The Price Of Fate
Because if I looked at it fully, I was afraid something inside me would crack in a way I could not repair before we reached the barrier.
The houses were blackened. Some still stood, but only in the stubborn way ruins stood when fire had eaten everything soft inside them. Others had collapsed into heaps of charred wood and stone. Trees had been split open, their trunks hollowed by flame, branches reaching upward like hands that had burned before they could pray. A market stall near the road had been crushed completely. Fruit lay scattered and rotting in the dirt, mixed with ash, blood, and torn fabric. Edenwood had not been attacked. It had been erased. That was the word that came to me, and