Grit crackled again as she made her way to the next corpse: an elderly man thrust through numerous times. Strong in his Jaghut blood, this one – he appeared to have ignored several mortal wounds to continue fighting – yet without the obvious strong markers of his heritage, the pronounced jaws and tusk-like teeth, the height. Without those. So did communities change over time. Look at the diversity of the peoples she knew – all from a common ancestor.

Ancestors she walked with now, who yet appeared far from her blood with their thick robust bones, their squat build and wide jaws.

Flies swarmed the dark holes that once held this one’s eyes. She was grateful that she did not have to meet his gaze, even a fixed death stare. She suspected it would be too much. She felt she was on a knife’s edge of … shattering. The faintest, most innocuous sound might send her tumbling over that edge to where she could never find herself again.

She’d driven her flesh beyond exhaustion, beyond what it should be expected to endure. Yet that was as nothing to the agony her soul had inflicted upon itself. Could a person choke on self-loathing? She felt she was as much a walking corpse as her companions.

Quick light steps across the littered floor swung her about: she caught a glimpse of a slip of a girl, her glaring eyes bright and wild in the gloom, her shirt and long skirting tattered and scorched, before the child launched herself upon her. Instinctively, Silverfox caught her arms and they rocked there, straining, limbs outstretched.

No reason remained in the hatred and rage pouring from the wide eyes. The broken nails of the clawed fingers stretched for her. Protect yourself! the voice of Tattersail shouted within. Destroy her! the Thelomen bellowed.

Yet Silverfox did not raise the powers of the magery at her command. Instead, she fought to catch those rolling eyes and said, her voice cracking: ‘Why?’

Perhaps it was the strangeness of being addressed – or the strangeness of the question itself – but she felt the girl’s arms ease. The mouth, working and twisted, fell into a frown of disbelief.

‘Why …?’ the girl repeated as if testing the word. ‘Why?’ She pulled away, clasped her hands behind her back as if to restrain them there. ‘You dare ask why? You, who slew my family?’

What could she say? The time for ‘Sorry’ was long past. Ten thousand years past. No, the gulf was too profoundly deep to be bridged by any such gesture. ‘What I mean,’ she said, ‘is why must we kill each other?’

The girl fairly quivered in the grip of emotions no doubt as profound as those afflicting Silverfox herself. Blood-smeared and ragged, she looked like a lost waif. Silverfox had to resist the urge to reach out in an effort to soothe her.

‘You attacked us!’ the girl accused.

‘And who are we?’