Category: News

Yeah, if you need to hire muscle, I have some recommendations. Just keep your voice down. Maybe you need someone stealthy – someone who can hide in the underbrush and attack outta nowhere, never see them coming? Got an assassin girl in the rafters that’ll make ribbons of a body in seconds. No, not quite right. But getting warmer, am I? You want to make a big splash, do you? Leave a real impression. Maybe the target’s friends will think twice… leave town to save their own heads?

Then you’ll be wanting Glaive.

He’s the big guy in the back. Yup, that one sitting next to the heavy metal engine on a stick in the corner. But he doesn’t come cheap. You gotta wonder about a Grangor in these parts, sweating his arse off likely, hell-bent on some trophy-hunting mission, keeping to himself, making enemies.

Grangor don’t take naturally to mercenary work, in my humble… whassat? That blindfold he wears? Glaive don’t have eyes, they say, or at least he can’t use ‘em if he does. All kindsa stories about how that particular misfortune found him, none of ‘em bedtime stories for young pups if you know what I’m… I don’t particular know how he does it, but he never misses his mark. They say a creature loses his sight, he gains power in his other senses.

Sure, sure, he’ll make a show of the corpse. Scare off your trouble. But I ain’t have any experience with that. Go on and talk to him, but if you’re planning on getting a discount on account of his blindness, I’ll call up the cleaning crew in advance to sweep up your skull bits from the floor. And hey, a word of advice: Don’t look right at him. Grangor don’t take kindly to that. And yeah, he’ll know if you do.

You thought you could call me beast from across the cantina. If you whispered it, you thought I wouldn’t hear. You thought that distance would give you a running start. And now you are at my feet, drunk little carnie fool. That’s why you lose at the dice tables, and why you return to lose again: You are only good from range.

But now my axe has knocked you close, so while you’re at my feet clutching at that nasty bruise, why don’t you insult me again? Ah, good, good. There’s some courage in you. I can respect a man who spits in the face of a beast.

Perhaps, though, you should think on what you consider beastly. True, my kind lives in the treetops and mountain caves. The patterns in our fur hide us in the vines, brush and thorns. Weaker creatures feed us. But you pockmark our mountains with your mines, draw out the crystal and the gold, then fight over the wells while the mountains crumble. The avalanches draw the beasts, as you call us, closer and closer. Which path is truly less civilized?

Shh, stop shaking, little carnie. This is not the end. There’s still a trophy to claim.

Get up off the ground, you cowardly shivering leaf, and let’s have a roll of dice to prove we can play nice. You can have all my gold if you win. But if you lose, I’m taking that side arm. Oh, it’s special to you, little Ringo? Then you’d best not lose.

And you’d best not cheat. I can smell every move.

https://youtu.be/BvH3BcEcxW8

Pathetic creatures, the humans. Ambition and cunning they have, but few survival instincts in the wild. The last time they made camp in Grangor territory, blasting holes in the hills in search of crystal, my family laid waste to all but the children. We kept the young in an effort to understand their kind, raised them like our own. I chose to mother one of the females, and I called her Koshka.

As she was, she would never have survived in the wild – not even with my protection. She did not camouflage into the underbrush. Her nails and teeth were worth next to nothing. Our world was dangerously unsuited to her, but I formed a bond with the little scrap of a thing.

She learned quickly, for a naturally incapable kind of creature. In the thick weeds she crouched, silent and invisible. She climbed the highest rattan and pounced down without fear. Once our metalworkers fashioned claws for her, she was a useful hunter. She thought ahead of her prey, cornering animals in the trees. She could trap a spider in a single eight-meter pounce.

Her curiosity caused her to leave me. Perhaps she seeks her own kind. I see her seldom now, though stories of her travel into the mountains. They make me laugh: psychotic jungle cat fighting for one side and then the other at random. Truly, she has no foes: In her world, everything is play. Beware, stranger: She is ruthless with her toys.

This is mine! I found it. I don’t know what it is, but finders keepers. It is very round. Round is a clue.

You, in the flower! Your pets are cute! Do they like candy? This candy is for the minions but maybe your pets would like it. Hey! Do you know what this thing is? I found it over… hey, come back! Are we playing chase? Ha, caught you! I’m much faster than everyone, all the everyones. While I have you here on the ground, what do you think this thing is? Ow! Oof! Hey! That burns! Stoppit! Okay, okay, fine, I’ll ask someone else.

Hello! I like your glowy sword. I have claws, see? You look grumpy. Let’s do our positive affirmations. I love and approve of myself. I replace my anger with understanding and compassion. Oh! I had a question. What is this thing I found? It is round and heavy and… ooh, it has a button! Should I push the… hey, where’d you go? Don’t go away, no, not you too!

Hey! I like your wings! Did someone make those for you? I want to try them on! Why won’t they come off? Hey, hey, stop that! What’s with everyone and the burning things today? I just want to know what my new toy does. Wait… whoa, those wings make you all floaty. Are you running… I mean, floating away too?

Fine then! I will just push this butto…

KABLAMMO!

…oh. That’s what that thing does.

“Wait up, Ozo!”

Mad blue sparks flashed from Ozo’s ring as it bumped down the cobbles of the Undersprawl’s main avenue, Ozo in its center, Koshka dashing doubletime after him in her prettiest red party dress. Red lanterns cast a charming glow on the dingy neighborhood, and paper cutouts decorated the windows of even the roughest taverns. Ozo spun to a flourished stop by the minion pens at the city gate. “I win!” he cried. The minions clapped.

Koshka caught up and gave Ozo’s nose a pinch. “It isn’t impressive if you ride in the ring!”

Ozo hooted laughing, crouching among the fragrant kumquat trees that grew by the fence, his tail flicking. “Don’t be jealous that I’m faster. And can jump farther.”

“You cannot,” said Koshka as she hopped the fence to the minion pen. “No one jumps farther than me. Come now, sweeties, it’s festival time!” she crooned at the minions.

“Can too. I can jump this whole city in one leap. And I’m stronger than all these minions put together. My ring weighs more than two elly-fants. Just try.” He held his ring out over the fence.

“What’s an elly-fant?” Koshka ignored the ring; the minions grunted and shoved their noses into her palms as she handed each a red envelope. “Don’t be rude,” she ordered, bopping one greedy beast on the noggin. “Open it over there.” The beasts crowded in a corner away from her, tearing open their envelopes. Two shiny gold coins dropped out of each. The minions tried to eat them.

“I can transform into anything,” bragged Ozo. “Guess what I am!” He paced back and forth along the fence on all fours, meowing.

Koshka giggled. “That’s nothing. I can pretend to be a girl.” She stood up on her two feet and pranced around the pen, her chin jutted up, and murmured in a breathy voice, “Look at me, I’m a princess. I like peanut butter.”

“I can summon the wind!” cried Ozo, then puffed out a big breath at her.

Koshka stumbled as if blown backward. “Whoa. Just for that, I’ll summon the rain.” She stuck out her tongue and blew a big zzzzrrrrbbbt at her monkey friend.

Ozo jumped away right in time, throwing down his ring and standing in the middle. “Well I can cast a protective barrier. Nothing can get me in here!”

Koshka wiggled her bum and shot forward on all fours right at him, leaping over the ring. “I’m way too strong for your dumb barriers!”

“You’re powerful,” said Ozo, “But I bet I can fit more kumquats in my mouth than you can.”

The pair dashed for the kumquat trees and jammed the fruit into their mouths, counting until the numbers were just muffled syllables. Koshka had to concede the victory to Ozo when her lumpy cheeks filled to bursting.

“Okay, okay,” said Koshka, chewing up the last of her mouthful. “But I can do a magic thing.”

“Nuh uh. You don’t know magic.”

“I know a thing,” she said. “Watch.” She scooted up close to Ozo and looked at his face. Her fingers slipped behind one of his ears. “Look what I found!” she announced, and held up a melon candy.

“Whoa,” whispered Ozo in awe, taking the candy. “You do know magic.”

“Happy Red Lantern Festival,” she said, hugging his neck, and the two sat and ate candied fruit together, watching the lanterns glow red on the cobbles as the sun set.

Love not architecture, for the Ender of Worlds crumbles all to ruin. Tend not to your fields, for His bloodfire reduces all to ashes. Care not for your future, for with a breath, Skaarfungandr, Ruler of Skies, eliminates nations entire. Beware the folly of pride, for even now your Reaper wakes. He is The Last; The Herald of Eternal Night. He is Skaarfungandr the Vehement, His Dreaded Majesty, the Indomitable and the Eater of All. Let us lament the last precious moments of Man.

-Taken from The Canticle of Skaarfungandr

The Walker Archives

This scroll was discovered among the bones of a Deinlandic female.

Skaarfungandr is one of a dozen names for a dragon featured in the folklore of many cultures. Though fossil records indicate that the dragon species has been extinct for many millennia, there is a cross-cultural mythology suggesting that one dragon in particular appears once every one-thousand years. Scholastically advanced civilizations generally disregard Skaarfungandr as myth, but I have studied many cultures in which this legendary dragon is believed to be quite real – a violent reckoning of sorts for the indulgences of society. Skaarfungandr appears in much the same form in wall art, mosaics, stained glass, oral storytelling traditions and written accounts in cultures that have never crossed paths. For some years, I have collected what I could of this evidence.

It is worth noting, if only for the amusement of historians, that the most recent of these accounts goes back nearly one thousand years.

-Exerpt from the personal journal of Martim Walker

*

This account was retrieved and translated by Walker from an unidentified culture. It was found among his belongings following his disappearance.

I should have died by the river, a fishing pole in my lap. Instead, I ran to the cave in hopes of postponing my death. One enormous eye peering at me from outside and noxious, hot breath filled my lungs.

He opened his jaw and I flinched from the sparks flashing down his throat. His giant body covered the cave opening, blocking the rising sun.

I thought of Appa wading out into the rice field at the edge of our farm. Of Eomma tending the fire, uncovering the birdcages. They expected me to return from the river with fish for breakfast, but they would never see me again. I hoped I would satiate the beast’s hunger, so that he might pass our great city and its surrounding farms.

Face to face with the predator, I lost all fear. I was prey. It was the natural order of the world.

In my last moments, I reached out to touch my death. I ran my palms over the horned bumps on his head and the scaled flesh of his muzzle. His dry tongue lolled out between two teeth as long as my body. I touched the scales. There were no weak spots, no places where steel could pierce. At any moment, he would exhale and turn me to ash, or fill his belly with me.

But dragons are not known for mercy.

With one fluid motion he turned from the cave. I followed, dread dropping like a stone into my chest, and watched as he rose into the sky, swooped from the crags, spiraled down with lazy grace, and incinerated my home.

The earth dried and split where the rice fields had been. The city walls, the monuments, the libraries – all the strength and learning of my people blackened and crumbled into ash.

Nothing remains now of my family. Gone are the friends and enemies who shaped my life. Not even their bones are left for me to bury. I am the only memory left of my people. From my peaceful vantage point above the valley, I looked down upon the wrath of Skaarfungandr: The End of Everything.

Artifacts and story translation from the private collection of Martim Walker. City and culture of origin unknown.

No one believed in Skaarfungandr. Was just a story told round campfires to thrill the youngsters, I thought. My own children were only babies then; now they have their own children, and they tell them not to listen to their grandmother’s scary tales. But we weren’t always from this town. We had our own village, our own farm, made a good life there. Then, one day, we woke to darkness.

Was no dawn that day. The sun a white pinpoint in an iron sky. Ash rained down, coating the roads, our homes, snuffing out cooking fires. It turned into a fine powder that smeared on my skin, stung my eyes, closed my throat. Even with windows sealed and blankets stuffed under the doors, the ash found its way in and settled on my table, on the food, my bed. It swirled a sickening silver in the water. The animals outside choked, fell dead. The babies cried; their tears ran gray.

The wind had brought ash from a fire in the village downroad. My husband went to help, never returned. By noon my wagon couldn’t move through it, and the heat got worse. The emergency bells rang then, calling us all out. Fire coming. I escaped then, ran with the rest of town, the wind and ash billowing at my back, the babies wrapped up into my cloak, shuffling through ash to my knees. Heat peeling my skin.

I was last out the gate, so I saw him come. The black sky split apart, sun spilled through and Skaarfungandr sank through the ash into view. His wings beat away the ash clouds. He was bigger than the stories told. Bigger than nightmares. He roared, and with the roar came the reckoning that swallowed my town. We ran with a wall of fire at our backs, people collapsing dead on the way.

When the ash cleared way for the sun, we came back, but nothing was left of the town. Not one stick of a fence or house. The wells dried. Nothing will grow in the earth there now. It’s a forgotten place: no name, no history. Easy to forget the name of a place when it’s leveled. Easy to blame it on fire got some accidental way. Easy to laugh at the stories of old people. Already, no one believes me.

The final translated account from the private collection of Martim Walker. Of particular interest is the reference to the “fifth reign” of Skaarfungandr.

During the fifth reign of Skaarfungandr, it fell to me as an initiate to watch the butcher boy boil alive in the pools a half-day’s walk from home. The butcher boy showed no fear when we saw evidence of the dragon’s presence: singed leaves, then whole patches of jungle burned away. The air was silent, even the birds burned away from their homes. The elephant’s path had overgrown with ivy and lichen. At the end of the path, under cover of wide leaves, we found the legendary dragon in the largest pool. He speared fish for his meal with great thrusts of his claws. He splashed himself, shook his massive head as fish bones crunched in his jaw.

“This is folly,” I whispered to the butcher. “Follow the wisdom of your betters and turn back now.”

“My blades are sharp as any warrior’s,” he replied. He drew from a leather belt round his waist a long machete. Assorted other weaponry swayed there. “I know beastly anatomy. I know where to strike killing blows. When I return home with this dragon’s head, the High Scribe will initiate me into the warrior caste.” His eyes did not stray from the dragon as he left me behind. He climbed a tall, blackened coconut tree behind the beast, the machete between his teeth. Hanging in the balance of that moment was everything I had ever learned, written and taught to others.

With a battle cry, the boy dropped down from the tree and landed on the back of the dragon. The beast paused, a fish tail hanging from its jaw, water shimmering with terrible beauty over his scales as the boy ripped the machete from his teeth. He stabbed at the dragon’s skull but the blade slid off of the scales. The machete splashed into the pool below, so the butcher unsheathed other assorted weapons – a serrated blade, a mallet meant for pounding knives through thick bone – but nothing would pierce the scales. The beast twisted and roared, and though the butcher boy grasped at the ridges along its back, the dragon shook him loose into the sacred pool and screamed fire onto him, cooking him alive.

Case Number: 082649259
Reporting Officer: Deputy A.F.
Date: CLASSIFIED

Incident Type: Property Damage

A farming family from the north foothills reported massive burn damage to their field in the early hours of the day. Investigators confirmed reports that the still-smoking field of chili peppers was destroyed by fire. The family blames the neighboring pepper farm. Extreme competition over pricing and exportation has resulted in damage in the past, though never to this extent. The affected farmer, CLASSIFIED, stated: “I heard someone sneaking around my garden that night, crunching on those peppers. Nasty manners. Sounded like, ‘Nomnomnomnomnom.’ Then there was an unholy belch, and I smelled smoke. By the time I got out there, the field was on fire.”

Investigators observed clawed footprints followed by a continuous line, indicative of a quadrupedal, tailed creature. In one cave uphill, bits of a massive broken eggshell were found (see attached documentation). Further investigation recommended.

—

Case number: 082649265
Reporting Officer: L.B.
Date: CLASSIFIED

Incident Type: Property Damage

A home belonging to the CLASSIFIED family in the southland neighborhood of CLASSIFIED burned to the ground in the night. Investigators found that the fire ignited in the bedroom of the family’s youngest son, seven-year old CLASSIFIED. The family was able to safely exit the premises and no injuries were reported. All family members maintain their innocence, though CLASSIFIED father, CLASSIFIED, is being held under suspicion of arson, as he bought an expensive home insurance policy earlier in the month.

The son maintains that the fire was started by his imaginary pet: “He’s my dog. I found him in the back yard yesterday. He’s a special kind of dog with wings and a tail. I took him to my room. His name is Buddy. I don’t know where he is now.”

—

Case Number: 082649276
Reporting Officer: J.Y.
Date: CLASSIFIED

Incident Type: Disturbing The Peace

Thirteen noise complaints were filed the night of CLASSIFIED, in the expatriate neighborhood of CLASSIFIED. The streets were blocked by a spontaneous gathering of chanting people. Officers were dispatched to the scene. Translators were escorted to the area to take statements. The crowd believes that an ancient monster has returned to punish unbelievers. One elder respected by the community expressed the belief that the monster must be placated with human sacrifice. Police sketches of the monster were made (see attached). Further investigation is warranted.

—

Case Number: 082649278
Reporting Officer: B.H.
Date: CLASSIFIED

Incident Type: Homicide
Aggravated Arson By Explosive
Criminal Damage to Property

Witnesses: CLASSIFIED
CLASSIFIED
CLASSIFIED
CLASSIFIED
CLASSIFIED

On the afternoon of CLASSIFIED, the downtown Arts & Humanities Spire was destroyed by fire caused by several explosions. During the fire, witnesses described a gassy smell in the air. The spire collapsed as it burned.

Officer H. took suspect CLASSIFIED into custody following several eyewitness accounts of CLASSIFIED fleeing the scene shortly after the first explosion. Other witnesses at the Flying Flea Tavern recounted recent conversations with an inebriated CLASSIFIED. “He’d lost his job,” stated CLASSIFIED. “After a few pints, he’d always start in about how he oughta teach those bigwigs a lesson, burn that spire to the ground. Looks like the guy actually went through with it.”

Detective Sarth was assigned to the case, and her investigation will follow.

“I didn’t do it!”

Detective Sarth exhaled and smiled. “I see our pyromaniac has a bit of a spark to him,” she said.

The sketch artist in the corner groaned. On his easel was a rough but unmistakable drawing of a dragon.

The detective leaned forward. “Haven’t been any dragons for a good thousand years!”

“Thousand years,” echoed the artist.

“I know what I saw.” The prisoner crumpled in his chair, miserable. “It had wings and scales and breathed fire. It flew. It was a dragon.”

“You got fired for no good reason right before retirement. You lost your pension. It’s only natural to want to destroy whoever did that to you,” said Sarth in her most comforting tone.

“I swear. I’ve never seen anything like it. It came out of the clouds, just like in the stories. The wings. The teeth. It looked right at me. And fire! Came right out of its mouth!”

“The stories.” The detective said it flat. “You’re actually going to imply that it was…”

“Skaarfungandr!” The prisoner spat it out, his face reddening. “He burned the spire. Remember the stories? It was like the legends. Except…”

“Except there was no dragon,” the detective interrupted. “Except you blew up and burned the spire for revenge. We have ten witnesses who saw you there that day.”

“No! It was like the legends except…”

A deep thump stopped him. Another thump jolted the floor. The walls shook. More rumbling, and the file wiggled off the table. The detective’s chair bounced backward. The artist’s pencil scraped a gray line across his illustration.

The next rumble was a jerk. Then there was heat, and the smell of gas. Of smoke. Then, screaming.

The Safety Spire began to burn.

“…except smaller!”

For a breathless moment, Sarth could only watch as the perp’s imaginary dragon rose into view from the blasted-out wall of the spire. His little wings churned up the ash, fanning the flames that roared up from below. All around, fiery paperwork fluttered and screamed echoed off the walls. The floor cracked beneath them while the officers discharged their weapons. The room lit up with the sparks from bullets ricocheting off the hatchling dragon’s scales.

Sarth grabbed the sobbing suspect by his upper arm and dragged him out to the emergency stairs. “It appears,” she shouted, stuffing the keys to his shackles into his mouth, “…that I owe you an apology.”

Then she drew her weapon, turned the corner and joined the firefight as the Safety Spire crumbled around her.

