The Last Heiress

Raina's povI don't know how long I stayed in that cellar. My sense of time had stopped working properly sometime around when the ceiling fell in. It might have been hours, or days. My throat was dry enough to crack, and my left arm had swollen to twice its normal size, the skin stretched tight and purple-black with bruising. The pain had stopped being a thing I experienced as an external stimulus and had become, instead, the baseline of my existence.When I finally forced myself to climb back up the stairs, it was because I realized that staying in that cellar until I died of thirst wasn't actually a survival strategy. It was just slow suicide, and I'd always been too stubborn to do anything slowly.The house was still standing, mostly. That seemed like a small miracle until I realized it was standing precisely because nothing had considered it important enough to completely destroy. The creatures had passed through, taken what they wanted, or what they thought they wanted—and move

Raina's pov The keep was smaller than I expected, but that might have been because so much of it was burning.The outer walls were still standing—thick stone, ancient but relatively unblemished by the Scourge's direct attention. But the buildings inside the walls, the structures that would have housed the garrison and stored the supplies necessary to survive a siege, were engulfed in flames. The smoke rolled across the mountainside in thick, dark waves, carrying with it the smell of burning wood and something else, something that made my stomach turn over."We can still use this," Corvin said, though she didn't sound like she entirely believed it. "The walls are intact. We can clear out the rubble, set up camp in the courtyard. The fires are already burning out—see how the smoke is lessening?"She was right about the smoke. But the reason it was lessening was because there wasn't much left to burn. As we approached the main gate, I could see bodies scattered throughout the courtyard.

Winter in the mountains is a thing of brutal beauty. The snow falls with an almost ceremonial precision, layering itself across the landscape in progressively deeper drifts. The mornings are bitter cold—cold that seeps into your bones and makes you question whether you'll ever feel warm again. But there's also a strange clarity to it, as if the cold strips away everything unnecessary and leaves you facing only what matters.Solace's training did that for us—stripped away the unnecessary and forced us to face what we actually were. Survivors, mostly. People who hadn't asked for the ability to fight, but found ourselves in a situation where that ability might be the only thing standing between us and extinction.The first week was brutal. Solace worked us through basic forms—sword work, staff fighting, archery for those with the aptitude for it. My arm, freshly healed, protested vehemently, but I pushed through it. Solace had a way of making weakness feel like personal failure, and pers

They put us in a barracks on the western side of the city—a building that had probably once housed soldiers but had been mostly cleared out to make room for refugees. There were pallets on the floor, a communal eating area, and what amounted to actual beds. After sleeping on the ground for the better part of six weeks, the pallets felt like luxury.But I couldn't sleep.Dovette lay on a pallet next to mine, and I could tell from her breathing that she wasn't sleeping either."How many do you think?" she asked quietly."The creatures? I don't know. Fifty? Hundred? More?""And we're supposed to fight them?" There was something like hysteria creeping into her voice. "We can barely fight each other, Raina. We've had, what, two months of training? Those things have been doing this for years, probably. Since the start of the world, for all we know.""I know," I said."And you're okay with that?"I thought about lying. I thought about saying yes, of course I was okay with it, of course I was