Chapter 67: Alira’s trial [1]
Alira stood before a ruined city which she once called it home.
The sky that night had no warmth and the stars above were suffocating.
A vast, uncaring void pressed down upon her, its infinite darkness studded with cold, merciless points of light. They did not twinkle, did not waver, only stared, unblinking, like the eyes of a thousand silent judges.
They had watched the slaughter unfold, had witnessed every scream, every fall, every last gasp of life snuffed out beneath their indifferent gaze. And now they watched her, as if waiting to see what she would do.
The air was a blade of ice against her skin, the wind a mournful chorus, keening through the ruins of the battlefield. It carried with it the stench of charred flesh and wet iron, of smoldering wood and the sour tang of spilled bowels.
The ground beneath her boots was a graveyard of steel and shattered bone, a wasteland where the earth itself seemed to weep ash.
Weapons lay discarded like the broken toys of cruel gods, swords snapped at the hilt, spears driven deep into the dirt, arrows feathered in the backs of the fallen.
Shields, once proud emblems of house and honor, were cleft in two, their splintered remains jutting from the mud like grave markers.
And there, half-buried in the filth, the banner of House Mor, the Golden Hands crossed in sacred oath, ripped asunder, its fabric stiff with dried blood, flapping in the wind like the last, shuddering breath of a dying thing.
And at the center of it all.
Laid two bodies.