After the town was good and curious about the carnival tents going up, Pavel and I would go to whatever hole served brew. We’d play Queen’s War with my trap deck, him losing and cursing, ’til the crowd was thick and sauced. Pavel and I, best friends since age 3, had grown up feeling out crowds of drunk people. You go wrong, they turn on you. Go right, you make out with the contents of their pockets.

I was a better bad guy than Pavel. He was our strong man, but he had big baby eyes. I’d make an ugly show of winning, buying pints with his money without sharing. Then, when the crowd was ripe, Pavel would demand a chance to make his money back.

“Fastest bullet in the world? I bet 10 gold I can catch your bullet in my teeth.”

“You’re drunk, Pavey,” I’d say big-n-loud. “Ain’t no one can catch a bullet in his teeth.”

Then, Pavel’d claim I cheated, and people started crowding around. Pavel’d put on his big tent voice and say, “Who has a gold piece that says I can catch this puny cheater’s bullet?”

Most people didn’t believe but wanted to see a guy get shot in the mouth, that being the kind of towns we stopped in.

The more I protested, the more gold the crowd put down. When we’d got a half-circle round us, I’d take aim and then drop my piece, say I couldn’t shoot at my oldest friend. But the crowd was frothed up, so I’d take my first shot, let it go wide and straight through the wall behind Pavel. Ha!

If the crowd hated me before, they hated me worse then. I’d try to run off but if we worked them right, the crowd would haul me back. I’d put up my gun, wrist shaking and fire wide the other direction, make another perfect hole in the wall. That’s when Pavel’d squawk chicken at me, making me good-n-mad. I’d aim with my tongue out and one eye closed for effect and blast a blank right at Pavel’s chubby sweet face.

We had it practiced so he turned his head hard at the sound, fall down with a floor-cracking slam and the crowd would gather all over him. Then he’d flutter his big baby eyes open and give a big grin to the crowd, a bullet between his front teeth.

I made a show of handing over all the gold he’d lost to me in Queen’s War and the crowd had such a good time watching the show that they didn’t mind handing over what they’d bet plus a couple rounds besides, and then we made a show of being good friends again, which people always love to see. It was a great bit. I miss that big boy Pavel. I bet he’s still lifting up chairs of ladies with his pinky fingers in the big tent somewhere. “Lousy at life; amazing at shooting,” he’d always said to me. How right he was.

You thought you could call me beast from across the cantina. If you whispered it, you thought I wouldn’t hear. You thought that distance would give you a running start. And now you are at my feet, drunk little carnie fool. That’s why you lose at the dice tables, and why you return to lose again: You are only good from range.

But now my axe has knocked you close, so while you’re at my feet clutching at that nasty bruise, why don’t you insult me again? Ah, good, good. There’s some courage in you. I can respect a man who spits in the face of a beast.

Perhaps, though, you should think on what you consider beastly. True, my kind lives in the treetops and mountain caves. The patterns in our fur hide us in the vines, brush and thorns. Weaker creatures feed us. But you pockmark our mountains with your mines, draw out the crystal and the gold, then fight over the wells while the mountains crumble. The avalanches draw the beasts, as you call us, closer and closer. Which path is truly less civilized?

Shh, stop shaking, little carnie. This is not the end. There’s still a trophy to claim.

Get up off the ground, you cowardly shivering leaf, and let’s have a roll of dice to prove we can play nice. You can have all my gold if you win. But if you lose, I’m taking that side arm. Oh, it’s special to you, little Ringo? Then you’d best not lose.

And you’d best not cheat. I can smell every move.

The big tent was a smorgasbord of boondogglery. Mechanically winged men fought mid-air with flashing swords. Collared fire and ice elementals danced, trying not to kill one another, to the tune of instruments that appeared to play themselves. The mermaid that townies had gawked all evening in the geek tent rose out of her aquarium prison in a globule of water that floated, intact, over the crowd. Acrobats made a bridge, gripping one another’s shoulders, muscles twitching, for the sabertooth that walked across, pursuing her nightly dripping ration of meat, on a platform at the other side.

Ringo swaggered on stage, carrying twin single-action revolvers named Faith and Reason. His thrower, a long-legged juggler dressed in top hat and a short flouncy clown skirt, strutted to the center after him. She set plates spinning on batons, then tossed them up high. Ringo, twirling the revolvers ‘round his trigger fingers, wasn’t much of a show in comparison to the thrower until the first plate exploded mid-air into tiny ceramic shards.

Tightrope walkers quivered above; the strongman lifted benches full of giggling, terrified minions overhead. If the thrower tossed too high or too low, it’d all go to hell, and that was part of the appeal. Ringo stumbled about like he’d been sauced for hours, swaying, one eye closed for focus, leering at his thrower’s gams, but when the plate flew, his guns paused cold at his hips and BANG: Whatever the thrower launched was destroyed.

Children crowded up front, holding out coins they’d pilfered from generous parents: “Me! Me! Mister Ringo, please, me!” The thrower made a big show of plucking up coins from their sticky fingers, then she twirled, tossed… BANG, and then she caught that same coin out of the sky, returning it to the lucky child with a perfect bullet hole through its center. Two at a time she threw – BANG-BANG – then caught one in each palm.

For the finale, she tied a blindfold around Ringo’s head and spun him some. The terrified crowd went silent. Some ducked behind their seats; some ran out. The thrower girl tossed three coins. Arms crossed, aiming over his shoulders, sightless Ringo fired: BANG-BANG-BANG. The thrower whirled, danced, then returned three coins (with faces blasted through) to their rightful owners.

The crowd exploded into standing applause.

How? they bellowed to one another. Impossible!

All the while, the carnie kiddos slipped purses from townie pockets, invisible as ghosts.

*

Outside the tavern, the broadside is still littered with half-ripped posters of Ringo, two-armed, whole, a perfect shot. Inside, at a round table of mean eyes glaring out over fanned cards, Ringo stares at a blasted coin, rubbing its indentations with his remaining thumb. “Heads, he says, “and I quit gambling.”

The coin flips away from his long fingers, spins fast in the air, lands in his palm and slams down on the table. He makes a show of peeking at it then grins, tosses another chip on the center pile. “I’m in,” he says, and while they deal, Ringo flips the coin again.

“Heads,” he says, “and I stop drinking.”

The coin flies, lands, slams home under his cupped palm. He peeks again, then calls out for another round.

The cards aren’t in his favor, but the cards rarely are. When the pint is empty, Ringo mumbles, “Heads, and I stop fighting. Get a legitimate job, pretty wife, babies, hang up old Reason for good.”

The coin flies, a faint whistle sounding through the hole in its center.

The Grangor people stood watch on a high icy shelf to watch the flames swallow the winding spires of Trostan. Smoke glittered around their faces and clogged their lungs as the city that had been the heart of the Gythian crystal trade turned into the mouth of hell. They threw Gythian gold down into the crevasse for safe passage for the dead. The coins had become, in one day, useless anywhere within a hundred miles.

The wise ones gathered in a snow-dusted cluster and thumped their staves on the ground in the ancient story rhythm. With a judgmental lick of his one tusk, the eldest began the first Telling of the story that would be told and retold for generations:

“It was Trostan once, but soon it will be forgotten.”

“The wise ones knew,” they sang in chorus.

“Humans came to tear holes in the glaciers. They came to rip the crystal from the earth. They came to drink of the well,” continued the next-eldest in her shrill tone.

“The wise ones knew.”

“Our trophy-hunters traded with humans for steel,” called the next.

“The wise ones knew.”

“The city collapsed under its own greed,” crooned another.

“The wise ones knew.”

“Their ancestors lie too far to carry home their souls,” wailed the eldest.

“The wise ones kn…”

An icy blast from the peak above trembled the ground and broke their song. “Sisuuk!” screamed a Mother, gathering her kits close. All eyes turned away from the flames to look upward. Instead of an avalanche, though, what came forth along with the freezing wind was a man, his spine bent with age, spotted skin fragile as onion layers. His claw-like hand gripped a staff. Around his shoulders he wore the pelt of a Grangor. Though none of the Grangor had seen him before, they all knew of the elusive recluse. Reim, they called him, master of ice, devourer of Grangor, terror of the Kall Peaks. Though they outnumbered him by many dozens, the Grangor backed away, weapons at the ready, while the ice mage exhaled enraged breaths that crystallized into frost.  

“Where is the boy?” he growled.

“His mother knows,” replied the eldest, but it was only an expression among the Grangor. It meant that a thing could not be known.

With a sneer, Reim turned away from the Grangor and walked the path down the mountainside, grumbling to himself all the way. The river that bordered the burning city flowed black with ash. Reim struck his staff on the ground and the flowing water froze in place. He shuffled over it, coughing and hacking, into the city, waving his staff in irritation at the fires as he passed them. They sizzled and hissed into frozen, charred kindling.

“Kid!” he called. “Hey kid!”

The city had bustled with trade and travelers that morning; now, only the livestock raced away from their burned enclosures to the rivers at either side of the basin.

The mage choked the fires under his conjured frost one by one, leaving destroyed homes and businesses under thick sheets of ice, by turns calling out and mumbling to himself. He stopped to roll his eyes at the mage tower, resplendent in its ancient Gythian spires, the center of Trostan’s government. The top third had collapsed; the rest was a scorched husk of its former magnificence. This, too, he left frozen behind him. Round the town he traveled, tension rising in his voice. “Hey kid, you’re late! Where’d you get off to?” he continued until he reached the halcyon well at the center, the only thing unaffected by the flames. Noxious fumes rose from the burnt detritus of Trostan, drowned under ice. There, at the well’s edge, was a small woman with her face buried in the furry shoulder of a much larger Grangor. In one hand, she held a lantern that cast eerie shadows in the swirling ash.

“Ay!” shouted Reim with an annoyed clearing of his throat.  “Who’s in charge here!”

The woman turned her soot-stained face, mapped with tears, toward the stranger, revealing the singed remains of the robes of a High Mage of Gythia. Her shoulders rolled back, her chin tilted up, and though she was much smaller than the other two, the answer to Reim’s question had been answered.

“The boy,” he demanded.

The woman shook her head and held the Grangor’s forearm for support. “He’s gone,” she answered, then looked up at the Grangor’s chubby face. “Everything is gone.”

A teenaged boy stood at the mouth of the cave, ice axe in his gloved hand, steel spikes buckled to his boots, furs wrapped round everything but his dark eyes. It had been more than a decade since the last daring hopeful had attempted to maneuver through the steep tunnels that wound upward inside the glacier atop which Reim, the ice mage of legend, made his home. It had been much longer since anyone had been granted an audience.

“She will kill me if you don’t come home,” said his stout Grangor companion.

“I’ve climbed scarier things than this.”

“It isn’t the climb that worries me. It’s what’s at the top.”

The boy patted the Grangor on his snow-dusted shoulder, then began his slow, slippery ascent.

When the boy popped his head out at the top, struggling for breath, he was eye level with a pair of furry boots. The famed ice mage himself waited, ripping apart pine cones and munching on the nuts. “Magister!” cried the boy, holding up one hand for help, “I have come to learn from you.”

“Lesson one,” grunted Reim, planting a boot in the center of the boy’s forehead. “Leave me alone.” With a little nudge, the boy slid back down the icy tunnel on his belly, his oofs and thuds echoing along with the mage’s laughter, all the way down to the Grangor’s feet.

“Um,” said the Grangor.

“I’m fine,” gasped the boy, and began again.

When he reached the top, he found Reim sitting by his tent cross-legged, eating lichen out of the first stomach of a half-frozen reindeer. “Magister,” he said, rising to his feet, “I have heard great tales of your magic.”

The mage chewed with his mouth open.

“I am Mageborn. I have reached the ninth level of Gythian mage discipline. I have passed the test of the Grangor hunter.”

Reim’s fluffy white eyebrows did not rise with interest.

The boy lost patience. “Or maybe you’re just a crazy old man. Maybe the wise ones tell the stories of you just to scare the kits.”

Reim pressed one finger to his nostril and honked a frozen booger out onto the boy’s cheek.

Insulted, the boy descended through the tunnels again. The Grangor sat by a little fire.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said the boy.

“Trying again?” replied the Grangor.

“Yes,” said the boy, and climbed again.

This time, he knelt in the snow before the ice mage. He unwrapped the furs from his head and pressed his face into the puffy new snow on the ground. “Magister,” he said, his words muffled, “I read about what happened to your son. Please help me to avoid his fate.”

Reim ignored him and went about his day. He gathered meat from his traps and snares. He ate. He napped. At sunset, he kicked the boy on his shoulder. “You want hypothermia?” he yelled in the deaf way of old men. “Come inside, you idiot!”

In a tent made of Grangor skins and tusks, Reim waited until the boy’s teeth stopped chattering.

“What’s your name!”

“Samuel,” said the boy.

“And you consort with the filthy cats?”

Samuel’s shoulders tensed. “The Grangor people are …”

“… are not people. And passing their little test won’t grow fur on your butt. So what are you?”

“I am Gythian. The Mageborn son of Archmage Lora, head of the war division of the mage guild …”

“You’re as Gythian as you are Grangor.”

“I can trace my bloodline back for ten Gythian generations.”

“Yeah? Who bakes the best crusty rolls on Via Lucia?”

Samuel’s eyes dropped. “I … I have been fostered in Trostan since I was four.”

“Then the servant who dumps your grand archmage mother’s chamberpot is more Gythian than you are.” Reim hacked out a laugh. “Mageborn. Bred like a dog. When Gythia finds something that doesn’t work, by golly they stick to it.”

“Your son was Mageborn,” whispered Samuel.

“If you don’t wanna end up like my son,” said Reim, closing his eyes, “don’t bother with the tenth level of Gythian mage discipline. Swab the deck of one of the ships hauling crystal out of Trostan. Tend one of those balmy Lillian vineyards. Heck, collect creature eyeballs with those walking furballs. Forget about magic, and forget about Gythia.”

“But my mother …”

“… didn’t want you, or she would’ve raised you.”

The snow-blanketed silence filled the tent.

Reim opened the flap of the tent. “Go home,” he grumped.

Resolute, Samuel crawled outside and wrapped the furs back around his face. The soupy gray sky flashed with green and red streaks of light.

“And be back at dawn!” bellowed the ice mage.

Samuel grinned back at the tent as the flap fell closed.

On the muddy shore of Trostan, Lyra watched a Grangor search expedition wind their way through the ghost town, past the glowing blue well of power and up the glacier trail. For days they had sorted through the smoking rubble, rubbing ash away from the faces of the dead, hearts in their throats, but Samuel had not been found.

The old ice mage shuffled up beside her, leaning his weight on a staff, one bushy eyebrow raised. “No one’ll blame you if you don’t go back.”

Lyra didn’t hesitate. “I am Gythian.”

“Uh huh.” Reim made the blah-blah motion with one gnarled hand.

“It’s time,” she said.

Reim stretched out one arm; from his palm, a spinning ice ball formed. Lyra’s breath froze in her throat. Goosebumps rose on her arms. Frost leapt from Reim’s fingers; icicles formed on his beard; ice coated his staff and he slammed it into the mud. The ground shook as an ice spire shot up at the center of Trostan, spearing the sky, sealing the well.

“Your turn,” said Reim. “Shut it down.”

The spellbook blinked and fluttered open between her hands; the ancient words dropped from her mouth. The city’s magic borders scrolled away from the sky, fluttered in the air and returned to the book. Held back for decades, roiling clouds fled down from the peaks, flooding the destroyed city, releasing snow in fat flakes that blanketed the seared wreckage in blinding white.

The mages boarded the last of the ships. From the stern, Lyra hugged her spellbook to her chest and watched the expanse of her life’s work shrink away into the distance. It had begun as a frozen camp for miners, thieves and get-rich-quick schemes, but within Lyra’s protective barriers, it had become a pocket of color in desolate white. Gythian settlers had filled it with spires, sculpture, vegetation, legitimate trade and proper jurisprudence. The mage tower of Trostan, though a shadow of the one at home, had been all her own, its rounded walls lined with books and art, now ash.

~

Twenty years and some earlier, the view from the prow of the icebreaker ship, with its strengthened hull crunched up against what would soon be the port of Trostan, was of white and more white, sandwiched between a cruel gray sky and a choppy gray sea.

The fateswoman’s dour mouth twisted under her white hood as she dumped the divine doves out of their gilded cage without ceremony. When they flew into the masts, she proclaimed it a positive augur as she’d been paid to do. The reading of the fates mattered not at all to Lyra, but the surrounding ship decks were packed with lower-born citizens who would not have disembarked without a good augur. These explorers and miners had settled this forsaken and frozen area of the Kall Peaks, where only Grangor had roamed before crystal had been found. High above, on the ledges of the mountains, the cat-beasts themselves watched. If Lyra succeeded, more ships would follow from Gythia with future Trostanians: architects, merchants, artists, agriculturalists with their seedlings and livestock, more miners and equipment and shipbuilders, teachers and physicians for their children.

Lyra huddled under a red fur cape that would have commanded respect were it not soaking wet. Spring in the Kalls meant sleet, a sleet that slammed into the sea at such a volume that her speech about the glory of the empire and hope for a future of affluence was abandoned.

Never before had so many eyes laid upon her. Never before had so much responsibility rested on her shoulders. Never before had she wished for failure.

“If there is a day for it, let it be today,” she muttered.

“What?” bellowed her Grangor guide. Though covered in fur, he seemed no worse for wear; the wetness slid away from him and his toothy grin triumphed over the storm.

“I had a speech prepared,” she yelled back. “I don’t think they’ll hear it!”

“May as well just do your thing!” The Grangor’s claws clasped together over his generous belly.

Lyra focused her gaze on the glowing glacier, all else falling away. She sank a deep, cold breath into her lungs and held it there, warming it, before releasing it out in a fog. “Come, Ambrosius,” she whispered, and her spellbook fled away from her cloak to float by her upturned palm. His eye rolled up as she whispered the words that appeared in runes on his pages. Another deep cold breath and the sleet sizzled when it struck her, and then her crimson fur cloak warmed and dried, then her hair, and she gathered the warmth between her hands and wished, as always, that she could hold it forever. Her arms spread wide and light flooded from her fingertips. Warm curved barriers formed at the borders of what would soon be Trostan, and the sleet fell around these wards like water around a glass globe. The clouds dissolved within her warm bulwark, the people turned joyful faces toward the sun, and the great glowing Halcyon-infused glacier began to crack and drip and flow into what would be known, for the next generation, as the twin rivers of Trostan.

Remarkable, Lyra thought, how quickly the settlers had mixed Gythian with the rough syllables of the Grangor tongue to create the language of Trostanian. Lyra never deigned to speak it, but understanding Trostanian was essential in the multicultural port town, no matter what garish throaty things it did to the lyrical Gythian syllables. Only five years ago, her barriers had melted the Halcyon glacier and already the settlement had become a growing, respectable town. Dockside inns filled to bursting with taxpaying travelers seeking their crystal fortune, adding their native nomenclature to the evolving language. On the docks, sailors called to one another in fluent Trostanian as they passed crates down the ramps from the ships’ tenders to the docks.

Lyra, escorted by her Grangor guide, disciplined her expression into sobriety, but her eyes shone as they darted around the dock. Golden-cloaked Gythian soldiers emerged from a tender hefting ornate chests and crates. With an impatient but formal gesture of greeting she approached the most decorated of the soldiers, a silver-templed man holding the hand of a small boy. “I was told my replacement would be of the mages, but I suppose Trostan can be held well enough by the army now that it’s operative,” she said. “You and your son are welcome here.”

“You’re mistaken, Lady Lyra. Your replacement is of the mages.” The soldier guided the boy forward by his shoulders. “Archmage Lora bade me deliver him to you and memorize her message.”

Lyra’s heart sank along with her eyes as she gazed down at the boy, resplendent in a night-black fur cloak far too large for him, his terrified dark eyes widened with hope. “Deliver the message, sir.”

