Prologue
Her mind was a blank.
Red light flickered across her vision, and her whole body throbbed as if it had been set on fire. Evangeline fought to force her stalled thoughts into motion. How had the battle gone? Sir Conworld? Sir Scabbard? The soldiers?
This is no time to be lying here.
Not a sound reached her. No voices, no animals — not even the faint cry of an insect in the grass. She still could not tell where she was, but of one thing she was certain: somewhere in the chaos of the melee, she had been cut off, and she was alone.
She had to rejoin the main force, and quickly. Evangeline twisted where she had collapsed, trying to rise — and a chain clanked. Only then did she realize both her hands were bound.
Every worst outcome she could imagine flashed through her mind, the way a life reels past the eyes of the dying.
"...No."
A hoarse voice scraped out between lips gone bone-dry. Half-lost to panic, Evangeline thrashed her bound arms like a woman gone mad.
"No, no, please..."
A click. A shriek of metal. An old key ground into rusted iron, and hinges so eaten by corrosion they could barely move screamed as they turned.
She forgot even to keep struggling. Trembling, Evangeline lifted her head.
A thick, guttural sound rolled out of the dark, and a bulk that had to stand a good ten feet tall filled her vision. Breathing in harsh rasps, the giant moved and flung whatever it held down at her feet. It landed with a wet, heavy thud.
Flesh. Something that, until not so long ago, had been a person.
"...Conworld?"
Another thud. A second mass of flesh dropped across what had once been Nasisa Conworld.
"Scabbard...?"
Thud. Thud. Thud. Raymond Scabbard. Jack Riccilio. Fiona Delpindo. Lumps of meat that had once carried names as human beings piled up before her eyes, one after another, the way garbage bags stack upon a heap.
She could not breathe. The clotted reek of corpses and blood stoppered her throat, and she gagged, her face drained a corpse-white.
A wetter, deeper growl. Before she had even registered it moving, the monstrous giant was standing over her — and the grotesque thing that rose from between its legs turned, slowly, toward her—
Evangeline's eyes flew open on a choking gasp.
The dim, crude torch that had lit the narrow cave was gone. So were the corpses crammed inside it. So was the hideous thing that had been forced toward her. All of it had vanished without a trace.
"Hah... hah... hah..."
One hand knotted in the blanket hard enough to tear it, she hauled in breath after ragged breath. She held herself just like that for a long while, bloodshot eyes boring into the dark, and only then, with an effort, did she part her parched lips.
"...Right."
Through the half-open window, a cold wind seeped in, carrying a thin wash of moonlight.
"The war. It ended."
Below her left shoulder, the empty sleeve of her nightclothes lifted on the wind and fluttered.