Page 310 of Blade of the Nightking

The village had always been worn by hardship, but this… this was devastation.

Fire had gutted nearly every building, leaving behind little more than scorched shells. Roofs had collapsed inward amid piles of splintered beams and charred stone. Burned bodies still lay where the flames had claimed them, blackened and frozen in their final moments.

Elsewhere, corpses littered the streets. They'd been torn apart, half-devoured, and trampled so many times beneath the feet of the Infected that the dead had ceased to look like people at all, reduced instead to flattened heaps of flesh, splintered bone, and rotting cloth.

Great brown smears stained the paving stones and streaked the remaining walls. The streets had become rivers of blood the day Midland fell.

And then I felt it.

A crushing wrongness hung in the air, so tangible it seemed to push against my skin. Dark magic permeated the settlement, filling my lungs with every breath, sinking deep into my bones.

Rìan stepped to my side, his body tense as his gaze swept over the ruins.

He felt it too.

He'd been right. The third Gate of Othyr was here.

My mind reeled. Of all the places in all the realms, fate had brought me back to the beginning. The final well had been here all along, somewhere beneath the village where I'd grown up.

Saskia wiped the sweat from her brow, leaving a streak of dirt across her forehead. She barely spared the rubble a glance, her eyes traveling instead along the battlements before returning to us. She met my gaze, then clasped my shoulder, her grip firm.

"Hurry."

She didn't wait for a reply. She scrambled up the collapsed stone with the sure-footed confidence of a mountain goat, catching the narrow stair along the inner wall and taking the steps two at a time. Her bow was in her hand before she reached the battlements, an arrow nocked as she turned toward the tree line.

Rìan swivelled to face me at once. "Where are the wells?"

Another scream tore through the air in the distance, making my hackles rise. Two of the Bone Women were gone.

"The... the..." I could barely force the words out.

His hands closed around my shoulders, shaking me hard.

"The town square," I gasped, the answer slamming into place. "In front of the old citadel."

"Take me there."

I ran.

My feet carried me down streets that had once been as familiar as my own heartbeat, through the broken remains of the village I'd called home. Twice our path ended abruptly beneath mountains of rubble, forcing us to double back and cut through narrow alleys my feet somehow still remembered. Every detour cost us precious moments.

The oppressive weight of magic hung in the air like a foul stench, following us wherever we ran.

The town square opened before us.

The slaughter here dwarfed everything we'd passed. Bodies lay strewn in heaps, sprawled over one another where people had fallen in their haste to escape, the sun shrivelling the corpses to withered husks. Eyes and tongues were missing, ripped away by the Infected.

The humans had run here, falling back from the failing walls in the hope that the citadel might still protect them. Judging by the bodies blanketing the square, it hadn't.

The old village well stood at its center.

"There," I breathed, though Rìan had already spotted it. He picked his way over the bodies and reached the rim just ahead of me. A fetid odor billowed from the depths. He looked down only briefly before jerking back. "Gods." He buried his nose in the crook of his elbow, then threw out an arm to stop me. "Don't look, Eidra."

I pushed past him anyway and leaned over the stone, one hand pressed over my nose and mouth. Three bodies lay half-submerged in the black water, tangled together in unnatural stillness. One bloated face broke the surface, turned up toward the pale circle of sky overhead. A woman, long strands of filthy hair drifting like weeds around her floating corpse.

I stared down at them, unable to tear my eyes away.

They hadn't fallen.