Page 82 of Children of Fallen Gods

I uttered a curse that came out as gibberish because I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth without vomiting.

The others were right behind me. Ashraia’s curse was louder than mine, drowning out Siobhan’s gasp.

Caduan looked at us and drew a hand over his forehead. Flecks of cloudy purple dotted his face.

“I know,” he said. “It’s not pleasant.”

“Not pleasant?” I repeated.

There was a Mathira-damned body sprawled out —opened— on a makeshift table in the center of the clearing. It had been cut open from throat to navel, exposing a mushy expanse of guts and flesh, all grayish purple. The face was covered by a small piece of white fabric, but greasy tendrils of red-gold hair hung over the edge of the table.

“What,” Ishqa said, deadly quiet, “are you doing?”

We were all thinking it: he’d gone insane. Not that anyone could blame him.

It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. The body on the table was most noticeably disfigured because of its opened abdomen, but its limbs, too, were twisted and gnarled, the skin grayish and too-formless.

“It’s from the House of Reeds,” I said.

“She,” Caduan repeated, nodding. “She is one of the Fey slain in the House of Reeds. Yes.”

I pressed the back of my hand over my nose and stepped forward. The closer I came, the…strangerthe body looked. I had seen many dead bodies in states of disrepair. I knew what normal Fey guts looked like.

This? This was not right. This was too grey, too…formless.

“What are you doing?” Ishqa repeated, most sharply.

“We needed answers,” Caduan replied. He didn’t take his eyes off the thing on the table. “I was hoping I was wrong.”

His gaze flicked up to meet mine, and I glimpsed raw fear.

“This is a Fey woman,” he said. “Or,wasa Fey woman. No longer.”

“I don’t understand,” Siobhan said. “Clearly something had happened to—”

“Not ‘happened to.’ She hasinherentlychanged.” He stepped back, grabbing a cloth to wipe his hands. “Her blood is tainted withhumanblood. And there is something else there, too. Something magic. I can’t identify it, but…” He frowned as his voice trailed off, looking like he didn’t even realize that he had stopped speaking.

“What does that mean?” I said, quietly. A knot of dread clenched in my stomach.

“It means that someone tried to change her into something else. Some sort of… hybrid creature.”

Caduan pulled the cloth from over the Fey corpse’s head, revealing a face that was somehow astoundingly beautiful and gut-wrenchingly hideous all at once. Her features had been ever so slightly rearranged, seeming to blur no matter how I focused. Her skin was sallow and sagging, violet veins blooming beneath its slick surface.

Even I could not identify what was so wrong about it. Yet, it was uncomfortable to look at. This was the face that had once belonged to someone who loved and smiled and laughed. And it had been corrupted.

“Why?” I choked out. “Why would they do that?”

“And how?” Siobhan said. “A whole House? All at once?”

Caduan shook his head, still not looking away from the corpse. “I do not know.”

“Perhaps it’s weaponry,” I said. “A way to kill them all, quickly.”

“I know very well that they do not need to do this to kill. No. I think whatever this was, it was a failure.” He lifted his knife, pointing to the exposed innards of the body. “Even just over the last several hours, all of this has degraded. Her body is withering away as we speak. Her own blood is poisoning her. We didn’t kill this one. I found her beyond the walls, untouched by the fires. Likely drowned in her own dissolved organs. Slowly.”

His voice was calm and level, but his knuckles were white around the handle of his blade.

“I do not think,” he said, “that this is what the humans wanted to happen. I think that this is a failed experiment. They weren’t trying to destroy. They were trying to create. And what we are looking at now is a Fey caught in-between. Just as Aefe was caught in-between, last night.” His eyes flicked up to mine, bright and furious. “The land itself was corrupted, there. Don’t tell me that you did not feel it as I did.”

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