Page 273 of Emylia

I faltered at the threshold.

My feet locked.

My breath shattered.

Please let them be alive.

Please.

My teeth sank into my bottom lip, hard enough to break the skin. The taste of blood flooded my mouth.

I pushed the overbearing fear aside and stepped through the threshold.

Into whatever came next.

Then the stench hit me. Thick. Rancid. The kind of scent that didn’t just cling—itinvaded.

It lived in your lungs.

Your clothes.

Your soul.

And it never left.

Wrong. So wrong.

The air was thick with it—heavy with death. It wrapped around my skin, soaked into my lungs. I could feel it pressing against my ribs like a second heartbeat.

And the silence—Gods, the silence was worse than any scream.

Then I saw it.

Blood.

Everywhere.

It wasn’t splattered. It waspaintedon—soaking the floorboards, streaking the walls like someone had tried to carve sorrow into every surface.

It clung to the grain of the table, the fabric of the curtains, the inside of the windows–dripping like tar–heavy, thick, the color of sin. My boots stuck to it with every step, peeling free with a sickening squelch.

Then—the bodies.

They hadn’t been arranged. They hadn’t been buried. They had simplyfallen.

Crimson halos pooled beneath their heads. Mouths hung open. Eyes blank, forever fixed on nothing.

A scream clawed up my throat. But it wasn’t from the atrocities before me.

Pain sliced through my arm—white-hot, immediate. Steel. Flesh. Blood.

I’d been too overwhelmed.

Too absorbed in all the death.

I dropped my bow without thinking. Unsheathed my sword. Spun.

The attacker—a tall man, masked in black—lunged again. This time I was ready. I ducked under his blade, slashing across his ribs. He snarled, pivoted, came at me with a brutal overhead strike.

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