The Last Heiress
But what had been a town of maybe two thousand people was now a necropolis, a place of ghosts and ash.
Bodies lay in the streets, some still recognizable as human, others reduced to something that suggested they'd been touched by something beyond comprehension.
The smell was incredible—smoke and blood and something else, something rotten and ancient.
There were survivors, though. Not many, as I could see them moving through the ruins, picking through wreckage with the dull deliberation of people who'd moved past grief into something beyond it. An old man sat on the remains of a wall, staring at nothing. A woman knelt beside what might have been a child, though it was hard to tell.