And when her mind cleared again, she stood more or less where she had been—near the shattered remains of the center square—but nothing else remained the same.
Sweat clung to her brow. She lifted a hand to wipe it away, but her fingers came back red. She stared at them, eyes opening and closing.
Then she looked down.
No.
Blood soaked her from head to ankles. It dripped from her chin, clung to her fingers, and pooled in the creases of her boots. Each step squelched thickly, soles sinking into crimson puddles. Around her, devastation stretched in every direction.
Doors had been ripped from their hinges and flung like kindling. Merchant stalls lay fractured, their frames splintered and scattered. Blood and viscera painted every surface.
She gasped, heart pounding. The upper half of a woman dangled from a shattered window frame. Her lower body lay discarded below, torn meat from bone.
A choked sob rattled from Rynna’s lungs. She moved, legs numb, toward the nearest building. The threshold gave way, revealing a scene from a nightmare—limbs, torsos, blood, and bones strewn in anarchic chaos. No structure. No mercy.
She checked another house.
Then another.
Each one worse than the last.
Every building was a slaughterhouse.
The Hunger had taken more than blood. It had demolished restraint. Identity. Sanity.
She staggered to the final structure—the farthest from the square, the only one untouched.
A sound reached her ears. Soft crying.
Relief hit so hard it buckled her knees.
“Thank the gods,” she whispered.
A soft pounding joined the crying—muffled and urgent, wood against wood. Someone was trapped somewhere beneath the wreckage.
She ran toward the sound, picking her way through debris. It led her to a half-standing house at the edge of the square, its structure sagging where it had taken the brunt of the destruction. Circling around the back, a heavy beam—splintered and dark with soot—had fallen from the neighboring house and pinned shut the doors of a root cellar.
The voices came from below.
She moved to the beam, dropping into a low squat. Her shoulder braced beneath the weight, and she shoved upward.
To her surprise, the beam rolled free.
“Huh,” she muttered. “Must not have been as heavy as it looked.”
Bending over, she pulled open one of the cellar doors. Inside, light crept in, pale and hesitant, revealing a huddle of small bodies tucked against the far wall. There were six, maybe seven, children. The oldest looked no more than ten. And a tiny girl held a baby in her arms, her body wrapped around it. Her green eyes fixed on Rynna, unblinking.
“Are you going to eat us, too?” The words landed like a slap.
“What?” Rynna’s voice cracked. “No. I’m not going to eat you. I want to help you get out. You were trapped.”
“You’re a monster!” the girl sobbed, tears welling in her eyes. “Get out of here!”
Rynna recoiled, hands lifting.
“No,” she said. But her voice sounded empty.
The words carved into her—truth wrapped in a child’s scream.
