Asena could only imagine what Evony and Elizeus had found. It couldn't be hostiles, Elizeus wouldn't have sent Evony away if they were. Rhosyn had suggested in whisper tones that Elizeus had gotten annoyed with the younger girl's admiring glances, but Asena didn't think so.

Evony's face was a lurid shade of red, which Rhosyn thought supported her theory. The ugly red shade was matched with puffy eyes and the smell of vomit, which inclined Asena to think that something had gone very wrong indeed.

As Asena looked down to the place where Elizeus' eyes were fixated, her heart stopped dead in her chest. Asena felt too many things at once: acidic vomit rising in her throat, warm sticky blood covering her clothes and skin, her heart starting again and beating double time, her breath rapid and sharp, dizzying.

It was too much. Too much. Too much. TOO MUCH. Asena's mind screamed at her

One moment, Asena was upright, the next she was face down in the dirt, taken into sweet oblivion, for there were no haunting memories in that kind of darkness. There was nothing at all in the blackness the oblivion brought.

Inches away from where Asena had collapsed were bones, old and weathered, but clearly that of a winged person--an Aviarius.

Laying where wings would have ended were pieces of gold still in the shape of feathers.