Changing Roads

The cottage smelled of old parchment, dried lavender, and stale pipe tobacco.

It was cramped, dominated by a heavy oak table covered in rolled maps, iron oil lamps, and stacked leather journals. Edwin didn't offer them a grand welcome. He poured two wooden cups of stale water, dragged an unpainted chair to the table, and sat down with a groaning sigh.

"Speak," Edwin said, rubbing his scarred knuckles. "Where did you come from?"

"Gray Vale," Aether answered quickly.

Edwin’s sharp brows pulled together. "Where?"

"Gray Vale," Aether repeated.

The old man stayed silent for three seconds, then shook his head. "Never heard of it."

Aether swallowed hard. Along the road, plenty of commoners hadn't known the small northern region, but hearing it dismissed so easily by the man Harold had sent them to find felt like a punch in the chest.

Kaelan stepped forward, his voice calm and precise. He began to trace their journey— starting from the small palisade of Stony Creek, down through the river fork, past the shattered outposts, through the ancient mountain bypass, and onto the southern high road.

Edwin listened, his eyes unreadable. He stood up, his right leg dragging slightly with a noticeable limp, and pulled a massive, cracked leather map from a shelf. He unrolled it across the table, weighting the corners with iron inkwells.

The map was a dense web of black ink and faded parchment, detailing cities, mountain ranges, and major riverways. But as Aether leaned over it, his heart sank.

Gray Vale wasn't on it. Stony Creek wasn't on it. The entire region of his childhood was represented merely as an empty, unnamed stretch of green ink tucked against the northern crags.

Aether searched again anyway. He followed the rivers with one finger, then the mountain line, then the faint marks that showed the larger roads. He knew where Gray Vale had to be. He could picture the path between the houses, the slopes beyond Stony Creek, the places where he had spent whole afternoons as a child. None of them existed here.

It was a strange kind of shock. The map was not wrong; it was simply drawn for a world larger than the one he had known. For the people who made it, Gray Vale had been too small to name. For Aether, until recently, it had been almost everything.

Edwin’s finger dragged across the parchment, following Kaelan’s verbal description, until it stopped at a blank spot near the northern border.

"Here?" Edwin asked.

Kaelan inspected the rivers surrounding the spot. "Aye. Right there."

Edwin stared at the empty patch of leather. "So that's where he hid himself."

A silence fell over the room. Aether stared at the map, a cold realization settling deep in his gut. The valley that had contained his entire world—his home, his childhood, everything he had ever known—was so small to the rest of the realm that no cartographer had bothered to write its name down.

Edwin didn't dwell on the map. He looked up, his pale eyes cutting through the dim room.

"Why are you here? Why did Harold send you down the trail?"

Aether took over the narrative. He told him about the first wolf attacks on the outer hamlets, the ruined crops, the blood on the snow, the steady stream of refugees packing their lives into carts, and the terrified rumors circulating in the markets of Whitestone.

Edwin listened without interrupting, though his posture slowly rigidified.

"How many families left?" he snapped.

"Dozens from the outer bounds," Kaelan replied. "More every week."

"How long has the pressure been building?"

"Since midwinter."

"Are the beasts hunting in packs, or just drifting?"

"Packs," Kaelan said coldly. "Organized. Striking the food stores first."

As the details piled up, the annoyance on Edwin’s face drained away, replaced by a thoughtful stillness. He turned back to the map, his thumb pressing hard against that tiny, unnamed green patch on the northern border.

Aether couldn't stand the silence. "What is it? What’s wrong?"

Edwin didn't answer immediately. He stared at the parchment, his eyes tracing invisible lines far beyond the northern mountains.

"Something is off," the old man whispered. "If what you're saying is true... the problem reaches farther than the valley."

The next morning, Edwin led them through the city before the market stalls had even opened.

The old man walked with a stiff, rhythmic limp, his heavy coat wrapped tight against the chill. He offered no explanations, ignoring Aether’s questions as they cut through the rising fog of the upper district.

They stopped before an imposing, grey-stone structure tucked behind the main administrative plaza. It lacked the grand archways of the Lord's Manor, but it hummed with an quiet urgency. Men clutching heavy leather ledgers darted up and down the steps, and two armed clerks stood at the double oak doors.

