Arizona
The black and white tiles are littered with shattered glass, crystal, and tracked with dirt. Every step makes a crunching noise as he crosses the foyer, his heel grinding into the shattered allusions of decadence and perfection. He pauses in a doorway to survey his men rifling through drawers and pulling objects out of cabinets.
In the depths of this desert, he has never felt so cold.
One of his men catches his eye and pauses. He nods, encouraging them to continue as he walks deeper into the mansion. The grandeur echoes the opulence of the architectural styles found in central-eastern Europe but it feels macabre, a grotesque mocking of the places he loves and calls home.
This place...this place was the fourth circle of hell and this mansion was hells hall.
'Here, too, I saw a nation of lost souls,
far more than were above: they strained their chests
against enormous weights, and with mad howls
rolled them at one another...'
Another of people pass him carrying a box and murmur greeting to him but words cannot reach him. They'd been instructed to gather anything of value, information, files, and data. Everything else would be left. If any of his people thought it worth their while to lift things of material value he wouldn't begrudge them. If they wanted to take things from this cursed house then that was their cross to bear.
He makes it to the dining room and surveys the large oak table. It gleams in the dim light and he wonders why two, three, maybe four people would sit at such a large obstruction. Dining is a thing of togetherness but this table didn't serve that purpose. It kept each individual in their place, firmly alone, and to earn a seat at this table would mean to have a strong stomach, a strong will. This was not a place a loving family gathered.
If they couldn't love each other then what shred of hope could souls enslaved here have? If these people could look at their partner, son, sister with nothing but cold dignity and the only feeling in their chest being a quiet concern for the games at play – then what horrors would they bring down on those they deemed beneath them? Lesser beings who's divine purpose is to serve their gifted masters. Stealing them out of their lives to put them in their proper place.
A chill, somehow colder than his blood, creeps over his neck.
He moves on, down a short corridor and to an open door where he steps down into a kitchen. Disturbed but not by his people...the remnants of a meal preparation covering the surfaces. Idly he starts going through the drawers and the cupboards and can almost believe it's an ordinary place of ordinary function... until he opens the cabinet homing glasses. On the top shelf is an old notebook. His gloved hand stretches up and pulls it down.
He flips through the pages, frowning at the lists and precise weights of food. Not recipes...inventory. A catalogue to keep track of everything used for the King and Queen of this hell. Insurance that not one measly thing would go without count.
'Then in haste
they rolled them back, one party shouting out:
"Why do you hoard?" and the other: "Why do you waste?"'
It had been a long time since he'd been in this void, a dark place between emotions, a place where words and feelings are lost to him. He keeps hold of the notebook as he crosses the kitchen and opens the door to the outside.
Stepping out into the dry and hot night air makes the hair on his neck stand up. Another grotesque masquerade of a place dear to his heart but the smells is wrong. The climate might impersonate Ankara but it does so poorly. His homeland is his heaven and this place...this place was evil.
He looks out across the yard and where the dusty shore breaks into the sea of berry bushes. They showed signs of not being carefully pruned and cared for since Dashkov's liberation. To his left in the yard is a large wooden gate that would lead into an orchard.
Distantly he hears footsteps approaching and beyond that the quiet activity in the night, the sound coming back like the frequency has been adjusted.
He knows who it is without having to turn.
"Is she here?" His voice is quiet, loaded, the silence in the eye of a storm.
Mikhail Tanner senses it. "It's hard to be certain but I think so. You will need to see for yourself. What's that?"
He looks down at the notebook in his grasp and wordlessly passes it to Mikhail. The quiet rustle of pages joins the night's activity as he surveys the right side of the yard beyond his friend. A structure, a barn, sits like a sore on the edge of the yard. Out of place. A compilation of different strips of wood bleached and chipped in places. A hastily thrown up cage that cannot be seen from the front of the estate.
Beside the barn a white tent has been erected, a mocking satire to it's neighbour.
He knows inside them there are rows of beds, sectioned off for some semblance of privacy. He knows there's an outside shower set up at the rear of the barn as the individuals here won't enter the house because they're terrified. He knows that most of the souls had chosen to sleep in the barn, wary and skittish of the new regime. Hoarding food because it had to be withheld sooner or later, the next meal isn't promised even though the routine has been the same for months.
He feels like he's swaying but he remains rigid.
Mikhail sighs heavily, as emotional as he'd allow himself to be. His second in command hands back the notebookand he slides it inside his jacket.
