The teleport home ended wrong.

 

Aithne knew it before her feet even found the ground. Before the pressure in her skull faded, before the world finished stitching itself back together.

 

There was a smell where there should not have been one -- smoke, thick and oily, carrying the bitter tang of burned hair and blood. Heat licked her cheeks as if the air itself were alive and angry.

 

She staggered one step forward and stopped.

 

The Kwåim was gone.

 

Not gone -- not erased -- but ruined in the way only violence could ruin something. Huts lay collapsed inward like broken ribs, their thatched roofs burned to blackened frames. Fires still crawled across the ground, devouring what little remained, orange tongues snapping and hissing as they fed on spilled oil and splintered wood. The central fire pit had become a crater of glowing coals and charred bones.

 

Bodies were everywhere.

 

Orcs lay where they had fallen -- near doorways, beside overturned tables, half‑buried beneath collapsed walls. Deep slashes crossed green skin. Not the clean lines of blades, but the ragged gouges of claws and teeth. Some corpses were torn nearly in half, ribs pried open as if something had reached inside and pulled. Others were flung so hard into posts or stone that their bones had burst through muscle.

 

Aithne felt her breath catch in her chest.

 

Chyehye swore, soft but vicious, her hand already moving to a blade that had no enemy left to meet. Nyatt stood frozen, eyes wide and glassy as he stared at the destruction, while Merks’ mouth hung slightly open, his face pale beneath the soot drifting through the air.

 

Aithne took a step forward and her boot slid. She looked down and recoiled as she realized she had stepped in blood -- dark, sticky, already partially congealed – and her stomach twisted.

 

This had not been a battle. There were no signs of defense, no lines of resistance. The bodies were scattered, random, torn down wherever they had been caught.

 

“This is a massacre.” Chyehye whispered the words. “What could have done this?”

 

Her words seemed to have broken Nyatt from his immobility, but only enough for him to begin to mumble, “No, no, no, no…”

 

Aithne forced herself to start moving, counting as she went without meaning to.

 

One. Two. Five. Twelve. Too many. She gave up after fifty-three.

 

Near the remains of what had once been the granary, something moved. Aithne’s hand snapped up instinctively, magic flaring half‑formed in her chest before she checked herself and forced it down. She stepped closer, boots crunching over ash and bone.

 

From beneath a fallen beam, an orc’s hand emerged, trembling, smeared with blood and soot. Aithne dropped to her knees without thinking, and together, the group moved debris to uncover Dyaj’s broken body.

 

He was not dead -- his chest rose in shallow, painful breaths. One arm was bent at an unnatural angle, bone white beneath torn skin. His face was swollen, one eye nearly closed, but it was unmistakably him.

 

“Aithne,” he rasped. His voice broke on her name.

 

She swallowed hard. “Easy. Don’t move.” She started to cast her healing spell, joined a moment later by Merks’ much better one, but knew they were too late. “What happened?”

 

Dyaj coughed, a wet, painful sound. “Mwiw.” The name fell like a stone.

 

Aithne’s jaw tightened. “Tell me.”

 

Dyaj closed his remaining eye for a moment, gathering what little strength he had. When he spoke again, his voice was clearer as some of his wounds faded.

 

“It’s my fault. I knew of his penchant for breaking women. The stronger, the better. I should have put a stop to it long ago.”

 

Aithne felt a cold, sinking dread bloom in her stomach. “The werewolf woman…”

 

Dyaj nodded. “He tried to break her. She broke him instead. Then she freed her companions and…” He waved a weak hand, then coughed blood.

 

Chyehye muttered a curse under her breath while Nyatt continued his mantra of denial.

 

“They rampaged,” Dyaj said. “Didn’t matter who. Warriors, elders, children—they killed anything that moved. They didn’t stop until the Kwåim was silent.”

 

Aithne squeezed her eyes shut for a heartbeat. “And then?”

 

“They left. Ran west, into the high forest. By the time the fires died down, there was nothing left but…” He trailed off.

 

Aithne looked around again, really looked. At the familiar shapes now reduced to corpses and ash. At the places where people had laughed, argued, eaten, lived.

 

When she looked back down, Dyaj had stilled. After a moment, she reached out and closed his eyes with her hand.

 

Silence fell, heavy and oppressive, broken only by the crackle of flames and the distant collapse of a burning roof.

 

“This place is dead,” Chyehye said quietly. “There’s nothing to save.”

 

Aithne nodded. She knew it was true, but hearing it spoken made it final.

 

They spent that night and the entire next day gathering the bodies, building pyres, sending their clanmates to Malacath in small groups. The air became acrid with the scent of burned wood and flesh, but they did not stop until the last of the bodies had flaked away to nothing. Then, wordlessly, they walked away.

 

The Kwåim did not watch them go.

 

It had already become ash.

 

 

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