“‘Greetings, Battlemage Lyra,” snapped the soldier. “‘The Mage Guild of Gythia is pleased to present Samuel the Mageborn, son of Archmage Lora the Mageborn and Scholar Titus the Mageborn, to be fostered and educated under your wise tutelage until such time as he comes of age and can take your place in the governorship of Trostan.’”

“What’s this?” asked the Grangor.

“Politics,” said Lyra through a wound-tight jaw. “Or a cruel joke.”

The Grangor hunched down. “Welcome, Sam. How old are you?”

The boy held up four fingers.

“Four winters old! Such a handsome big boy you are.” The Grangor mussed the child’s hair.

“Lora has banished me to Trostan for fourteen more years.” Lyra coughed out a laugh. “She still fears me.”

“We’ll make you up a room in the mage tower, Sam,” said the Grangor. Without ceremony he swung the boy up onto his shoulders and the soldiers followed them into town, leaving Lyra to stare off into the warm sea of her memories.

~

In Gythia, the onshore cold from Bladed Bay breezed the curtains in Lyra’s mage tower apartment. Back then, Trostan was a stratagem, a hope for Gythia’s post-war recovery effort. Before she experienced the ice storms of Trostan, Lyra thought this breeze unbearable; she rolled over in bed, smooshing her face into Titus’ chest to escape it. “Hold me,” she mumbled into his skin. “I’m cold.” He slung one leg over her waist, making her giggle. “Useless, you are. Now I’m overheated just on this spot. Get off me and I’ll make tea.”

He held her down, sliding a steel letter opener through the wax seal of a scroll. “If you wanted to escape, you’d turn me into a toad or something, Miss Battlemage.”

“No need,” she said, arching up for a sour morning kiss. “I trust you.”

“That is your first mistake. Ooh,” he said, drawing the sharp point of the letter opener down her side, “It’s from the Archmage. You are important now.”

“Your envy is unattractive.” Lyra shivered and smiled, inhaling the sweat and sandalwood scent of him. “What is that?”

“A letter came for you with breakfast.”

“If it is for me, don’t you think I should open it?”

He held the scroll out of her reach. “Battlemage Lyra of the Mage Guild, blah blah … immediate deployment to the Kall Peaks to establish the colony of Trostan …”

“They’re sending us to the Kalls?” Lyra reached for the scroll, but Titus held fast to it, his brows knitted.

“Your petition of marriage to Scholar Titus the Mageborn is heretofore denied due to the arrangement of marriage to …”

Lyra rolled over him and snatched the letter from his hands; wax bits scattered onto the bed. “.. to Lora the Mageborn,” she mumbled. “There’s been some administrative error. Someone mistook my name for Lora’s. This has happened before.”

“You are not Mageborn.” Titus drew her close. “You knew they might choose to arrange my marriage. The Guild wants …”

“… Mageborn children,” she said. “But I went through all the proper channels. I filled out the forms. I thought ….” She held his ears in her hands, pressed her forehead to his. “We do not have to obey. We can be farmers in the provinces. We can disappear in Taizen Gate.”

“You have worked since childhood to rise in the guild’s ranks. I will not allow you to give up everything you worked so hard to accomplish,” he said, burying his face in the plum tumble of her hair. “We are Gythian foremost.”

She soaked his neck with silent tears, her fingers clawing into his shoulders.

Samuel emerged from his rented island room sullen, his cheeks gaunt, dressed all in black. He walked past hammocks where the locals napped away the hot afternoon, couples snoring together in a tangle of limbs, mothers curled around little children like shells around peas. Away from the dwellings he found a handful of goats gnawing on shrubs; honeybees dove through tall bamboo to rummage inside of flowering beans, zucchini and asparagus. In the garden it was difficult to believe that the island was the shell of the giant and ancient titanback named Archelon, floating his annual way around the world.

He followed a path through the tide pools where barefoot children sprinted over the slick bone surface, squatting to inspect the bright slugs, limpets, anemones, sea slugs and stars. A small child held a sea urchin in one hand, drawing out meat from its belly with deft fingers and slurping it up as he watched Samuel step with care. Older children looked after nests of eggs larger than their heads.

At the highest point of the island, the smell of food cooking set his stomach to growling. Locals milled about, poking at a grill, laying out baskets, cleaning up children. A giant carp smoked to a golden brown crisp on smoldering coals laid in the center, its stuffed belly open; clams and oysters and heaps of pickled seaweed lay in steaming piles around it.

“Take cover, ladies. A raincloud approaches,” called a voice, followed by ladies laughing. “Join us, Samuel.”

Blossoms drifted down from a cherry tree under which sat a large man, two women and a basket of food. The three wore sarongs; the man’s was fuschia and wrapped round his waist. One of the women shaved his head with a straight razor. The other sat cross-legged, her hand outstretched, as the man manicured her nails.

Samuel paused in an awkward half-step before sitting at the edge of the shade. “I am afraid I do not know you.”

“You need not fear. I am Lance,” said the man. The woman pushed his ear forward to shave behind it. “Eat honey and cheese. It will sweeten you.”

“I will not eat today,” said Samuel.

“Are you sick?” asked the woman with the straight razor.

“No,” said Samuel. “Fasting preserves power and increases discipline.”

“You have all the rest of your lonely life to starve,” said the man. “How many days will you have for licking honey from the fingers of a beautiful lady?”

Samuel turned his blushing face away from the manicured woman, who dipped a finger in the honeypot with a sly smile. “Is she not one of your wives?”

“People are not possessions,” replied Lance.

“Are these not your children?” sputtered Samuel.

“The children belong to everyone, or rather, we belong to them.” The woman folded away her razor and a little boy slipped down from a branch onto Lance’s shoulders. “You will break your fast today, Sam. If you argue, we will take offense.”

“I prefer Samuel,” he said, but he could not refuse. He deposited a bit of fish into his basket and plucked meat from the fragile bones with his fingers like the others. Children crawled up on his legs and asked incessant questions. Lance made no move to save him from the onslaught, and before long Samuel could not help but chuckle.

After they had eaten, the crowd walked the long pathway down to the shell’s edge to watch the sea trolls hunt. They herded seals and held them under, drowning them before tossing them high in the air and catching them in their giant maws.

“I would not allow the children so close to those hunters,” said Samuel.

Lance kept an arm around Samuel’s stiff shoulder as though they were old friends. “The trolls come ashore once a year to lay eggs, and we care for them. In return, the trolls protect Archelon’s soft underbelly from predators, and we play together. Come, watch the jousts.”

At the shell’s edge, past the long line of docked barges, men tied woven saddles to the beasts’ great heads. Wearing bamboo armor and shields and wielding rattan lances, the men mounted the trolls and charged, their lances crashing into one another’s shields with startling cracks. Lance was the best of these knights; he took to the saddle as if born there, sending one opponent after another splashing into the water, his powerful arm locked around his weapon, a frightening grin spread across his face. His troll roared its pleasure and sprayed the onlookers with a wall of water from its slapping tail.

After the jousts, Samuel and Lance watched the moon rise together while the others wandered away. “How do you like our home?” asked Lance.

“It will not last,” said Samuel. “Archelon will not live forever.”

“The rings round the scutes tell us that Archelon has lived at least a thousand growth seasons, and he swims stronger than ever.”

“All things die.”

“Have faith, Sam.” Lance clapped the young man on his shoulder.

“That is no answer.”

“And yet, it is ever the correct one.”

On the last day of his months-long journey, Samuel dove to look into the eye of Archelon. Lance waited on shore, remembering the day that he had passed this same test: the eye gleaming at him, far wider than he was tall. When Samuel surfaced, gasping, Lance hunched down to help him out. “Did you gaze into his eye?”

“I saw it, and it saw me,” said Samuel, drawing on dry clothes.

“What did Archelon say to you?”

Samuel’s brow cocked. “I do not speak whatever burbling beast language he speaks.”

“You heard nothing in your heart?”

“I also do not speak whatever burbling beast language the heart speaks.”

“Well enough; you have presented yourself to Archelon and so you are one of us. Come.” Lance led him around the shell shore, pausing to rub the heads of sea trolls when they poked through the surface. “Archelon is too large to swim through Bladed Bay. At dawn, I shall escort you to the city by barge.” In the Gythian language he continued: “Your destiny is also mine.”

“I did not think to hear that language from an Archelion,” said Samuel also in Gythian, his words cutting sharp corners. On the docks where the barges hung, children took air in little sips before diving for pearl oysters, dripping nets dangling round their necks.

Lance led Samuel inside the cabin of one of the barges. “Long ago, when I was a young man, a Gythian like yourself bought passage on Archelon to see the world during his last year. He was a knight with a good heart.”

“Nothing like me then,” said Samuel.

“He taught me to wield the lance and shield and live by the knightly tenets of justice, courage, mercy, decorum, honesty, honor, loyalty and character.” A beatific light shone in Lance’s eyes. “And he told me about the city’s rich history of music and passion, enough beauty to inebriate the soul.”

“Did he forget about the wars, corruption and ruthless politics in his dotage?”

“It is true; there is much in the world to be set aright. How can I stay on Archelon when my duty is elsewhere? Look: When my teacher passed on, he gave me these.” Lance lit candles round the cabin and, as the light flickered a warm air of the sacred, opened a hidden compartment under the floorboards where armor, shield and a lance laid in repose. “Since then, I have made it my life’s work to collect Gythian artifacts.”

He hefted up the shield to display, but Samuel rifled through a neat pile of kitchen tools, a bronze candelabra, long-outdated maps and recipes, plumed carnival masks and a brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. He plucked up a rusted garlic press, snapped it open and closed. “Beautiful shield, and not a scratch on it,” he said. “Your fabled knight did not see enough battle to find those tenets difficult.”

“War is not the whole of a knight,” said Lance, unwavering. “I vowed to one day protect a Gythian, and in doing so earn knighthood for myself.”

“I do not need protecting.” Samuel threw the garlic press back to its spot. “I am not the Gythian of your dreams. I have not even seen the city since I was four years old.”

“You are he. I know it.”

“You do not know me, and you do not know Gythia, for all of your careful study of its garbage. Who bakes the best crusty rolls on Via Lucia?” Samuel grabbed up a book and paged through it fast. “The knighthood is just old families clinging to faltering fortunes. It has nothing to do with … what was that ludicrous list? Justice, honesty, decorum …”

Lance took the book from Samuel’s hand as if handling a sleeping baby. “That ludicrous list has everything to do with me.”

And so, at the first gray light, Samuel sat on Lance’s barge, folded in bad posture inside his dark cloak. Lance, wearing the full armor of a Gythian knight, steered the sea troll that pulled the barge through the treacherous black-toothed mouth of the city. The mist parted and a rose-gold light bathed the gleaming fountains and sculpture, the towers and spires, the churning water wheels. Lance’s breath caught in his throat; tears sprang unbidden to his eyes. His plain barge pulled up to the dock between luxury steamboats where a grand reception of dignitaries in elegant finery waited.

Samuel moved like an unwilling shadow behind Lance’s great steel bulk as they disembarked. Lance held up his hand in greeting, but all eyes locked on the hooded young man. The woman in the center stepped forward, one hand heavy with rings appearing beyond long silk sleeves to show her palm in proper greeting. “Welcome home, Samuel,” she said. “We feared the worst.”

“My thanks, Mother,” said Samuel.

Samuel returned to his room at sunset to find Lyra there, staring at the collection of ceremonial Grangor headdresses he’d mounted on one curved wall. He dropped his dripping snow gear on the floor and fell back on his unmade bed, flopping one arm over his eyes. “So there will be a lecture tonight,” he muttered. “Safety or obligation?”

Lyra picked her way with care across the disaster of stacked books, maps and papers, giving a wide berth to the skeleton of the mammoth seal Samuel had speared at his Grangor hunter trial. “Did you… eat this creature?”

“The tribe feasted after the trial. I ate the right flipper and the chief ate the left.”

Lyra shuddered. “I shall have your room cleaned. There is a spider above your bed.”

“It’s a sleep-spider. It gobbles up dreams and spins webs in the shapes of those dreams. I took it from the Netherworld. Don’t touch it.”

Lyra’s eyes blazed. “I told you not to dabble in the Netherworld. The nightmares and phantasms …”

“And dreams and ghosts and Valkyries. Magister Reim …”

“And I told you to stay away from that crazed old man. Is that where you were all week?”

Samuel chuckled, his arm still covering his eyes. “Add that to your list of disappointments. I have given up trying to please you. I rather think you are incapable of pleasure.”

“You do not have the luxury of adolescent insolence.”

“The obligation lecture, then.” Samuel responded with an exaggerated yawn.

Lyra exhaled through her nose, eyes closed, collecting herself. “No. That is the Archmage’s duty now.” She dropped a heavy but small steel machine onto the bed next to him and he removed his arm from his eyes to squint at it.

“What is that contraption?”

“It came with the latest shipment. They have managed to make holograms work, thanks to infused Trostanian crystal. They’ve had holographic messages in Mont Lille for years …”

“… and in Campestria far longer.” Samuel sat up in his bed to inspect the box.

“It is progress nevertheless, so our efforts here are not in vain.”

“Well then, let us see what my mother deigns to say to me.”

“Samuel.” Lyra rested a hand on his shoulder. The gesture was awkward and made them both flinch. “I think … I do not know if this message …”

“Don’t worry, Lady. I am not an orphan harboring dreams of mommy bestowing affection on me after fourteen years of no word.” Samuel snorted. “The Magister said I was bred like a dog.”

Lyra was quieted by that. She focused her gaze on the message box, her violet curls falling to hide her expression while Samuel hit the button with his fist. The platform buzzed with blue light that broke and spat before it came together to form a face. The Archmage’s face. He had no memory of it, and there was no color to her eyes, but the resemblance was obvious.

“Samuel.” The sound crackled with static. “Lady Lyra has kept me informed of your progress. Well done on passing the first nine disciplines. The Mage Guild depends on you passing the tenth. You shall return home to prove your worth in the final test before your formal induction into the guild. I trust Lyra has prepared you well.”

Home. He almost missed what came after.

“After you have received your rank, you shall be positioned as governor of Trostan and lead the effort to move the Grangor population to the frontier. You shall see to the expansion of our crystal mining in the Kall Peaks. Your rapport with the Grangor beasts will be essential to this effort. You shall return to Trostan with whatever contingent of troops you deem necessary to assist you.

“Our guild and our empire depend on your success, my son. With your help, Gythia shall return to its former glory.”

The picture blinked out of existence and Samuel stared at the place where it had been. “Move the Grangor population,” he breathed. “Has she ever met a Grangor?”

Lyra clasped her hands inside her long sleeves. “If it is necessary …”

“They won’t go. I have seen their souls in the Netherworld. They are rooted to this land by blood and ritual and the hunt.”

“You sound like one of them,” said Lyra, her tone measured.

He stood and paced the room. “I’d have to kill them all. My mother wants me to kill them all.”

“You are Gythian.”

Samuel whirled to face her. “Why should I have to explain to you that this is wrong?” he cried, and the words spilled out of him in a dark magic that formed into a treacherous churning orb that surrounded them both.

Inside the orb was the deep cave-dark of nightmares. Nothing Lyra had taught Samuel of Gythian magecraft explained that darkness, or the weakening beat of her heart. She snapped awake without realizing she’d been asleep, gasping and shaking, and whispered the words of warding. A green glow shone through the blackness, drinking it in, dispelling it.

Above the bed, the sleep-spider wove into its web a shimmering silken depiction of Trostan in flames.

Bright-plumed Titanbeaks pulled the mages’ litters through the Gythian streets: the Archmage in her own, Lyra and Magister Reim in the next. Lance insisted on riding in the third with Samuel; he craned his head out of the curtained window to gape at the complex of short military towers and training yards sprawled against the great obsidian wall, then the closed-up and somber Ministers’ Tower, the Cartographers’ Tower with its landings and patios housing all sizes of telescopes and finally the Mage Tower, taller by a hundred feet than any other and wide as a city block. It was adorned around each level with golden sculptures of past Archmages, each holding the ancient wand named Verdict.

Samuel entered the tower under the hard golden gaze of his sculpted mother and followed his escort into the grand center theater. The acrid taste of unfamiliar magic stung his tongue. Lyra and Reim stopped Lance from following; the three stood by the door.

A walkway edged with sculpted obsidian pillars led to two stone platforms, one higher than the other. Samuel stood on the shorter; atop the high platform stood the guild’s top-ranking mages, the Archmage at the fore, her robes removed to reveal the somber black lace vestments of judgment. “Samuel the Mage Born,” she said, her sugared tone echoing in the immense room, “your tenth trial begins now. If you pass, you shall receive your rank in our guild.” She stretched Verdict forth. “I hope you are prepared.”

Samuel pulled from his belt the wand named Malice. “So I am not to answer for disobeying you, Mother? For burning down Gythia’s hopes? Does it trouble you overmuch to acknowledge the failure of your bloodline?” He spun the wand between his fingers before clenching it in his fist.

A shadow fled from Verdict and landed in Samuel’s periphery a split moment before pain flooded his belly. He whirled to face his aggressor and stared into his own face, at Malice pointed at his own torso. There was no time to register this ultimate betrayal before his shadow double flanked and shot again.

~

Lance lunged forward only to slam full-force into a shimmering green wall.

“For every action, there is a consequence,” said Lyra.

Reim watched the fight, expressionless, white-knuckling his staff.

~

A rushing water sound filled Samuel’s ears. He circled to the right and his shadow self mirrored him; there was a flash, and a sting bloomed on Samuel’s leg, a pain that sank to his bones. He curled his tongue around the words of power and a burst of magic fled from his wand, missing the shadow by a breath. He dove and spat out another word: “Uruz!” Another shot just missed the shadow’s neck. The shadow returned the blasts and Samuel dodged. They traded dark magic fire until the platform was a blinding shower of light. He could not outwit himself.

But the shadow could not learn.

He feinted right and leaped away from his double, springing to the nearest pillar, cracking his ribs, two fingers curled around the canine teeth of a carved lion’s head. With the half-second he’d bought, he pulled himself up to crouch atop it.

“Kenaz,” he cried, and the air wavered, and around him were the souls of ancient mages, thousands of them with hollow eyes watching, and the darkness of the Netherworld enveloped him as he leaped. Light flashed from Malice and the shadow crouched, spun wrong and caught the full force of the spell in its back.

When the dark had dissipated, Samuel stood alone on the platform. The Netherworld, having been opened, lurked close, the phantasms murmuring hate and promising justice. Above, the Archmage extended Verdict again.

“So you present a test no one can survive to save yourself the embarrassment of convicting me.” Samuel’s bitter laugh seized as he held his broken ribs. “That is how Magister Reim’s son died, isn’t it? He asked too many questions.”

“If it is so,” said the Archmage, “then you should concentrate on succeeding.”

A second shadow fled from Verdict, forming beside Samuel. He slid back, Malice held in his fist like a blade, his eyes narrowed at his new opponent –

– and his arm dropped as he flinched away from the little boy who looked up at him with wide, terrified eyes: Samuel, as he’d been fourteen years past when he entered Trostan for the first time, Malice far too big for his little hands.

“Such poetry,” mocked Samuel. “I suppose I shall face my wise old future self next?”

“You shall have no such future if you fail,” called the Archmage.

Samuel sidestepped the shadow boy’s fumbling shots with ease. Tears welled in the boy’s eyes.

“I would rather fail,” said Samuel, and released the phantasm that twisted and curled into the skull-shape of nightmares, sailing around the shadow child and then the mages high above, lulling them all to sleep. The shadow disappeared and the Archmage fell.

~

The shimmering wall dropped. A spinning, churning hole appeared in the walkway by Lance’s feet.

“Go,” choked Lyra behind him. “Go!”

~

The Archmage landed in Samuel’s outstretched arms, slamming him to the floor. His shoulder dislocated from its socket, sending shocks of pain through his arm and spine. He snatched Verdict away from her, rolled away, yanked his shoulder back into place with an agonized gasp, then stumbled to his feet. “Where is she?” he screamed.

“Who?” gasped the Archmage, blinking, disoriented.

