[ALARIC]

Two years. Two goddamn years since I saw her. The memory is a tape loop playing in the back of my skull: the gaping wound in her throat, those enlarged, lifeless eyes, her beautiful face a mask of dried blood. That long, deep gash running+ right across her dead eye. She was just red, soaked in it, and the vivid image runs and runs and runs—always ending the same way: her still, small body being dragged off by those scavenging ferals.

I couldn’t give Lana the full details that ...