They didn't leave immediately.
The decision to run took time to surface, like breath returning after being held too long. Alex felt it first as pressure—an awareness of space narrowing, of the ruins offering fewer shadows with every passing moment.
The girl shifted beside him.
She tilted her head, listening.
Alex followed her gaze.
The forest edge loomed just beyond the last broken houses, dark and dense where the village gave way to trees. Smoke drifted low across the ground, thinning as it reached the undergrowth, as if the woods were already swallowing what the fire had left behind.
She tugged once at his sleeve.
This time, there was no hesitation.
They moved.
Not running—not yet. Moving quickly, carefully, slipping through the gaps the collapse had created. Alex led where the ground was clearer; she followed where the shadows thickened. They crossed what had once been a narrow lane, then another, then passed beneath a stone arch that had lost half its span and leaned at an angle that made Alex flinch as they ducked under it.
Behind them, the village exhaled.
A crack. A groan. Something collapsing under its own weakened weight.
Alex didn't look back.
The forest swallowed them in stages.
First, the ground softened. Packed dirt gave way to leaf rot and loam, each step quieter than the last. Then the light thinned, branches knitting overhead until the sky fractured into dull fragments. Smoke faded, replaced by the cold, wet scent of earth.
They stopped only once, just past the tree line.
The girl bent forward, hands braced on her knees, breathing hard but controlled. Alex mirrored her without thinking, palms on his thighs, chest heaving.
When he straightened, something caught his eye.
Stone.
Scattered everywhere.
At first, he thought it was debris from the village—chunks thrown outward by the dragon's passage. But as his eyes adjusted, the pattern emerged.
The stones weren't random.
They lay in shapes.
Curved segments. Jointed lengths. Fractured pieces that fit together too well.
Alex crouched and picked one up.
It was heavy, its surface rough and uneven, edges freshly broken. He turned it over slowly.
A claw.
Not a complete one—just the end, snapped clean through, but unmistakable in its shape. Taloned. Scaled.
Alex's throat tightened.
He looked around.
The forest floor was littered with them.
Chunks of limbs. Shattered torsos. Half-buried heads with mouths frozen mid-snarl, stone teeth bared at nothing. Some pieces were moss-covered, their breakage older. Others were pale and raw, as if they'd only just come apart.
Statues.
Or what had been.
The girl watched him closely.
"This… isn't just from today," Alex said quietly, though he wasn't sure why he spoke at all. The words felt small against the evidence around them.
She shook her head.
Her gaze swept the clearing, lingering on a massive slab nearby—what might once have been a chest or back, the curve of it too large to belong to anything human. Deep cracks spiderwebbed across its surface, splitting outward from a central fracture.
Unpetrified.
The thought came unbidden, unwelcome.
Alex stood slowly.
The forest here felt wrong in a way he hadn't noticed before—not empty, not hostile, but altered. As if it had been holding its breath for a long time and only recently dared to exhale.
He followed the line of broken stone deeper into the trees.
More pieces appeared as they went.
Some were small enough to kick aside without thinking. Others were enormous, half-sunk into the earth, roots already threading through their cracks as if the forest had been waiting for permission to reclaim them.
Alex paused beside one that had collapsed inward on itself, its shape barely recognizable now. Only the suggestion of wings remained, one slab angled into the dirt, the other snapped clean off and lying several feet away.
He imagined it whole.
Imagined it standing.
The image made his skin prickle.
Behind him, the girl let out a sound—soft, sharp.
Alex turned.
She stood very still, her attention fixed on something ahead. Her shoulders had drawn up slightly, horns catching a dim line of light as she leaned forward.
Alex followed her line of sight.
The trees opened into a wider space.
Not a clearing—too uneven for that—but a stretch of forest where the ground dipped low and then rose again. Stone fragments littered the slope, larger here, more concentrated.
At the center of it all lay a shape that hadn't fully broken.
A massive form, still mostly intact, slumped on its side. One wing lay twisted beneath it, the other shattered outward in jagged plates. Its head was turned away from them, jaw cracked open where stone had split along old seams.
Even like this, it was enormous.
Alex stopped breathing.
The girl's hand closed around his wrist.
Not hard.
Warning.
They stood there, framed by the remains of something that had once been alive, or at least capable of movement.
Alex felt a chill settle deep in his chest.
If this forest was full of things like this—
If the village statues had been only the closest, the most convenient—
Then whatever had woken the dragon hadn't stopped at the square.
It had rippled outward.
Alex swallowed.
"Let's keep moving," he said.
The girl nodded once.
They turned away from the broken titan and disappeared deeper into the trees, leaving behind the scattered remains of a world that had been frozen—and had begun, finally, to move again.