A lone boat was tethered and bobbing over the calming waves.

This entire portion of the isle was empty, the city and the harbor still in shambles. Wood, rock, and miscellaneous belongings that hadn’t been scavenged dotted the shoreline and the alleyways beyond.

Eerie silence crept through The Graveyard with the sea-salted breeze. Silent, but not still. Beneath each crumbling shop and overturned broken wagon, the bones and souls of those slain here lingered.

I wondered if they too were trapped. If perhaps one day when this city was rebuilt, they may find some semblance of peace.

Maybe, they would simply prefer to stay.

Moving deeper down what had once been the city’s main street, I kept my eyes off the ground. The last time I’d visited, the sight of toys and portraits had snuck so thoroughly beneath my skin, I’d never forgotten what each looked like.

They didn’t want us to forget, Rorn had said. They wanted us to ensure such devastation never happened again.

And we had, but barely. The siege on the city and the surrounding towns and villages was something none of us had been prepared for.

The only reason the humans we’d once deemed friends hadn’t managed worse was because they lacked the abilities and force that had been gifted to our kind—and because of those I could hear now in the forests and along the coastline. The units of wolves on patrol.

The faint scent of smoke rose in the distance from a campfire. I walked toward it. Not to visit with them, but merely for something to do.

Sand and glass and rock crunched under my bare feet. Though I hoped I would, I felt none of it as I continued to the street’s end and down the coastal road. The connected piles of broken and crumbling shops soon turned into vacated and destroyed homes.

Staring northeast at the sea, I could feel it. A tug at the bones. A song of the soul in the form of the wind whispering over the ocean. The temptation to return. The aching desire to run to what I’d run from and never once look back at this life again.

To better ignore it, I warped to the mountainous terrain of the towers.

Months had passed. There was little point in returning to a land that wasn’t my own for a male who had likely moved on. There was little point in giving in to daydreams and memories of something I could not have.

For the only way a monarch such as myself could escape their duties was death.

Leaves still danced at my feet from my arrival in the forest when I heard it.

Shouting.

Slinking back against a tree, I waited for the caravan of warriors to pass by. Blood stained the air. Some of them were injured.