“Gythia’s little creature.” He bent over her, spitting the words into her face. “Trostan wasn’t the only iron you had in the fire. Where is the Storm Queen’s niece?”

The Archmage flinched away. “Gathering allies,” she whimpered. “The Halcyon -”

Samuel sneered and aimed both wands at the Archmage’s face. “Well done, Mother.”

Armor clattered as the knight rolled into position between them, weapon at the ready, shield high. Samuel stepped back, wands crossed in front of him.

“Reconsider, my friend,” growled Lance.

Samuel’s grim mouth cracked into a smile. “You are better than Gythia ever was,” he said, and fell back into the churning portal.

Reim stood at the portal’s source, palm out as Lyra’s face turned blue. Icicles hung from her ears and hair. Her book, encased in ice, laid useless on the floor. Samuel tumbled from the portal’s source at his feet, struggling for breath as he looked up at his teacher’s distressed eyes.

“Magister,” he whispered.

“Run, you fool.”

On the unkempt path along the mangrove-lined river, overgrown with vines and flowers, the paladin in his gilded ceremonial armor cut an imposing figure. A dozen warriors and several local guides marched behind him; explorers brought up the rear, sketching, collecting samples and taking notes. The paladin’s wide-eyed young daughter gripped his outstretched finger with her whole small fist.

“Do you like the islands, Grace?”

At six years old, this was her first trip outside of Gythia, and the foreign tropics were a dizzying delight. Wherever there was soil, color burst through. Flowers as big as her head called hi! hey! hi! Exotic birds showed off their plumage and screeched to make sure she looked. Even the mosquito swarms shimmered.

“Yes,” she answered, her tone solemn. “This must be the prettiest place in the world.”

“These shall be the Grace Islands, then.” Her father waved his arm in an arc to indicate the half-moon shape of the archipelago. “Make a note of it,” he called over one shoulder, and a mapmaker scribbled in her journal.

Grace stared in reserved wonder at her surroundings while her father named the flora and fauna as though he’d created it all. The locals wore colorful sarongs and flowers in their hair. They waved and never ceased smiling. One of them fed plums to a young macaque that perched with hungry obedience on the little girl’s shoulder.

“These are nice people,” observed Grace.

“Peace and kindness is embedded into their culture. They even file down the sharp teeth of adolescents to remove their violent nature.”

Grace touched her own teeth. “Does it hurt?”

“Oh yes.”

“You should tell them to stop, Papa.”

“Oh, dulcissima! A man may be a better hunter than a tiger, but he would be a fool to tell the beast how to hunt on its own land.”

“But these are people.”

“Yes, they are people,” mused the paladin. “Of a kind.”

Grace stopped short, wavering on her feet. The world around her brightened at the edges. The monkey leaped away and the retinue came to a halt.

“Papa?” she whimpered.

The paladin held her steady by the shoulders. “Do not fear. Tell me what the light shows you.”

Grace shivered as a great wall of ice rose up, blocking their path. Where the path forked toward the river, a wall of fire blazed upward, spitting embers and burning her cheeks. “Ice and fire,” she whispered.

“Which way is the fire?”

She pointed to the river and the vision ended, the walls only tricks of the light.

The procession moved single-file onto the stone steps leading across the river. In the center of the water stood a temple.

A guide intercepted them. His smile never wavered, though his voice was strained. “Sir,” he said, bowing low, “visitors do not cross here, Sir. Danger, Sir.” He held out his arms, revealing rippling burn scars.

“Stand back,” said the paladin. He rested a hand on the guide’s shoulder, and when he lifted it, a hand-shaped spot of healed flesh remained.

The temple was made of stone. The mangroves growing over it were scorched. The buzzing mosquitos and bickering monkeys stayed away, so that the temple was cloaked in eerie quiet. At the temple’s entrance a local boy appeared, perhaps a year younger than Grace. He wore only a sarong around his waist, so that gruesome scars and new welts from burns showed all over his chest and face.

“This boy speaks fire,” whispered the guide. He stared in wonder at his shoulder as the healed skin spread down his arm. “His name is Reza.”

“He’s hurt,” said Grace.

The paladin guided Grace forward, toward the boy. “Go and do as you have learned.”

Grace stepped across slick stones to the temple with care, leaving her father behind. She greeted the boy with a Gythian hand gesture and he flinched.

“I’m going to take care of you,” she said, gentle but firm. She rested her palms on the boy’s face. The light burned at the top of her head and she guided it down, as her father had taught her, down through her head and throat, flooding her heart and belly and arms and then escaping through her fingertips. The light swelled and the boy’s eyes grew wide. Down to his shoulders her hands slid, leaving behind smooth, healed flesh. The light traveled down his body, enveloping him with its warmth. “There,” she said when she had done. She was tired to her bones from the effort, but the boy’s burn scars and welts had disappeared, leaving behind a dazzling, dark beauty. “That’s better.”

The boy opened his mouth to speak, or cry or laugh; it couldn’t be known, for what came from his mouth was a trail of fire, just like in Grace’s vision, spurting sparks and raining ash.

The paladin’s light shield burst into being between her and the boy just in time. The flames beat against it but could not penetrate. The boy’s mouth shut and his eyes filled with ashy tears as the paladin approached.

“The Mageborn must be trained to the proper use of their power, just as you, born to the light, have learned to control your visions,” he said, patting Grace’s red braid. “Until we deliver him to the mages, you must care for him like a sister.”

“My brother.” Grace took the boy’s hand. “I shall name you Titus.”

Grace woke in the dark, her greyhound nuzzling its wet nose into her foot. Rolling the morning stiffness from her shoulders, she made her way to the empty training yard in the first rose light of dawn, the greyhound following at her heel. She selected a heavy mace from the weapon rack and moved through a warmup flow, swinging it in slow, controlled circles in front of her body and then behind her back, changing grip and direction, then progressed through lunging battle forms. Her mind stilled as she put her body through the old disciplines. In this way, she had learned long ago to control visions, to bid them come when she wished. Her consciousness flowed with her breath, up and up, the training yard falling away, up and then out.

At first there was only a sound, that of a young man crying out words of power, and then there was a darkness that split apart the air. From that darkness came tortured beings, phantasms, dead things with white eyes yearning for freedom. The Nether, a place of nightmares, the absence of life and light, called forth by a mage.

Grace danced through the mace flow, blind to the world around her, her eyes rolled up, and forced the vision forward. Show me he who opened the Nether, she said without saying, and the vision changed – but instead of a mage, she saw a knight wandering the city’s twisting alleyways in the dark. He was a stranger in Gythian armor, bearing a shield and a lance, braving the sea-cold wind without tiring, asking locals for the whereabouts of a wayward boy. Grace watched as he paused to admire the ancient towers, to stare at torchlit fountains and, in the minutes before dawn, to breathe in the smell of the day’s first bread baking.

Grace ended the mace flow and shook off the vision. A silent cluster of acolytes in robes and cowls filed out to the yard and went to work trimming the rose bushes, brushing and raking the clay and sand yards, and skimming the surface of the battle pool with a net. The mace landed in Grace’s palms with finality and acolytes scurried to bring water and towel the sweat from her brow.

“There is a man at the gate,” said Grace, sitting for her breakfast. “Bring him to me.”

Grace’s visions were not questioned. A few moments later the stranger from her dream was led to her table. He stared at the training yard with open-mouthed awe, his eyes beatific as an icon, while his shield and lance were presented to Grace for study. “These were Gennaro’s,” she said. “Did you know him?”

The man met Grace’s eyes with a wide smile and an ease that few possessed in her presence. “Gennaro was my teacher. He journeyed to the next world on the back of Archelon and passed his possessions to me.”

Grace handed the shield to an acolyte. “Then we mourn together. Gennaro was a good knight, and a friend of my father’s. Do you, then, seek knighthood?”

“That was my reason for coming here,” said the man, and all at once he seemed tired down to his soul. “I found a mage and swore to protect him, to prove myself worthy. But his tenth trial was designed to kill him, and I could not do as I promised.”

“So he is dead.”

“No. I don’t know.” The man sighed. “He did something I could not understand.”

“He opened the Nether,” Grace whispered.

“He tried to kill the Archmage. His own mother.”

“His mother?” Grace’s heart fell.

“I stopped him, and he fled. So I must find him, and right this wrong, so that I can fulfill my destiny.”

Grace stood, and even without the splendor of her ceremonial dress she was an imposing figure, the sunlight enveloping her. “What is your name, warrior?” she said in a low tone.

“Lance,” he said, his voice withered with shame. “Lance of Archelon.”

“On your knees, Lance of Archelon.”

The man knelt, prepared for punishment. Instead, he felt the woman’s palm on his bare head. Warmth flooded down his spine, and with it, a peace he had not known since he was a babe in his mother’s arms.

“With valor and bravery you saved the life of the Archmage,” she said. “You kept watch in the night. Do you swear to live by the tenets of justice, courage, mercy, decorum, honesty, honor, loyalty and character?”

“I do.” His words cracked with emotion.

“Then you are welcome in my guild and in my country. Rise, Lance, Knight of Gythia, in the name of the Light.” Grace smiled and her hand dropped. “Go and rest. This is now a matter for the office of the paladin.”

He wept his thanks as the acolytes guided him away. Grace’s attendants hovered close.

“Shall we call upon the Archmage, Domina?”

“No.” Grace turned and strode toward her chambers, the greyhound at her heel. “Find my brother.”

The Grangor people stood watch on a high icy shelf to watch the flames swallow the winding spires of Trostan. Smoke glittered around their faces and clogged their lungs as the city that had been the heart of the Gythian crystal trade turned into the mouth of hell. They threw Gythian gold down into the crevasse for safe passage for the dead. The coins had become, in one day, useless anywhere within a hundred miles.

The wise ones gathered in a snow-dusted cluster and thumped their staves on the ground in the ancient story rhythm. With a judgmental lick of his one tusk, the eldest began the first Telling of the story that would be told and retold for generations:

“It was Trostan once, but soon it will be forgotten.”

“The wise ones knew,” they sang in chorus.

“Humans came to tear holes in the glaciers. They came to rip the crystal from the earth. They came to drink of the well,” continued the next-eldest in her shrill tone.

“The wise ones knew.”

“Our trophy-hunters traded with humans for steel,” called the next.

“The wise ones knew.”

“The city collapsed under its own greed,” crooned another.

“The wise ones knew.”

“Their ancestors lie too far to carry home their souls,” wailed the eldest.

“The wise ones kn…”

An icy blast from the peak above trembled the ground and broke their song. “Sisuuk!” screamed a Mother, gathering her kits close. All eyes turned away from the flames to look upward. Instead of an avalanche, though, what came forth along with the freezing wind was a man, his spine bent with age, spotted skin fragile as onion layers. His claw-like hand gripped a staff. Around his shoulders he wore the pelt of a Grangor. Though none of the Grangor had seen him before, they all knew of the elusive recluse. Reim, they called him, master of ice, devourer of Grangor, terror of the Kall Peaks. Though they outnumbered him by many dozens, the Grangor backed away, weapons at the ready, while the ice mage exhaled enraged breaths that crystallized into frost.  

“Where is the boy?” he growled.

“His mother knows,” replied the eldest, but it was only an expression among the Grangor. It meant that a thing could not be known.

With a sneer, Reim turned away from the Grangor and walked the path down the mountainside, grumbling to himself all the way. The river that bordered the burning city flowed black with ash. Reim struck his staff on the ground and the flowing water froze in place. He shuffled over it, coughing and hacking, into the city, waving his staff in irritation at the fires as he passed them. They sizzled and hissed into frozen, charred kindling.

“Kid!” he called. “Hey kid!”

The city had bustled with trade and travelers that morning; now, only the livestock raced away from their burned enclosures to the rivers at either side of the basin.

The mage choked the fires under his conjured frost one by one, leaving destroyed homes and businesses under thick sheets of ice, by turns calling out and mumbling to himself. He stopped to roll his eyes at the mage tower, resplendent in its ancient Gythian spires, the center of Trostan’s government. The top third had collapsed; the rest was a scorched husk of its former magnificence. This, too, he left frozen behind him. Round the town he traveled, tension rising in his voice. “Hey kid, you’re late! Where’d you get off to?” he continued until he reached the halcyon well at the center, the only thing unaffected by the flames. Noxious fumes rose from the burnt detritus of Trostan, drowned under ice. There, at the well’s edge, was a small woman with her face buried in the furry shoulder of a much larger Grangor. In one hand, she held a lantern that cast eerie shadows in the swirling ash.

“Ay!” shouted Reim with an annoyed clearing of his throat.  “Who’s in charge here!”

The woman turned her soot-stained face, mapped with tears, toward the stranger, revealing the singed remains of the robes of a High Mage of Gythia. Her shoulders rolled back, her chin tilted up, and though she was much smaller than the other two, the answer to Reim’s question had been answered.

“The boy,” he demanded.

The woman shook her head and held the Grangor’s forearm for support. “He’s gone,” she answered, then looked up at the Grangor’s chubby face. “Everything is gone.”

A teenaged boy stood at the mouth of the cave, ice axe in his gloved hand, steel spikes buckled to his boots, furs wrapped round everything but his dark eyes. It had been more than a decade since the last daring hopeful had attempted to maneuver through the steep tunnels that wound upward inside the glacier atop which Reim, the ice mage of legend, made his home. It had been much longer since anyone had been granted an audience.

“She will kill me if you don’t come home,” said his stout Grangor companion.

“I’ve climbed scarier things than this.”

“It isn’t the climb that worries me. It’s what’s at the top.”

The boy patted the Grangor on his snow-dusted shoulder, then began his slow, slippery ascent.

When the boy popped his head out at the top, struggling for breath, he was eye level with a pair of furry boots. The famed ice mage himself waited, ripping apart pine cones and munching on the nuts. “Magister!” cried the boy, holding up one hand for help, “I have come to learn from you.”

“Lesson one,” grunted Reim, planting a boot in the center of the boy’s forehead. “Leave me alone.” With a little nudge, the boy slid back down the icy tunnel on his belly, his oofs and thuds echoing along with the mage’s laughter, all the way down to the Grangor’s feet.

“Um,” said the Grangor.

“I’m fine,” gasped the boy, and began again.

When he reached the top, he found Reim sitting by his tent cross-legged, eating lichen out of the first stomach of a half-frozen reindeer. “Magister,” he said, rising to his feet, “I have heard great tales of your magic.”

The mage chewed with his mouth open.

“I am Mageborn. I have reached the ninth level of Gythian mage discipline. I have passed the test of the Grangor hunter.”

Reim’s fluffy white eyebrows did not rise with interest.

The boy lost patience. “Or maybe you’re just a crazy old man. Maybe the wise ones tell the stories of you just to scare the kits.”

Reim pressed one finger to his nostril and honked a frozen booger out onto the boy’s cheek.

Insulted, the boy descended through the tunnels again. The Grangor sat by a little fire.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said the boy.

“Trying again?” replied the Grangor.

“Yes,” said the boy, and climbed again.

This time, he knelt in the snow before the ice mage. He unwrapped the furs from his head and pressed his face into the puffy new snow on the ground. “Magister,” he said, his words muffled, “I read about what happened to your son. Please help me to avoid his fate.”

Reim ignored him and went about his day. He gathered meat from his traps and snares. He ate. He napped. At sunset, he kicked the boy on his shoulder. “You want hypothermia?” he yelled in the deaf way of old men. “Come inside, you idiot!”

In a tent made of Grangor skins and tusks, Reim waited until the boy’s teeth stopped chattering.

“What’s your name!”

“Samuel,” said the boy.

“And you consort with the filthy cats?”

Samuel’s shoulders tensed. “The Grangor people are …”

“… are not people. And passing their little test won’t grow fur on your butt. So what are you?”

“I am Gythian. The Mageborn son of Archmage Lora, head of the war division of the mage guild …”

“You’re as Gythian as you are Grangor.”

“I can trace my bloodline back for ten Gythian generations.”

“Yeah? Who bakes the best crusty rolls on Via Lucia?”

Samuel’s eyes dropped. “I … I have been fostered in Trostan since I was four.”

“Then the servant who dumps your grand archmage mother’s chamberpot is more Gythian than you are.” Reim hacked out a laugh. “Mageborn. Bred like a dog. When Gythia finds something that doesn’t work, by golly they stick to it.”

“Your son was Mageborn,” whispered Samuel.

“If you don’t wanna end up like my son,” said Reim, closing his eyes, “don’t bother with the tenth level of Gythian mage discipline. Swab the deck of one of the ships hauling crystal out of Trostan. Tend one of those balmy Lillian vineyards. Heck, collect creature eyeballs with those walking furballs. Forget about magic, and forget about Gythia.”

“But my mother …”

“… didn’t want you, or she would’ve raised you.”

The snow-blanketed silence filled the tent.

Reim opened the flap of the tent. “Go home,” he grumped.

Resolute, Samuel crawled outside and wrapped the furs back around his face. The soupy gray sky flashed with green and red streaks of light.

“And be back at dawn!” bellowed the ice mage.

Samuel grinned back at the tent as the flap fell closed.

On the muddy shore of Trostan, Lyra watched a Grangor search expedition wind their way through the ghost town, past the glowing blue well of power and up the glacier trail. For days they had sorted through the smoking rubble, rubbing ash away from the faces of the dead, hearts in their throats, but Samuel had not been found.

The old ice mage shuffled up beside her, leaning his weight on a staff, one bushy eyebrow raised. “No one’ll blame you if you don’t go back.”

Lyra didn’t hesitate. “I am Gythian.”

“Uh huh.” Reim made the blah-blah motion with one gnarled hand.

“It’s time,” she said.

Reim stretched out one arm; from his palm, a spinning ice ball formed. Lyra’s breath froze in her throat. Goosebumps rose on her arms. Frost leapt from Reim’s fingers; icicles formed on his beard; ice coated his staff and he slammed it into the mud. The ground shook as an ice spire shot up at the center of Trostan, spearing the sky, sealing the well.

“Your turn,” said Reim. “Shut it down.”

The spellbook blinked and fluttered open between her hands; the ancient words dropped from her mouth. The city’s magic borders scrolled away from the sky, fluttered in the air and returned to the book. Held back for decades, roiling clouds fled down from the peaks, flooding the destroyed city, releasing snow in fat flakes that blanketed the seared wreckage in blinding white.

The mages boarded the last of the ships. From the stern, Lyra hugged her spellbook to her chest and watched the expanse of her life’s work shrink away into the distance. It had begun as a frozen camp for miners, thieves and get-rich-quick schemes, but within Lyra’s protective barriers, it had become a pocket of color in desolate white. Gythian settlers had filled it with spires, sculpture, vegetation, legitimate trade and proper jurisprudence. The mage tower of Trostan, though a shadow of the one at home, had been all her own, its rounded walls lined with books and art, now ash.

~

Twenty years and some earlier, the view from the prow of the icebreaker ship, with its strengthened hull crunched up against what would soon be the port of Trostan, was of white and more white, sandwiched between a cruel gray sky and a choppy gray sea.

The fateswoman’s dour mouth twisted under her white hood as she dumped the divine doves out of their gilded cage without ceremony. When they flew into the masts, she proclaimed it a positive augur as she’d been paid to do. The reading of the fates mattered not at all to Lyra, but the surrounding ship decks were packed with lower-born citizens who would not have disembarked without a good augur. These explorers and miners had settled this forsaken and frozen area of the Kall Peaks, where only Grangor had roamed before crystal had been found. High above, on the ledges of the mountains, the cat-beasts themselves watched. If Lyra succeeded, more ships would follow from Gythia with future Trostanians: architects, merchants, artists, agriculturalists with their seedlings and livestock, more miners and equipment and shipbuilders, teachers and physicians for their children.

Lyra huddled under a red fur cape that would have commanded respect were it not soaking wet. Spring in the Kalls meant sleet, a sleet that slammed into the sea at such a volume that her speech about the glory of the empire and hope for a future of affluence was abandoned.

