When a woman was selected, they divested her of her gag, thus her screams rent the air, and the men fed on them as this time, Tedrey forced himself to watch.

Forced himself to study them each in turn. Forced his focus to them to make certain they were tuned to what they were doing, and none of them turned to Tedrey.

Forced his memory to carve their visages in his brain, for he hoped one day to find them all again and make them pay for this desecration.

It took some time, the clouds covering the dawning sun, before the rains came.

Tedrey worked at his wrists.

The men brutalized.

The knot slipped free. His hands fell free. And Tedrey almost did not catch his cry of joy before the next quake came.

Thus, Tedrey did not move a muscle.

For this one felt different.

It felt unlike the other, which had been a powerful shudder. Like the earth below them seemed to be speaking and very much wished those who walked it to listen to its message.

This had another meaning.

A sinister one.

And as the men before him ambled about excitedly, the man at work on the miserable girl tethered to the dirt cried out his release, right before, suddenly, he cried out for a different reason as the earth underneath them broke open.

The man was tossed one way.

She rolled the other.

And Tedrey stared as it seemed beings were forming from the mud.

With the stakes she’d been tied to no longer stuck in the ground, the woman who had been being used struggled to her feet and raced into the forest with ropes and rods dangling from wrists and ankles.

No one paid her mind at what seemed to be happening in the clearing.

The women at his side started scuffling on their behinds to get away, as the men who had wrought this catastrophe milled about with wonder and jubilation, watching the breaking of the earth with zealotry awash on their faces.

And then Tedrey saw two men and a number of women form from the sludge as if erupting from a swell at the center of the earth.

The rain pelted them as they stood in the mire, gazing about.

And as the rain cleaned the mud from them, Thom cried joyously, “Jell!”

Thom rushed forward.

“No!” the man wearing filthy robes of what Tedrey thought was a Go’Doan priest cried. “He is my—!”

“Kill him!” the woman, standing closest to the man between her and the priest, a priest that was G’Jell, shrieked.

But that man was already moving.

And then there was naught in that clearing but the sound of the driving rain as all went immobile when the man took Thom’s head in his two hands, and with a terrible crunching noise, crushed it in an explosion of gore with no apparent effort.

Tedrey blinked against the rain as the man released Thom, and he fell lifeless to the muck.