The Ashes of Vane Hall
The sky over Vane Hall bruised itself purple and grey, the last light of day bleeding out behind the mountains like something mortally wounded. Elysia stood at the edge of what had once been her family's outer wall, now little more than a broken row of teeth jutting from frost-hardened earth, and let herself feel the cold before she let herself feel anything else.
Seven years. Seven years, and the ruin still smelled of smoke.
That could not be true, of course. No fire burned forever, and the one that had devoured Vane Hall had been extinguished the same night it started, drowned by rain and the tears of the few servants who'd survived to weep over the wreckage. But memory was a strange alchemist, and it had fused the scent of that night to this place so thoroughly that Elysia wondered if she would smell burning timber on her deathbed, wherever and whenever that came.
She pulled her hood lower and crossed the threshold where the gates had stood.
The courtyard greeted her in fragments—a shattered fountain here, its cherub statue missing its head; a stretch of scorched flagstone there, weeds forcing their way between the cracks like green fingers reaching up from some buried…