Never before had so many eyes laid upon her. Never before had so much responsibility rested on her shoulders. Never before had she wished for failure.

“If there is a day for it, let it be today,” she muttered.

“What?” bellowed her Grangor guide. Though covered in fur, he seemed no worse for wear; the wetness slid away from him and his toothy grin triumphed over the storm.

“I had a speech prepared,” she yelled back. “I don’t think they’ll hear it!”

“May as well just do your thing!” The Grangor’s claws clasped together over his generous belly.

Lyra focused her gaze on the glowing glacier, all else falling away. She sank a deep, cold breath into her lungs and held it there, warming it, before releasing it out in a fog. “Come, Ambrosius,” she whispered, and her spellbook fled away from her cloak to float by her upturned palm. His eye rolled up as she whispered the words that appeared in runes on his pages. Another deep cold breath and the sleet sizzled when it struck her, and then her crimson fur cloak warmed and dried, then her hair, and she gathered the warmth between her hands and wished, as always, that she could hold it forever. Her arms spread wide and light flooded from her fingertips. Warm curved barriers formed at the borders of what would soon be Trostan, and the sleet fell around these wards like water around a glass globe. The clouds dissolved within her warm bulwark, the people turned joyful faces toward the sun, and the great glowing Halcyon-infused glacier began to crack and drip and flow into what would be known, for the next generation, as the twin rivers of Trostan.

Remarkable, Lyra thought, how quickly the settlers had mixed Gythian with the rough syllables of the Grangor tongue to create the language of Trostanian. Lyra never deigned to speak it, but understanding Trostanian was essential in the multicultural port town, no matter what garish throaty things it did to the lyrical Gythian syllables. Only five years ago, her barriers had melted the Halcyon glacier and already the settlement had become a growing, respectable town. Dockside inns filled to bursting with taxpaying travelers seeking their crystal fortune, adding their native nomenclature to the evolving language. On the docks, sailors called to one another in fluent Trostanian as they passed crates down the ramps from the ships’ tenders to the docks.

Lyra, escorted by her Grangor guide, disciplined her expression into sobriety, but her eyes shone as they darted around the dock. Golden-cloaked Gythian soldiers emerged from a tender hefting ornate chests and crates. With an impatient but formal gesture of greeting she approached the most decorated of the soldiers, a silver-templed man holding the hand of a small boy. “I was told my replacement would be of the mages, but I suppose Trostan can be held well enough by the army now that it’s operative,” she said. “You and your son are welcome here.”

“You’re mistaken, Lady Lyra. Your replacement is of the mages.” The soldier guided the boy forward by his shoulders. “Archmage Lora bade me deliver him to you and memorize her message.”

Lyra’s heart sank along with her eyes as she gazed down at the boy, resplendent in a night-black fur cloak far too large for him, his terrified dark eyes widened with hope. “Deliver the message, sir.”

“‘Greetings, Battlemage Lyra,” snapped the soldier. “‘The Mage Guild of Gythia is pleased to present Samuel the Mageborn, son of Archmage Lora the Mageborn and Scholar Titus the Mageborn, to be fostered and educated under your wise tutelage until such time as he comes of age and can take your place in the governorship of Trostan.’”

“What’s this?” asked the Grangor.

“Politics,” said Lyra through a wound-tight jaw. “Or a cruel joke.”

The Grangor hunched down. “Welcome, Sam. How old are you?”

The boy held up four fingers.

“Four winters old! Such a handsome big boy you are.” The Grangor mussed the child’s hair.

“Lora has banished me to Trostan for fourteen more years.” Lyra coughed out a laugh. “She still fears me.”

“We’ll make you up a room in the mage tower, Sam,” said the Grangor. Without ceremony he swung the boy up onto his shoulders and the soldiers followed them into town, leaving Lyra to stare off into the warm sea of her memories.

~

In Gythia, the onshore cold from Bladed Bay breezed the curtains in Lyra’s mage tower apartment. Back then, Trostan was a stratagem, a hope for Gythia’s post-war recovery effort. Before she experienced the ice storms of Trostan, Lyra thought this breeze unbearable; she rolled over in bed, smooshing her face into Titus’ chest to escape it. “Hold me,” she mumbled into his skin. “I’m cold.” He slung one leg over her waist, making her giggle. “Useless, you are. Now I’m overheated just on this spot. Get off me and I’ll make tea.”

He held her down, sliding a steel letter opener through the wax seal of a scroll. “If you wanted to escape, you’d turn me into a toad or something, Miss Battlemage.”

“No need,” she said, arching up for a sour morning kiss. “I trust you.”

“That is your first mistake. Ooh,” he said, drawing the sharp point of the letter opener down her side, “It’s from the Archmage. You are important now.”

“Your envy is unattractive.” Lyra shivered and smiled, inhaling the sweat and sandalwood scent of him. “What is that?”

“A letter came for you with breakfast.”

“If it is for me, don’t you think I should open it?”

He held the scroll out of her reach. “Battlemage Lyra of the Mage Guild, blah blah … immediate deployment to the Kall Peaks to establish the colony of Trostan …”

“They’re sending us to the Kalls?” Lyra reached for the scroll, but Titus held fast to it, his brows knitted.

“Your petition of marriage to Scholar Titus the Mageborn is heretofore denied due to the arrangement of marriage to …”

Lyra rolled over him and snatched the letter from his hands; wax bits scattered onto the bed. “.. to Lora the Mageborn,” she mumbled. “There’s been some administrative error. Someone mistook my name for Lora’s. This has happened before.”

“You are not Mageborn.” Titus drew her close. “You knew they might choose to arrange my marriage. The Guild wants …”

“… Mageborn children,” she said. “But I went through all the proper channels. I filled out the forms. I thought ….” She held his ears in her hands, pressed her forehead to his. “We do not have to obey. We can be farmers in the provinces. We can disappear in Taizen Gate.”

“You have worked since childhood to rise in the guild’s ranks. I will not allow you to give up everything you worked so hard to accomplish,” he said, burying his face in the plum tumble of her hair. “We are Gythian foremost.”

She soaked his neck with silent tears, her fingers clawing into his shoulders.

Samuel emerged from his rented island room sullen, his cheeks gaunt, dressed all in black. He walked past hammocks where the locals napped away the hot afternoon, couples snoring together in a tangle of limbs, mothers curled around little children like shells around peas. Away from the dwellings he found a handful of goats gnawing on shrubs; honeybees dove through tall bamboo to rummage inside of flowering beans, zucchini and asparagus. In the garden it was difficult to believe that the island was the shell of the giant and ancient titanback named Archelon, floating his annual way around the world.

He followed a path through the tide pools where barefoot children sprinted over the slick bone surface, squatting to inspect the bright slugs, limpets, anemones, sea slugs and stars. A small child held a sea urchin in one hand, drawing out meat from its belly with deft fingers and slurping it up as he watched Samuel step with care. Older children looked after nests of eggs larger than their heads.

At the highest point of the island, the smell of food cooking set his stomach to growling. Locals milled about, poking at a grill, laying out baskets, cleaning up children. A giant carp smoked to a golden brown crisp on smoldering coals laid in the center, its stuffed belly open; clams and oysters and heaps of pickled seaweed lay in steaming piles around it.

“Take cover, ladies. A raincloud approaches,” called a voice, followed by ladies laughing. “Join us, Samuel.”

Blossoms drifted down from a cherry tree under which sat a large man, two women and a basket of food. The three wore sarongs; the man’s was fuschia and wrapped round his waist. One of the women shaved his head with a straight razor. The other sat cross-legged, her hand outstretched, as the man manicured her nails.

Samuel paused in an awkward half-step before sitting at the edge of the shade. “I am afraid I do not know you.”

“You need not fear. I am Lance,” said the man. The woman pushed his ear forward to shave behind it. “Eat honey and cheese. It will sweeten you.”

“I will not eat today,” said Samuel.

“Are you sick?” asked the woman with the straight razor.

“No,” said Samuel. “Fasting preserves power and increases discipline.”

“You have all the rest of your lonely life to starve,” said the man. “How many days will you have for licking honey from the fingers of a beautiful lady?”

Samuel turned his blushing face away from the manicured woman, who dipped a finger in the honeypot with a sly smile. “Is she not one of your wives?”

“People are not possessions,” replied Lance.

“Are these not your children?” sputtered Samuel.

“The children belong to everyone, or rather, we belong to them.” The woman folded away her razor and a little boy slipped down from a branch onto Lance’s shoulders. “You will break your fast today, Sam. If you argue, we will take offense.”

“I prefer Samuel,” he said, but he could not refuse. He deposited a bit of fish into his basket and plucked meat from the fragile bones with his fingers like the others. Children crawled up on his legs and asked incessant questions. Lance made no move to save him from the onslaught, and before long Samuel could not help but chuckle.

After they had eaten, the crowd walked the long pathway down to the shell’s edge to watch the sea trolls hunt. They herded seals and held them under, drowning them before tossing them high in the air and catching them in their giant maws.

“I would not allow the children so close to those hunters,” said Samuel.

Lance kept an arm around Samuel’s stiff shoulder as though they were old friends. “The trolls come ashore once a year to lay eggs, and we care for them. In return, the trolls protect Archelon’s soft underbelly from predators, and we play together. Come, watch the jousts.”

At the shell’s edge, past the long line of docked barges, men tied woven saddles to the beasts’ great heads. Wearing bamboo armor and shields and wielding rattan lances, the men mounted the trolls and charged, their lances crashing into one another’s shields with startling cracks. Lance was the best of these knights; he took to the saddle as if born there, sending one opponent after another splashing into the water, his powerful arm locked around his weapon, a frightening grin spread across his face. His troll roared its pleasure and sprayed the onlookers with a wall of water from its slapping tail.

After the jousts, Samuel and Lance watched the moon rise together while the others wandered away. “How do you like our home?” asked Lance.

“It will not last,” said Samuel. “Archelon will not live forever.”

“The rings round the scutes tell us that Archelon has lived at least a thousand growth seasons, and he swims stronger than ever.”

“All things die.”

“Have faith, Sam.” Lance clapped the young man on his shoulder.

“That is no answer.”

“And yet, it is ever the correct one.”

On the last day of his months-long journey, Samuel dove to look into the eye of Archelon. Lance waited on shore, remembering the day that he had passed this same test: the eye gleaming at him, far wider than he was tall. When Samuel surfaced, gasping, Lance hunched down to help him out. “Did you gaze into his eye?”

“I saw it, and it saw me,” said Samuel, drawing on dry clothes.

“What did Archelon say to you?”

Samuel’s brow cocked. “I do not speak whatever burbling beast language he speaks.”

“You heard nothing in your heart?”

“I also do not speak whatever burbling beast language the heart speaks.”

“Well enough; you have presented yourself to Archelon and so you are one of us. Come.” Lance led him around the shell shore, pausing to rub the heads of sea trolls when they poked through the surface. “Archelon is too large to swim through Bladed Bay. At dawn, I shall escort you to the city by barge.” In the Gythian language he continued: “Your destiny is also mine.”

“I did not think to hear that language from an Archelion,” said Samuel also in Gythian, his words cutting sharp corners. On the docks where the barges hung, children took air in little sips before diving for pearl oysters, dripping nets dangling round their necks.

Lance led Samuel inside the cabin of one of the barges. “Long ago, when I was a young man, a Gythian like yourself bought passage on Archelon to see the world during his last year. He was a knight with a good heart.”

“Nothing like me then,” said Samuel.

“He taught me to wield the lance and shield and live by the knightly tenets of justice, courage, mercy, decorum, honesty, honor, loyalty and character.” A beatific light shone in Lance’s eyes. “And he told me about the city’s rich history of music and passion, enough beauty to inebriate the soul.”

“Did he forget about the wars, corruption and ruthless politics in his dotage?”

“It is true; there is much in the world to be set aright. How can I stay on Archelon when my duty is elsewhere? Look: When my teacher passed on, he gave me these.” Lance lit candles round the cabin and, as the light flickered a warm air of the sacred, opened a hidden compartment under the floorboards where armor, shield and a lance laid in repose. “Since then, I have made it my life’s work to collect Gythian artifacts.”

He hefted up the shield to display, but Samuel rifled through a neat pile of kitchen tools, a bronze candelabra, long-outdated maps and recipes, plumed carnival masks and a brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. He plucked up a rusted garlic press, snapped it open and closed. “Beautiful shield, and not a scratch on it,” he said. “Your fabled knight did not see enough battle to find those tenets difficult.”

“War is not the whole of a knight,” said Lance, unwavering. “I vowed to one day protect a Gythian, and in doing so earn knighthood for myself.”

“I do not need protecting.” Samuel threw the garlic press back to its spot. “I am not the Gythian of your dreams. I have not even seen the city since I was four years old.”

“You are he. I know it.”

“You do not know me, and you do not know Gythia, for all of your careful study of its garbage. Who bakes the best crusty rolls on Via Lucia?” Samuel grabbed up a book and paged through it fast. “The knighthood is just old families clinging to faltering fortunes. It has nothing to do with … what was that ludicrous list? Justice, honesty, decorum …”

Lance took the book from Samuel’s hand as if handling a sleeping baby. “That ludicrous list has everything to do with me.”

And so, at the first gray light, Samuel sat on Lance’s barge, folded in bad posture inside his dark cloak. Lance, wearing the full armor of a Gythian knight, steered the sea troll that pulled the barge through the treacherous black-toothed mouth of the city. The mist parted and a rose-gold light bathed the gleaming fountains and sculpture, the towers and spires, the churning water wheels. Lance’s breath caught in his throat; tears sprang unbidden to his eyes. His plain barge pulled up to the dock between luxury steamboats where a grand reception of dignitaries in elegant finery waited.

Samuel moved like an unwilling shadow behind Lance’s great steel bulk as they disembarked. Lance held up his hand in greeting, but all eyes locked on the hooded young man. The woman in the center stepped forward, one hand heavy with rings appearing beyond long silk sleeves to show her palm in proper greeting. “Welcome home, Samuel,” she said. “We feared the worst.”

“My thanks, Mother,” said Samuel.

Samuel returned to his room at sunset to find Lyra there, staring at the collection of ceremonial Grangor headdresses he’d mounted on one curved wall. He dropped his dripping snow gear on the floor and fell back on his unmade bed, flopping one arm over his eyes. “So there will be a lecture tonight,” he muttered. “Safety or obligation?”

Lyra picked her way with care across the disaster of stacked books, maps and papers, giving a wide berth to the skeleton of the mammoth seal Samuel had speared at his Grangor hunter trial. “Did you… eat this creature?”

“The tribe feasted after the trial. I ate the right flipper and the chief ate the left.”

Lyra shuddered. “I shall have your room cleaned. There is a spider above your bed.”

“It’s a sleep-spider. It gobbles up dreams and spins webs in the shapes of those dreams. I took it from the Netherworld. Don’t touch it.”

Lyra’s eyes blazed. “I told you not to dabble in the Netherworld. The nightmares and phantasms …”

“And dreams and ghosts and Valkyries. Magister Reim …”

“And I told you to stay away from that crazed old man. Is that where you were all week?”

Samuel chuckled, his arm still covering his eyes. “Add that to your list of disappointments. I have given up trying to please you. I rather think you are incapable of pleasure.”

“You do not have the luxury of adolescent insolence.”

“The obligation lecture, then.” Samuel responded with an exaggerated yawn.

Lyra exhaled through her nose, eyes closed, collecting herself. “No. That is the Archmage’s duty now.” She dropped a heavy but small steel machine onto the bed next to him and he removed his arm from his eyes to squint at it.

“What is that contraption?”

“It came with the latest shipment. They have managed to make holograms work, thanks to infused Trostanian crystal. They’ve had holographic messages in Mont Lille for years …”

“… and in Campestria far longer.” Samuel sat up in his bed to inspect the box.

“It is progress nevertheless, so our efforts here are not in vain.”

“Well then, let us see what my mother deigns to say to me.”

“Samuel.” Lyra rested a hand on his shoulder. The gesture was awkward and made them both flinch. “I think … I do not know if this message …”

“Don’t worry, Lady. I am not an orphan harboring dreams of mommy bestowing affection on me after fourteen years of no word.” Samuel snorted. “The Magister said I was bred like a dog.”

Lyra was quieted by that. She focused her gaze on the message box, her violet curls falling to hide her expression while Samuel hit the button with his fist. The platform buzzed with blue light that broke and spat before it came together to form a face. The Archmage’s face. He had no memory of it, and there was no color to her eyes, but the resemblance was obvious.

“Samuel.” The sound crackled with static. “Lady Lyra has kept me informed of your progress. Well done on passing the first nine disciplines. The Mage Guild depends on you passing the tenth. You shall return home to prove your worth in the final test before your formal induction into the guild. I trust Lyra has prepared you well.”

Home. He almost missed what came after.

“After you have received your rank, you shall be positioned as governor of Trostan and lead the effort to move the Grangor population to the frontier. You shall see to the expansion of our crystal mining in the Kall Peaks. Your rapport with the Grangor beasts will be essential to this effort. You shall return to Trostan with whatever contingent of troops you deem necessary to assist you.

“Our guild and our empire depend on your success, my son. With your help, Gythia shall return to its former glory.”

The picture blinked out of existence and Samuel stared at the place where it had been. “Move the Grangor population,” he breathed. “Has she ever met a Grangor?”

Lyra clasped her hands inside her long sleeves. “If it is necessary …”

“They won’t go. I have seen their souls in the Netherworld. They are rooted to this land by blood and ritual and the hunt.”

“You sound like one of them,” said Lyra, her tone measured.

He stood and paced the room. “I’d have to kill them all. My mother wants me to kill them all.”

“You are Gythian.”

Samuel whirled to face her. “Why should I have to explain to you that this is wrong?” he cried, and the words spilled out of him in a dark magic that formed into a treacherous churning orb that surrounded them both.

Inside the orb was the deep cave-dark of nightmares. Nothing Lyra had taught Samuel of Gythian magecraft explained that darkness, or the weakening beat of her heart. She snapped awake without realizing she’d been asleep, gasping and shaking, and whispered the words of warding. A green glow shone through the blackness, drinking it in, dispelling it.

Above the bed, the sleep-spider wove into its web a shimmering silken depiction of Trostan in flames.

Bright-plumed Titanbeaks pulled the mages’ litters through the Gythian streets: the Archmage in her own, Lyra and Magister Reim in the next. Lance insisted on riding in the third with Samuel; he craned his head out of the curtained window to gape at the complex of short military towers and training yards sprawled against the great obsidian wall, then the closed-up and somber Ministers’ Tower, the Cartographers’ Tower with its landings and patios housing all sizes of telescopes and finally the Mage Tower, taller by a hundred feet than any other and wide as a city block. It was adorned around each level with golden sculptures of past Archmages, each holding the ancient wand named Verdict.

Samuel entered the tower under the hard golden gaze of his sculpted mother and followed his escort into the grand center theater. The acrid taste of unfamiliar magic stung his tongue. Lyra and Reim stopped Lance from following; the three stood by the door.

A walkway edged with sculpted obsidian pillars led to two stone platforms, one higher than the other. Samuel stood on the shorter; atop the high platform stood the guild’s top-ranking mages, the Archmage at the fore, her robes removed to reveal the somber black lace vestments of judgment. “Samuel the Mage Born,” she said, her sugared tone echoing in the immense room, “your tenth trial begins now. If you pass, you shall receive your rank in our guild.” She stretched Verdict forth. “I hope you are prepared.”

Samuel pulled from his belt the wand named Malice. “So I am not to answer for disobeying you, Mother? For burning down Gythia’s hopes? Does it trouble you overmuch to acknowledge the failure of your bloodline?” He spun the wand between his fingers before clenching it in his fist.

A shadow fled from Verdict and landed in Samuel’s periphery a split moment before pain flooded his belly. He whirled to face his aggressor and stared into his own face, at Malice pointed at his own torso. There was no time to register this ultimate betrayal before his shadow double flanked and shot again.

~

Lance lunged forward only to slam full-force into a shimmering green wall.

