Never feel...anything again.
It sounded good.Wonderful.I sighed, settling into the lure, the temptation of that.
I blinked several times, sluggish thoughts roiling through me.
Lethargy pulled me under...down, down, down.
I could join Da and Maretta. I could join my mother and finally meet her.
It would be so easy. An escape from the loss and the longing and the grief. I only needed to let go. Just. Let. Go.
No! Arden, get up! Get up, lass!
I came to as though roused from a deep sleep, blinking awake, sucking in a breath, my eyes flaring wide at the loud, insistent voice inside me that sounded an awful lot like Da’s deep baritone. The words pushed out everything else. They jarred me and gave me a sudden surge of motivation, a desire to live, to keep fighting. I had fought this long. Lost my childhood. Endured so much for years. It would be wrong to give up now.
I rolled over, clawing fistfuls of snowy earth as I pushed to my feet and staggered out of the trees to stare down at my burning home. The fire had calmed, no longer stretching into the sky.
The dragons were gone, but still their handiwork smoldered, releasing smoke thick as soup.
I walked in a meandering line, unsteady on my feet, like someone deep in their cups. I didn’t want to go back, but I forced myself. I had to see. What if there were survivors? Da. Maretta. Hilla. As unlikely as it seemed, I had to search. Whatever their fate, I had to find them. I couldn’t leave them there like rubbish in a burn pile.
They were more than that. They were people. They were loved.Myloved ones.
The smoke in the air grew stronger as I advanced, and I knew it would simmer for days, the fumes mingling in the mist, seen by no one. Not that anyone was alive to see. I tasted the residue of ash and flame on my lips. It was all that was left.
And the dead.
I thought of them—the villagers who died screaming in terror and misery. I shook my head, steering my thoughts away from those visions. It was a frightening abyss waiting to devour me.
My boots crunched over the burnt ground. I lifted one foot after the other with the stoic resolve of an automaton as I entered my village—or what remained of it.
I moved through the smoke and sparking embers, the heat singeing my skin, electrifying my hair, crackling the ink-dark strands around me, lifting the tendrils from my shoulders in a great nimbus as I searched dazedly.
It was pointless. Even if I did find someone, a survivor, what could I do? They wouldn’t even be able to see me. I could offer no help.
Still, I searched among the rubble, finding only ruin, only death, and unearthing no one.
I am the last.
The only one left. If I could even be counted as someone. I wasn’t sure I mattered.
I sucked in a cold, ragged breath. “Hello?” I called out like a warbling bird, still putting my voice out there where no one could hear it, and not just because I was invisible, but because they were all gone. No one was alive to hear me.
I walked through what I believed was High Street, although it was beyond recognition and difficult to determine with any certainty. I had trouble distinguishing the houses and buildings I once knew so well. I was fairly certain of the meetinghouse. It was the largest pile of rubble with flickering flames and embers still glowing hot in the pile of ashes. Everything else was a blur of sameness: all dark, smoldering debris...and in the debris, the dead.
They weremypeople. They deserved a proper funeral with all the rites and ceremony due them. Although wedidburn our dead in pyres, and I supposed that was what Isstad was now...one giant pyre, the final resting place of the charred remains of my people.
A humorless sound fell from my lips, and my mouth twisted into a grimace as I faced that particular truth. I nodded once to myself, accepting this sorry state of affairs because it was not as though I had a choice. I could not unearth them myself. I could not pull hundreds of corpses from the scorched wreckage and give them the tribute they deserved.
A crow cawed from its perch on a beam jutting out from rubble, the dark, purply black wings of its body flashing with an iridescent gleam. It was the only evidence of life within the carnage, and my gaze clung to it for a long moment, hungry for this proof of life.
I didn’t see anything else. Not a single soul...not even a pet. The village boasted several dogs and cats, but they were eerilyabsent, not trotting about as they usually did. Had they perished, as well? Or taken to the woods?
The crow suddenly bolted, launching into the smoke with panicked shrieks.
I froze, my heart lurching to my throat, fleeing with it.
I glanced around wildly, shifting only my eyes, afraid to move my body, afraid that something had spooked the crow, something that remained in the ashes, something not of the mortal world.
