The Far Far Better Thing by Auston Habershaw

Author:Auston Habershaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

Myreon the Destroyer

Myreon emerged from the boardinghouse with the ashes of twenty men covering her hands. Twenty of her own men. Men who had cast off their humanity and become beasts. She screamed.

Two hours had passed since she learned of her army’s descent into madness. Two hours of her running up and down the streets, screaming commands at looters and lynch mobs. The first groups she met had the decency to look ashamed—to hang their heads and leave their beaten victims on the street. But she was only one woman, mage or not. When she left, the men came back.

She talked to some of them. Interrogated them in alleys at the point of her glowing staff. She asked them why. The responses varied, but all had a central theme: These people were hoarding food, these people were harboring the enemy, these people betrayed us . . .

These people . . .

There was no getting around those two words. The good men of the White Army—the revolutionaries Myreon had led across the country to rid it of evil and injustice—had in them the same malice she was trying to stamp out. Appeals to the cause fell on deaf ears and empty stomachs, and all they cared about was that Ayventry had more than they did, and that they got it by helping Sahand. And now the city would be made to pay.

Then there was the boardinghouse. The housemaster had opened his doors to widows and orphaned girls—women with no one to guard them and nowhere to go. He had barred his doors and boarded his windows and kept them all quiet in the dark, waiting for the chaos outside to end. And then someone had found them.

The housemaster put up a fight and killed a man. He died shortly thereafter, and the blood of their comrade gave the hungry, desperate men of the White Army every excuse they needed. Word spread—a house full of Ayventry whores, ready for the taking. That was how Myreon had come upon it. Three floors of rape, of screaming women, of weeping girls beaten bloody by weapons intended for Delloran mercenaries. Weapons paid for by Myreon’s own gold.

It was all Myreon could take. The Fey filled her like a volcanic eruption, and she cleansed the house of every man in a white tabard, burning them to the bone, one by one. There was nothing they could do to stop her—she was inevitable as death.

This battle had ceased to be a battle. This was no longer war. Myreon began to doubt whether she had ever actually known what war truly was. She wondered if any of these people had known. Horror and pain and senseless violence and pointless suffering and the blood of children. If only I’d known this would happen.

Myreon leaned against a wall in an alley and sank to the ground, head in her hands, weeping. Tyvian told me. He told me and I didn’t listen. This was what he wanted to stop. This is what he died to prevent.

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