When Hunger ended, a meteor fell from the heavens. It was him—the Third brother. Father cast him down like a used tool.

  I went out to the humans. They looked like shadows crawling in the dust. I stepped onto dead, cracked earth. And where my foot touched, a green sprout suddenly broke through. I walked forward.

  “Grow,” I whispered.

  Vines of wild grapes stretched up from beneath my steps. Red spots of berries flared to life. Wheat stalks—golden, heavy with life—rose in seconds. From the forests, obeying the call of life, animals began to emerge—gaunt but living deer, hares.

  People fell to their knees, grabbing berries with filthy hands, crying with happiness. Zariil stood behind me and smiled. For the first time in a long while, his smile was warm.

  “You give them what we took away, sister. Life.”

  “We have to find him,” I said. “He fell there, beyond the hills.”

  We found Krav in a crater.

  But it was a strange crater. The air around it was thick and black. Darkness condensed as if reality itself were rotting. The grass I had grown blackened and crumbled into sand the moment it came near him.

  Krav sat on a stone, clutching his head in his hands. He was thin, unnaturally elongated, with skin the color of old parchment.

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  “I didn’t want to…” he muttered, rocking back and forth. “So many deaths… they’re screaming… in my head…”

  He saw us and shrank back.

  “Don’t come closer! I was afraid of Father! He said to destroy… I didn’t want to, but I had to! And they died for so long… so painfully…”

  Suddenly the air turned hot. At the edge of the crater, wrapped in smoke, Ignis appeared. He didn’t come down to help. He came to watch.

  “A pathetic sight,” Ignis snorted, looking at the trembling Krav. “You were always weak, brother. You couldn’t even kill them properly—only made them suffer. Look at yourself. You’re just trash.”

  Ignis spat fire at our feet and, spreading his black wings, vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared. It disgusted him to be near us.

  My heart tightened with pity. Ignis was cruel, but Krav… Krav suffered more than any of us.

  “Brother…” I stepped toward him. “It’s over. It isn’t your fault.”

  I reached out to touch his shoulder, to comfort him.

  “NO!” Zariil shouted.

  But it was too late.

  My index finger touched Krav’s shoulder. In that same instant, I felt not cold and not heat, but absolute emptiness. My skin turned gray, dried out, and cracked.

  CRACK.

  My finger simply withered and broke off, falling into the dust—where it immediately crumbled into ash.

  “AAAA!” I screamed with savage pain and terror.

  Zariil yanked me back at once, raising a wall of ice between me and Krav. I stared at my hand. There was no blood. Only a dry stump.

  But my immortality worked. Flesh boiled with light, bone stretched—and within seconds a new finger grew where the old one had been.

  Krav howled, clutching his head.

  “I’m cursed! Everything I touch dies! Go away! GO AWAY!”

  Around him, the fertile earth I had just healed turned into dead, dry sand before our eyes. A desert spread from him like an ink stain.

  Zariil lifted me into his arms.

  “We can’t help him, Lucida. This is madness—for a long time. If you stay, he’ll dry you out faster than you can regenerate.”

  We went back north, leaving Krav howling in the middle of the desert he had created.