“For every action, there is a consequence,” said Lyra.

Reim watched the fight, expressionless, white-knuckling his staff.

~

A rushing water sound filled Samuel’s ears. He circled to the right and his shadow self mirrored him; there was a flash, and a sting bloomed on Samuel’s leg, a pain that sank to his bones. He curled his tongue around the words of power and a burst of magic fled from his wand, missing the shadow by a breath. He dove and spat out another word: “Uruz!” Another shot just missed the shadow’s neck. The shadow returned the blasts and Samuel dodged. They traded dark magic fire until the platform was a blinding shower of light. He could not outwit himself.

But the shadow could not learn.

He feinted right and leaped away from his double, springing to the nearest pillar, cracking his ribs, two fingers curled around the canine teeth of a carved lion’s head. With the half-second he’d bought, he pulled himself up to crouch atop it.

“Kenaz,” he cried, and the air wavered, and around him were the souls of ancient mages, thousands of them with hollow eyes watching, and the darkness of the Netherworld enveloped him as he leaped. Light flashed from Malice and the shadow crouched, spun wrong and caught the full force of the spell in its back.

When the dark had dissipated, Samuel stood alone on the platform. The Netherworld, having been opened, lurked close, the phantasms murmuring hate and promising justice. Above, the Archmage extended Verdict again.

“So you present a test no one can survive to save yourself the embarrassment of convicting me.” Samuel’s bitter laugh seized as he held his broken ribs. “That is how Magister Reim’s son died, isn’t it? He asked too many questions.”

“If it is so,” said the Archmage, “then you should concentrate on succeeding.”

A second shadow fled from Verdict, forming beside Samuel. He slid back, Malice held in his fist like a blade, his eyes narrowed at his new opponent –

– and his arm dropped as he flinched away from the little boy who looked up at him with wide, terrified eyes: Samuel, as he’d been fourteen years past when he entered Trostan for the first time, Malice far too big for his little hands.

“Such poetry,” mocked Samuel. “I suppose I shall face my wise old future self next?”

“You shall have no such future if you fail,” called the Archmage.

Samuel sidestepped the shadow boy’s fumbling shots with ease. Tears welled in the boy’s eyes.

“I would rather fail,” said Samuel, and released the phantasm that twisted and curled into the skull-shape of nightmares, sailing around the shadow child and then the mages high above, lulling them all to sleep. The shadow disappeared and the Archmage fell.

~

The shimmering wall dropped. A spinning, churning hole appeared in the walkway by Lance’s feet.

“Go,” choked Lyra behind him. “Go!”

~

The Archmage landed in Samuel’s outstretched arms, slamming him to the floor. His shoulder dislocated from its socket, sending shocks of pain through his arm and spine. He snatched Verdict away from her, rolled away, yanked his shoulder back into place with an agonized gasp, then stumbled to his feet. “Where is she?” he screamed.

“Who?” gasped the Archmage, blinking, disoriented.

“Gythia’s little creature.” He bent over her, spitting the words into her face. “Trostan wasn’t the only iron you had in the fire. Where is the Storm Queen’s niece?”

The Archmage flinched away. “Gathering allies,” she whimpered. “The Halcyon -”

Samuel sneered and aimed both wands at the Archmage’s face. “Well done, Mother.”

Armor clattered as the knight rolled into position between them, weapon at the ready, shield high. Samuel stepped back, wands crossed in front of him.

“Reconsider, my friend,” growled Lance.

Samuel’s grim mouth cracked into a smile. “You are better than Gythia ever was,” he said, and fell back into the churning portal.

Reim stood at the portal’s source, palm out as Lyra’s face turned blue. Icicles hung from her ears and hair. Her book, encased in ice, laid useless on the floor. Samuel tumbled from the portal’s source at his feet, struggling for breath as he looked up at his teacher’s distressed eyes.

“Magister,” he whispered.

“Run, you fool.”

On the unkempt path along the mangrove-lined river, overgrown with vines and flowers, the paladin in his gilded ceremonial armor cut an imposing figure. A dozen warriors and several local guides marched behind him; explorers brought up the rear, sketching, collecting samples and taking notes. The paladin’s wide-eyed young daughter gripped his outstretched finger with her whole small fist.

“Do you like the islands, Grace?”

At six years old, this was her first trip outside of Gythia, and the foreign tropics were a dizzying delight. Wherever there was soil, color burst through. Flowers as big as her head called hi! hey! hi! Exotic birds showed off their plumage and screeched to make sure she looked. Even the mosquito swarms shimmered.

“Yes,” she answered, her tone solemn. “This must be the prettiest place in the world.”

“These shall be the Grace Islands, then.” Her father waved his arm in an arc to indicate the half-moon shape of the archipelago. “Make a note of it,” he called over one shoulder, and a mapmaker scribbled in her journal.

Grace stared in reserved wonder at her surroundings while her father named the flora and fauna as though he’d created it all. The locals wore colorful sarongs and flowers in their hair. They waved and never ceased smiling. One of them fed plums to a young macaque that perched with hungry obedience on the little girl’s shoulder.

“These are nice people,” observed Grace.

“Peace and kindness is embedded into their culture. They even file down the sharp teeth of adolescents to remove their violent nature.”

Grace touched her own teeth. “Does it hurt?”

“Oh yes.”

“You should tell them to stop, Papa.”

“Oh, dulcissima! A man may be a better hunter than a tiger, but he would be a fool to tell the beast how to hunt on its own land.”

“But these are people.”

“Yes, they are people,” mused the paladin. “Of a kind.”

Grace stopped short, wavering on her feet. The world around her brightened at the edges. The monkey leaped away and the retinue came to a halt.

“Papa?” she whimpered.

The paladin held her steady by the shoulders. “Do not fear. Tell me what the light shows you.”

Grace shivered as a great wall of ice rose up, blocking their path. Where the path forked toward the river, a wall of fire blazed upward, spitting embers and burning her cheeks. “Ice and fire,” she whispered.

“Which way is the fire?”

She pointed to the river and the vision ended, the walls only tricks of the light.

The procession moved single-file onto the stone steps leading across the river. In the center of the water stood a temple.

A guide intercepted them. His smile never wavered, though his voice was strained. “Sir,” he said, bowing low, “visitors do not cross here, Sir. Danger, Sir.” He held out his arms, revealing rippling burn scars.

“Stand back,” said the paladin. He rested a hand on the guide’s shoulder, and when he lifted it, a hand-shaped spot of healed flesh remained.

The temple was made of stone. The mangroves growing over it were scorched. The buzzing mosquitos and bickering monkeys stayed away, so that the temple was cloaked in eerie quiet. At the temple’s entrance a local boy appeared, perhaps a year younger than Grace. He wore only a sarong around his waist, so that gruesome scars and new welts from burns showed all over his chest and face.

“This boy speaks fire,” whispered the guide. He stared in wonder at his shoulder as the healed skin spread down his arm. “His name is Reza.”

“He’s hurt,” said Grace.

The paladin guided Grace forward, toward the boy. “Go and do as you have learned.”

Grace stepped across slick stones to the temple with care, leaving her father behind. She greeted the boy with a Gythian hand gesture and he flinched.

“I’m going to take care of you,” she said, gentle but firm. She rested her palms on the boy’s face. The light burned at the top of her head and she guided it down, as her father had taught her, down through her head and throat, flooding her heart and belly and arms and then escaping through her fingertips. The light swelled and the boy’s eyes grew wide. Down to his shoulders her hands slid, leaving behind smooth, healed flesh. The light traveled down his body, enveloping him with its warmth. “There,” she said when she had done. She was tired to her bones from the effort, but the boy’s burn scars and welts had disappeared, leaving behind a dazzling, dark beauty. “That’s better.”

The boy opened his mouth to speak, or cry or laugh; it couldn’t be known, for what came from his mouth was a trail of fire, just like in Grace’s vision, spurting sparks and raining ash.

The paladin’s light shield burst into being between her and the boy just in time. The flames beat against it but could not penetrate. The boy’s mouth shut and his eyes filled with ashy tears as the paladin approached.

“The Mageborn must be trained to the proper use of their power, just as you, born to the light, have learned to control your visions,” he said, patting Grace’s red braid. “Until we deliver him to the mages, you must care for him like a sister.”

“My brother.” Grace took the boy’s hand. “I shall name you Titus.”

Grace woke in the dark, her greyhound nuzzling its wet nose into her foot. Rolling the morning stiffness from her shoulders, she made her way to the empty training yard in the first rose light of dawn, the greyhound following at her heel. She selected a heavy mace from the weapon rack and moved through a warmup flow, swinging it in slow, controlled circles in front of her body and then behind her back, changing grip and direction, then progressed through lunging battle forms. Her mind stilled as she put her body through the old disciplines. In this way, she had learned long ago to control visions, to bid them come when she wished. Her consciousness flowed with her breath, up and up, the training yard falling away, up and then out.

At first there was only a sound, that of a young man crying out words of power, and then there was a darkness that split apart the air. From that darkness came tortured beings, phantasms, dead things with white eyes yearning for freedom. The Nether, a place of nightmares, the absence of life and light, called forth by a mage.

Grace danced through the mace flow, blind to the world around her, her eyes rolled up, and forced the vision forward. Show me he who opened the Nether, she said without saying, and the vision changed – but instead of a mage, she saw a knight wandering the city’s twisting alleyways in the dark. He was a stranger in Gythian armor, bearing a shield and a lance, braving the sea-cold wind without tiring, asking locals for the whereabouts of a wayward boy. Grace watched as he paused to admire the ancient towers, to stare at torchlit fountains and, in the minutes before dawn, to breathe in the smell of the day’s first bread baking.

Grace ended the mace flow and shook off the vision. A silent cluster of acolytes in robes and cowls filed out to the yard and went to work trimming the rose bushes, brushing and raking the clay and sand yards, and skimming the surface of the battle pool with a net. The mace landed in Grace’s palms with finality and acolytes scurried to bring water and towel the sweat from her brow.

“There is a man at the gate,” said Grace, sitting for her breakfast. “Bring him to me.”

Grace’s visions were not questioned. A few moments later the stranger from her dream was led to her table. He stared at the training yard with open-mouthed awe, his eyes beatific as an icon, while his shield and lance were presented to Grace for study. “These were Gennaro’s,” she said. “Did you know him?”

The man met Grace’s eyes with a wide smile and an ease that few possessed in her presence. “Gennaro was my teacher. He journeyed to the next world on the back of Archelon and passed his possessions to me.”

Grace handed the shield to an acolyte. “Then we mourn together. Gennaro was a good knight, and a friend of my father’s. Do you, then, seek knighthood?”

“That was my reason for coming here,” said the man, and all at once he seemed tired down to his soul. “I found a mage and swore to protect him, to prove myself worthy. But his tenth trial was designed to kill him, and I could not do as I promised.”

“So he is dead.”

“No. I don’t know.” The man sighed. “He did something I could not understand.”

“He opened the Nether,” Grace whispered.

“He tried to kill the Archmage. His own mother.”

“His mother?” Grace’s heart fell.

“I stopped him, and he fled. So I must find him, and right this wrong, so that I can fulfill my destiny.”

Grace stood, and even without the splendor of her ceremonial dress she was an imposing figure, the sunlight enveloping her. “What is your name, warrior?” she said in a low tone.

“Lance,” he said, his voice withered with shame. “Lance of Archelon.”

“On your knees, Lance of Archelon.”

The man knelt, prepared for punishment. Instead, he felt the woman’s palm on his bare head. Warmth flooded down his spine, and with it, a peace he had not known since he was a babe in his mother’s arms.

“With valor and bravery you saved the life of the Archmage,” she said. “You kept watch in the night. Do you swear to live by the tenets of justice, courage, mercy, decorum, honesty, honor, loyalty and character?”

“I do.” His words cracked with emotion.

“Then you are welcome in my guild and in my country. Rise, Lance, Knight of Gythia, in the name of the Light.” Grace smiled and her hand dropped. “Go and rest. This is now a matter for the office of the paladin.”

He wept his thanks as the acolytes guided him away. Grace’s attendants hovered close.

“Shall we call upon the Archmage, Domina?”

“No.” Grace turned and strode toward her chambers, the greyhound at her heel. “Find my brother.”

The Grangor people stood watch on a high icy shelf to watch the flames swallow the winding spires of Trostan. Smoke glittered around their faces and clogged their lungs as the city that had been the heart of the Gythian crystal trade turned into the mouth of hell. They threw Gythian gold down into the crevasse for safe passage for the dead. The coins had become, in one day, useless anywhere within a hundred miles.

The wise ones gathered in a snow-dusted cluster and thumped their staves on the ground in the ancient story rhythm. With a judgmental lick of his one tusk, the eldest began the first Telling of the story that would be told and retold for generations:

“It was Trostan once, but soon it will be forgotten.”

“The wise ones knew,” they sang in chorus.

“Humans came to tear holes in the glaciers. They came to rip the crystal from the earth. They came to drink of the well,” continued the next-eldest in her shrill tone.

“The wise ones knew.”

“Our trophy-hunters traded with humans for steel,” called the next.

“The wise ones knew.”

“The city collapsed under its own greed,” crooned another.

“The wise ones knew.”

“Their ancestors lie too far to carry home their souls,” wailed the eldest.

“The wise ones kn…”

An icy blast from the peak above trembled the ground and broke their song. “Sisuuk!” screamed a Mother, gathering her kits close. All eyes turned away from the flames to look upward. Instead of an avalanche, though, what came forth along with the freezing wind was a man, his spine bent with age, spotted skin fragile as onion layers. His claw-like hand gripped a staff. Around his shoulders he wore the pelt of a Grangor. Though none of the Grangor had seen him before, they all knew of the elusive recluse. Reim, they called him, master of ice, devourer of Grangor, terror of the Kall Peaks. Though they outnumbered him by many dozens, the Grangor backed away, weapons at the ready, while the ice mage exhaled enraged breaths that crystallized into frost.  

“Where is the boy?” he growled.

“His mother knows,” replied the eldest, but it was only an expression among the Grangor. It meant that a thing could not be known.

With a sneer, Reim turned away from the Grangor and walked the path down the mountainside, grumbling to himself all the way. The river that bordered the burning city flowed black with ash. Reim struck his staff on the ground and the flowing water froze in place. He shuffled over it, coughing and hacking, into the city, waving his staff in irritation at the fires as he passed them. They sizzled and hissed into frozen, charred kindling.

“Kid!” he called. “Hey kid!”

The city had bustled with trade and travelers that morning; now, only the livestock raced away from their burned enclosures to the rivers at either side of the basin.

The mage choked the fires under his conjured frost one by one, leaving destroyed homes and businesses under thick sheets of ice, by turns calling out and mumbling to himself. He stopped to roll his eyes at the mage tower, resplendent in its ancient Gythian spires, the center of Trostan’s government. The top third had collapsed; the rest was a scorched husk of its former magnificence. This, too, he left frozen behind him. Round the town he traveled, tension rising in his voice. “Hey kid, you’re late! Where’d you get off to?” he continued until he reached the halcyon well at the center, the only thing unaffected by the flames. Noxious fumes rose from the burnt detritus of Trostan, drowned under ice. There, at the well’s edge, was a small woman with her face buried in the furry shoulder of a much larger Grangor. In one hand, she held a lantern that cast eerie shadows in the swirling ash.

“Ay!” shouted Reim with an annoyed clearing of his throat.  “Who’s in charge here!”

The woman turned her soot-stained face, mapped with tears, toward the stranger, revealing the singed remains of the robes of a High Mage of Gythia. Her shoulders rolled back, her chin tilted up, and though she was much smaller than the other two, the answer to Reim’s question had been answered.

“The boy,” he demanded.

The woman shook her head and held the Grangor’s forearm for support. “He’s gone,” she answered, then looked up at the Grangor’s chubby face. “Everything is gone.”

A teenaged boy stood at the mouth of the cave, ice axe in his gloved hand, steel spikes buckled to his boots, furs wrapped round everything but his dark eyes. It had been more than a decade since the last daring hopeful had attempted to maneuver through the steep tunnels that wound upward inside the glacier atop which Reim, the ice mage of legend, made his home. It had been much longer since anyone had been granted an audience.

“She will kill me if you don’t come home,” said his stout Grangor companion.

“I’ve climbed scarier things than this.”

“It isn’t the climb that worries me. It’s what’s at the top.”

The boy patted the Grangor on his snow-dusted shoulder, then began his slow, slippery ascent.

When the boy popped his head out at the top, struggling for breath, he was eye level with a pair of furry boots. The famed ice mage himself waited, ripping apart pine cones and munching on the nuts. “Magister!” cried the boy, holding up one hand for help, “I have come to learn from you.”

“Lesson one,” grunted Reim, planting a boot in the center of the boy’s forehead. “Leave me alone.” With a little nudge, the boy slid back down the icy tunnel on his belly, his oofs and thuds echoing along with the mage’s laughter, all the way down to the Grangor’s feet.

“Um,” said the Grangor.

“I’m fine,” gasped the boy, and began again.

When he reached the top, he found Reim sitting by his tent cross-legged, eating lichen out of the first stomach of a half-frozen reindeer. “Magister,” he said, rising to his feet, “I have heard great tales of your magic.”

The mage chewed with his mouth open.

“I am Mageborn. I have reached the ninth level of Gythian mage discipline. I have passed the test of the Grangor hunter.”

Reim’s fluffy white eyebrows did not rise with interest.

The boy lost patience. “Or maybe you’re just a crazy old man. Maybe the wise ones tell the stories of you just to scare the kits.”

Reim pressed one finger to his nostril and honked a frozen booger out onto the boy’s cheek.

Insulted, the boy descended through the tunnels again. The Grangor sat by a little fire.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said the boy.

“Trying again?” replied the Grangor.

“Yes,” said the boy, and climbed again.

This time, he knelt in the snow before the ice mage. He unwrapped the furs from his head and pressed his face into the puffy new snow on the ground. “Magister,” he said, his words muffled, “I read about what happened to your son. Please help me to avoid his fate.”

Reim ignored him and went about his day. He gathered meat from his traps and snares. He ate. He napped. At sunset, he kicked the boy on his shoulder. “You want hypothermia?” he yelled in the deaf way of old men. “Come inside, you idiot!”

In a tent made of Grangor skins and tusks, Reim waited until the boy’s teeth stopped chattering.

“What’s your name!”

“Samuel,” said the boy.

“And you consort with the filthy cats?”

Samuel’s shoulders tensed. “The Grangor people are …”

“… are not people. And passing their little test won’t grow fur on your butt. So what are you?”

“I am Gythian. The Mageborn son of Archmage Lora, head of the war division of the mage guild …”

“You’re as Gythian as you are Grangor.”

“I can trace my bloodline back for ten Gythian generations.”

“Yeah? Who bakes the best crusty rolls on Via Lucia?”

Samuel’s eyes dropped. “I … I have been fostered in Trostan since I was four.”

“Then the servant who dumps your grand archmage mother’s chamberpot is more Gythian than you are.” Reim hacked out a laugh. “Mageborn. Bred like a dog. When Gythia finds something that doesn’t work, by golly they stick to it.”

“Your son was Mageborn,” whispered Samuel.

“If you don’t wanna end up like my son,” said Reim, closing his eyes, “don’t bother with the tenth level of Gythian mage discipline. Swab the deck of one of the ships hauling crystal out of Trostan. Tend one of those balmy Lillian vineyards. Heck, collect creature eyeballs with those walking furballs. Forget about magic, and forget about Gythia.”

“But my mother …”

“… didn’t want you, or she would’ve raised you.”

The snow-blanketed silence filled the tent.

Reim opened the flap of the tent. “Go home,” he grumped.

Resolute, Samuel crawled outside and wrapped the furs back around his face. The soupy gray sky flashed with green and red streaks of light.

“And be back at dawn!” bellowed the ice mage.

Samuel grinned back at the tent as the flap fell closed.

