Chapter 28: Shreds
They’re not even people anymore, not really. They’re shreds of what was: a broken shriek, the gnawing of a bottomless hunger, the reflexive grasping of tendons long since severed.
If I hadn’t run the undead gauntlet of the Mara’s prey before, this would be so much worse. But the edges of my own worlds have been bordered with the dead for so long now. At least these fragments are barely identifiable as human. They’re not waiting here to torture me, they’re simply lashing out in self-protection. The ground gold mixed into their undoing keeps them here, cementing them into place as they tear one another into continually lesser bits of wounded flesh and spirit.
It doesn’t burn them, though, not like it would my kind. Not like it does me. This strange half-existence, or ma
