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None speak. There is too much shock to speak.

There is only breath.

In tandem.

In, out.

In, out.

“Mother above,” Tasheem exhales behind them, coming clear of the trees. “What happened here?”

Before them is what remains of a building – the wasted, blackened skeleton left to slowly smoulder. The top floor has crumbled inward, smothering what once lay below. The pigs and chickens lie dead in their pens.

“Salem’s inn,” Ryon finally answers. His voice quavers, his eyes are wild. He stalks forward, unbalanced, the hide of his boots singeing on the burning rubble.

“Ryon!” Dawsyn calls out, but the hybrid continues on. Glass shatters beneath his weight. “Ryon!” she calls again.

The wreckage of Salem’s inn still burns, and she knows it is not safe to touch. Even as she thinks it, Ryon stumbles trying to climb the heap. His hands catch his fall.

“Fuck,” he grunts, palms likely searing.

Dawsyn lurches forward. “Ryon!Get down–”

But a sound reaches them, stilling them all. It is distant. Smothered.

Baltisse’s eyes go round, and Dawsyn almost doesn’t hear her say it. The pounding of her own blood behind her eardrums nearly drowns it out, but she sees it. The mage’s lips form the word,Esra, and it is followed by another far-away cry.

“Esra?” Ryon says, eyes falling to the pile of smoking rubble. “ESRA?” he roars. It is a sound to awaken beasts. Nearby birds take flight in flocks, if not jolted from the sound, then startled by the charge in the air. Dawsyn’s skin shows the static of it.

At once, Ryon rips the swords from his back and throws them aside. He takes the vest of hide from his chest and wraps his hands in a frenzy. “Help me!” He calls to the rest and begins lifting away the debris.

Dawsyn takes her gloves from her waistband and dons them as she leaps over a crate, a window frame, a banister. Ryon growls as he tries to dislodge a stair railing from the heap, and Dawsyn brings her ax to the point where the frame traps it, cutting it in two. Ryon hurls it away.

They all dig and pull and break, the sounds of snapping timber echoing between the surrounding trees, and all the while a keen screaming arises from the depths of the rubble, growing less and less distant the further they dig.

But the digging is so achingly slow. The pile is too high. The smoke and ash are clinging to her tongue, her throat. Keeping her eyes open is painful, sucking at the air is painful, and it seems they come no closer to the voice that cries and breaks somewhere beneath the mound.

She coughs, her chest heaving, and someone grabs the back of her coat, pulling her away.

It is Baltisse, eyes churning like tempests.

“Damn the mother.Step aside!” She calls, and the others have a mere second to leap away before the ground beneath their feet begins to quake. Baltisse stares with fierce determination at the place where the screams come from, face screwed tightly, morphing into a creature of a different realm.

Dawsyn feels the iskra pricking at her fingertips and wills it to be still.

The ground beneath them quakes. The rubble begins to lift. The mound rises from its middle first, as though it might erupt, lifting higher, higher. And then Baltisse groans the words of a language Dawsyn has never heard, and it breaks. The broken pieces of Salem’s home fall away like waves, leaving a hole in its middle.

The crying stops.

“Esra?” Ryon calls. There is no answer. The smoke born from the disruption makes it difficult to see. Ryon glances at Dawsyn, and together they begin clambering back over Salem’s burnt and broken inn.

Where Baltisse cleaved the burning debris away, there lies a trapdoor. Dawsyn recognises it immediately, though its wood is burnt and blackened like everything else. The handle is the same. When Ryon grasps it to wrench the door open, she can hear it sizzle against his skin. He ignores it. He heaves upward.

Time slows. Sound is muted. Her eyes water incessantly, but not enough to blind her to what lies beneath, in the cellar that Salem dug out himself.

A cellar that she crawled into with the hybrid.

The smoke swirls in the air, and Ryon shouts something to her but she can’t make sense of it. He jumps into the hole.