Moonspear i already drank that cup.

She trembled as her paws touched land she never dreamed they would ever step upon again. Never had she dared to imagine what it would be like to be here again. There was hardly any of it left; the eruption had devastated so much of the mountain, wiping the scene of so many of her childhood memories from the earth. They would never be again. Yet still, Yami Ostrega felt the haunting of reverie, the ghosts of her family, and most of all, the crushing weight of regret.

It was gone. All of it. The land that had once sustained their empire. The family that had held dominion here. Their legacy stretched far beyond the wilds, and so the news of their end had reached her in her travels. She had reeled over the news for days until finally deciding she needed to see for herself. Now that she was, she wished she hadn’t come. So much was lost, not the least of which was her chance to make any amends with those she’d abandoned.

Yami eventually dropped to her haunches and imagined she was sitting at her family’s old rendezvous site where she and her siblings used to play. She had no real way of knowing—the landscape was bleak and littered with rubble as it never had when the land had been populated. The memories didn’t need validation, though. They swarmed her, drowned her, regardless.