She levered herself up, her muscles knotting and twitching, her insides scoured. Panting, she found her feet and her balance. She was alive; the pain told her so. Slowly she looked around the charred circle of destruction that surrounded her, and the sullenly smouldering trees beyond. Already the dampness from yesterday's rains was overcoming the hungry tongues of flame, and the fire was subsiding gradually.

She fought to reconcile the scene with the one she had been walking through when the pain struck her, and could not. Blackened rock faces hunkered out of soil gone hard and crisp. Scorched leaves curled into skeletal fists. Trees had been split in half, roughly decapitated or smashed aside. The very suddenness of the obliteration was almost impossible to understand; she could scarcely believe she was still in the same place as she had been when she had fainted.

The mask, unharmed, lay on the ground nearby, its empty gaze

mocking. She stumbled over to it and picked it up. There was a terrible weariness in her body, a hazy blanket over her senses that smothered her towards sleep or unconsciousness or death – she was not sure which, and welcomed all equally.

Her eyes fell upon the crumpled white shape lying nearby. Numb, she staggered over to it, absently stuffing the mask into her belt as she went.

It was Asara. She lay strewn in a hollow where she had been thrown by the blast. One side of her had caught the brunt, evidently. Her robe was seared, her hair burned and smoking. Her hand and cheek were scarred terribly. She lay limp and still.

Kaiku began to tremble. She backed away, tears blurring her eyes, her fingers dragging at her face as if she might pull the flesh off and find the old Kaiku underneath, the one that had existed only yesterday, before chaos and madness took her in a stranglehold. Before she had lost her family. Before she had killed her handmaiden.