Whoever said it’s easier to destroy things than to build them was a scammer, and I want my coin back.

I should be sitting in the castle, worrying about the valkerax. I should be thinking of what to do after I get my heart back. How Crav, Peligli, and Y’shennria are. But here I am, against my own sound judgment, tucked behind a brick wall and watching the broken tower near West Gate like it holds the key to all my problems.

Whichever natural disaster destroyed this tower was a very angry one—scorch marks blaze black across the crumbling parapets. The blackened stone looks familiar somehow, and then it hits me: Ravenshaunt, Y’shennria’s ancestral home that was consumed by witchfire. She showed me the ruins of it when she retrieved me from Nightsinger’s woods and brought me to Vetris. They’re the same marks. That means this tower, too, is a survivor of the Sunless War.

In my shadowed hiding place, I go still. Y’shennria. The truth Fione revealed to me—the idea of Y’shennria baring her throat for the Heartless as a lure away from her child freezes my blood. From here, my view of the West Gate is clear. Soldiers tromp through the streets, the clash of their swords in practice combat reverberating from their camps just outside the wall. Caravans loaded with grain and other dried rations come into Vetris in a constant stream, the lawguards unloading their contents and taking inventory. The molten glow of the blacksmiths’ forges never goes dark.

I promised her. I promised Y’shennria I’d stop the war. And yet it grinds its gears just in front of me.

If I teach the valkerax, if Varia gets the Bone Tree and controls it without an issue, if it works the way Yorl and she say it will, if Varia isn’t lying about using it only to stop the war—all these ifs. I try to imagine an army of white valkerax swarming over the white walls of Vetris, easily, effortlessly, like serpents over a forest floor. A hundred copies of the valkerax below the South Gate, no—thousands of them, just as large, just as riddled with teeth and claws.

Such a thing would, in no uncertain terms, stop the war cold.

I can still stop the war and get my heart. I can still do everything I told Y’shennria I would. I just have to trust that what Varia says is true.

trust is a comforting delusion, the insipid sister of hope.