The reports detailed three meals were provided, enough calories to keep a person alive. Basic sickness was cared for when presented. Outbursts 'subdued'. These details allowed you to cast your own cultivated image on the situation but between the lines the reality is very clear. These people are not cared for, they are attended to.
A band-aid on a gaping wound, that is Dashkov's kindness.
"Sir?" Mikhail says again.
He's been talking to him but words had just joined the other sounds, not distinguishable from the ringing in his head. He drags his gaze to Mikhail's who repeats his question.
"Kaja and Marcus are with them now but Robert has asked for you."
"Robert?" He hears his voice like a strangers but it must have left his lips.
Mikhail nods stiffly and looks past him. "He's on the orchard path with Alden. He said…"
It never boded well when Robert said something Mikhail found difficult to repeat. With effort he hauls himself fully into the present, his responsibilities hardening him.
"What?" Lightening cracks in his tone.
"He said death walks there."
He inhales deeply, the balmy air brushing into his lungs. He looks past Mikhail to the two structures and he cannot allow himself to think about the implications of his past choices. The things he had once said and not meant...
He moves toward the orchard, trying to turn his mind away from the barn as he had his back. Tries not to think of her being pregnant here, of his child being born into dust and dirt, a childhood inside a pen where she was starved, abused, neglected and -
His gloved hand unlatches the gate and Mikhail follows him into the dark. There are no lights in the orchard bar the faint flicker of wards between shadows in the distance. They find the two men bathed in moonlight on the wide path between treebanks. A few paces from them he senses a small shift in the atmosphere, as small as the drop in temperature just before the rain. The change sparks his sixth sense, his affinity to living elements around him, and makes it coil.
Death walks here.
The sixth sense blends into the others, amplifying them. He can taste the tang of apples not yet ripe, feel the steady exhale of the barked lungs around them, and the harmony between the flow of life of the orchard but beneath...beneath the grass and roots….there is something else.
Something wrong.
This place of flourish is home to something that does not belong, something out of harmony and stronger than the rot of fallen fruit.
"Do you feel it?" Robert asks quietly, not looking back at him.
"I sense something. Alden?"
Alden's connection to his elemental gift is stronger than any earth user he has ever met. If there is something wrong here then he would know, not just feel or sense.
Alden works his mouth as if there's a sour taste in it. "There are graves."
He didn't think it was possible but another frigid wave crashes over him, sending him spinning, not knowing what way the surface is.
"Can you tell how many?" He hears himself say.
"They are not at peace." Robert says, stepping back. His tawny eyes flick around, seeing things no one else can. Mikhail places a light hand on his shoulder.
Alden shakes his head. "No, but I can't...I cannot go further to find out."
He understands why. The taste of rot is on his tongue and becoming stronger. Alden must be close to vomiting.
"We cannot leave them like this." Robert says.
"When could you feel this?" He says to Alden who takes a step back.
"In the drive. I felt a strange pull toward here." The intricacy of nature when it surrounds you is like a perfectly woven blanket of life, everything in harmony and crossing correctly but death...death is like a plucked thread. An interruption to the course of things and it beckons. "Did you not?"
He had been too focused on subduing the Guardian's placed here and fighting nineteen years of guilt and questions and hatred pressing in. Every strike of his cane meeting an opponent beat it back, holding it at bay. Those jaded people, sent here for an easy job of overseeing welfare, were not the enemy. The real enemies had been relieved of their positions by Dashkov and scattered elsewhere, not suffering the consequences they deserved. Not yet.
"No. My focus was elsewhere" He answers and then asks Robert. "Would Victor have felt it, do you think?" Mikhail gives Robert a gentle nudge, drawing him back to the conversation. "Would Victor have felt this from the drive?"
"Perhaps. Yes, I think so."
The cold is beginning to burn inside him.
"I can't be here any more." Robert says in a blaze of panic. He holds out his hands as if trying to comfort what they cannot see. "I am more than sorry than I can say."
He breaks past Mikhail and back toward the yard. Alden follows.
The taste of rot and decay is filling up his head and twisting his stomach. He doubles over, finally allowing the control to slip now only Mikhail is there to witness. It isn't just the sour corrosion filming his tongue it's the knowledge of this place finally crashing into him, moving him out of the void and forcing him to face the truths.
