A New Kind of Strength

The dust had settled, quite literally. For days, the air in Oakhaven had been thick with it, a gritty reminder of the chaos that had nearly swallowed us whole. Now, it was just… dust. And silence. A heavy, expectant silence that felt almost louder than the screeching monstrosity that had tried to turn our village into a pile of splinters and screams.

Lyra, bless her perpetually optimistic heart, was already humming. It was a slightly off-key rendition of the harvest festival song, which was frankly a bit premature given that the entire harvest had been trampled by a creature that looked like a grumpy badger that had swallowed a thundercloud. I, on the other hand, was still mentally cataloging the various ways our village had almost imploded.

“You know,” I said, picking a stray cobweb out of my hair, “I think the most impressive thing about yesterday was how many different ways we managed *not* to die.”