On the muddy shore of Trostan, Lyra watched a Grangor search expedition wind their way through the ghost town, past the glowing blue well of power and up the glacier trail. For days they had sorted through the smoking rubble, rubbing ash away from the faces of the dead, hearts in their throats, but Samuel had not been found.

The old ice mage shuffled up beside her, leaning his weight on a staff, one bushy eyebrow raised. “No one’ll blame you if you don’t go back.”

Lyra didn’t hesitate. “I am Gythian.”

“Uh huh.” Reim made the blah-blah motion with one gnarled hand.

“It’s time,” she said.

Reim stretched out one arm; from his palm, a spinning ice ball formed. Lyra’s breath froze in her throat. Goosebumps rose on her arms. Frost leapt from Reim’s fingers; icicles formed on his beard; ice coated his staff and he slammed it into the mud. The ground shook as an ice spire shot up at the center of Trostan, spearing the sky, sealing the well.

“Your turn,” said Reim. “Shut it down.”

The spellbook blinked and fluttered open between her hands; the ancient words dropped from her mouth. The city’s magic borders scrolled away from the sky, fluttered in the air and returned to the book. Held back for decades, roiling clouds fled down from the peaks, flooding the destroyed city, releasing snow in fat flakes that blanketed the seared wreckage in blinding white.

The mages boarded the last of the ships. From the stern, Lyra hugged her spellbook to her chest and watched the expanse of her life’s work shrink away into the distance. It had begun as a frozen camp for miners, thieves and get-rich-quick schemes, but within Lyra’s protective barriers, it had become a pocket of color in desolate white. Gythian settlers had filled it with spires, sculpture, vegetation, legitimate trade and proper jurisprudence. The mage tower of Trostan, though a shadow of the one at home, had been all her own, its rounded walls lined with books and art, now ash.

~

Twenty years and some earlier, the view from the prow of the icebreaker ship, with its strengthened hull crunched up against what would soon be the port of Trostan, was of white and more white, sandwiched between a cruel gray sky and a choppy gray sea.

The fateswoman’s dour mouth twisted under her white hood as she dumped the divine doves out of their gilded cage without ceremony. When they flew into the masts, she proclaimed it a positive augur as she’d been paid to do. The reading of the fates mattered not at all to Lyra, but the surrounding ship decks were packed with lower-born citizens who would not have disembarked without a good augur. These explorers and miners had settled this forsaken and frozen area of the Kall Peaks, where only Grangor had roamed before crystal had been found. High above, on the ledges of the mountains, the cat-beasts themselves watched. If Lyra succeeded, more ships would follow from Gythia with future Trostanians: architects, merchants, artists, agriculturalists with their seedlings and livestock, more miners and equipment and shipbuilders, teachers and physicians for their children.

Lyra huddled under a red fur cape that would have commanded respect were it not soaking wet. Spring in the Kalls meant sleet, a sleet that slammed into the sea at such a volume that her speech about the glory of the empire and hope for a future of affluence was abandoned.

Never before had so many eyes laid upon her. Never before had so much responsibility rested on her shoulders. Never before had she wished for failure.

“If there is a day for it, let it be today,” she muttered.

“What?” bellowed her Grangor guide. Though covered in fur, he seemed no worse for wear; the wetness slid away from him and his toothy grin triumphed over the storm.

“I had a speech prepared,” she yelled back. “I don’t think they’ll hear it!”

“May as well just do your thing!” The Grangor’s claws clasped together over his generous belly.

Lyra focused her gaze on the glowing glacier, all else falling away. She sank a deep, cold breath into her lungs and held it there, warming it, before releasing it out in a fog. “Come, Ambrosius,” she whispered, and her spellbook fled away from her cloak to float by her upturned palm. His eye rolled up as she whispered the words that appeared in runes on his pages. Another deep cold breath and the sleet sizzled when it struck her, and then her crimson fur cloak warmed and dried, then her hair, and she gathered the warmth between her hands and wished, as always, that she could hold it forever. Her arms spread wide and light flooded from her fingertips. Warm curved barriers formed at the borders of what would soon be Trostan, and the sleet fell around these wards like water around a glass globe. The clouds dissolved within her warm bulwark, the people turned joyful faces toward the sun, and the great glowing Halcyon-infused glacier began to crack and drip and flow into what would be known, for the next generation, as the twin rivers of Trostan.

Remarkable, Lyra thought, how quickly the settlers had mixed Gythian with the rough syllables of the Grangor tongue to create the language of Trostanian. Lyra never deigned to speak it, but understanding Trostanian was essential in the multicultural port town, no matter what garish throaty things it did to the lyrical Gythian syllables. Only five years ago, her barriers had melted the Halcyon glacier and already the settlement had become a growing, respectable town. Dockside inns filled to bursting with taxpaying travelers seeking their crystal fortune, adding their native nomenclature to the evolving language. On the docks, sailors called to one another in fluent Trostanian as they passed crates down the ramps from the ships’ tenders to the docks.

Lyra, escorted by her Grangor guide, disciplined her expression into sobriety, but her eyes shone as they darted around the dock. Golden-cloaked Gythian soldiers emerged from a tender hefting ornate chests and crates. With an impatient but formal gesture of greeting she approached the most decorated of the soldiers, a silver-templed man holding the hand of a small boy. “I was told my replacement would be of the mages, but I suppose Trostan can be held well enough by the army now that it’s operative,” she said. “You and your son are welcome here.”

“You’re mistaken, Lady Lyra. Your replacement is of the mages.” The soldier guided the boy forward by his shoulders. “Archmage Lora bade me deliver him to you and memorize her message.”

Lyra’s heart sank along with her eyes as she gazed down at the boy, resplendent in a night-black fur cloak far too large for him, his terrified dark eyes widened with hope. “Deliver the message, sir.”

“‘Greetings, Battlemage Lyra,” snapped the soldier. “‘The Mage Guild of Gythia is pleased to present Samuel the Mageborn, son of Archmage Lora the Mageborn and Scholar Titus the Mageborn, to be fostered and educated under your wise tutelage until such time as he comes of age and can take your place in the governorship of Trostan.’”

“What’s this?” asked the Grangor.

“Politics,” said Lyra through a wound-tight jaw. “Or a cruel joke.”

The Grangor hunched down. “Welcome, Sam. How old are you?”

The boy held up four fingers.

“Four winters old! Such a handsome big boy you are.” The Grangor mussed the child’s hair.

“Lora has banished me to Trostan for fourteen more years.” Lyra coughed out a laugh. “She still fears me.”

“We’ll make you up a room in the mage tower, Sam,” said the Grangor. Without ceremony he swung the boy up onto his shoulders and the soldiers followed them into town, leaving Lyra to stare off into the warm sea of her memories.

~

In Gythia, the onshore cold from Bladed Bay breezed the curtains in Lyra’s mage tower apartment. Back then, Trostan was a stratagem, a hope for Gythia’s post-war recovery effort. Before she experienced the ice storms of Trostan, Lyra thought this breeze unbearable; she rolled over in bed, smooshing her face into Titus’ chest to escape it. “Hold me,” she mumbled into his skin. “I’m cold.” He slung one leg over her waist, making her giggle. “Useless, you are. Now I’m overheated just on this spot. Get off me and I’ll make tea.”

He held her down, sliding a steel letter opener through the wax seal of a scroll. “If you wanted to escape, you’d turn me into a toad or something, Miss Battlemage.”

“No need,” she said, arching up for a sour morning kiss. “I trust you.”

“That is your first mistake. Ooh,” he said, drawing the sharp point of the letter opener down her side, “It’s from the Archmage. You are important now.”

“Your envy is unattractive.” Lyra shivered and smiled, inhaling the sweat and sandalwood scent of him. “What is that?”

“A letter came for you with breakfast.”

“If it is for me, don’t you think I should open it?”

He held the scroll out of her reach. “Battlemage Lyra of the Mage Guild, blah blah … immediate deployment to the Kall Peaks to establish the colony of Trostan …”

“They’re sending us to the Kalls?” Lyra reached for the scroll, but Titus held fast to it, his brows knitted.

“Your petition of marriage to Scholar Titus the Mageborn is heretofore denied due to the arrangement of marriage to …”

Lyra rolled over him and snatched the letter from his hands; wax bits scattered onto the bed. “.. to Lora the Mageborn,” she mumbled. “There’s been some administrative error. Someone mistook my name for Lora’s. This has happened before.”

“You are not Mageborn.” Titus drew her close. “You knew they might choose to arrange my marriage. The Guild wants …”

“… Mageborn children,” she said. “But I went through all the proper channels. I filled out the forms. I thought ….” She held his ears in her hands, pressed her forehead to his. “We do not have to obey. We can be farmers in the provinces. We can disappear in Taizen Gate.”

“You have worked since childhood to rise in the guild’s ranks. I will not allow you to give up everything you worked so hard to accomplish,” he said, burying his face in the plum tumble of her hair. “We are Gythian foremost.”

She soaked his neck with silent tears, her fingers clawing into his shoulders.

Samuel emerged from his rented island room sullen, his cheeks gaunt, dressed all in black. He walked past hammocks where the locals napped away the hot afternoon, couples snoring together in a tangle of limbs, mothers curled around little children like shells around peas. Away from the dwellings he found a handful of goats gnawing on shrubs; honeybees dove through tall bamboo to rummage inside of flowering beans, zucchini and asparagus. In the garden it was difficult to believe that the island was the shell of the giant and ancient titanback named Archelon, floating his annual way around the world.

He followed a path through the tide pools where barefoot children sprinted over the slick bone surface, squatting to inspect the bright slugs, limpets, anemones, sea slugs and stars. A small child held a sea urchin in one hand, drawing out meat from its belly with deft fingers and slurping it up as he watched Samuel step with care. Older children looked after nests of eggs larger than their heads.

At the highest point of the island, the smell of food cooking set his stomach to growling. Locals milled about, poking at a grill, laying out baskets, cleaning up children. A giant carp smoked to a golden brown crisp on smoldering coals laid in the center, its stuffed belly open; clams and oysters and heaps of pickled seaweed lay in steaming piles around it.

“Take cover, ladies. A raincloud approaches,” called a voice, followed by ladies laughing. “Join us, Samuel.”

Blossoms drifted down from a cherry tree under which sat a large man, two women and a basket of food. The three wore sarongs; the man’s was fuschia and wrapped round his waist. One of the women shaved his head with a straight razor. The other sat cross-legged, her hand outstretched, as the man manicured her nails.

Samuel paused in an awkward half-step before sitting at the edge of the shade. “I am afraid I do not know you.”

“You need not fear. I am Lance,” said the man. The woman pushed his ear forward to shave behind it. “Eat honey and cheese. It will sweeten you.”

“I will not eat today,” said Samuel.

“Are you sick?” asked the woman with the straight razor.

“No,” said Samuel. “Fasting preserves power and increases discipline.”

“You have all the rest of your lonely life to starve,” said the man. “How many days will you have for licking honey from the fingers of a beautiful lady?”

Samuel turned his blushing face away from the manicured woman, who dipped a finger in the honeypot with a sly smile. “Is she not one of your wives?”

“People are not possessions,” replied Lance.

“Are these not your children?” sputtered Samuel.

“The children belong to everyone, or rather, we belong to them.” The woman folded away her razor and a little boy slipped down from a branch onto Lance’s shoulders. “You will break your fast today, Sam. If you argue, we will take offense.”

“I prefer Samuel,” he said, but he could not refuse. He deposited a bit of fish into his basket and plucked meat from the fragile bones with his fingers like the others. Children crawled up on his legs and asked incessant questions. Lance made no move to save him from the onslaught, and before long Samuel could not help but chuckle.

After they had eaten, the crowd walked the long pathway down to the shell’s edge to watch the sea trolls hunt. They herded seals and held them under, drowning them before tossing them high in the air and catching them in their giant maws.

“I would not allow the children so close to those hunters,” said Samuel.

Lance kept an arm around Samuel’s stiff shoulder as though they were old friends. “The trolls come ashore once a year to lay eggs, and we care for them. In return, the trolls protect Archelon’s soft underbelly from predators, and we play together. Come, watch the jousts.”

At the shell’s edge, past the long line of docked barges, men tied woven saddles to the beasts’ great heads. Wearing bamboo armor and shields and wielding rattan lances, the men mounted the trolls and charged, their lances crashing into one another’s shields with startling cracks. Lance was the best of these knights; he took to the saddle as if born there, sending one opponent after another splashing into the water, his powerful arm locked around his weapon, a frightening grin spread across his face. His troll roared its pleasure and sprayed the onlookers with a wall of water from its slapping tail.

After the jousts, Samuel and Lance watched the moon rise together while the others wandered away. “How do you like our home?” asked Lance.

“It will not last,” said Samuel. “Archelon will not live forever.”

“The rings round the scutes tell us that Archelon has lived at least a thousand growth seasons, and he swims stronger than ever.”

“All things die.”

“Have faith, Sam.” Lance clapped the young man on his shoulder.

“That is no answer.”

“And yet, it is ever the correct one.”

On the last day of his months-long journey, Samuel dove to look into the eye of Archelon. Lance waited on shore, remembering the day that he had passed this same test: the eye gleaming at him, far wider than he was tall. When Samuel surfaced, gasping, Lance hunched down to help him out. “Did you gaze into his eye?”

“I saw it, and it saw me,” said Samuel, drawing on dry clothes.

“What did Archelon say to you?”

Samuel’s brow cocked. “I do not speak whatever burbling beast language he speaks.”

“You heard nothing in your heart?”

“I also do not speak whatever burbling beast language the heart speaks.”

“Well enough; you have presented yourself to Archelon and so you are one of us. Come.” Lance led him around the shell shore, pausing to rub the heads of sea trolls when they poked through the surface. “Archelon is too large to swim through Bladed Bay. At dawn, I shall escort you to the city by barge.” In the Gythian language he continued: “Your destiny is also mine.”

“I did not think to hear that language from an Archelion,” said Samuel also in Gythian, his words cutting sharp corners. On the docks where the barges hung, children took air in little sips before diving for pearl oysters, dripping nets dangling round their necks.

Lance led Samuel inside the cabin of one of the barges. “Long ago, when I was a young man, a Gythian like yourself bought passage on Archelon to see the world during his last year. He was a knight with a good heart.”

“Nothing like me then,” said Samuel.

“He taught me to wield the lance and shield and live by the knightly tenets of justice, courage, mercy, decorum, honesty, honor, loyalty and character.” A beatific light shone in Lance’s eyes. “And he told me about the city’s rich history of music and passion, enough beauty to inebriate the soul.”

“Did he forget about the wars, corruption and ruthless politics in his dotage?”

“It is true; there is much in the world to be set aright. How can I stay on Archelon when my duty is elsewhere? Look: When my teacher passed on, he gave me these.” Lance lit candles round the cabin and, as the light flickered a warm air of the sacred, opened a hidden compartment under the floorboards where armor, shield and a lance laid in repose. “Since then, I have made it my life’s work to collect Gythian artifacts.”

He hefted up the shield to display, but Samuel rifled through a neat pile of kitchen tools, a bronze candelabra, long-outdated maps and recipes, plumed carnival masks and a brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. He plucked up a rusted garlic press, snapped it open and closed. “Beautiful shield, and not a scratch on it,” he said. “Your fabled knight did not see enough battle to find those tenets difficult.”

“War is not the whole of a knight,” said Lance, unwavering. “I vowed to one day protect a Gythian, and in doing so earn knighthood for myself.”

“I do not need protecting.” Samuel threw the garlic press back to its spot. “I am not the Gythian of your dreams. I have not even seen the city since I was four years old.”

“You are he. I know it.”

“You do not know me, and you do not know Gythia, for all of your careful study of its garbage. Who bakes the best crusty rolls on Via Lucia?” Samuel grabbed up a book and paged through it fast. “The knighthood is just old families clinging to faltering fortunes. It has nothing to do with … what was that ludicrous list? Justice, honesty, decorum …”

Lance took the book from Samuel’s hand as if handling a sleeping baby. “That ludicrous list has everything to do with me.”

And so, at the first gray light, Samuel sat on Lance’s barge, folded in bad posture inside his dark cloak. Lance, wearing the full armor of a Gythian knight, steered the sea troll that pulled the barge through the treacherous black-toothed mouth of the city. The mist parted and a rose-gold light bathed the gleaming fountains and sculpture, the towers and spires, the churning water wheels. Lance’s breath caught in his throat; tears sprang unbidden to his eyes. His plain barge pulled up to the dock between luxury steamboats where a grand reception of dignitaries in elegant finery waited.

Samuel moved like an unwilling shadow behind Lance’s great steel bulk as they disembarked. Lance held up his hand in greeting, but all eyes locked on the hooded young man. The woman in the center stepped forward, one hand heavy with rings appearing beyond long silk sleeves to show her palm in proper greeting. “Welcome home, Samuel,” she said. “We feared the worst.”

“My thanks, Mother,” said Samuel.

Samuel returned to his room at sunset to find Lyra there, staring at the collection of ceremonial Grangor headdresses he’d mounted on one curved wall. He dropped his dripping snow gear on the floor and fell back on his unmade bed, flopping one arm over his eyes. “So there will be a lecture tonight,” he muttered. “Safety or obligation?”

Lyra picked her way with care across the disaster of stacked books, maps and papers, giving a wide berth to the skeleton of the mammoth seal Samuel had speared at his Grangor hunter trial. “Did you… eat this creature?”

“The tribe feasted after the trial. I ate the right flipper and the chief ate the left.”

Lyra shuddered. “I shall have your room cleaned. There is a spider above your bed.”

“It’s a sleep-spider. It gobbles up dreams and spins webs in the shapes of those dreams. I took it from the Netherworld. Don’t touch it.”

Lyra’s eyes blazed. “I told you not to dabble in the Netherworld. The nightmares and phantasms …”

“And dreams and ghosts and Valkyries. Magister Reim …”

“And I told you to stay away from that crazed old man. Is that where you were all week?”

Samuel chuckled, his arm still covering his eyes. “Add that to your list of disappointments. I have given up trying to please you. I rather think you are incapable of pleasure.”

“You do not have the luxury of adolescent insolence.”

“The obligation lecture, then.” Samuel responded with an exaggerated yawn.

Lyra exhaled through her nose, eyes closed, collecting herself. “No. That is the Archmage’s duty now.” She dropped a heavy but small steel machine onto the bed next to him and he removed his arm from his eyes to squint at it.

“What is that contraption?”

“It came with the latest shipment. They have managed to make holograms work, thanks to infused Trostanian crystal. They’ve had holographic messages in Mont Lille for years …”

“… and in Campestria far longer.” Samuel sat up in his bed to inspect the box.

“It is progress nevertheless, so our efforts here are not in vain.”

“Well then, let us see what my mother deigns to say to me.”

“Samuel.” Lyra rested a hand on his shoulder. The gesture was awkward and made them both flinch. “I think … I do not know if this message …”

“Don’t worry, Lady. I am not an orphan harboring dreams of mommy bestowing affection on me after fourteen years of no word.” Samuel snorted. “The Magister said I was bred like a dog.”

Lyra was quieted by that. She focused her gaze on the message box, her violet curls falling to hide her expression while Samuel hit the button with his fist. The platform buzzed with blue light that broke and spat before it came together to form a face. The Archmage’s face. He had no memory of it, and there was no color to her eyes, but the resemblance was obvious.

“Samuel.” The sound crackled with static. “Lady Lyra has kept me informed of your progress. Well done on passing the first nine disciplines. The Mage Guild depends on you passing the tenth. You shall return home to prove your worth in the final test before your formal induction into the guild. I trust Lyra has prepared you well.”

Home. He almost missed what came after.

“After you have received your rank, you shall be positioned as governor of Trostan and lead the effort to move the Grangor population to the frontier. You shall see to the expansion of our crystal mining in the Kall Peaks. Your rapport with the Grangor beasts will be essential to this effort. You shall return to Trostan with whatever contingent of troops you deem necessary to assist you.

