And so the world burned. Trees that had once stood tall and proud crumbled to ashes around them, spitting blackness into the wretched air that all at once hung with smoke and blood droplets. Knotrium's skin burned; her heart rose up and beat war-drums against ribs that felt like they'd been shattered. Every inch of her hurt. The mortal agony trailed from a gaping hole inside her chest. 

Every child knew the legend. Every parent taught how losing a thrall cut some part of you away. And in all the evil of the world? All the cruelty Knotrium saw from vampire to human? She'd never believed it. Now, if death would take her, Knotrium would have welcomed it. 

As the sun set, she kept a bitter vigil by Alexei's body, counting the seconds, computing how long it would have taken her to run if she'd gone just a little bit faster, waiting a little less, stopped a little closer. 

At dawn, they gathered for an ancient funeral, one Knotrium had seen many times. Kukupici and Gavriil built a pire of the picnic tables; Edward set it alight with a match hidden in his coat pocket. The scream building up for so long against Knotrium's throat broke, and in the reddening light as Alexei turned back to the ash, she let it free; when the howls of her companions joined her, they shook even the forest with their grief. 

Maybe the sadness had cooled her. 

The well of molten rage hardened now. 

The coven had taken from her? She would take back. 

Quid pro quo. 

Knotrium would raze her brother. She would salt the ground beneath his feet and burnt what he had built until he, like her, knew that searing, bitter, breaking agony and fell on his own sword.