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Ch. 131 – Only Ashes

  When Lucas sprinted back toward the cider house that hid his b, he found half the grounds on fire. Fortunately, when he reached in, the building itself was only mildly charred, and Kar’gandin was doing his best to put out fires by smothering them with a bnket. His beard was singed, but otherwise, he seemed okay.

  “Was that what I think it was, d?” the dwarf yelled as Lucas came barreling into the pce. “A bleedin’ dragon is attacking Lordanin?”

  “Not the whole city,” Lucas gasped, running past him and opening the secret door to the stairs below. “Just us. Just here.”

  “What?” he bellowed in arm. “That’s madness! Why us? Why now?”

  “Later!” Lucas yelled as he ran downstairs.

  “Later? There’s not going to be a ter if there’s a dragon involved. What are we supposed to do about it now?” the dwarf demanded.

  “Pray,” Lucas mumbled to himself as he ignored Kar’gandin’s final outburst. He didn’t have time for conversation. In fact, he didn’t have time for anything except trying to save people because he was certain that as soon as he stopped and figured out who he hadn’t been able to save, he would come apart entirely.

  So, he kept his hands busy instead of his mind and started to put anything with a healing component to it in one of the spare crates he’d set aside for bottling blue. Healing sves, healing tinctures, lesser healing potions, and more all went right in there.

  Fortunately, he had a lot of lying around. That wasn’t surprising, considering that it had been one of his biggest areas of experimentation for a long time.

  While he was down there, he looked around to see if he’d made potions of fire resistance or anything else that might enable him to run through the fmes of the main house and see if there was anyone in there that might yet be saved, by the time he’d filled his box with healing draughts, he saw nothing of the sort. Even after the wooden box was full, he still had more stuff people might be able to use, so he shoved it into his pockets and then made his way back to the house as fast as he could.

  “Where ye goin!” the dwarf called out after him as Lucas rushed out of the building. “There’s still fires t’put out!”

  “To save lives!” Lucas called back. “When you get the fires out, get some more healing potions and bring them to the front gardens!”

  He didn’t give a shit if the whole cider house burned down and his b with it. It was just stuff. They could gather new herbs, blow new gssware, and make new gold. Even if the gold in their strongbox was fused solid, it could still be recoined, but not a single life that was extinguished tonight could ever be repced.

  The stuff in this box would have saved my ass after the owl bear but against Dragonfire? Lucas’s mind boggled at the idea. Though he’d reacted as if this outcome was a real possibility from the moment Skyra had tossed Adin over the railing of the balcony, he hadn’t really believed it. It seemed too ludicrous.

  It was like the government calling in a drone strike on your house. It was something they were certainly capable of, but they didn’t actually do it. “She did do it, though,” he grunted as he carried his crate of medical supplies back toward the building. “She killed all these people, and as soon as I’m done here, I’m going to go kill her.”

  That no one was around to hear him vow vengeance or that such vengeance was as ludicrous as it was impossible were not his concern. It was still true, and some way, somehow, he would figure it out. For now, though, it was only a distraction, and he pushed it from his mind as soon as he came across the first victim to cross his path.

  Bel was a handmaid to… well, who she worked for didn’t matter, but she was suffering from smoke inhation, and he gave her two potions before he moved on to the next survivor. They came in rapid fire after that. A stable boy with a burned face who was almost certainly blinded in both eyes, a footman with burned hands who had tried to dig someone out of the rubble, and a tough who’d had his leg crushed by fallen masonry were the next people that cross his path.

  Minute by minute, more victims came stumbling from the shadows and the outbuildings. Though the maid house had been quite literally annihited, there were survivors. Everyone that appeared that wasn’t Danaria, though, broke his heart a little more. Still, Lucas pushed that out of the way as he and anyone else lucky enough to be mostly unscathed did what they could for the victims of the inferno while it continued to roar in the background.

  Maybe I should have learned magic, he thought, questioning his earlier resolve to focus on alchemy. If he knew healing magic, then he’d be able to do a lot more for these people, and if he knew elemental magic, well, then he might have been able to put these fires out and save more people.

  I might have been able to save her, his mind whispered before he forcefully shut that line of thought down. He absolutely could not think about that or about the charred body near Hura’gh when he went to treat the half-orcs wounds.

  “You gonna make it, buddy?” Lucas asked him, willing himself to smile even though there wasn’t a trace of happiness left in his soul.

