Brand’s first mistake was stipulating terms for her freedom. Lunara had spent her life ensuring it, guarding it with every waking moment, every ounce of her energy. That he would fucking dare to use it against her was enough to have her shaking with fury.
His second was forgetting she was a Sorcerit. He may not know just how powerful she was, that she could level the entire settlement if she wanted to, but it didn’t matter.
His third was not bothering to secure her arms—arms she knew how to use now, thanks to him and his own damned commanders.
Hedda and Faldir appeared in the fringes of her vision on either side.
“What the fuck, witchling?” Magnus said, his voice coming from somewhere behind.
Lunara ignored him and relaxed her body, venom in her tone as she spoke only loud enough for Brand to hear. “There’s exactly one fucking heart beating in that village, and it’s barely holding on. The rest are silent, though I can feel their flesh rotting as if it were my own. Is that fuckingplainenough for you?”
Harsh, but someone needed her.Now.
The instant Brand went slack, she cranked an elbow right into his nose. With a curse, he dropped her like a sack of rocks and she hit the ground. Her knees crumpled, but no matter—she was already sending a shockwave of her power out to knock him and the others back as she regained her feet.
She was at the bottom of the hill, sprinting towards that one, lonesome heartbeat, before any of them recovered.
Brand was upand after Lunara the second he stopped seeing stars, the others slower to recover from whatever the fuck she’d pummeled them with.
A problem for another time.
He leapt the rest of the way down the hill, boots tearing through soft, fertile soil. He ignored the produce he was ravaging—ignored her cryptic fucking words, doing their best to send him into an episode—and focused only on catching her.
Her hair streamed behind as she raced away, her strangled whimper as she hit the village outskirts loud enough to reach him even this far back.
“Lunara!” he shouted, desperate for her to stop and fucking think. “Please!”
He crossed some invisible line just as he was about to reach her and the fetid smell of decaying flesh hit him like a solid wall, even through his likely-broken nose. His steps faltered and death forced its way into his lungs, demanding he breathethrough his mouth so it could deposit its rancid essence onto his tongue, insisting he taste its devastation.
“Fucking shite,” he wheezed, coughing against the back of his hand. “Lunara, wait!”
Brand readied his power—to throw up a wall, an enclosure,something.Anything to stop her from possibly running headlong towards her own fucking end like an absolute?—
That’s when he saw it. The blood.
Everywhere.
The tall, wooden longhouses were bathed in it. Indistinguishable pieces and parts littered the ground and rooftops alike, and Brand had to swallow back the rising bile.
Sisters fucking save them.
For some reason, his gaze fixed on a bed of flowers tucked up against the nearest home. On the yellow, sunlit blooms that were almost deranged as they fluttered in the breeze, untouched and ignorant of the tiny hand lying too still beneath their stems.
His feet tried to stop him right there—to root him to the ground in the miserable safety of that one horrific sight, instead of carrying on into whatever atrocity he was about to find—but Lunara’s choked sob wrenched him forward, propelling his legs into obedience.
Her speed was a mercy. Focused on her, the countless bodies were little more than streaking smudges as the world blurred by.
Brand followed Lunara between buildings and into the middle of the village where a tower kept watch over the massacred landscape. She stopped in the center of it all, tears streaming down her face as she seemed to orient herself, searching amongst the carnage.
It was wrong, so wrong, to see her there with blood soaking the hem of her dress, crimson droplets splattered across her face and shoulders from the puddles of it they’d run through.
Puddles.
Her head finally tilted up, her eyes locking on the watchtower, and she raced around the support beams to fling herself upon the ladder on the other side.
“Don’t—”
Brand lost his footing in the gore beneath his boots. He thrust his arms out to catch himself, retching at the squelching softness his fingers encountered, and couldn’t ignore his surroundings any longer.
