The dawn did not arrive with warmth nor gentle promise, but crept across the broken city like a hesitant witness, pale light touching shattered stone and blood-stained ground as though uncertain it had any right to illuminate what had been done beneath the cover of night.
A faint mist lingered low upon the earth, curling around fallen debris and still bodies, softening the edges of violence without erasing it, as though the world itself attempted to hide what it could not undo.
The sky shifted slowly from darkness to grey, yet the light that followed did not feel like hope, only exposure, only truth laid bare where shadows could no longer conceal it.
Those who remained stood scattered across the square, their bodies weary, their breaths uneven, their gazes heavy with something deeper than exhaustion, something that lingered in the quiet spaces between them.
"We survived," one wolf murmured, his voice hoarse, as though the words themselves carried weight too great to speak easily.
