“And when it’s all over, you come out of the holes you’ve hidden yourself in, and it’s like you are on the moon. Everything that made it your world, everything that made it home, has been wiped away. Cities are ravaged. Towns are destroyed. Fields are drowned in thick, murky lakes. The houses—​the homes where you woke up every day, said hello to your parents, ate your breakfast, complained about your sisters, fixed your socks, did all the daily little things that you used to take for granted—​are broken bits of wood. The table you ate every dinner at is firewood. That is, if you can find it, if it hasn’t been flung miles away by the wind. Any animals you had that you couldn’t take with you belowground are lost. And any people who failed to hide well enough, or the people in hiding places that flooded—” At this, Eione stopped abruptly. She stood and stalked out of the house, slamming the door behind her.

They stared after her.

“That was dramatic,” Ferro said. “Is it true?”

“Sadly, yes,” Neela said. “Come with us. There’s something we should show you.”

“All right,” Jyx said in a small voice. She looked as haunted as Mina felt.

Neela washed the teacups, wiped her hands on a towel, and then, with Varli, led them all outside. Eione didn’t rejoin them, but Mina saw others peeking out their windows and watching them from wherever they were—​by the chickens, at a butter churn, near the well, by a stable.

It didn’t take long to cross the outpost. They passed the houses, the sheds, and the dilapidated buildings. “Eione mentioned storm bunkers?” Jyx asked.

“Ours can withstand an ordinary storm, but to survive a catastrophic ten-year storm, you need the heavy-duty bunkers they have in the cities,” Varli said.

Neela chimed in, “Thankfully, some of your storm guardians have shared the date of your next festival. We’ll leave here in six days, before your celebration begins and the next ten-year storm arrives. In the past, before any of your people understood the connection between your displays of power and the storms, we had no warning that these storms would be worse than the usual. And there were consequences.”

Varli pointed ahead of them. “See the consequences.”

Neela and Varli led them to a meadow of wildflowers. An apple tree grew in the center, and a stream babbled across its pebbled banks. All around the meadow were flat, upright stones.

Gravestones.

These weren’t the fancy engraved markers Mina had seen in Alorrian cemeteries. This graveyard had different kinds of headstones—​some red, some black, some gray speckled with mica—​and the shapes were irregular. They were loosely flat rectangles, but some were fatter and some taller. The guardians and the beasts walked between them, reading the names.

“Look at the dates,” Zek said.