Korva Tallandria was in Egorian when it fell. The fall was very sudden, and very literal, in that half the buildings in the city collapsed, crushing huge numbers of people beneath them. It happened at night, so Korva was sleeping when her house collapsed on top of her. She had to dig herself out in the darkness with one of her hands smashed, choking on dust and debris that were kicked up in the earthquake. Then she had to go back into the wreckage, still bleeding and nearly blind, and dig out Zara, her niece, before she could suffocate. 

She'd meant to stay near the house until morning, when they could dig out what they could of their possessions. She'd meant to stay out of sight, in the wreckage - because if there were good parts of Egorian, the part where Korva lived wasn't one of them. She'd meant to be smart. But, of course, the city had caught fire in the earthquake, and Korva - Asmodeus damn her - had realized that one of the blazes was spreading in the direction of the daycare where she worked.

After that, she wasn't smart at all.

By the time Korva reached the daycare - which was also an orphanage, at night, housing two dozen children too young to be usefully indentured - the fires were spreading throughout the city. The housekeeper, she determined much later, had been killed in the earthquake itself; the orc nursemaid had taken the opportunity to run away. Several of the children she found dead under the rubble, but some of them she was able to dig out. She'd had to set them on the road outside the building as the flames licked closer, leaving it to Zara to attempt to hold onto them, to keep them enough in one place that none of them killed themselves by wandering right back into the wreckage.

The last child she got out was a four-year-old whose legs had been completely crushed under one of the support beams. She'd tried to lift the beam herself, but it was too heavy. She'd called out for help, and, miraculously, it had come. The help was an orc who was very obviously an escaped slave, but he was strong enough to lift the beam, and strong enough to carry a four-year-old child with crushed legs long distances. (Korva could do that when she was healthy; she couldn't do it with one broken hand.)

She didn't know whether there was anyone still inside the building when it caught fire. She'd heard screams, but she told herself she didn't know exactly what direction they were coming from. They had about half of the children who had been in the building when she left work that evening.

The next five days were - not hell. In hell, you don't watch a dozen small children at once, desperately trying to keep alive them and a bigger child and an orc who could barely speak Taldane and might choose to kill and eat them all later. You don't get desperate and gag a two-year-old who refuses to stop screaming and making it impossible to hear what the others need, only to find in the morning that the child has suffocated to death. You don't decide to head for the outlying farms in search of an animal capable of nursing the multiple starving infants you've been carrying around, and end up watching the orc you just allied with murder an uncooperative farmer in order to steal his goat, leaving behind more orphans in your wake. She supposed it was possible that you did get to watch your hand swell up and get infected, leaving you with a fever that wouldn't break and left you barely able to stand, let alone haul several uncooperative infants around. That seemed like the sort of thing that might happen to somebody in hell, somewhere. She comforted herself with the thought that when she died, she would have a better understanding of what it was like.

She hadn't died, of course. Neither had the children, apart from the one she had suffocated. They'd camped on the shores of Lake Sorrow, where there was water but no food - except for the goat - until the area had been taken over by foreign paladins.

She doesn't remember the weeks after that very well. She knows that at some point the orc left. She knows that the the archmage they call Naima came and regenerated her hand, giving her new strength and maybe saving her life, though it took weeks for the fever to leave her entirely. Perhaps this is an undeserved mercy, but Korva has left a dead child without even burying it, praying to Pharasma to guide the soul to the boneyard, rather than letting it wander the earth as a ghost. It was killed by their hands as much as by hers. She is not so easily bought.

When she finally returns to the wreckage of her home, there's nothing there but garbage. She and her niece are destitute. The paladins are kind enough to let them watch some of the orphans their conquest created, but the pay is just enough to buy food, not private shelter. She'd hoped that Zara would achieve something better, but the new rulers have closed the schools, and she still doesn't dare reveal her sorcery. A year passes, but they make no progress, not really.

She's not angry. There's a bitterness in her mouth that never goes away, now, but she rarely opens her mouth to speak about it. There are few places safe enough, and it's never what Zara needs to hear, anyway.