Page 135 of Lore of the Tides

“I’ll leave you to clean up the mess. Order the humans back to their hovel. We can’t have so many bodies on our front step; better to do as originally planned and orchestrate the culling in their home. Yes. Gather the troops.” A laugh. “In a few years, the forest will have made it like new again; we won’t even have to dispose of the bodies...”

Lore couldn’t make sense of the words; her world was a muddled, incomprehensible thing. She covered her ears. She didn’t want to know what they were saying, for it would bring only more torment.

“Throw her in the dungeon.”

The voices faded.

Chapter 48

Lore peered into the dim, wavering light. She rubbed at her eyes, removing clumps of reddish-brown flakes that had dried onto her lashes.

Blood.

Lore grimaced, and the pain in her face amplified a thousandfold. She gingerly pressed on the swollen, crusted, weeping mess that was all that was left of her right cheek and hissed in pain. She tapped gently on her right eye—swollen shut. Tried to work her jaw, but sharp, piercing pain resonated through her skull.

Lore rolled onto her back. Her shoulders were bruised and scraped, her entire body racked with shivers. Shock, or the cold of the dungeon floor that had already seeped into her bones, she didn’t know which.

Yesterday she had woken up beside Finndryl. Hazen and Isla had been there. Grey... they’d been so filled with hope.

They’d been so meticulous. They had planned for everything.

Except, she failed. She hadn’t noticed that she couldn’t use her magic in the throne room until it was too late.

Moonlight drifted in through a window she couldn’t see, but fingers of light reached through the bars of the cell. The shimmering, dancing dust motes seemed to be laughing at her. If it had beenSourcedancing in the light, she could call her books, melt the bars of this jail, and leave. But there was noSourcehere. Like the throne room, this was a void as well.

Yesterday she had hope.

Today she had nothing.

There was no one left.

Lore moaned, her grief a physical pain.

She clenched her hands into fists. She could feel their emptiness. They would never again hold Milo to her. Feel Eshe’s warm hand in hers. Feel Finndryl’s beating heart while she laid her head on his chest.

She’d gathered everyone that she loved, and she’d marched them straight into a demon’s clutches. For the king was just that... a demon. He may have been born a person, a thousand years ago, but whatever empathy or civility or mortality he’d had... he must have exchanged it for evil. For whatever monstrosity she had encountered yesterday... he could not be beaten.

She’d killed them all.

And what had he said as he’d walked away?

Her brain shied away from the memory of the throne room as if to protect her.

But she needed to remember. The pain she was feeling was just punishment for her incompetence.

She pressed through the mental block, her own mind’s attempt at kindness. She didn’t deserve kindness of any kind. She was the worst sort of person... the type who lost everyone and was the only one left alive.

He’d said... he’d been giving orders. Instructions. Dungeon... force the humans back to Duskmere... a cull. They had already been planning on killing them all.

Even if she hadn’t brought them here, he was going to kill them. But none of that mattered, because if she had never wanted to change their circumstances, the king would probably have continued on forwho knows how many more years being cruel, but from a distance. If she hadn’t shaken things up, he wouldn’t have decided to end things.

But she hadn’t been the one to shake things up.Hehad orchestrated an earthshake. That was what had been the beginning of their end. She just didn’t realize it. And despite her attempts... her desperate search for the books... it hadn’t been enough.

She was weak. Useless. She had never stood a chance. Not really. And now, they were dead.

All of them.

Lore rolled over onto her side, gagging. But she had vomited up everything, because all she did was heave, painfully; unsatisfactorily, nothing rose to the surface.