And there is still so much he didn't know. He had yet to hear testimonials or face the people kept here. Every piece of information gathered so far has prevented him from finding sleep or peace, and he deserved it. Two ghosts followed his thoughts until he circled back to them. Two ghosts aggrieved for protection he didn't provide from dangers he hadn't seen.
And this cold rage, this living destruction, is beginning to fill him and colour every thought and instinct. With every bit of knowledge gained its need to destroy is gains more momentum.
The two ghosts flash behind his eyes and he heaves.
Mikhail waits, doesn't move or speak to him. Murmuring instruction into his earpiece as a question filters through.
He straightens and runs a hand down over his jacket, feeling the weight of that notebook. He pulls a mint from his pocket as he turns abruptly and follows his men. Mikhail falls into step beside him.
"Excavate the area."
"I can stay and oversee it." Mikhail replies.
"No. I need you with me." He needs a second set of ears and eyes, to hear and see without consuming rage. He needs someone to reason when he could be blind. He needs Mikhail's reliable and trustworthy presence, especially for the days ahead. "Assign Marcus and Leks."
Marcus Finch and Leks Kask have seen some of the most ungodly things in this world. They were there there the night of the Zeklos massacre. He has confidence they could head this task.
"As you wish."
They move across the yard and pass the moving shadows of his people. Dead psi hounds have been dragged onto the dirt. A woman sits a short distance from their carcasses having her arm sewed up as she glares at them.
A liberated place where the hounds of hell remained. What had Dashkov done for this place bar to remove its rulers? Remove them and place them where he needed them to be. His pawns, his puppets, his means to an end.
He stalks past, gaze trained ahead on the structures where there's more flurry of activity. The Guardian's left in charge of this place had been rounded up and subdued on the front-drive. The interrogation was underway before the next step. Mikhail should be overseeing it.
"Go and make sure things are running smoothly at the front." He tells him, digging into himself for the nerve he knew he possessed, had honed and nurtured these past years.
His second pulls him to a stop and he looks down at his hand. Mikhail doesn't move it. "Be careful. She is unpredictable. The reports -"
"I know what the reports say." He snaps. Mikhail doesn't flinch but he feels the eyes of others flit to them. "I have read every detail provided."
Mikhail removes his grip but watches him levelly. When he speaks his voice has dropped lower so as not to share delicate information that only he, Robert, and Marcus know. "Unpredictable. Traumatised. You could never, in any lifetime, be prepared to meet her again like this or she you. I am saying be careful not just for your sake but for hers."
The words hang between them in the warm air.
Finally, he says, low and controlled. "Go and ensure we have everything they can give us."
A beat passes before Mikhail nods and stalks away.
He looks back to the barn and this time he sways where he stands unnoticed by the activity filtering around him.
He stands there and this place presses into him. The musky smell of creosote, the sweet acidic taste of blueberries, and behind it the crisp sugar of apples but under this, hiding is that festering wound. That undercurrent of rot and decay, overturning his stomach.
And she had been here for almost nineteen years.
She had been here and she had given birth, here. Here, where Psi hounds corralled them like livestock. Corpses are buried in the orchard where their child would have walked and worked, labouring over apples to be plucked and sold to a prized cider mill, blueberries to a local upscale winery. The profit of the efforts is a minuscule amount, not necessary. A mere drop in the ever-flowing river of Ozera wealth.
He doesn't make the conscious decision to start walking but he is, reaching the barn doors and one of his warriors is talking to him. Most understand that they are leaving, Robert is helping placate those whose terror has spiked at the commotion and the information they will be getting into vehicles to move. One had become violent in their fear and compulsion has been used to soothe them.
He had shared the weekly reports sent to Dashkov with his people. They believed tonight was a salvation mission, another evil they were sworn to fight. His people didn't know of his connection here – only Robert, Marcus, and Mikhail knew the truth. The men he trusted the most, the spirit user, the ex-alchemist, and his second. They had been with him the longest.
He had not told them that this movement, the world they were fighting to build, had been an idea born from whispered conversations over damson gin with the woman held prisoner here.
A prisoner of war before it had even begun.
He had failed her.
He had failed her over and over again.
He says her name to the Dhampir woman with cropped hair and she points inside, 'at the back'.
He steps inside the barn where the night's odour changes to dry wood, sweat, and faint traces of mould. Cots have been erected against the walls and he passes the first few slowly, recalling how some had hidden their food beneath the mattresses. This was not mercy or philanthropy, this scene made him think of makeshift refugee camps or old war infirmaries. Not the efforts of a man with all the world's resources at his disposal.
