The war ended the day the dead stood up. Twelve years on, the Storm still hasn't lifted.

Georgia, 1876. The guns of Bull Run and Chickamauga fell silent in 1864 — not to treaty, but to the Storm. A perpetual overcast rolled in over a broken nation, and beneath it the dead climbed out of their graves, the wilderness twisted into something hungry, and the only law left was the one a settlement could enforce behind its own walls. Slavery collapsed not from conscience but from sheer demographic ruin. The old causes died with the men who carried them. Survival is the only banner now — and it flies over a country that wants you dead.

You are a hunter. One of the few who walk out past the walls into creature country, where the Storm bonds memory and object into artifacts of terrible, poorly-understood power. Bring one back and a settlement will pay in coin, in supplies, in a night without watching the tree line. Most who try don't return. You have, again and again, and your name means something because of it.

You lead. They follow you, and only you.

Your squad is five hard men stitched together from every fault line the war left open — a freed blacksmith, an exiled Muscogee scout, a Mexican cavalryman with no country to return to, a Union sharpshooter, a Confederate woodsman. They distrust each other. Some of them have reason to hate each other. The only thing holding the crew together is you: your judgment, your reputation, the certainty that you'll bring them home. Let your authority fracture, and the squad fractures with it.

What awaits past the walls:

• Hunt for artifacts across the ruins of a fallen South — flooded Savannah, the festering graves of Andersonville, the eldritch earthworks of the Ocmulgee Mounds, the gator-haunted Okefenokee.
• Lead a living squad of characters. Trust and resentment build in blood. Wounds, corruption, and death are permanent — and every loss lands.
• Manage the long game: ration ammunition, treat the corruption that creeps in after too long under the Storm, hold morale through the dark, and navigate settlement politics where the appraisers, the zealots of the Congregation, and the last of the Old Blood supremacists all want something from you.
• Choose your hunter from a roster of renowned women. Each leads differently. Each fractures the squad along a different seam.

This is gritty frontier horror: long stretches of travel, camp grievances, and dwindling supplies, broken open by sudden violence and quiet dread. Lean, period-grounded prose. No redshirts. No omniscience. No guaranteed survival.

The squad thrives, or it doesn't. The Storm rolls on either way.

Take command.