I climbed to my feet. I still had my short sword on and the knife in my belt. Hell, I’d never had a chance to strip out of my leathers. One word rang in my head as I started jogging:Breached. Breached.
I didn’t know what I was running toward, except that I had no choice but to run toward it.
As I came out of the barracks’ yard, three more green spears tore through the air high above me. Each angled toward a different section of the district in a concerted assault. I still didn’t know what those were, except that I didn’t want to be anywhere close to their destination.
I emerged into a street full of darkness and yelling and stampeding bodies. People surged past me, around me, aimless but united in one thing: flight.
Where were the rest of the guard?
Someone ran into me, nearly knocking me over. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, righting me before running on. This wasn’t right—the people of the southern district weren’t like this. We were hard-bitten, clear-eyed, thoughtful; we lived close to the outermost wall. Of anyone, we were the true sons and daughters of the storm.
What could possibly terrify them this much?
That was when I heard it.
I turned as a group of people tore around the corner of a building, some of them falling, scrabbling back up to their feet, shoving each other forward. The sound that chased them was like metal on metal, a whisper that crescendoed to a screech. The darkness seemed todistend out of an alley’s mouth, and a swath of those people were cut down like wind passing over grass.
When they dropped, they didn’t rise. Bodies bent, separated, fell part from part into pieces. They lay still, silent, and the cries of the living became more violent.
To my left, another metallic scream. Another swath of people was cut down, and I blinked against the maddening darkness, but saw nothing, only shadows flaring and fading as if they had come to life. What had cut them down?
Now I understood the chaos, the abject fear. People were being culled by something they couldn’t see, couldn’t understand, could only hear just before their lives were ended.
Monsters.
Some part of me wanted to chase after that guard and his torchlight. Another part of me wanted to shrink against a wall. But the part of me that acted was the most potent of all.
I ran toward the destroyed southern wall, toward my home.
I had to find my mother.
The southern districthad never felt so dark, so foreign. I hardly recognized the streets and alleys. Buildings loomed like behemoths. Alleys shrank as narrow as creeks. What had once been as familiar to me as my own palms was now a strange killing ground.
Shrieks and cries ricocheted through the streets, pushing and pulling me along. Every time I veered away from one horrific sound, another seemed to return from the opposite side.
Whatever I had seen scythe down those people, it was ongoing. It was happening all around me. People I’d known all my life were dying.
I pushed through destruction. It seemed everyone was headed inthe opposite direction of me, running and climbing over bodies and rubble and who knew what else lay beneath their feet.
Whatever this threat was, within minutes it had taught me one thing: I could die at any moment.
I kept running on the hope I would be spared. It was luck alone that would save me now. Not my short blade or my knife or my fists or my guts, just chance and the likelihood that, for once in my life, my height would serve me. Maybe I would go unnoticed.
Getting to my mother’s house was slower work than I’d planned. Throngs of people shoved me, thrust me aside. I ended up following the gutter along a street, running half in and out of the depression and nearly tripping all the while.
Along the way, the only landmark I recognized was the white pillar of the southern district. It still stood, but it wasn’t white; on this cloud-covered night it bore a green hue. Still, it helped me find my way when I needed it.
When I finally turned onto my mother’s street, I stopped hard.
This couldn’t be it. I must have gotten lost in the night, in the fracas?—
Therewas no streethere.
Only a gouge in the ground, vast and unfathomable, as if Nyros himself had hurled a flaming star to crash into my street in the southern district and destroy everything beneath it.
This wasn’t destruction. This was a crater.
I stared, shock and horror braiding themselves like two snakes in my chest. This was… It was…