He continues the walk and focuses on a tattered sheet hanging from a low beam,
It's silent, still and the material moves in the phantom breeze beckoning him forward. Beckoning him to face his mistakes. The tip of his cane reaches out to push it aside when there's a flicker in his mind.
'Robert.' He warns internally.
'I won't listen but in case you get overwhelmed I can-'
'No.'
'You don't have to do this alone.'
'Yes, I do.'
And he shuts him out, a barrier pulled around his mind and leaving Robert on the outside. Tonight will cost Robert enough and he will not add to the weight of it.
The cane lifts the sheet and he ducks under it. In the dimness he makes out an old bedroll, so worn it is almost level with the ground, a pair of battered tennis shoes, a book splayed like it's been thrown and another hospital cot in the corner. More food rots in but it hasn't been hidden, it's been abandoned.
He takes a few steps forward and lifts the book, careful of its worn spine and pages. A dictionary. He turns a few pages finding words underlined and cramped handwriting in the margins.
A small noise, an intake of breath with a shallow rattle to it. His gaze flicks around the room until it settles on the space between the cot and the wall.
Wedged into the cramped gap is a woman but it's not her, it's not the woman he knew. It cannot be her.
She's too thin, too slight, her hair too dull, the curls limp. Her face is hidden, turned into the wall as her fingers grip faded red fabric.
He swallows then says quietly. "Sevgili?"
Not her name, he couldn't bring himself to that and he had never used it much in their short time together. The vast distance between himself and this woman would not be bridged by it. The term of endearment, the only woman he ever had one for, was theirs.
Her small frame remains still.
He approaches slowly and sets the book down on the mattress with his cane. He lifts the bottom rail of the bed, gently pulling it out to widen the gap.
He moves closer and kneels. "Sevgili?"
A tremor passes through her and she mumbles something that he thinks is 'go away'. And he's still in the in-between place of disbelief and desperation. Is this the wild girl whose hair caught fire in the sun and always had a laugh playing around her lips?
He wishes there was more light but he didn't dare shine one.
"Sevgili, it's Ibrahim." He says softly.
The skin on the back of her hands is like paper. Tendons and knuckles almost puncture through. The eye of the storm he'd found himself in is shifting rapidly, ready to take hold of him.
She lifts her chin a fraction and he realises the item in her clutches is a shirt.
"You're not real." Her voice is monotone, not pulling on any memory.
"I am real." He responds. "And we are going to leave this place."
In the silence, he thinks she might be considering this and he wills her to look at him because he dares not touch her, but her chin dips and she repeats "you're not real".
Desperation claws up his throat and he swallows against it. He reaches into his jacket and pulls out the talisman he hopes will bring her back.
He moves forward in his crouch hoping the gold catches her eye. "I gave this to you in Cappadocia, when you thought you might find hidden treasure in the catacombs. I gave it to you on that beach when the hot air balloons began to sink across the horizon at sunset. Do you remember?"
"You're not here." She repeats but pain thins her words and his heart cracks.
"I am here and I am not going to leave without you." He inches closer with the strip of gold dangling from his gloved hand.
Slowly one hand on the red shirt unfastens and turns over. Carefully he sets the pendant into her open palm, and hears her sharp intake of breath. The chain slips out of his grasp as she draws it to her.
"I am here." He repeats louder. "Sevgili, I am here."
She shakes her head and he almost begs her to look at him. "I gave this to her. You can't have it. You can't be here."
He exhales and feels like he's being crushed from the inside out. "To our daughter, to Rose."
She lifts her head and he almost falls back. Her cheekbones are sharp where her face used to be full. Freckles peppered across the bridge of her nose, tan starbursts scattered across the pale cream of her skin. Her lips are dry and cracked, weighed with such terrible sadness that not even the ghost of laughter can be found there. Laughter had always played around her lips, had been a huge part of her essence, her ability to take nothing and no one seriously, not even herself.
And they had stripped it from her, stripped it all from her, everything she was, everything she could have been. Stripped her down to flesh and bone.
Little by little the Ozera's had killed her.
Her hazel eyes don't find him, they are not focused entirely on the present.
"He promised he would keep her safe." She says, more to herself than him.
The man's name rises like bile in his throat along with the memory of how he first met his daughter. "Dashkov still has her but I will get her back."
"This is not real." She repeats, voice contorted with grief. She turns her face away from the phantom sent to torture her. In the early months, even years, she had hoped, resorted to prayer, and he had not come. He had not come now.
