Flinging it around my shoulders, I picked through the room until I found a knife to replace the one I’d lost to the green-eyed man’s leg. Then I did my best to wrestle my frizzy, tangled hair into a braid and secured it with a stray hair ribbon on the floor.
I wouldn’t borrow anything else.
Steal, not borrow.
Swallowing hard, I opened the door and poked my head out.Well, damn.
What I’d thought was a home on the outskirts of the village was the complete opposite. While it was against a village wall, the front door faced five other dwellings that sat on the same dirt path. It was a miracle I hadn’t been seen last night.
I scanned for signs of life, listening for activity, but found…nothing. I looked and listened again, because that couldn’t be right.
Still, nothing.
Quietly sealing the entranceway behind me, I scurried to the closest home, its weathered stone walls and sagging thatched roof identical to the ones around it. A glance through the uncovered window revealed nothing but another lived-in space. I darted to the next cottage, peeking into the window to find the same thing.
If all of these homes were deserted, I could shelter here.
Carefully moving down the path, I checked every home I passed. All were empty, but they hadn’t been that way for long. Fresh bread sat on counters, half-filled pots of water dangled above dead fires, and clothes hung from strings to dry.
The path came to a sharp turn at the end of the row. Peering around the wall of the final cottage, I studied the course. Other rows of homes connected to the path, and at the end, dark lumps dotted the ground, hinting at a community wood or rock pile. Our village didn’t have one, which is how I made coin chopping lumber, but I knew others did.
Still, there were no people. A rarity, but not entirely strange. A village could be abandoned, temporarily or permanently, for a variety of reasons. Disease was the most common. Second to that was war. If a village was young and their boys and men were conscripted into the army, their families would leave and camp by their base to access the resources there.
Perhaps Third Territory was battling with Fourth.
But why not take the bread?
Uneasy curiosity nagged me as I examined the five cottages in the next row of homes and found them empty. When I returned back to the main path, the lumps were closer, enough for me to make out their odd, round shapes and mismatched colors. Not a woodpile, then, but rocks for building. Then one of the shapes moved. Nothing extraordinary, just a slight shift, but enough to make me pause and study the field. Cocking my head, I squinted at the form.
A moan traveled through the air.
For the second time in two days, the hairs on my neck rose.
The moan came again, and there was agony in the animalistic noise. Something moved again, a thin rod and a blur—
My stomach plummeted as my insides went cold.
“No. No, that’s not…” The words I wanted to believe died as I moved closer, the bumps and lines shaping into things too unnatural to be rock.
I was running forward before I knew that I was moving, my eyes glued to the—thebodies—
“Oh,no,” I choked, heartbeat pounding in my ears like an uncontrollable drum as I came closer and closer to themassacrebefore me.
Blood stained the ground, and finally, my legs stopped moving.
I stood, frozen.
Bodies, thirty—no, forty, maybe more—men, women,children,dark blood staining their clothes, the ground, the limbs that were not attached to bodies—
I bent to the side and vomited until I heaved up nothing.
This cannot be real. This is a nightmare, all of it is, and you’ll wake up now.
But when I cleared the tears from my eyes, the atrocity was still there, innards folding out of skin and onto the ground, faces carved beyond recognition.
This wasn’t just killing. It was cruel, unfettered slaughter. And from the lack of rot, this was less than a day old. The owners of my cottage hadn’t gone because of disease or war. They left the bread on the counter because they planned to eat it last night.
My stomach cramped, and I heaved again, coughing up air.
