I found Hans and Abigail near what was left of my grandfather's barn, the one where Aki and Yoshi had spent their whole secret lives until a few weeks ago. Hans was throwing his dagger with the same reckless flair he'd always had, dropping a rider clean off his mount with a throw that would have made him unbearably smug on any other morning of his life. Abigail stood behind him with a woodaxe held two-handed, swinging it like she'd been doing it her whole life, which, given how she ran that farm without a single complaint for years, she probably had been.
Both of them were bleeding. Both of them were still upright. Neither of them looked like they had the faintest intention of running.
I put an arrow through the throat of the rider bearing down on Hans's blind side before he even knew to duck, and Hans spun toward the sound with a curse already halfway out of his mouth, and then his eyes found mine on Aki's back and something in his whole face cracked open with relief before he clamped it back down into something harder.
"About time," he shouted up at me, which was as close as Hans had ever come to telling anyone he loved them.
"Get the others toward the well!"
I shouted back, because the well sat in the open, clear of the burning roofs, and because I had already started counting riders and had stopped being able to keep the number straight past twenty.
Abigail didn't shout anything at all. She just looked up at me for one long second, axe still dripping, her hair torn half loose from its usual furious bun, and something passed over her face that I didn't have time to name and have never quite managed to name since.
I loosed arrow after arrow after that, dropping riders in twos and threes, Aki wheeling low enough that his wingtips nearly clipped the burning thatch of the Hendersons' roof, and for one stretch of minutes I believed we might actually turn this. The smoke stung worse the lower we flew, thick enough in places to blot out whole houses, and underneath it I could smell things I am never going to be able to fully forget: scorched hay, a neighbor's goats screaming somewhere I couldn't see, the particular sweetish reek of a roof beam giving way and folding a whole house in on itself in one long groan. Yoshi had gone rigid against my ribs, both small hands fisted in my shirt, and even Aki, who never once in his whole short life had shown me anything but delight at being airborne, had gone quiet in a way that told me he understood what kind of flying this was.
Then more riders came pouring out of the tree line where the road bent toward Fenholt, more than I had arrows left to answer, and they converged on the well and the huddle of villagers sheltering behind it with the kind of numbers that make individual courage into a rounding error. I watched old Miller Corwin, a man who used to slip me extra flour scraps as a boy, take a blow to the shoulder that folded him straight to the ground, and I put an arrow through the rider who'd done it before I'd even finished registering what I'd seen, no thought in between the seeing and the doing at all, which frightened me more, looking back, than anything the riders themselves managed to do that morning.
My grandfather's letter sat flat against my chest where it always did, a small hard weight I only noticed the way you notice your own heartbeat once you start paying attention to it: not a comfort, just a fact of my body, present and unbothered by whatever else was happening around it.
I made a decision I have never once been able to fully defend to myself since, not even on the nights when I lie awake trying.
I nocked an arrow, and I poured every scrap of mana I had left into the Lanternwood Bow until the whole weapon shuddered in my hands like something alive and furious, the blue glass string humming a note too low and too large to be a sound at all. Hans and Abigail were less than sixty feet from where I meant to aim. I knew that.
I looked at that fact directly and did not let myself look away from it, which is its own kind of ugly courage, or its own kind of cowardice dressed up as one.
"GET DOWN!
EVERYONE, GET DOWN, NOW!"
I screamed it until my throat tore, and I don't know, to this day, how many people actually heard me in time, or heard me at all over the roaring and the screaming and the fires eating through everything my grandfather had ever built with his own two hands.
I let the arrow go.
There was a pillar of light that could be seen from everywhere in Aftermath. From the volcanic shore of the Salt Isle in the far west, to the deserts of the Aurent Dominion on the eastern continent of Kessara, to the icy court of Frostgate in the deep north, to the temple peaks of Highhollow in the deep south, ordinary people who had never heard the word Hallowmere in their lives looked up from whatever they were doing and saw the sky itself catch fire for one endless second, and then go dark.
I didn't see any of that. I was already unconscious by the time the light finished climbing, caught in the outer edge of my own blast the way a fool catches the recoil of a weapon he swore he understood, and the last thing I remember before the world went white and then black and then nothing at all was the ringing in my ears swallowing even the sound of my own name being screamed by someone whose voice I couldn't place anymore.