Where was Berkano, Oren asked?

Trying to find a way to save the hostages she didn't know were already safe.

Jeddah, like many other runes, had immediately started sprinting across the ash-dusted pavement. Her compassionate nature did not allow her to sit and wait for orders.

Unlike Silvarse, Volkir, and the more fortunate Amity, however, Jeddah did not have the skill and thirst for battle and desensitization to danger woven into the fibers of the muscles that had propelled the others into sheets of flame. She needed to find a safer way in. She couldn't help the helpless if she was dead.

But as she rounded the corner, she spotted a small cluster of people, a few paces down an alley. Some of them were mere teenagers. Some of them had their phones held high.

"I caught it through the window a second ago."
"Oh my - did you see that? Someone else is in there!"

"Hey," Jeddah cried, incredulously jogging to them. "Get out of here. What's wrong with you? Get as far away from here as you can!"

This might have gotten no response if it wasn't for the sudden explosion that rocked the ground and burst windows even here on the other side of the house. The spectators stumbled back and scattered, disappearing around the next corner. Jeddah could hear their shouting fade...in tandem with the flickering of her rune. She pushed her hair out of the way and placed her hand on it. Her stomach was it knots.

One man, however, hadn't moved.

"Hey. Sir," said Jeddah, approaching him with urgency. "You need to leave."

"You're here," he acknowledged with a charming half-smile. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking calm as can be about the fire and chaos.

"Yeah, well, I'm - I'm chosen by the gods," Jeddah said weakly.

"Oh. Well in that case." He didn't move, looking at her like she was a dumb kid playing make believe.

He seemed like a real douche canoe, but that didn't mean Jeddah wasn't going to save him from his own stupidity. Sufficiently flustered and annoyed with his smug, terse replies, she looked toward a patch of weeds crowing in the cracks of the cement and coaxed them to shoot upward, growing ten times their length in the space of a second. Then she turned around and showed him the rune on the back of her neck.

Now his curiosity was piqued. He examined the marking, twirling something in his pocketed hand.

Now, Jeddah thought, he would take her seriously. It did not come naturally to the sweet natured girl, but she mustered her most authoritative voice. "You need to get out of here, now, or - "

Those were her last words before cold steel slit deep and clean through corotid, jugular, and trachea.

Spire - Fenrir, Fenris Wolf, Fenrisulfr, but Spire for now - held her up with one arm around her waist and the one with the short combat blade grasped in her hair while she sputtered and gagged and jerked against him, so that he could easily pull her further from the main road while continuing to examine the marking with a calmly satisfied air.

The smell of the bright thick blood cutting theough the scent of the fire and the charred meat and the much closer traces of the coconut soap in her hair was a pleasant distraction from his task, but the berkano rune on her skin was clearly fading, like a trick candle in a strong wind.

It disappeared entirely at the same moment as Jeddah's blood soaked body went entirely limp.

Interesting.