"Sevgili. This is real and I am taking you from this place."
She doesn't respond and his patience frays.
He takes his phone from his pocket and she flinches at the movement. The storm continues to move through him, almost out of the eye.
He opens the images, photos of his daughter, the first one with the Dashkov and Dragormir girls.
When he had met her in Estonia he had known the girl in Dashkov's company had been a slave, been leverage for something and he had planned to find out where she had been kept. Planned to bring karma back on the Ozera's for this crime against humanity but he hadn't known and hadn't felt any recognition of paternity. It might have been because he was too livid that Dashkov was willing to use someone as collateral, masquerading as the voice of reason among the coalition and royals.
He had looked at the girl and saw the hardship marked on her, despite being out of hell for a matter of weeks. If he had seen her, if he could imagine what she had looked like when she lived here, how she endured, how she suffered...he might have done more than fight back in that bar.
It was not meant to have happened the way it did. He had anticipated a fight but not of that magnitude, he expected resistance but not a battle, had not expected that Guardian to risk his own life to hold onto her.
His daughter. They were holding onto his daughter.
He holds the screen in her eyeline, the light casting over her face and he almost flinches.
Dull red, threads of silver and faded stars.
She leans toward it, eyes focusing on the image. She moves unconsciously, fingers taking the rectangle from his and he's careful not to touch her. No one would touch her again without her permission.
Her dry lips part and he suppresses the urge to call for water. Instead, he focuses on the change in her expression, a breath of life whispering across it.
Her hazel eyes try to find the familiar in the stranger, the yearning in her cutting to the bone and warring with the most beautiful sensation of relief. The same mix of emotions that had rushed through her when she first heard her baby cry and needed her safe in her arms, now that she wasn't safe inside her body.
Carefully he moves a finger toward the screen and swipes. Her breath catches at the new image. Rose alone, laughing at someone behind the camera. Chocolate eyes bright, cheeks pink and her dark hair a shiny waterfall over her shoulders.
"That's her." She breathes.
He had poured over the images, detailing the transformation in each one as his daughter began to thrive.
He swallows. "Yes." Footsteps approach and the sheet is pulled up by Mikhail. Ibrahim holds up his palm to halt whatever he was going to say. "I have a man in Dashkov's house. He is watching over her." He says softly and then rises
Mikhail inclines his head toward him so only he can hear. "Sunrise is in one hour. The first car has left." Taking people to the care and treatment they need. "Oksana is waiting for them. Is the plan still the same?"
"Yes. With some adjustments. The orchard must be kept clear."
"Alden has air elementals ready." Whatever he is about to say next is halted as his navy eyes flick over his shoulder.
Janine Hathaway is standing and that wave crashes over him again. Each stark detail is another rush of disorientation. She's as short he remembers but the thinness of her makes her seem even smaller. Her hair's grown out but it's impossible to know how long it is now as it's tied back in a knot. She holds his phone, her necklace, and the red shirt.
But her eyes, golden whiskey when the sun lights them, are fixed on him.
"You're here." She says.
He senses Mikhail fall back behind the sheet and he reminds himself that medical has seen her.
"I am."
Conflict crosses her face as she fights to surface. "And we're leaving?"
"Yes."
Unwillingly she's yanked into the past and she winces. "They took her from me and I couldn't do anything. And she said she was going to be his Bloodwhore. She said that's what they were going to do with her but that Guardian swore to me by a -"
Ibrahim steps toward her and the movement silences her. "She is unharmed."
Her hazel eyes sharpen and she looks down at the gold in her hands. "I told her to survive."
"She has as you have." He takes another small step toward her, noting the purplish-blue tint to the back of her hands. "Like you always have." He turns and with the cane he lifts the sheet, a canopy leading back to the world. "And you will walk out now and leave this place behind."
He asks her to go against almost nineteen years of abuse, order, rules, and fears ingrained to be truths – nobody leaves this place.
But Janine Hathaway takes one unsure step forward, then another until she's under the veil. She meets his eyes and when she speaks it's an order. "Rosemarie…bring her to me."
In the quiet of the approaching dawn, he vows. "I will."
She sways slightly and his hands clench. She says their daughters' name again and looks at the treasures in her grasp. If this is a dream then she doesn't want to fight it, let it sweep her along into fanciful places where she can reunite with her ghosts.
She walks out from under the sheet and through the barn with Ibrahim at her back.
