break with steel," he muttered. "But nature breaks all."
His captains said nothing.
He finally spoke again: "Turn the terrain into the weapon. Smoke them. Blind them. Starve them."
"Shall we march full strength to the ridge?" one lieutenant asked.
"No. Keep our numbers small. Just enough to sting." His tone grew colder. "Make them question if this forest is still theirs."
That night, the flames rose like pillars of warning.
The Thorn Circle did not run.
They moved through the underroot — a network of narrow, animal-used paths Senja had forced her warriors to memorize. The fire crept above them, roaring through the upper canopy, but the roots below were damp with old water, shaded for centuries.
Senja walked at the front, eyes red from smoke, her skin streaked with blackened sweat.
"We'll circle the southern basin," she ordered. "Tonight, we strike their tents — their supplies, not their blades."
By dawn, a third of the Kalyan's food stores had been turned to ash.
Their wounded awoke choking on smoke, their medicine packs stolen or soaked in piss.
A lone tree near their camp had been carved during the night — a woman's face with wolf's teeth for eyes.
Kael'Thar stood beneath it, jaw clenched.
"She wants us angry," he said. "She feeds on it."
His lieutenant frowned. "So we stop chasing?"
"No. We stop playing."
He raised his hand and gestured to his priests.
"Begin the rites. If she fights like a spirit, we'll answer with our god."
Back in the hidden shelter of the lower hills, Senja dipped her hands into a bowl of ash and water.
She looked into the polished stone at her reflection: her face streaked black, her eyes hard, almost hollow.
"I have to become worse than they believe I am," she murmured.
Kenu stepped beside her. "You already are. And that's why we follow."
She said nothing for a long while. Then she nodded and stood.
"Tonight," she said, "we tear out the tongue of the Mouth."
The Kalyan soldiers did not speak loudly anymore.
They whispered as they gathered near their fires, backs to trees, blades never sheathed. Even the boldest among them avoided looking into the woods too long.
Because the trees were watching.
Because she was watching.
That night, Senja waited until the smoke had thinned and the winds had changed. She painted herself in a thick layer of ash and river clay, leaving only the whites of her eyes visible. Her warriors — what remained of the Thorn Circle — did the same.
They didn't look like humans anymore.
They looked like spirits carved from fire and earth.
"Tonight," Senja said, "we do not fight like warriors. We fight like curses. We become the story they tell their children to keep them in their beds."
Kenu grinned. "No more mercy?"
"No more memory," she replied. "They won't remember who they were when we're done."
Just before the second moon crested the treetops, Senja launched her assault.
But this time, she didn't strike the soldiers.
She struck everything else.
Oil lamps in tents were knocked over and lit. Dead animals were left in cooking pots. Symbols — old and forgotten ones, used by tribes no longer spoken of — were smeared in blood on tents and shields.
Every corpse they had buried over the last week was dug up and positioned around the Kalyan camp in grotesque formations — warriors sitting with their own skulls in their laps, jawbones arranged in circles, eyes sewn shut with bark-thread.
A soft flute melody drifted through the smoke — no clear source, but every man heard it in their own ear.
When the Kalyan commander finally found the strength to rally his soldiers, they discovered their leader's war horse standing at the center of the camp — headless, its body flayed and painted with ash-wolf runes.
No one knew when it had happened.
No one had seen her.
And yet… they knew it was her.
Kael'Thar stood over the chaos, his face like stone.
Even he, unshaken by blood or fire, clenched his fists tighter than usual.
"She's not breaking us," one of his lieutenants muttered, trembling. "She's unmaking us."
Kael'Thar did not answer.
He looked eastward.
And for the first time, he wondered if he would die on this campaign.
Back in the dark grove, Senja sat alone with her hands still painted black, a fire crackling quietly beside her.
One of her youngest warriors approached her. "They're terrified."
"They should be," she said.
"They think you're not human."
"I'm not."
A long silence passed between them before Senja finally whispered, almost to herself:
"They've seen war. Now they've seen what happens when war comes from the woods."
The sky cracked.
Not with thunder — but with drums. Deep and unrelenting. Not struck by hands, but by hearts ablaze.
Senja stood at the center of the grove, her warriors encircling her. Their bodies were painted not just in ash and clay — but in iron dust and crushed coal, forming sigils passed down by the first war priests of Kan Ogou.
Kenu stepped forward, offering her a blade dipped in oil and wrapped in red cloth.
"Are we sure?" he asked.
Senja didn't speak.
She knelt at the altar stone they had unearthed days earlier — a shrine to Ogou Feray, god of war, fire, and iron — buried centuries ago during the last war of spirits.
And she pressed her palm flat against the cracked metal plate embedded in its surface.
The world inhaled.
Then fire answered.
It poured through her — through every warrior present — a surge of molten fury, ancient and holy. Not a possession, but a channeling. They did not lose themselves.
They became themselves, fully and violently.
The Thorn Circle burned with red light. Blades in their hands hummed like living flame. Their veins glowed beneath skin. Their breath turned to steam.
Ogou had come.
And he did not walk alone.
He rode in their limbs, shouted in their rage, and struck with their fists.
That night, the Kalyan launched their final offensive. Kael'Thar had gathered every warrior he had — nearly four hundred strong. He expected resistance.
He did not expect what rose from the trees.
Senja led the charge barefoot, bare-chested, her eyes twin furnaces of warlight.
She did not command that night.
She unleashed.
Her warriors came in silence, blades melting shields, bodies moving faster than trained eyes could follow. Every strike felt preordained, every kill sacred.
The forest itself opened for them.
Flames wrapped the trees but did not consume them — they became torches to light the massacre.
Kael'Thar fought near the rear, slashing wildly, calling out to his god.
And for the first time, the Mouth answered.
The air twisted.
From the black canopy above, a figure dropped like smoke and iron — tall, featureless, its face a gaping, fanged maw. Eyes like pits. Voice like bone grinding bone.
"I am hunger made spirit," it said. "I am the Mouth."
The battlefield stopped. Even the flames stilled.
Then Senja stepped forward, blade in hand, blood running down her arms like oil.
"You are not god," she said.
The gods locked eyes.
Time stopped.
The battlefield fell silent.
Even Senja lowered her blade. She stepped back, as did every warrior on both sides. Mortals had no place in what was about to happen.
And as Ogou lifted his hammer into the storm-wracked sky, thunder struck again.
Not from above.
From him.
Lightning coursed through the battlefield — not to kill, but to declare:
"This war… belongs to ME."
He lunged, his hammer wreathed in flame, meeting the Mouth's blackened claws in a shockwave that turned stone to dust.
God fought god.
Above, below, and within the world.
Senja turned.
Behind her, the Thorn Circle raised their weapons.
"Mortals to mortals," she growled.
"We clean the rest."
And they moved.
They fell upon the Kalyan ranks like wolves with memory. Every strike had purpose. Every movement honored those lost. No wasted fury. No blind rage.
They weren't fighting for survival anymore.
They were delivering judgment.
By dawn, the Kalyan army had shattered.
Bodies burned. Spears snapped. Surrender came not from lips, but from knees collapsing.
The Mouth was gone — driven back by Ogou into the deeper dark, screeching with fury, vanishing like smoke into a sealed wound.
Ogou did not linger.
He raised his hammer once more — a final arc of fire into the sky — then vanished in a swirl of cinders and wind.
Senja stood alone as the smoke cleared.
The forest exhaled.
And in her heart, she heard no words — only the faint echo of metal on metal.
A blessing.
A promise.
A god saying: "You held the line."