Isabell stood at the edge of the devastation as the sun rose the next morning, and she couldn't move. Couldn't look away. Couldn't make herself accept what she was seeing, even though she'd seen worse during the war. During the war, she'd become all too familiar with the sight of burned and blackened bodies that were left behind when the flames died down. Now, the trial of the Hemlock tree presented her with the horror of bodies crushed and broken, swollen and bloated by the waters of the flood.
A woman's body, face down in the mud, one arm still reaching toward where her house had been. An old man lay crushed beneath timbers that Isabell herself had shaped and reinforced to support the weight of a footbridge across the river, only now the wood refused to break or snap even as it trapped him beneath the surge of water and mud, ensuring that no one could free him before the giant log claimed his life.
