Jingwei blinked.
The ash was still settling. Fine gray powder, drifting in lazy spirals across her exposed collarbones, catching in the loose strands of her dark hair. The cold mountain air moved through the torn silk of her 'dudou', goosebumps rising sharp across the generous swell of her chest, her stiffened peaks pressing visibly against the white fabric.
She blinked again.
The forest was quiet.
'They are gone,' her mind supplied, slowly, like a man climbing stairs in the dark. 'The three of them are simply — gone.'
Then the rest of it arrived.
All at once, with the blunt, ugly force of something that had been waiting politely in the anteroom of her shock while the immediate emergency occupied the front of her awareness.
Meiren. Liufen. Fenxu. The others. The last sound she had heard from behind her before she ran — that particular silence that was not peaceful but empty, the silence that meant the screaming had stopped for a reason.
Her throat closed.
"My — my sisters —"
