I should be crying. I should be falling apart beneath the weight of what happened here. Instead there is only a hollow quiet spreading slowly through my chest. The kind of quiet that follows after a storm destroys everything in its path.
I walk through the ruins as though my body has forgotten how to feel anything else, the ash crunching beneath my boots while the reality of what I have done settles deeper with every step.
Somewhere inside me the guilt is screaming. But the rest of me has gone completely numb.
I recognize nearly every face among them. I had once been part of this place. Now I move through it like a ghost haunting its ruins.
A man near the edge of the group mutters something under his breath that carries farther than he intended.
“She brought the demon.”
Another voice answers quickly.
“No. The demon brought her.”
The difference hardly matters. My heart squeezes painfully as the murmurs ripple through the survivors like restless wind.
Somewhere behind me someone whispers a quiet prayer. Not for the dead. For protection. From me.
And as the words settle into the smoke-filled air, I realize with sickening clarity that the village no longer sees the healer who once walked these streets with baskets of herbs.
They see the thing that burned their world to the ground. A woman I once helped deliver her first child stares at me with trembling hands clutched around the shoulders of her daughter. A man whose broken leg I set two winters ago watches me as though I might ignite again at any moment.
No one approaches. The distance between us feels wider than the entire marsh. I lower my gaze and continue walking.
Ash swirls softly around my boots with each step as I cross what remains of the square, unable to meet the terrified stares lingering on my back.
Then I see him. Ravik Keld sits on a fallen beam near the edge of the ruins where his farm road once began. His clothesare stained with soot and his shoulders sag beneath the weight of exhaustion that seems to have hollowed him out completely. The fury that once twisted his face has vanished entirely.
He looks… broken.
His gaze lifts slowly to meet mine. I brace myself for hatred. Instead I find something worse. He is terrified of me. Not the wild panic of last night. A quieter kind. The kind people reserve for monsters.
I want to tell him I am sorry. The words rise in my throat but refuse to leave my mouth.
Because what apology could possibly exist for something like this?
My legs suddenly feel too weak to hold me upright. The guilt presses down on my chest like a physical weight, threatening to drag me to my knees in the middle of the ruined square. My vision blurs slightly as I struggle to breathe past the crushing realization that every burned beam and shattered roof surrounding us traces back to the same terrible truth.
I did this.
The thought loops through my mind again and again until the world begins to tilt around its edges.
Then movement breaks through the fog of my thoughts. Threxian steps forward beside me.
I had almost forgotten he was there, his presence so unwavering through the lifeline that it feels like part of my own heartbeat now. The hell power that once blazed through him during the firestorm has quieted into something controlled and watchful, his wings folded loosely behind his back as the villagers shrink away from his towering form.
But he does not look at them. His attention remains fixed on me.
Slowly, deliberately, he lowers himself to one knee in the ash before me. The motion is so unexpected that for a moment I forget how to breathe.
A demon.
A wrath demon.
Kneeling.
His gilding eyes lift to meet mine.
