My boots crunch softly against ash as I take a slow step forward into the ruins. The ground is still warm beneath my feet.
Pieces of charred wood shift beneath the gray dust that now blankets everything, and each step sends thin clouds of ash drifting upward into the morning light. The silence of the ruined square feels unnatural after the chaos of the night before. Only the quiet crackle of cooling embers breaks the stillness.
I pass the remains of the cooper’s shop. The place where I once treated his wife’s infected hand after a splinter festered beneath her skin.
My throat tightens painfully.
The memories come uninvited. The laughter of children playing near the well. The smell of fresh herbs drying in the summer air. The quiet gratitude in people’s voices when a fever finally broke after days of worry.
All of it is gone. I walk deeper into the square. Movement catches my attention.
Several villagers have begun returning to the ruins, drawn back by the same terrible need that pulled me here. They gather cautiously among the surviving stone walls near the chapel, wrapped in blankets or clutching whatever belongings they managed to save before fleeing into the night. Their faces are gray with exhaustion, their eyes hollow from hours spent watching their homes burn.
When they notice me approaching, the quiet murmuring stops. Every gaze turns toward me. There is no anger in their expressions now. Only fear.
The silence does not last long. At first the villagers say nothing, watching me the way people watch something dangerous that has not yet decided whether to strike again. Their fear hangs heavy in the air, thick as the smoke drifting through the ruins.
Then the whispering begins. Not loudly. Not openly. Just quiet murmurs that carry easily across the shattered square in the fragile stillness of morning.
“I told you it was witchcraft,” someone mutters hoarsely.
Another voice answers, low and shaken. “That wasn’t witchcraft. You saw the demon.”
“I saw the fire.”
“That thing came out of the sky.”
My stomach tightens as their words drift toward me through the ash-filled air.
A man standing near the broken well rubs his face with trembling hands.
“My brother’s house is gone,” he says quietly. “It burned in minutes. There wasn’t even time to get the animals out.”
A woman beside him shakes her head slowly, her eyes fixed on me.
“It followed her,” she whispers.
“It started when she came here,” another voice adds. “First the fires. Then the demon. Then… this.”
A child’s frightened voice cuts through the murmuring.
“Is she going to burn us again?”
The question silences the group instantly. The mother pulls the boy closer to her side, her gaze flicking nervously toward me before she lowers her voice.
“Don’t look at her,” she murmurs.
But the boy is already staring. His wide eyes hold the kind of frightened curiosity children reserve for things they do not yet understand but know they should fear.
A few of the villagers shift uneasily as I pass. Some step backward. Others lower their gaze entirely, unwilling to meet my eyes.
The quiet rejection settles over me like another layer of ash. I expect the tears to come. They do not.
Somewhere between the first roof collapsing and the moment the village square turned into a storm of fire and screaming voices, something inside me seems to have burned away along with the rest of Briarthorn. The grief is still there, heavy and suffocating in my chest, but it feels distant now, like a wound so deep the nerves around it have stopped responding.
My eyes sting from smoke and sleeplessness, yet no tears fall.
I think of the people who lost everything last night, of the homes that once stood along these streets, of the children who used to run laughing between the market stalls while their parents shouted half-hearted warnings from the doorways.
