Sous walked through the smoking palace grounds with the slow, deliberate stride of something that had forgotten how to feel pain. The devoured power thrummed inside her chest like a second, larger heart, violet and blue lights flickering beneath her skin whenever she breathed.
Blood no longer dripped from her wounds; they had sealed into black scars that glowed faintly, as though Zhiliary's seals now lived in her flesh. Every footstep cracked stone. Every exhale carried the scent of burnt meat.
She called their names once, voice low, layered with the echo of eight devoured muzzles.
"Kara. Tany." She knew Shadow, Faye, and Pamoen were present, but where was Kara and Tany?
Only wind answered, threading through broken colonnades and toppled statues.
She moved faster; she had to move faster for these women whom she loved, each of them differently though.
The great hall where she had last seen them lay open to the sky, roof collapsed inward, moon-oak beams charred to splinters. Sous stepped over fallen banners and shattered pixie glass, claws scraping grooves in marble.
Bodies of Apex guards and palace wolves lay twisted where the battle had thrown them, but none wore Kara's colors, none carried Tany's scent beneath the overwhelming reek of Zhiliary's rot.
She tore aside a collapsed archway with one hand, stone exploding into dust. Nothing beneath except more corpses and silence.
"Kara!"
The name cracked across the ruins, deep enough to rattle loose bricks from distant towers.
She searched the eastern wing where the Omegas had kept their quarters when Apex took over the palace from the pixies. Walls had pancaked into rubble.
Sous dug with bare hands, now no longer a titan but her regular form, hurling slabs the size of wagons aside, sending up clouds of choking dust. She uncovered beds crushed flat, tapestries shredded, a child's wooden toy wolf snapped in half.
No trace of silver nor amber hair.
She moved to the gardens next. Every tree lay flattened, earth gouged into canyons by the titans' battle. Sous walked the length of the devastation, hands dragging, eyes scanning every shadow.
She overturned fountains, split petrified trunks, scattered ash that had once been flowers. Nothing. Not a ribbon, not a scrap of cloth, not a single drop of blood that carried their scent.
Her chest tightened, an ache separate from the devoured power roaring inside her.
She climbed the broken western tower, the one that once overlooked the entire valley. From the top she could see for miles: the palace a gutted carcass, forests flattened in radiating rings, the horizon scarred by smoke.
She searched every road, every treeline, every distant glint that might have been armor or hair catching sunlight.
Sous stood motionless until the sun climbed higher and burned the blood on her skin into crust. The wind carried only ash and silence.
She dropped to her knees among the shattered crenellations, hands digging into stone until it bled dust. The thing inside her (Zhiliary's leftover hunger, or her own grief, she no longer knew) howled without sound.
Power enough to devour gods pulsed uselessly in her veins while the two people she had come back for were simply gone.
Sous pressed her forehead to the broken stone and spoke to the empty air, voice raw and small beneath the monster she had become.
"Where are they?"
Sous descended the tower in silence, her hands carving fresh grooves down the inner wall where stairs had once stood. Each landing she passed revealed more absence: a child's shoe half buried under rubble, a torn Omega cloak snagged on rebar, a broken bow that might have belong to someone. She touched none of it. It wasnt her to touch.
She crossed the inner keep, the part that had housed the witch's laboratories. The iron doors hung twisted off their hinges, runes still flickering with dying crimson light. Inside, cages lay open and empty, chains slick with old blood.
Sous stepped over the corpse of a guard whose face had been chewed away, and paused at a circle of melted stone where something large had burned from the inside out.
The stench of Zhiliary's seals lingered, thick and cloying, but beneath it she caught the faintest trace of traces: Kara's scent, pine smoke and warm milk, gone cold hours ago.
The trail led down spiral stairs into the undercroft, past vaults cracked open and emptied of their relics. The scent grew stronger, then vanished abruptly at a wall that had not existed yesterday.
Fresh stone, seamless, sealed with the same violet sigils that now crawled beneath Sous's own skin. She pressed a hand to the surface. The sigils flared in recognition, then drank the drop of her blood that welled up and parted like theater curtains.
Beyond lay a chamber, a mystery.
The floor was a mirror of black glass, reflecting the ruined ceiling far above. In the center stood a single circle of salt and bone dust, broken.
Inside the circle: two sets of footprints leading nowhere, the witch's?
Sous knelt for a better look.
She touched the salt line with reverence, afraid to disturb it, afraid to believe what it meant. The witch had taken them. Not Zhiliary.
The witch who had gifted the seals in the first place, the same ancient creature Faye and Abigail had hunted across dimensions. She had come back for her payment, or her revenge, or simply to finish what she started centuries ago.
Sous rose slowly.
The second heart inside her chest beat once, hard, in perfect rhythm with the violet sigils that now pulsed across the chamber walls like veins. Somewhere beyond this world, Kara and Tany were alive. She felt it the way a wolf feels the moon even through storm clouds.
She turned and walked out of the chamber, out of the palace, out of the ruins entirely. Each step cracked the earth a little deeper. The devoured power coiled, eager, tasting the promise of new prey.
On her way out, she met with Shadow, Faye, and Pamoen. She stared at Faye who nodded her head at the Alpha.
"They're with the witch," the priestess said.