Chapter 17

B lood. There was so much blood. The stench was ripe in my nose as it rushed down my face by the bucket load. The rancid taste of iron flooded my mouth. I clawed at my eyes. There was too much streaming down to wipe away. I couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't breathe. I was drowning in it. It continued flowing down my neck, my chest, my legs.

"Look at what you've done," a voice hissed from the darkness behind me, like a serpent of the shadows. Still wiping away the sickeningly hot fluid gushing down my brow, I turned to face it.

"Open your eyes Elpis. Look at the destruction you've caused." Its words slithered around me in tendrils of ice.

Finally, the flow slowed enough for me to wipe the remaining drops from my face. My blurred vision, stained in crimson hues, finally focused on the bodies below me.

Hundreds of them.

No.

Thousands.

Twisted and mangled in unnatural positions. Two feet folded against the forehead of a crumpled dark haired man. Hands, broken at the wrists, coiled backwards across a woman with the same jet black hair. These had been city folk. The entire northern city was dead and rotting beneath my feet.

Sobs escaped me. Bones cracked and popped under my weight as I fell to my knees, entirely overwhelmed by the horror.

"You did this," the voice, now licking the back of my neck, whispered. I jerked my head around and stared at the lips that had produced those words.

All the air was sucked out of the darkness. My chest burned until I thought my sternum might collapse in on itself. I shook my head and stifled the desperate breaths now escaping my lips. The geometric features and pale complexion of my sister glared back at me.

Gaping black voids remained where her ice-blue eyes once were. Her complexion, once white and pure as snowfall, was a leathery, rotten grey.

"Look at all the innocence lost, Elpis. Look at them all. Look at what you've taken from them," she said, pointing her long, perfectly shaped fingernail at the bodies of our people.

"Look at what you've done to me," she hissed through a putrid breath.

This wasn't real. She couldn't be here. I couldn't have killed these people. I pressed against a broken skull to support myself from the shock. The hands beneath me were not my own. Instead of the usual short nails, claws protruded from my fingertips.

"You did this," she hissed again, rage seething through her clenched, rotten teeth.

My heart flamed against the inside of my chest. Clutching for it, I fell across the pile of bodies, my face squelching against the innards of an eviscerated city guard. The scream of horror building pressure at the top of my throat finally unleashed and echoed through the chamber.

"Look at them. Look at me. Look at what you did. What you took." Adria's voice grew into screams until it overpowered the chamber, echoing against every corner and curve of the walls. Repeating those words over and over again, she reached for a mangled body and threw it on top of me. Then another, and another, and another until I was buried beneath the still warm carcasses. I clawed and pounded at the body. My cries, muffled through dead flesh, became nothing but a murmur. Everything faded into red as the pile of innocent, slaughtered lives devoured me .