A monument to remorse. The embodiment of regret. A mage with but one purpose: to undo what she’d done.

When the sun finally rose, sullen and cloud-veiled, Venette ventured out of Remmie Lindin’s room at the Shooting Star inn to see for herself what fresh calamities the new day had brought them. Dreen Brislyn ventured with her. They left Barl Lindin’s silent brother behind to wait for his courageous, catastrophic sister.

“I pity him,” Dreen said, as they made their way through the hushed, seemingly deserted inn. “He loves her, and would defend her, but it isn’t possible to defend the indefensible—and he knows it.”

Venette pushed open the inn’s heavy front door. “You must live a very… uncomplicated… life.”

“Lady Martain, you astonish me,” Dreen said, staring. “You’d still defend Morgan Danfey? Even now?”

She didn’t answer. She had no interest in discussing Morgan, at least not with this young woman… and besides, the sight that greeted her beyond the doorway robbed her entirely of speech.

“Justice preserve us,” Dreen whispered, her voice colourless with shock. “And how are we to mend this? Surely all of Dorana is suffering the same fate.”

Venette felt her belly churn. Orwin. But she couldn’t afford to think of him… or the rest of their scattered family. Not yet.

The narrow street on which the Shooting Star sat was riddled and warped and blighted with mage-mist. The filthy stuff clung like fruit-rot to the buildings and the cobblestones, shattered stained glass or turned it to melted slag, poisoned the bright flowers and the spreading, shading trees. Floated malevolent through the air, bright and deadly in the growing sunlight.

Dreen pointed. “Is that—are those—bodies?”

A stench of death and too-rapid decay clogged their throats as they picked their cautious way along the street. The silence was eerie. Unsettling. Broken only by the distant, staccato sounds of glass smashing to shards.

The corpses of two men and a woman huddled on the sidepath. She had perished from mage-mist, her face bubbled into obscurity. But the men—the men—

“It must have been those things that Lord Danfey created,” Dreen Brislyn said, her voice shaking. “These wounds—only talons could make them.”

Nodding, Venette forced herself to look at the spilled entrails, the splintered bones, the punctured, rended flesh. “And fangs.” Oh, Morgan. Morgan. My dear, you are lost. “I wonder if there’s any chance that Mage Lindin could—”

Above their heads, a slow, dry, leathery rustle of bat wings. And then a thud, a thud, and a thud amidst a clatter of loosened roof tiles.

“Do not move, Lady Drislyn,” Venette breathed. “Do not even blink.”

Shadow by swallowed shadow, the rising day crept along the empty street. They waited, unmoving, muscles aching and trembling, breathing in the sour stink of spoiling blood and emptied bowels and viscera strewn like discarded fish guts at the markets.