  “This is nothing,” Hura’gh boasted, even though he could barely open his mouth, and half his body looked to be burned. It was a grisly wound, and Lucas was sure if he’d been burned half so bad, he’d already be dead. “Orcs are famous dragon syers, and a member of the tribe would shrug off wounds like this.”

  Lucas let him boast, even as he flinched from Lucas’s touch as he applied a healing balm to the half-orcs face and the worst spots on his chest and back. After that, he stripped off his soaked jacket and id it across the warrior to try to soothe his wounds.

  He wanted to do more, but even if Lucas had used every potion he had on the half-orc, it wouldn't be enough to heal him completely at the moment, so after that, he moved on. There were too many injured to linger too long on any one person.

  Person by bloodied person, Lucas made his way through the growing number of injured. As he went, he handed out tinctures and salves, and he ripped off his sleeves to make bandages, but it was never enough. He was just one man, and even with a couple of the uninjured men who had been on watch, he was entirely overwhelmed by the growing tide of human suffering around him.

  This is my fault, he repeated to himself like a mantra as he went, immersing himself in the misery in a desperate bid to keep from cracking under the weight of thoughts he didn’t dare to think.

  He was still working, even though tears were rolling down his face, as he sought to save what lives could still be saved when he heard the familiar voice. His fine suit had been ripped to shreds to make bandages, and most of the healing potions he’d brought up from his underground b had long since been used up, but he still didn’t think half the burn victims were going to make it.

  “Lucas, tell me how I can help?” she asked.

  “By not dying,” he answered, not taking his eyes off the maidservant, who would probably be blind if she managed to recover.

  “Lucas, stop, I’m right here.” the delusion said. For a moment, he almost made the mistake of turning and looking, but this close to madness, the temptation was too great. He knew that when he turned around and saw nothing, he would crack.

  Not looking didn’t help when he felt someone’s hands on his shoulders, though. For a moment, her touch was so familiar that he knew it couldn’t be anyone else, but that just meant he was crazier than he thought he was. He could even smell Danaria’s perfume over the stench of smoke and charred meat.

  Still, it wasn’t until she grabbed his head and turned it to face him that he saw Danaria standing there. She was wearing a white dress and looked pale, like every ghost he’d ever imagined. “Are you okay, Lucas?” she asked.

  “Of course, I’m not okay!” he said, too loud. He couldn’t help it, though; his emotions were entirely out of control. “You’re dead, and the house is—”

  She pulled him to her, forcing his ragged, soot-covered body against hers. It was only when he felt that warmth and his arms didn’t close around empty air that he started to believe. “I’m right here,” she told him. “I’ll always be right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Lucas broke then and buried his face in her breasts as he tried and failed to hide the wracking sobs that passed through him then, and it was more than a minute before he could speak. Until that moment, he was sure that Danaria was dead. He was sure that the corpse Hura’gh had rescued from the manor was the body of his fiancée and that he was too te.

  This moment made no sense, not until he eventually gasped, “How are you still here?” and she started to expin that she’d been in Meadowin.

  “I was at Cassara’s apothecary shop,” she expined. “I’d gone there on an errand for Arissa. She needed a tea for nausea, and when we got talking, I lost track of time. It wasn’t until I heard that dreadful roar that I came back.”

  As Dannaria continued to talk, it became apparent that she had no idea what had happened. That sobered him up. She’s alive, he reminded himself. That’s all that matters.

  That was enough to put all of his grief back in the lockbox in the center of his normally cold dead heart and notice everything that was going on around him. It wasn’t just him and a couple of the guards that were trying to help people now. Cassara was here, doing what she could for one of the cooks, and more and more of the vilgers were pouring through the gate. Some of them were even forming up into a bucket brigade.

  That wouldn’t do much, of course, but still, the gesture touched him. Never in his life did he have friends and neighbors that would come and help him in a moment like this, and now it seemed like half of Meadown had mobilized to do just that. While he watched the hive of activity stirring around him now that his tunnel vision had faded, Danaria continued to speak, but she’d switched from expining how she’d survived to asking questions about what had happened.

  Who had done this and why? What had happened to her brother and, very probably, his wife? Those were questions that would get their answers ter, or perhaps not at all in some cases, Lucas decided as he pulled away from her. For now, all he could do was tell her that he loved her. Everything else would come once the dying were saved or at least comforted.

  Part of him felt the need to whisk her away from this awful scene, but the rest of him knew that he couldn’t run away from what he’d done. If Skyra came back again, the two of them would die together. For now, they would do everything they could for those who had fallen.

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