The drums deepened, the voices of her people rising in song as hundreds of lanterns drifted out beneath the silvery banners strung between the terraces.
From above, Lunareth shimmered like a constellation carved into earth and stone, its colors alive, its people’s laughter folding soft into the hum of the river. Jesenia quietly watched the remainder of the festival from afar until the lanterns burned themselves out and her people began to slowly return to their homes.
Festival dancers passed, their silk sleeves embroidered with bright colors and their wrists and ankles adorned with heavy bangles.
The Lunarethians prized artistry above all else, surviving by selling little trinkets and colorful dresses to passing merchants, who went on to sell them in the larger cities as novelties.
The walls of the stone cottages were adorned with mosaics of their ancestor’s myths, of the river, of musicians and dancers. The murals lined the cobbled streets, and the Lunarethians knew that their people kept their homes open to each other.
Jesenia was proud of her people and the way they relived their history and honored their grief through beauty.
Tragedy was rare in Jesenia’s country. Her people kept out of the wars and politics of the larger realms, but her village was directly between the bloodthirsty rule of Korvath and the opulent riches of Seraveth, so she worried that war would come for them,eventually.
Jesenia woketo the sound of screaming.
She shot up from her small bed, meeting her brother’s eyes. He gave her a concerned look, then went outside to see what was happening. Jesenia waited with bated breath, her palms sweating through her thin blanket.
Something in the air shifted. There was a fracture in time that made her stomach drop, followed by a hush so sudden it unsettled her bones under her skin.
Then there was chaos. It was no longer one woman screaming. It was women, children, men. The noise was louder, closer. Jesenia watched as a single flaming arrow crashed through the glass of her window, setting alight a wooden shelf of books in the room before spreading to the kitchen.
Jesenia froze, unable to comprehend what was happening as she watched fire take her home bit by bit.
Danyel crashed through the door, seizing Jesenia’s wrist and shouting at her, but she couldn’t hear him. He gathered what little he could grab into his arms and dragged her out of the house.
What Jesenia saw outside was the embodiment of Hell. The crowd splintered in different directions. Children were abandoned in the streets. Merchant stalls were already burned to the ground. Jesenia finally came to her senses, grabbing the two lonely children, one in each hand, and followed her brother. To where? She didn’t know. She wasn’t even sure what was happening, but Danyel was running, and so she ran with him.
Jesenia stumbled over debris as she ran through the fire-lined streets.
Fire. That was all she could see. It was all she could hear—crackling, swallowing wood and silk and the painted stones of her people’s homes. Everything was now painted in flames or soot.
And then she finally saw the harbingers of this disaster.
Out of the flames and the shadows spilled soldiers armored in black steel, their long, precise blades catching the reddish-orange glow of the fire. They laughed as they murdered Jesenia’s people in the streets. Laughed as children cried at their mother’s corpse. Laughed as they dragged women by their ankles across the dirt, clawing away to try and escape their evil.
One of them met eyes with Jesenia, and he smiled, his teeth thick with blood. He was larger than the others, and wore a cape as black as his armor, and was drenched in malice. The fire seemed to warp around him. He dropped his sword and came for her and the children. She pushed their small, crying bodies behind her own and stood with her chin held high. He would not touch them without going through her.
Her voice broke, sharp, ragged. “Please. They’re just children?—”
“Jesenia, run!” Danyel yelled, his voice cracking against the roar of the crowd and the fire. He tackled the single soldier headed for Jesenia, but Danyel’s frame was no match for the unflinching steel of his armor.
Danyel fell to the ground, disoriented and bleeding from a gash in his head. Jesenia cried, but could do nothing as she watched the soldier crack his relentless fist across her brother’s bleeding face.
Danyel went limp, and Jesenia nearly fell to her knees, but another body caught her before she hit the ground. One of thevillage elders dragged her and the two children along with him by their clothes.
The soldier gave Jesenia one last smile before disappearing into the flames, but she finally heard him speak:
“For Korvath! Bow or burn!”
Something deep in her chest splintered at her brother’s corpse, but her body moved anyway, pulling the two children through alleys as flame and steel roared around her.
The fire spread faster than she thought possible. The wind carried it along the rows of silks, across the shallow bridges, through the climbing terraces carved into the stone. One by one, the paper lanterns Jesenia had watched float so gently upon the river earlier burst into flame, their golden light swallowed beneath the smoke.
She thought of her people’s mosaics, their river songs, their carved ancestral stones. She thought of the hundreds of lanterns she’d watched float into the darkness only hours ago, carrying wishes she’d whispered beneath her breath.
And for the first time in her life, Jesenia knew they wouldn’t come true.
By dawn, the fires still smoldered. The people of Lunareth gathered on the northern road, carrying what little remained of their lives in woven baskets, bundled silks, and small wrapped satchels. Children clung to their mothers’ skirts, their wide eyes fixed on the mountains ahead.
