Ryn’s breath caught in his throat. He wanted to scream too, to shout, to protest, but he had gone utterly dumb.

In through the doorway walked a hulking man in a black suit of armour. He carried a long, gleaming, black-hilted sword that twinkled at the tip. He wore no helmet, and his thick hair was flame-red.

Ryn just watched the man walk in, rooted to the spot in shock.

The man strode up to Ryn’s mother and, as the boy looked on paralysed, as she continued screaming, placed the sword in her chest. It slipped past her raised hands and slid in straight through her heart.

An instant of agony.

The man withdrew his blade and a gush of blood flowed out of the wound with it, spattering his mother’s clothes and the floor. She fell face forwards onto to the ground immediately, landing with a slap.

Mum, her blonde hair splayed over her head, lay face down on their kitchen floor in a puddle of her own life force.

The image etched itself into Ryn’s heart.

The man in black turned to him. There was something animal about the twitch that pulled up the corner of his upper lip in his round face.

The man stepped towards Ryn, raising his sword high in the air, but when he brought it down Ryn darted out of the way to one side, able to move at last. He knocked his hip into the kitchen table, lost his footing and tripped, putting out his hands to break his fall.

A shadow appeared from behind him over the floor, wide and long, another slimmer shadow jutting out of it, which grew longer...

Ryn rolled just in time to avoid another swing of the sword, which thunked into the wooden floorboards where he had just been.

He scuttered backwards on his hands and feet and banged his head on the kitchen wall, barely registering the pain.

“Help!” he cried as loud as he could, his voice suddenly returning to him. “Help!” he called again in desperation. “Murder! Attack! Someone, help!”

The man in black armour yanked his sword out of the floor, then shoved the kitchen table over to one side. “No one will come for you, boy,” he said, snarling. His voice was terribly, horribly close. “They are all dead or dying. Now hold still while I gut you.”

Ryn managed to dive out of the way again as the waking nightmare strode towards him and took another swing. The man was slower than Ryn was in his heavy armour, but only just, so the boy ran round the kitchen as the man chased and swiped at him, smashing crockery, knocking the baskets of food from their places on the worktop, opening a breach in one of the pipes of the argar, which belched steam into the room.

The armoured man bellowed with frustration. “Hold still, damn you!”

The man paused, and Ryn saw a chance--a clear path through the kitchen, out of range of the man, to his front door. He bolted out through the opening, out of the door, and into the streets of his hometown.

His hometown, which was on fire.

He ran past his neighbours’ wooden houses, red and orange tongues leaping from their thatches and walls, sending black smoke into the sky, and called out the first word that came into his head.

“Dad!”

As he ran, he began to cry. He was cried at the wanton destruction of everything he had ever known, at the sudden loss of his mother and at his own shame, already constricting around his chest, at having done absolutely nothing to protect or save her.

The screams were all around now, filling the air along with shouts of pursuit, and gurgles of death, the words of people pleading for mercy, the crackle of flame, the snapping of timber.

More men in black armour kicked down the doors of houses that were not yet on fire, or walked out of the ones that were. None of them paid any attention to Ryn.

When he reached the town square, the first thing he saw was the Spring Totem, on fire too.

It stood there in the middle of the square, erect but incandescent with a flickering red and orange aura, the silk streamers that hung from its top flapping in the air as they burned.

At the peak of the totem, the wood carving of his hometown’s frog-god, Imkala, squatted with his contented, thick-lipped, grinning face, completely on fire.

He, neither, had done anything whatsoever to save or protect Ryn’s mother or his hometown. Imkala was utterly impotent squatting up there amid the flames.

Ryn looked round the square and his wet eyes grew wide.

Beneath the totem the bodies of men, women and children lay dead, mutilated, burned, dismembered, bleeding, some begging softly to be put out of their misery.

The tents of Fair attractions and the tables of market stalls lay strewn throughout the square, interspersed among the bodies, ripped or burning or dashed to pieces. The armoured men had already moved on from here having butchered the townspeople who had been setting up for the Fair.

“Dad!” Ryn called out as his feet came unstuck at last and he began to run among the corpses, searching for a sign of his father. He was dimly aware at the back of his mind that his calls might attract more soldiers, but he didn’t pay attention to that, such was his desperation.

He couldn’t see his father anywhere. He couldn’t even recognise the faces of some of the people on the floor, because wounds had been gashed across them, or they had lost their heads entirely. Ryn had to turn away from more than one as vomit rose in his throat, and he choked it back. A woman with once-brown hair who had lost an eye looked up at him pleadingly and said “Please kill me.” Ryn stumbled backwards when he realised who it was--Mrs Orvis, his teacher from the local schoolhouse. Where was his father?

“Dad!” he called out again.

“Ryn…” said a weak voice from about ten paces away, “...is that you?”

“Dad?!”

Ryn sprinted over to where the voice had come from, muffled. He reached down and hefted a corpse off of another body.

Underneath was the weathered, grey-mantled face of his father.