"The Quartermaster’s Office," Edwin muttered, stepping up the stone stairs without pausing.

Inside, the guards didn't block him. In fact, several older clerks bowed their heads slightly as the limping man passed. Aether realized then that the bitter old man living in the slums of the East Ward was far from an ordinary veteran.

They reached a private office at the rear. Behind a desk stacked high with parchment sat a man in his thirties, his hair thinning, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep.

The man didn't look up when the door opened. "Leave the grain reports on the chest. I'll review them by noon."

Edwin rapped his knuckles against the edge of the oak desk.

The clerk snapped his head up, annoyance flaring—and then his jaw dropped. "Edwin?"

A wide smile broke across his exhausted face as he stood up, pushing a pile of ledgers aside. "What in the heavens are you doing out of your hole? I was going to send a runner to your cottage tomorrow."

Edwin waved his hand dismissively. "Save it, Garreth. I'm not here for social calls."

Garreth’s smile faded, his eyes narrowing. "Then it’s bad."

"Aye," Edwin said, sliding into a heavy wooden chair. His eyes flicked to Kaelan and Aether.

"These two are with me. Harold’s people."

Garreth’s eyes widened slightly as he looked at the boys, a subtle shift of respect entering his gaze, though he asked no questions. "What do you need?"

"The migration logs," Edwin said bluntly. "The last four years."

"All of them?"

"All of them."

Garreth didn't argue. He walked to a wall of heavy oak filing cabinets, pulled four thick, dust-covered ledgers from the shelves, and slammed them onto the table, sending a cloud of grey powder into the air.

Aether leaned in, but the thousands of tiny, cramped numbers written in red and black ink meant nothing to him. It looked like an impenetrable wall of scribbles.

Edwin opened the first ledger. "East route."

Garreth flipped through his personal notes effortlessly. "Three years ago: eighty-seven households registered at the gates. Two years ago: one hundred two. Last year: ninety- five. This year so far: one hundred nine."

Edwin nodded once, his face emotionless. "West."

"Sixty-five... seventy-one... sixty-eight... seventy-three."

"South."

"One hundred twenty-one... one hundred eighteen... one hundred twenty-seven... one hundred thirty-two."

The numbers rolled off Garreth’s tongue with dull regularity. Aether glanced at Kaelan; his friend’s face was sharp, his eyes devouring every figure, memorizing the cadence of the report.

Edwin leaned back slightly, his pale eyes locking onto the clerk. "North."

Garreth’s hand stopped on the parchment. He hesitated, his brow furrowing as he flipped to the back section of the current ledger.

"Three years ago... two households."

"Two years ago... four households."

"Last year... five households."

Silence stretched in the dusty room. Edwin didn't move a muscle.

Garreth lowered his gaze to the final page, his finger tracing down the column of fresh red ink. "This year... first six months..."

"How many?" Edwin demanded softly.

Garreth swallowed hard, his voice dropping an octave. "Thirty-eight households as of yesterday afternoon."

Aether looked between the two men, confused. Thirty-eight sounded like a tiny number compared to the hundreds coming from the south and east. Why had the air in the room suddenly turned to ice?

"That’s impossible," Garreth whispered, staring at his own writing. "The northern border is a dead zone. Nobody lives up there to begin with."

"They do now," Edwin said, his voice dropping into a low voice. "Or rather, they don't anymore."

Garreth unclipped a separate bundle of individual field reports, scanning the origins of the refugees. "The settlements listed... they're creeping down. First the deep woods, then the foothills, now the high valley outposts." He looked up at Edwin, his face pale. "The border isn't just leaking. It's collapsing inward."

Edwin reached out, his scarred hand resting flat over the northern ledger.

"Beast trouble itself is nothing new," Edwin said, resting a hand on the northern ledger. "What worries me is where it is appearing now."

Garreth looked again at the figures. "Thirty-eight households means little to Whitestone," he said. "But for the north, it is far too many.""

Aether looked again at the figures. A moment ago they had seemed meaningless. Now they began to resemble the people he had passed on the road: families carrying what they could, carts moving south, villages quietly emptying.

Kaelan stepped closer to the table, his dark eyes fixed on Edwin. "The north is changing."

Edwin looked up, his expression grave. "Aye, boy. It’s changing."

"What happens next?"