Mikhail and Robert wait outside.
"I know your face." Janine murmurs.
Robert smiles. "You know it from dreaming. I hope I brought you some peace."
He watches Robert lead her to the house, the back door where Alden waits for them. It's the last time she will enter the place. The last time she will pass through. As she disappears through the kitchen door the storm inside him shifts and he is out of the eye.
He removes his gloves.
The night becomes deathly still and quiet as the natural noises of insects cease. He moves across the dirt yard to the break where the berry bushes begin.
"Abe." Mikhail says quietly as groans and deep creaking sounds from the treeline.
Birds take flight into the lightning sky.
He kneels and presses his palms to the ground.
For so long the Moroi have used their gifts as parlour tricks and worn their elements like costume jewellery. Gifts that if honed and hammered and forged are a force more deadly than any blade or weapon of silver.
He hears Mikhail's heavy exhale and around him the balmy air changes. He hears more birds take flight, their squawks breaking past the surge of the hurricane funnelling through him into the earth. The hurricane churns and he delves deeper into the well of his element.
Let hell reveal its true face.
The guilt and the rage seep into the earth, parching the soil and scouring away life. He feels the rapid decay of the bushes, feels them wither and die, the whisper of death over the berries, once sweet becoming sour. The trees bordering this field groan, a parasite raging through the wood and causing it to dry and crack. Leaves wilt and fall from branches. The grass is no longer there to catch their corpses as it yellows and collapses.
His rage is a plague.
'A rapid bolt will rend the clouds apart,
and every single White be seared by wounds.
I tell you this. I want it all to hurt...'
Nothing will grow here again.
His brown eyes look out at the landscape of bleached bark and twigs, the fallen and the curled leaves. The soil is now as pale as the dust in the yard. The sea of berry bushes a sea of skeletal spindles, bony fingers reaching blindly toward the sky, reaching for salvation that would not come. He had not just touched the treeline but gone deeper into the forest than he intended. The sentries that guard this perimeter are now petrified and bare.
He tilts his head back and inhales the putrid smell of decay.
He imagines the pride and arrogance the Ozera's held looking out from their ivory tower over this place. The power they wielded like cruel children with a magnifying glass, and the meticulous standard they set for their slaves. Let them come back and see what they have reaped.
"Is it doused?" He asks quietly as he stands.
"Yes." Mikhail responds, eyes roaming over the wasteland.
"Good." He turns on his heel and after a moment Mikhail follows.
They walk back through Hell's hall, glass and crystal crunching underfoot. He steps over photos and paintings, silverware, and books. They stride back through the black and white foyer, paper soaked and lining the walls with precision. Regal portraits of the last three generations of Ozera's have been slashed and defaced. He lingers in front of one, regarding the man with salt and pepper hair and eyes of burning ice, somehow captured precisely. If he weren't already dead then would have taken his time making him beg to be.
In the large drive, the men posted here kneel the furthest away. Four of his people guard them. From their slackened expressions the compulsion is already in effect. Robert and Janine must already be in the car, waiting. The last minivan has gone, taking the last survivors away from this place.
A pity he thinks, that they won't see what becomes of this place.
He takes the notebook from his pocket and Mikhail offers him a lighter.
"Here pity only lives when it is dead." He murmurs, clicking the flame to life.
He holds the flame to the notebook, watching the pages curl before they catch. He tosses the token of cruelty into the foyer, let it be the catalyst of atonement.
Fire ignites and spreads like a creature ravenous to devour. The heat presses into him and urges him back but he doesn't move until the blaze is blinding and smoke has begun to thickly roll against the chandelier.
He strides away with the heat licking at his back and toward his people. Two remaining fire elementals have their attention trained ahead and when he and Mikhail are clear they unleash their fury. The windows explode as the fire eats the house from the inside out.
He watches and feels the effort from the air elementals stationed near the orchard, keeping it clear of the fire.
Silently they watch hell burn.
When the Arizona sun crests the sky and smoke curls thickly in the air, the remaining Guardians rise from where they've knelt for the past few hours. The amble without seeing the true nature of their surroundings. They move past the blackened wreckage and into the dead land behind it. They take the abandoned cots and lie in them until they need to eat or relieve themselves.
They have no memory of who has been and gone, no notion of those now who have finally escaped but in a few days when the compulsion lifts from the first man, he will cock his head in question at the words scored into the earth.
'Abandon all hope, you who enter here.'