Y — A Year of Blood and Smoke

 

The long campaign that reshaped Padua.

When people in Padua speak of the year, they rarely bother to specify which one.

Everyone knows.

It began quietly enough, rumors along the Avon, strange fogs, missing travelers, and the first unsettling discoveries in the ruins upriver. At the time, no one realized they were standing at the beginning of something much larger. But trouble has a way of building momentum, and once it started, the town found itself pulled into a relentless cycle of danger.

Battles followed discoveries. Fires followed battles. Creatures that belonged to nightmare or legend pushed their way into the world, leaving scars on both the land and the people forced to confront them. The group of unlikely allies that had gathered in Padua found themselves at the center of it all, fighting in forests, ruins, and riverbanks while the town behind them struggled to endure.

By the end of that long stretch of conflict, Padua was no longer the same place. Some buildings never reopened. Some faces never returned to Katherina’s Rest. And the quiet frontier town that once survived by keeping its head down had become something else entirely: a place that had stared directly into the darkness and refused to disappear.

That’s why the phrase still lingers in conversation…A year of blood and smoke isn’t easily forgotten, especially by the people who lived through it.