The Dead Forest was behind them, but its weight remained on their shoulders.
Nnamdi limped, every step a conversation with pain. His left arm was wrapped in cloth soaked deep in dried blood. Ifeanyi moved slower than usual, not from wounds — though he bore many — but from silence. The kind that follows men who have looked death in the eye too long.
They walked under an open sky again, and it felt strange. Too bright. Too free.
Three days passed before they saw it — the remnants of a village, cradled between two scorched hills. "Oba-Idu", it had once been called, though its name now was whispered only in mourning.
Huts lay in ruin, some burned, others collapsed under the weight of time and tragedy. Fields were overgrown. Ash choked the earth. What remained of the people were mostly women, elders, and children, their eyes hollow, their backs bent beneath invisible burdens.
At first, the villagers feared them — two bloodied warriors emerging from the path of death, carrying strange weapons and eyes that looked beyond the present. But then the elders came, and the fear turned into cautious recognition.
"You… came from the Forest?" an old woman asked.
Ifeanyi nodded. "And survived."
Whispers followed. One child called them "storm-walkers." Another, "bone-breakers." They didn't correct them.
That night, the villagers gave them what little they had — a thin soup, roasted yam, a place by the fire. In return, Nnamdi spoke softly of what they had seen. Of the shadows. Of the things that crawl in forgotten places. And of how they fought — not as heroes, but as men who refused to die quiet deaths.
***
Days turned into weeks.
Ifeanyi built with his hands. He had once lived in cities before the Calamity, where he learned to shape stone and wood. He guided the young men of Oba-Idu in reforging homes, digging new wells, sharpening farming tools from scrap metal. He taught them to walk the forest without fear, to track game without being seen.
Nnamdi found the children.
At first, they stared at him like he was a ghost. But he smiled — a rare, tired thing — and sat cross-legged in the dust.
"Come,"he said. "Let me show you the game of the Four Warriors."
They played with carved stones and sticks, building miniature battlefields. They leapt and rolled, pretending to fight invisible shadows. Laughter, for the first time in months — maybe years — echoed between the broken huts.
Every night by the fire, Nnamdi and Ifeanyi told stories of the time they faced the horned shadow beast in the Dead Forest, where Nnamdi leapt onto its back while Ifeanyi struck its heart with his Machete.
Of the day they climbed the Tower of Ash, hunted by whispering spirits, and how they tricked them using the echoes of their own laughter.
And of the woman in white — a spirit of mercy — who led them out of the forest after they buried the bones of a forgotten king.
The children listened with wide eyes, their minds painting pictures where scars used to live. The elders wept quietly in the dark, grateful that their youth were learning wonder again.
***
One evening, a boy approached Ifeanyi while he carved a wooden toy blade.
"Will I be a warrior too?" the boy asked.
Ifeanyi looked at him. Not with the hardness of a soldier, but with the weight of a man who had fought too many wars.
"You'll be better," he said. "You'll build before you fight. And when you fight, you'll protect more than yourself."
The boy nodded, holding the toy blade like it was made of iron.
***
By the second moon, Oba-Idu began to breathe again.
The fields sprouted green. Smoke rose from steady fires. Songs were heard at dawn, and names of the dead were spoken no longer in sorrow, but with honor.
Nnamdi stood at the edge of the village one morning, watching the sunrise. Ifeanyi joined him, arms crossed, face soft with quiet pride.
"We could stay," Nnamdi said.
Ifeanyi nodded. "We could."
But they both knew they wouldn't.
There were other places still broken. Other children still afraid of the dark. Other villages where the wind still carried screams instead of laughter.
And Nnamdi and Ifeanyi — bound by battle, tempered by shadow, and softened by flame — would walk until the land no longer needed warriors.
Only stories.