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Silence again.

Neia, my cousin, broke it with, “Let’s look for life.”

* * *

There was none.

Hana found no souls in the forest, no souls in the castle, and none in the city.

Bodies, however, we found plenty of. Piles of ash as well. I didn’t know lightning was capable of turning a person to ash, but apparently, it was.

Within the castle, we found dozens. Some were only dust, like the queen in the throne room. If Lux told the truth—and I did believe that he had—good riddance. That bitch had made a deal with the greatest enemy our people had ever seen. For treason like that, she deserved death.

The elderly woman with burns in the shape of lightning over every inch of her body, standing beside the clothesline outside the castle though…

I cried for her. I cried for the man beside the body of a draken on the rooftop. I cried for the pile of ash in the watchtower, nothing left of them to determine their gender.

We all did.

As we carried the bodies of those who still had them to the field outside for burial, we mourned.

They were innocents. They were just people. They’d done nothing wrong. They were only living their day to day lives, finishing their chores, preparing meals, sitting down with their families for supper, when that bastard murdered them.

No tantrum justified this. Nothing could allow me to forgive him for this. How could he have done the same thing twice? How could he have annihilated Matriaza, recognized the awful he’d done, and repeated it a second time?

Mistakes don’t happen twice.

Aside from that, there were dozens of people here who I’d made immortal with the tree of life. There were only two ways to kill someone who’d taken from the tree of life: with the worms the maalaichte cnihme had created specifically to do the job and siphoning the soul from their body. That was only possible for necromancers, like Nix, El, Hana, and Lux.

And yet, I found no life.

So it wasn’t only that he killed on accident. He didn’t simply lose his temper. He siphoned souls from bodies of the living.

That was the same magic the maalaichte cnihme practiced. It was how they’d gotten their title of soul eaters. It was why everyone hated them so badly.

Holding a soul within the body of someone stronger wasn’t always an evil act. Nix had done it with our son. I’d miscarried, and he took his soul into himself so it wouldn’t get lost in the abyss. So that when we were ready to try for a baby again, he could have the soul that now resided in Mirobhail’s body.

But this wasn’t the same. Lux had taken in all these souls purely for the sake of doing so.

He’d killed two entire worlds and absorbed every soul he butchered. Perhaps because he didn’t want them all to get lost in the abyss, but the fact remained.

He couldn’t have done that on accident. It required thought and intense focus, not a moment of red drenched fury.

I kept thinking,Just one survivor. Find justonesurvivor.

Then I’d have some hope. Then there’d be a single ray of sunshine for all this awful.

And we did.

Hana sensed something near the water, so we went to the beach that framed the capital. As soon as we got there, I saw her, and my heart broke all over again.

She lay on the black sand, wiggling and squirming, struggling to get to the water. Her arm was scaly and fish like while her leg resembled a person’s. Her face was bleak and misshapen, as though she was mid-shift, and couldn’t free her body to the form she was trying to morph to.

A merrow. They could shift between two forms. Fish and person. Currently, she was stuck in the middle of both.

We ran at full speed. She didn’t recognize us, and she was unable to form words at first, but she was grateful as we lifted her arms and dragged her into the water.

Once she submerged herself, taking in gasping gulps of liquid, she lifted her mouth from the water’s cusp and pulled in breaths, gills fluttering on her cheeks, trying to bring a normal rhythm back to her body.