Chapter 31 #2
When we finish clearing the homes that aren’t completely engulfed, I’m barely on my feet. I lean against Kaelzar’s thick forearm, and he doesn’t let go.
“Did you see where all those men disappeared to?” I finally ask.
“Yes,” he says, his voice like distant thunder. “There’s a pile of them outside the gates.”
I blink at him. “You stacked them into a pile?”
“What’s left of them,” he corrects evenly. “But I think we’ll still be able to question some of them.” He pauses, reconsidering. “One for sure.”
I open my mouth to reply, but a gentle tug on my arm pulls my attention away. “Lady,” a girl, the same one from the first house, says. “We need help.”
I follow her gaze. The freed women lay sprawled across the burnt ground. Some dead. Some dying. Others suffer in silence, covered in burns. Dozens of them.
The flames have thinned, and many of the screams have quieted. Only the light breeze moves now, lifting ash from the earth like falling rain in reverse. The chaos had blocked it out, but now the low, aching sounds of their pain sinks into me and I reach inward.
My Blood magic is drained. Even my own scrapes now throb.
“Will someone help us?” she asks, voice full of fragile hope. “The healers?”
No one is coming. Not for cursed girls. Even if there were, it would be too late. Too many would die waiting. The answer rises in my mind, obvious and horrifying. I push it away.
Kaelzar must have had the same thought, but he doesn’t shy away from it. “Listen to your magic, Trouble.” He says. “Find those who suffer needlessly. Ease their pain.”
In an instinctive response to his quiet command, my other magic, Decay’s twin, unspools like a net.
I reel at the sudden reminder of its strength.
Fueled by so many prayers, it feels intricate and nearly sentient, aware not only of what it can do but of what must be done.
I feel every broken body, every heartbeat slipping away.
Every scream they don’t have the breath to release.
If I had lifeforce to spare, I’d save them all. But I don’t. Even the greatest healers couldn’t fix this without it. The memory of the dying wolf flickers in my mind. The guilt. The relief when the pain ended. The screams will go quiet. I know that.
But I can’t. I can’t be the one to do this.
A whisper reaches me. “Please…”
I turn.
A body lies nearby, charred and twitching. No hair, no clothes. Just raw, cracked skin.
“Please,” she whispers again, tears falling over ruined flesh.
I blink my own tears away. Another soft sob draws me left.
An older woman rocks back and forth in the dirt, arms wrapped around herself.
Her face is burned, but not beyond recognition.
She murmurs through cracked lips over and over, “Why her? Why not me?” The woman clutches a smaller form, her child, already gone.
“Let me go with her,” she begs into the ashy nothingness, not realizing that I hold the power to make it so.
And for a moment, I want to honor her plea, let her slip into the silence she craves. But I can’t. Not for grief.
“It’s not up to me to take your pain,” I whisper. “Only to give you the chance to carry it.”
“Ray…lane,” the voice croaks, ragged and thin, and I snap my head toward the sound.
It’s the first woman I noticed. I step closer, and the last thread of resolve holding me upright snaps in an instant.
I recognize her, though just barely.
Brienne.
The girl I helped avoid the lashing. The girl Peonica risked her life to save.
Dying anyway.
Despite everything, they made her suffer more.
And now, after all of it, she’s at the end.
Her lips move, but no sound escapes. I don’t think she’s capable of speech anymore.
Just one more tear slips from the raw rim of her eyelid, no lashes left to catch it.
In her eyes, there’s no anger. No blame. Only a quiet plea for mercy.
I can’t deny it, I realize. Not to her or to any of those who need it.
I close my eyes, uncurl my fingers… and release the rot.
It spreads like fog across still water. The mental web I wove with my Blood magic guides it now, outlining only those beyond saving.
Ten bodies.
Twenty.
Forty.
Sixty.
Ninety-eight.
It’s too easy to direct the magic now. I offer it so much death, and it rushes to take it. Or maybe it’s because some part of me feels relieved to finally let it loose. As if the destruction gives me permission to stop holding back. As if a necessary killing is the excuse I’ve been waiting for.
Mael’s words drift through my mind. But I see you. You like the weight of life and death in your hands. Careful, Raylane. That sort of appetite has a way of growing.
I growl under my breath at the memory and shake it off with a slow exhale, forcing my focus back to the present.
It takes five breaths. Just five. And then it’s done.
The lifeforce of Blood magic rushes inside. It floods me, beautiful and heavy, and I immediately shove it outward.
First to the closest survivors. Then the less injured with broken bones and burns. I feel each wound mend, each scream go silent. I heal over two hundred people. And when it’s done, dark silence swallows the world.
I stand trembling, the magic still humming in my veins like a second, feverish pulse. But there’s no pride in the power, only the echo of the ones I chose to end. I count them again in my mind, to honor them by remembering each one.
Ninety-eight.
I breathe in smoke and the scent of ash and think this is the price, this is what mercy costs. And then I collapse. I fall to my knees and sob. Into my hands. Into the dirt. Into what’s left of myself.