Edwin stared out the narrow office window toward the distant snow-capped peaks of the northern range.

"Next," Edwin said quietly, "we find out what’s pushing them."

***

By mid-afternoon, the heat in the quartermaster’s archives had grown stifling.

Edwin spent hours cross-referencing trade route ledgers with refugee manifests, his scarred hands leaving smudge marks on the yellowed parchment. Kaelan sat beside him in absolute silence, helping organize the cracked maps, while Aether leaned against the stone wall, watching the endless stream of desperate city officials enter and leave the office.

Every report delivered to Garreth’s desk carried the same undertone: Less. Less grain arriving from the north; less iron mined from the crags; less timber clearing the riverways. And yet, every hour, more people poured through the city's southern and eastern gates.

"The roads are dying," Aether muttered to himself, looking at a master map pinned to the wall.

Lines that had once represented thriving trade arteries were crossed out in red ink— marked as abandoned, unsafe, or unmonitored.

When they finally stepped out of the Quartermaster’s Office, the afternoon sun had washed the white stone walls of the city in a late gold. The main thoroughfares were choked with an unusual density.

After hours among ledgers, the street felt different to Aether. Earlier, a crowded road had simply been crowded. Now he found himself wondering where the carts had come from, which road they had taken, and whether the families walking beside them had meant to come to Whitestone at all. Numbers he had barely understood inside the office seemed to be moving around him on two feet.

He did not say this aloud. Kaelan was watching the same streets with a different attention, counting guards, wagons, and the gaps between patrols. Edwin walked ahead of them, saying little.

They walked toward the central plaza, where a massive wooden platform had been erected near the granary district. A crowd of fifty or sixty men—ragged, dust-coated, and desperate—had gathered around a city overseer standing on a heavy supply crate.

"Laborers!" the overseer bellowed, holding a wooden chalkboard. "Eight men for the canal repairs! Hard stone work! Two copper bits a day!"

The crowd surged forward all at once. Men shoved each other, waving their calloused hands, shouting their credentials, screaming for a chance to earn two coins.

Aether stopped, watching an old farmer near the back get shoved into the dirt by a younger, larger man. The overseer picked eight men within two minutes, barked an order, and marched them off. The remaining forty-odd men stood in the dust, their shoulders slumped, their disappointment plain.

The old farmer pushed himself up slowly and brushed the dust from his knees. For a heartbeat Aether thought he might protest, but the man only stepped back into the crowd. He had the broad shoulders of someone who had worked land for most of his life, yet here that strength meant no more than anyone else's when fifty men were asking for eight places.

Aether wondered where his farm had been. He wondered whether the man had left it willingly. The questions came faster now, and Whitestone offered few answers.

"There were only twenty men standing here yesterday," Kaelan noted quietly, his eyes sweeping the rejected laborers.

"There'll be eighty tomorrow," Edwin growled, not slowing his pace. "A city is like a bucket.

Keep pouring water into it without punching a hole in the bottom, and eventually, the water spills into the dirt."

They pushed deeper into the lower wards. Near the river docks, the air smelled of rotting fish and stagnant water. Hundreds of out-of-work deckhands and displaced rural laborers sat along the stone wharves, huddled around small trash fires.

"Used to be you could get a job on a barge in five minutes," an old sailor grunted as Aether walked past. He spat a dark stream of tobacco juice into the river. "Now? You gotta fight three men just to carry a sack of grain off a boat."

"Why?" Aether asked, stopping despite Kaelan’s warning look.

The sailor looked at Aether’s clean, uncalloused hands with open contempt. "Because the northern barges aren't coming down no more, boy. No cargo means no work. No work means no bread. You do the math."

Further down the avenue, in the shadow of the eastern outer wall, a makeshift refugee camp had swallowed three entire residential blocks. Timber shacks built from scavenged crates and frayed canvas leaned against the ancient stone walls. Children with dirt- streaked faces ran barefoot through mud puddles, while women boiled withered roots over small clay braziers.

Aether slowed as they passed. One family had arranged three stones around a cooking pot no larger than his two hands. A little girl sat beside it, carefully breaking a piece of bread into smaller pieces before giving the largest one to a younger boy. Nearby, two men were repairing a torn section of canvas together, arguing quietly about where the next rain would come from.