The closer I got to the heart of the territory, the heavier the air became. It wasn't just smoke or dust. It was something older, sourer, like the earth itself had grown tired and started to rot. My boots crunched over brittle leaves that should have been green but looked like someone had drained the color out of them with a bucket of bleach. Even the trees bent wrong, their branches pointing down instead of up, like they had given up on life and wanted to bury themselves in the dirt.
"Home sweet home," I muttered, though my chest tightened as I said it. The words felt like a joke I didn't really want to tell.
The Vale was gone, collapsed behind me like an old tent. Orrin had warned me things wouldn't be the same when I came back. He didn't exactly say, "By the way, Luciana, your house will look like it got into a fistfight with a storm and lost." But maybe I should've expected it.
Still, nothing prepared me for what I saw when I finally stood on the ridge overlooking our land.
