burst from their homes wielding shovels and pitchforks, while children and the elderly were corralled out back doors or went running, blind, into the blackness of night.
Sev stumbled through it all, detached from his body. He thought he might have floated away entirely if not for the painful spasms of his heart. Every beat rattled his rib cage and sent shock waves through his blood.
Though the farms, houses, and outbuildings had been rebuilt since the war, Hillsbridge was a fraction of the size it had once been. Even when Sev had lived here it was a modest community, its only claim to fame the bridge that gave safe crossing over a branch of the River Aurys and onto empire lands.
But it was still familiar, still home. Sev kept seeing it as he’d seen it as a child—rolling hills and tall trees—and then, in sudden, jarring contrast, he’d see it the way it was the last time he was here. The last time the empire marched on his home. The scent of smoke, the sound of death. Every clash of weapon, every thump of boot, every voice that cried out—then was abruptly silenced. It all blurred together, and Sev felt like a child again. Lost, lost… completely lost.
Shouts drew his attention to the distant bridge, and Sev was brought abruptly back to the moment his parents dove from the sky, careening toward that same bridge and the hundreds of soldiers preparing to cross. He remembered the feel of heat on his skin, knowing that the fire was devouring not just the enemy soldiers, but his mother and father. Scorching the clothes from their backs, the flesh from their bones.
And there was a shed—no, there had been a shed, now replaced by a burning wagon.
There was the stonework garden path, scattered with leaves—no, there was now a dirt trail, scattered with bodies.
Captain Dillon had split up their forces, and by Anyanke’s cruel fate, Sev was assigned to the advance guard.
His hands trembled so violently he could barely hold his spear, his palms slick with sweat, but still his legs marched him inextricably forward into the cluster of houses atop a gently sloping hill. His house—the one he and his parents had lived in—was gone, and that was some small mercy. But the houses that stood here now were not so different.
As soldiers to the left and right of him put torches to every surface, great swaths of fire licking across timber and catching on the dry, sunbaked summer grass, Sev was carried with the rush of bodies making for the doors.
His awareness seemed to blink in and out, his vision turning to black-and-white, shadow and flame. Faces were leached of color, of life, and the darkness moved.
One second he was running toward a house, soldiers breaking through a barricaded door, and the next, Sev was inside, and there were bodies, and screams, and the clang of weapons echoing against the wooden walls.
Sev felt frozen, and yet he moved, carried along like a leaf on a river current, the stream crashing through doorways and swirling into eddies, room after room, bringing death and destruction in its wake.
He didn’t lift his spear or make any move to attack, and yet there were bodies everywhere, appearing out of the shadows like some gruesome nightmare.
Sev stared uncomprehending at a small body on the floor in a back room. Someone had reduced the door to splinters, and the child—for it was definitely a child—lay near the open window, so close to freedom… but not close enough.
Horror glued Sev’s feet to the ground, and when a villager climbed back in through that same window, murder in his eyes, Sev waited obediently for it.
It seemed only right.
It seemed only just.
Sev had escaped death more than once, so maybe it was his time.
The man raised a hatchet, the kind used to cut firewood or hew logs, but the strike halted with his arm up over his head. A spear protruded from his chest, coming from the doorway to Sev’s left.
The soldier standing there still held the weapon in his hands, but when he wrenched it free, the man crumpled, his body motionless next to the child’s.
Sev blinked. He was alive, somehow, and the thought did not comfort him.
The soldier next to him was a grizzled war vet. His face was impassive, unfeeling, and Sev was as haunted by it as he had been by the expression of rage and heartbreak on the man now dead on the ground.
“Wake up, kid,”