I did this. Not just with my magic, but by giving them hope. By making them believe. If it weren’t for me, they’d all have agreed to serve. I feel shame for being angry with those women in Mael’s estate. They chose to live. How could I blame them?
But what kind of life will it be? A voice rises in my mind furious and roaring— mine.
I lift my head. Kaelzar kneels beside me, his shadow wraps around us like a shield, blotting out the dying fires behind.
He says nothing, and in that silence, something inside me hardens. I did what had to be done, and I will carry it. But I won’t let its weight stop me, no matter how impossibly heavy it settles on my shoulders, or how long it stays.
“I want to see those men,” I say.
If I hadn’t just taken the lives of nearly a hundred people, I might have broken in revulsion at what Kaelzar has done to the men responsible for all of it.
Only they’re not men anymore. Just a pile of torn limbs and twisted bodies. Arms ripped from torsos. Hands that hurt, that chained, that burned all those women. And then, cold horror tightens in my chest.
When my Blood magic swept through the burning settlement, healing every body still clinging to life, it didn’t know to choose. It mended some of them too, the ones Kaelzar left to bleed out in this monstrous heap.
Their wounds closed, but it couldn’t reattach limbs. So now they writhe on the ground, crying, shaking, reliving every moment of his retribution.
Maybe I should feel remorse. But all I feel is sick, dizzying pleasure that disgusts me more than the pile of ruined bodies ever could. Let them survive. Let them suffer.
They’ll live the rest of their lives without arms. The same arms that beat and burned and restrained innocent girls. And for what?
I say the question aloud without realizing it.
One of them lifts his head. His face is gaunt, filthy, eyes wild with pain. “You’re an abomination,” he spits. “You and your disciples. You’ll all burn!”
I recognize him from Micheline’s inn, the man with a milky eye Kaelzar pointed out watching me. Had they been planning it for that long?
The man pushes himself to his feet with a howl, stumbling when he forgets he no longer has arms to steady himself.
Disciples.
“You did this,” I say slowly, “because they were praying to Calista? Because they were praying for me?”
He stands now, shaking with rage. The others begin to stir, crawling or scrambling away when they spot Kaelzar. I see the fear return to their eyes.
But the mind of a man who spoke seems to be fractured, just like his body. He starts laughing through his tears.
“Mael will make you pay,” he chokes out, voice breaking.
“I served him well. He’ll reward me. A whole harem of red harlots for what we did today.
For showing them what happens to those who won’t obey.
Who won’t serve. All I have to do is put their hands into the gauntlets and they’ll be mine to play with.
” He hurls these last words at me like venom.
A sharp crack sounds behind me, like ice splintering, and I turn. Kaelzar is standing still as stone. Two jagged, shadow-forged swords have formed in his hands, long, curved, and deadly.
“You still have two limbs left,” he says in a low voice. “If you want to keep them, I suggest you use them to march in the opposite direction from my Champion. Because for every word you speak after this, I’ll take a piece of shadow from your wretched body.”
His calm is terrifying. The man stumbles backward, then turns and runs, chasing after the others disappearing between the ruins. A group of armless men, fleeing.
If my heart weren’t shattered into so many pieces, I might have smiled. But I don’t.
I stay still, breathing smoke, sweat, and blood. My magic buzzes faintly in my chest like it doesn’t know what to do next. For a moment, there’s only the crackle of dying flames and the sound of footfalls fading into ash.
“How did they manage to catch so many off guard?” I whisper, not expecting an answer. “How did they lock them all inside?”
Kaelzar says, “They came under the pretense of inspection.”
My eyes lift slowly to meet his.
Reading a question in them, he replies. “I already asked these questions,” he explains.
“They told the women they were following up on a new proposal you’d made to improve the settlement, approved by the king, apparently.
Said they were here to inspect the houses, to test their sturdiness.
And that no one was allowed outside during the inspection. ”
I cover my face with my hands. Did those women look for me through the smoke? Did they wait by the door, whispering my name? I promised them safety. But I gave them fire.
They trusted me. They sat in their homes while the windows were boarded shut, believing this was part of the future I promised them. Believing they were safe, while Mael’s men sealed the doors. Lit the fires. And walked away.
Did they think it was my order? Did they pray to me with their last breaths?
As my gaze sweeps over the desolated ground, I spot a single wooden pole standing just beyond the ruin’s edge, ironically untouched, still upright when everything else around it has been reduced to ash.
It rises like the symbol of a broken system that refuses to fall, no matter the damage it inflicts. Untouchable. Indestructible.
Not anymore.
A roar tears from my throat as I thrust my hands forward, and just as I promised during the Spectra Judicium, I let the rot take it until its last remnant crumbles into nothing.
Then I lower my hands and look back at the settlement, trying to see it for what it truly is now that the rush of the fight is gone.
Only ashes, still drifting in the air, soft, silent, and relentless.
Somewhere behind me someone coughs. A woman murmurs my name, and I’m unsure whether it’s a plea or a prayer. And then I realize…
There is no settlement. There’s nothing left, only a scar on the earth.
And maybe, now, one in me.