The fae spread across the fortress like a flood with a purpose.
For a few heartbeats they only swarmed — hundreds upon hundreds of glowing fist-sized souls wheeling through the gray air, pouring down stairwells, streaming through arrow-slits, spilling into every hall and corridor of the castle inside and out, a cold luminous tide trailing ribbons of spirit-fire.
Then, all at once, they found their purpose. Each one peeled off toward a body, and dove.
They went in through the mouths.
Every monk in the courtyard, on the walls, in the towers — the silent child-bodied horde and everything else that drew breath in that fortress — opened their jaws as a fae forced its way down, and the soul slipped inside, and the body went still. It happened everywhere at once.
