Chapter 101: I feel your grief.
As they emerged on the other side of the portal, Ren leaped from Kai’s arms, her eyes wide with terror. The once beautiful hills were ablaze, and the stench of burning flesh twisted her stomach. Smoke spiraled high into the sky... and yet she could see through it. Somehow, her vision pierced the haze, revealing the massacre hidden within the smoke that curled around them like a living thing.
Zaira, the woman from the training hall who had once urged her to take Arkilla down, was now cradling a wolf’s severed head, her grief raw and shaking. Nearby, Rail knelt in anguish, and from the look on his face, Ren didn’t need to ask. It was Kamin. Her heart pounded like the drums of a giant’s parade beyond the horizon. Even their giants had been wounded.
She had brought destruction to this land.
But why? Had her father, the King of Alvonia, struck a deal with Luther... only to break it?
She knew so many of the fallen, those who were slaughtered cruelly. She had dined beside them, watched their easy smiles, and seen them spar and prepare for battle, never imagining it would end in death. And, they were preparing for death only to bring peace to others. The light in her eyes dimmed. While she’d been distracted by so many other things, lives had slipped through her fingers. This land had bled. And those elders, the chiefs of Thegara... perhaps they were right. Did she truly deserve to be their Luna? To be their shining moon in these dark days, when death cast its shadow over them?
She had no time to question herself, no time to seek answers from Kai, or even to register the anguish in her husband’s voice as he barked orders in the background.
Then Arkilla’s hand settled on her shoulder. "Do you see what I see? Is that... Gloria?"
Ren sprinted toward the gate where stood her wounded maiden, Gloria, and little Dave beside Orgeve, all trying to assist Agara as he tended to the injured shifters.
Dropping to her knees beside a wounded Female Omega whose hand was barely hanging by a thin skin, Ren pressed her palm gently over the woman’s bloodied arm. The techniques her healing instructor once taught at the Summer Mansion of the Dreamland came flooding back, clear and sharp in her mind.