Page 18 of Elven Throne

But wasn’t death supposed to also be the end of pain?

Nothing but pain existed now, lancing through her body, igniting every nerve at once, even before she tried to move.

No, she wasn’t dead. That was the good news.

She had a feeling the bad news was still waiting for her to discover it.

Her throat felt ripped open from the inside when she coughed, and her muscles cried out in excruciating protest. Somehow, through the constant burn igniting her senses, she managed to draw in a searing breath.

Why was she soheavy?

Then she realized the extra solid weight in her arms wasn’t hers…

Blinking through the agony of fully opening her eyes again, she looked down to find her arms still wrapped tightly around the healer’s body.

Not a corpse, either.

Zida, lying limp in Rebecca’s arms, would have looked convincingly dead if it weren’t for her violent shivering from head to toe and her quick, panting breaths.

They’d survived.

Rebecca forced her gaze away from the healer to take in their surroundings.

At first, the thick black smoke rising in every direction made it impossible to see much of anything. But when a gentle breeze blew across the parking lot and cleared enough of the smoke away, she got a perfectly unimpeded view.

Then she almost wished she hadn’t.

She and the healer sat in the center of a massive crater punched into the parking lot, right outside the compound’s front entrance. Though those double doors had shattered, glass shards strewn everywhere, and the metal frames hung askew on their partially remaining hinges.

Rebecca couldn’t see much more than that from down here, but what shecouldsee in the distance over the jagged, crumbling lip of the crater told her enough.

Everything had been destroyed. Chunks of brick and cement ripped from the compound building now dotted the crater’s perimeter. Some teetered on the edge of tumbling down to join the elf and the daraku who, by all rights, shouldn’t have survived.

Glass shards, strips of metal, chunks of brick, and frayed wires filled in the empty spaces, mixed with dust and rubble and scattered tree branches.

The section of forest visible from her seat in the crater looked like it had been half-demolished by a wrecking crew, half-burned to the ground.

When the wind shifted, a brief shudder wracked Rebecca too as the sour stench of ozone and dangerously concentrated magic nearly spent wafted toward her.

Shefeltthe remnants of it lingering in the air around her, in the wreckage of the blast, even in the bits of crumbled asphalt lying in the base of the crater with her.

Even the earth beneath her rippled with residual magic settling after such an incredible blast. As if the entire compound and surrounding forest, no matter how devastated, breathed a collective sigh of relief that it was finally over.

More than that, she noticed the silence. Cold. Penetrating. Absolute.

Even without being able to see across the rest of the parking lot, she knew the truth.

The griybreki swarms—the entire horde—were gone.

That was all she had time to notice before the agony of her body’s existence—the proof she still lived—screeched through her awareness again, demanding her full attention.

Rebecca sucked in a hissing gasp against the pain and tried to muffle her cry when the intensity simply became too much.

She was alive, sure, but she’d definitely been burned. Not all the way. Not out of existence, like the griybreki horde, but close enough.

A single glance at her bare arms, her shirt all but burned away, convinced her how bad it was—red and singed, most of it still smoking after the fact. Large swatches of skin, mottled with a combination of charred, blackened flesh and oozing remnants of that had melted into muscle.

Zida didn’t look any better.

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