Across the room, the last bloodwright standing was the very picture of her father’s rage but so much quicker, long distance devastating. She was no longer a girl, no longer Riki, replaced by a snarling feral shriek of grief when she laid another cluster of darts so locust plague thick across her sightline that nine of them struck true, no less than five shredding through her target’s thigh. They found bone to attach themselves to, crude projectiles transformed into living barnacles in lapsed time, calcifying tongues flaying muscle from femur, digging into hairline fractures till they could taste the marrow of the sergeant’s bones.

A flash of dying light caught the corner of Eoran’s eye like an albino glimmer cutting fractions from the molecularity of their shared air. The boy’s head snapped sideways, but it had always been too late. A man flew into the room from the stairwell, hair a tear of night against the forever fraying day, […]

As he waited, Eoran’s mind implored him to prepare himself for eventualities. It urged him to not ignore the plethora of possibility and every reality the early evening held close to its mirage-mottled breast. The boy found that his positivity tended to be a resilient thing. His parents found him foolish in how he shirked any duty deigned beneath him under the assumption that it would just work out. So, then, why was he being so negative? Why were his lungs heavy with sentiments best collected by necrographers?