“Our guild and our empire depend on your success, my son. With your help, Gythia shall return to its former glory.”

The picture blinked out of existence and Samuel stared at the place where it had been. “Move the Grangor population,” he breathed. “Has she ever met a Grangor?”

Lyra clasped her hands inside her long sleeves. “If it is necessary …”

“They won’t go. I have seen their souls in the Netherworld. They are rooted to this land by blood and ritual and the hunt.”

“You sound like one of them,” said Lyra, her tone measured.

He stood and paced the room. “I’d have to kill them all. My mother wants me to kill them all.”

“You are Gythian.”

Samuel whirled to face her. “Why should I have to explain to you that this is wrong?” he cried, and the words spilled out of him in a dark magic that formed into a treacherous churning orb that surrounded them both.

Inside the orb was the deep cave-dark of nightmares. Nothing Lyra had taught Samuel of Gythian magecraft explained that darkness, or the weakening beat of her heart. She snapped awake without realizing she’d been asleep, gasping and shaking, and whispered the words of warding. A green glow shone through the blackness, drinking it in, dispelling it.

Above the bed, the sleep-spider wove into its web a shimmering silken depiction of Trostan in flames.

Bright-plumed Titanbeaks pulled the mages’ litters through the Gythian streets: the Archmage in her own, Lyra and Magister Reim in the next. Lance insisted on riding in the third with Samuel; he craned his head out of the curtained window to gape at the complex of short military towers and training yards sprawled against the great obsidian wall, then the closed-up and somber Ministers’ Tower, the Cartographers’ Tower with its landings and patios housing all sizes of telescopes and finally the Mage Tower, taller by a hundred feet than any other and wide as a city block. It was adorned around each level with golden sculptures of past Archmages, each holding the ancient wand named Verdict.

Samuel entered the tower under the hard golden gaze of his sculpted mother and followed his escort into the grand center theater. The acrid taste of unfamiliar magic stung his tongue. Lyra and Reim stopped Lance from following; the three stood by the door.

A walkway edged with sculpted obsidian pillars led to two stone platforms, one higher than the other. Samuel stood on the shorter; atop the high platform stood the guild’s top-ranking mages, the Archmage at the fore, her robes removed to reveal the somber black lace vestments of judgment. “Samuel the Mage Born,” she said, her sugared tone echoing in the immense room, “your tenth trial begins now. If you pass, you shall receive your rank in our guild.” She stretched Verdict forth. “I hope you are prepared.”

Samuel pulled from his belt the wand named Malice. “So I am not to answer for disobeying you, Mother? For burning down Gythia’s hopes? Does it trouble you overmuch to acknowledge the failure of your bloodline?” He spun the wand between his fingers before clenching it in his fist.

A shadow fled from Verdict and landed in Samuel’s periphery a split moment before pain flooded his belly. He whirled to face his aggressor and stared into his own face, at Malice pointed at his own torso. There was no time to register this ultimate betrayal before his shadow double flanked and shot again.

~

Lance lunged forward only to slam full-force into a shimmering green wall.

“For every action, there is a consequence,” said Lyra.

Reim watched the fight, expressionless, white-knuckling his staff.

~

A rushing water sound filled Samuel’s ears. He circled to the right and his shadow self mirrored him; there was a flash, and a sting bloomed on Samuel’s leg, a pain that sank to his bones. He curled his tongue around the words of power and a burst of magic fled from his wand, missing the shadow by a breath. He dove and spat out another word: “Uruz!” Another shot just missed the shadow’s neck. The shadow returned the blasts and Samuel dodged. They traded dark magic fire until the platform was a blinding shower of light. He could not outwit himself.

But the shadow could not learn.

He feinted right and leaped away from his double, springing to the nearest pillar, cracking his ribs, two fingers curled around the canine teeth of a carved lion’s head. With the half-second he’d bought, he pulled himself up to crouch atop it.

“Kenaz,” he cried, and the air wavered, and around him were the souls of ancient mages, thousands of them with hollow eyes watching, and the darkness of the Netherworld enveloped him as he leaped. Light flashed from Malice and the shadow crouched, spun wrong and caught the full force of the spell in its back.

When the dark had dissipated, Samuel stood alone on the platform. The Netherworld, having been opened, lurked close, the phantasms murmuring hate and promising justice. Above, the Archmage extended Verdict again.

“So you present a test no one can survive to save yourself the embarrassment of convicting me.” Samuel’s bitter laugh seized as he held his broken ribs. “That is how Magister Reim’s son died, isn’t it? He asked too many questions.”

“If it is so,” said the Archmage, “then you should concentrate on succeeding.”

A second shadow fled from Verdict, forming beside Samuel. He slid back, Malice held in his fist like a blade, his eyes narrowed at his new opponent –

– and his arm dropped as he flinched away from the little boy who looked up at him with wide, terrified eyes: Samuel, as he’d been fourteen years past when he entered Trostan for the first time, Malice far too big for his little hands.

“Such poetry,” mocked Samuel. “I suppose I shall face my wise old future self next?”

“You shall have no such future if you fail,” called the Archmage.

Samuel sidestepped the shadow boy’s fumbling shots with ease. Tears welled in the boy’s eyes.

“I would rather fail,” said Samuel, and released the phantasm that twisted and curled into the skull-shape of nightmares, sailing around the shadow child and then the mages high above, lulling them all to sleep. The shadow disappeared and the Archmage fell.

~

The shimmering wall dropped. A spinning, churning hole appeared in the walkway by Lance’s feet.

“Go,” choked Lyra behind him. “Go!”

~

The Archmage landed in Samuel’s outstretched arms, slamming him to the floor. His shoulder dislocated from its socket, sending shocks of pain through his arm and spine. He snatched Verdict away from her, rolled away, yanked his shoulder back into place with an agonized gasp, then stumbled to his feet. “Where is she?” he screamed.

“Who?” gasped the Archmage, blinking, disoriented.

“Gythia’s little creature.” He bent over her, spitting the words into her face. “Trostan wasn’t the only iron you had in the fire. Where is the Storm Queen’s niece?”

The Archmage flinched away. “Gathering allies,” she whimpered. “The Halcyon -”

Samuel sneered and aimed both wands at the Archmage’s face. “Well done, Mother.”

Armor clattered as the knight rolled into position between them, weapon at the ready, shield high. Samuel stepped back, wands crossed in front of him.

“Reconsider, my friend,” growled Lance.

Samuel’s grim mouth cracked into a smile. “You are better than Gythia ever was,” he said, and fell back into the churning portal.

Reim stood at the portal’s source, palm out as Lyra’s face turned blue. Icicles hung from her ears and hair. Her book, encased in ice, laid useless on the floor. Samuel tumbled from the portal’s source at his feet, struggling for breath as he looked up at his teacher’s distressed eyes.

“Magister,” he whispered.

“Run, you fool.”

On the unkempt path along the mangrove-lined river, overgrown with vines and flowers, the paladin in his gilded ceremonial armor cut an imposing figure. A dozen warriors and several local guides marched behind him; explorers brought up the rear, sketching, collecting samples and taking notes. The paladin’s wide-eyed young daughter gripped his outstretched finger with her whole small fist.

“Do you like the islands, Grace?”

At six years old, this was her first trip outside of Gythia, and the foreign tropics were a dizzying delight. Wherever there was soil, color burst through. Flowers as big as her head called hi! hey! hi! Exotic birds showed off their plumage and screeched to make sure she looked. Even the mosquito swarms shimmered.

“Yes,” she answered, her tone solemn. “This must be the prettiest place in the world.”

“These shall be the Grace Islands, then.” Her father waved his arm in an arc to indicate the half-moon shape of the archipelago. “Make a note of it,” he called over one shoulder, and a mapmaker scribbled in her journal.

Grace stared in reserved wonder at her surroundings while her father named the flora and fauna as though he’d created it all. The locals wore colorful sarongs and flowers in their hair. They waved and never ceased smiling. One of them fed plums to a young macaque that perched with hungry obedience on the little girl’s shoulder.

“These are nice people,” observed Grace.

“Peace and kindness is embedded into their culture. They even file down the sharp teeth of adolescents to remove their violent nature.”

Grace touched her own teeth. “Does it hurt?”

“Oh yes.”

“You should tell them to stop, Papa.”

“Oh, dulcissima! A man may be a better hunter than a tiger, but he would be a fool to tell the beast how to hunt on its own land.”

“But these are people.”

“Yes, they are people,” mused the paladin. “Of a kind.”

Grace stopped short, wavering on her feet. The world around her brightened at the edges. The monkey leaped away and the retinue came to a halt.

“Papa?” she whimpered.

The paladin held her steady by the shoulders. “Do not fear. Tell me what the light shows you.”

Grace shivered as a great wall of ice rose up, blocking their path. Where the path forked toward the river, a wall of fire blazed upward, spitting embers and burning her cheeks. “Ice and fire,” she whispered.

“Which way is the fire?”

She pointed to the river and the vision ended, the walls only tricks of the light.

The procession moved single-file onto the stone steps leading across the river. In the center of the water stood a temple.

A guide intercepted them. His smile never wavered, though his voice was strained. “Sir,” he said, bowing low, “visitors do not cross here, Sir. Danger, Sir.” He held out his arms, revealing rippling burn scars.

“Stand back,” said the paladin. He rested a hand on the guide’s shoulder, and when he lifted it, a hand-shaped spot of healed flesh remained.

The temple was made of stone. The mangroves growing over it were scorched. The buzzing mosquitos and bickering monkeys stayed away, so that the temple was cloaked in eerie quiet. At the temple’s entrance a local boy appeared, perhaps a year younger than Grace. He wore only a sarong around his waist, so that gruesome scars and new welts from burns showed all over his chest and face.

“This boy speaks fire,” whispered the guide. He stared in wonder at his shoulder as the healed skin spread down his arm. “His name is Reza.”

“He’s hurt,” said Grace.

The paladin guided Grace forward, toward the boy. “Go and do as you have learned.”

Grace stepped across slick stones to the temple with care, leaving her father behind. She greeted the boy with a Gythian hand gesture and he flinched.

“I’m going to take care of you,” she said, gentle but firm. She rested her palms on the boy’s face. The light burned at the top of her head and she guided it down, as her father had taught her, down through her head and throat, flooding her heart and belly and arms and then escaping through her fingertips. The light swelled and the boy’s eyes grew wide. Down to his shoulders her hands slid, leaving behind smooth, healed flesh. The light traveled down his body, enveloping him with its warmth. “There,” she said when she had done. She was tired to her bones from the effort, but the boy’s burn scars and welts had disappeared, leaving behind a dazzling, dark beauty. “That’s better.”

The boy opened his mouth to speak, or cry or laugh; it couldn’t be known, for what came from his mouth was a trail of fire, just like in Grace’s vision, spurting sparks and raining ash.

The paladin’s light shield burst into being between her and the boy just in time. The flames beat against it but could not penetrate. The boy’s mouth shut and his eyes filled with ashy tears as the paladin approached.

“The Mageborn must be trained to the proper use of their power, just as you, born to the light, have learned to control your visions,” he said, patting Grace’s red braid. “Until we deliver him to the mages, you must care for him like a sister.”

“My brother.” Grace took the boy’s hand. “I shall name you Titus.”

Grace woke in the dark, her greyhound nuzzling its wet nose into her foot. Rolling the morning stiffness from her shoulders, she made her way to the empty training yard in the first rose light of dawn, the greyhound following at her heel. She selected a heavy mace from the weapon rack and moved through a warmup flow, swinging it in slow, controlled circles in front of her body and then behind her back, changing grip and direction, then progressed through lunging battle forms. Her mind stilled as she put her body through the old disciplines. In this way, she had learned long ago to control visions, to bid them come when she wished. Her consciousness flowed with her breath, up and up, the training yard falling away, up and then out.

At first there was only a sound, that of a young man crying out words of power, and then there was a darkness that split apart the air. From that darkness came tortured beings, phantasms, dead things with white eyes yearning for freedom. The Nether, a place of nightmares, the absence of life and light, called forth by a mage.

Grace danced through the mace flow, blind to the world around her, her eyes rolled up, and forced the vision forward. Show me he who opened the Nether, she said without saying, and the vision changed – but instead of a mage, she saw a knight wandering the city’s twisting alleyways in the dark. He was a stranger in Gythian armor, bearing a shield and a lance, braving the sea-cold wind without tiring, asking locals for the whereabouts of a wayward boy. Grace watched as he paused to admire the ancient towers, to stare at torchlit fountains and, in the minutes before dawn, to breathe in the smell of the day’s first bread baking.

Grace ended the mace flow and shook off the vision. A silent cluster of acolytes in robes and cowls filed out to the yard and went to work trimming the rose bushes, brushing and raking the clay and sand yards, and skimming the surface of the battle pool with a net. The mace landed in Grace’s palms with finality and acolytes scurried to bring water and towel the sweat from her brow.

“There is a man at the gate,” said Grace, sitting for her breakfast. “Bring him to me.”

Grace’s visions were not questioned. A few moments later the stranger from her dream was led to her table. He stared at the training yard with open-mouthed awe, his eyes beatific as an icon, while his shield and lance were presented to Grace for study. “These were Gennaro’s,” she said. “Did you know him?”

The man met Grace’s eyes with a wide smile and an ease that few possessed in her presence. “Gennaro was my teacher. He journeyed to the next world on the back of Archelon and passed his possessions to me.”

Grace handed the shield to an acolyte. “Then we mourn together. Gennaro was a good knight, and a friend of my father’s. Do you, then, seek knighthood?”

“That was my reason for coming here,” said the man, and all at once he seemed tired down to his soul. “I found a mage and swore to protect him, to prove myself worthy. But his tenth trial was designed to kill him, and I could not do as I promised.”

“So he is dead.”

“No. I don’t know.” The man sighed. “He did something I could not understand.”

“He opened the Nether,” Grace whispered.

“He tried to kill the Archmage. His own mother.”

“His mother?” Grace’s heart fell.

“I stopped him, and he fled. So I must find him, and right this wrong, so that I can fulfill my destiny.”

Grace stood, and even without the splendor of her ceremonial dress she was an imposing figure, the sunlight enveloping her. “What is your name, warrior?” she said in a low tone.

“Lance,” he said, his voice withered with shame. “Lance of Archelon.”

“On your knees, Lance of Archelon.”

The man knelt, prepared for punishment. Instead, he felt the woman’s palm on his bare head. Warmth flooded down his spine, and with it, a peace he had not known since he was a babe in his mother’s arms.

“With valor and bravery you saved the life of the Archmage,” she said. “You kept watch in the night. Do you swear to live by the tenets of justice, courage, mercy, decorum, honesty, honor, loyalty and character?”

“I do.” His words cracked with emotion.

“Then you are welcome in my guild and in my country. Rise, Lance, Knight of Gythia, in the name of the Light.” Grace smiled and her hand dropped. “Go and rest. This is now a matter for the office of the paladin.”

He wept his thanks as the acolytes guided him away. Grace’s attendants hovered close.

“Shall we call upon the Archmage, Domina?”

“No.” Grace turned and strode toward her chambers, the greyhound at her heel. “Find my brother.”

No one has ever rebuilt the overgrown Old Quarter, where the stink of magic lingers in the destroyed buildings. The children dare one another to touch those still-crackling buildings for the shock. That shock was Kestrel’s first memory.

She wasn’t Kestrel then, but the name her parents gave her is classified.

Kestrel knew about the war, though she hadn’t been born yet, and she knew about the Storm Queen, who lived far away in Mont Lille. She knew never to bother the border guards, who the locals called blancorojos. She learned the rolling, throaty language of Mont Lille alongside her family’s dialect. She saluted the queen’s flag every morning at school. Every child had to take the queen’s aptitude tests; teachers and parents drilled them in mathematics, languages and geography for weeks preceding the test. Taxes were light on families whose children were chosen.

At six years of age, Kestrel took the first battery of tests: analogies, number series, mirroring patterns of blocks and solving puzzles. She did well. She loved the smell of pencil shavings and her examiner’s smart white lab coat trimmed with red. She loved how numbers fell into neat patterns, and she spoke Lilliaise with an adorable accent.

For the last test, the examiner placed a combination of black and white boxes before her with a candy under one. Kestrel’s task was to guess if it was under a black or a white box. At first, there were nine white boxes and one black box. She picked white and collected her candy. The next round, there were seven black boxes and three white ones. She picked black and earned more candy. Her cheeks were stuffed with candies after a few rounds of disproportionate numbers of one color box, then: betrayal. There were six white boxes, but the candy was under one of the four black ones.

Kestrel had never before doubted herself.

The examiner set out the boxes again: five of each.

“Choose,” she said.

“No.”

“Don’t you want the candy?”

“Yes.”

“Then, choose.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know where it is.”

“The test requires you to choose.”

“No.”

The examiner bent double so that she’d be at eye level with the little girl. Her voice was kind. “There is no punishment for guessing wrong, and a candy if you guess right. You must choose.”

“No.”

“The queen requires you to choose.”

“No.”

“Very well.” The examiner straightened and produced a stick the length of her arm. “If you do not choose, you will be struck on your palms.”

Kestrel looked straight ahead with her palms up while the stick smacked into them, remembering the surprising pain of the magic shock she’d given herself in the Old Quarter, how it had lessened into mild tingling after a time. The stick did not hurt that much.

She did not cry, and she did not choose.

The next day, two blancorojos came to her home. Kestrel escaped out the back and climbed a walnut tree, armed with a slingshot and enough underripe ammo to make a grand nuisance should her father seek to punish her for failing the test of the boxes. Instead, her parents coaxed her down with tears and kisses, for she had been called to continue her education in Mont Lille. Her parents had one hour to say goodbye.

The Storm Queen sat sideways on Catherine’s lounge chair, her legs slung over one arm, cloaked and hooded, a raven perched on her shoulder. With no lamps lit, the intruder was invisible in the windowless living quarters. Catherine was not a fan of extra entryways, yet the queen had made her way past the reinforced and locked front door. The queen swung her legs forward and lit the nearest lamp. The raven adjusted its feet but remained in place. “They are nearby. I assume this room is secure?”

“I thought so, yet here you are.”

The queen half-smiled. “You will assemble the Stormguard tonight.”

Catherine sheathed the sword she had been gripping with both fists since first entering her apartment. “Who is the target?”

“Targets. Twin targets, with remarkable magical abilities. You’ll remember their mother, my sister, Julia.”

“Your sister? She’s been dead for years.”

“So she would have us believe. Our spies have found her in southern Gythia.”

“That is tech territory now.”

“A hive of soulless machines and their engineers. Julia has made an alliance with them, hoping to supplant me. She’s even married one of their technologists and made some babies. Isn’t that sweet?”

“Twin babies?”

“Indeed. You will bring them to me so they can be trained.”

“Why is the traitor not a target?”

The queen stood, and the dim light seeped up into her hood, showing the stitches that crossed over the flesh where her eyes had been. They had been removed at birth, in the way of storm mages. “There are laws against royal murder, no matter how justified.” She stroked Catherine’s cheek with the back of her icy hand as she spoke, as if in lullabye. “I should execute you where you stand for suggesting it.”

It was said that evil doles out affection in tiny droplets, yet Catherine could not help her desperate thirst. In a frustrated whisper she said, “So, we take the children and leave their mother to plot your murder? Your sister will seek revenge. She will enlist the Gythians to help her if you do this thing.”

“Let us hope you are right. The Stormguard has never been stronger, and the Gythians are stretched thin fending off the technologists.”

“You wish for war again, my queen?”

“No, Catherine. I do not wish for war. I make it.” The queen’s hand dropped. “Now is the time. Now, while the technologists are a disjointed army of gadgets, while Gythia is an elderly collection of has-beens with shiny trinkets. They are a decade away from readiness and nothing without their toddling prodigies.”

Catherine stared into the raven’s eyes as she spoke. “As you will, my queen.”

“They have made their home in the farms northwest of Pompium. Vyn will accompany you.” Only then did the raven, the queen’s eyes and ears, move; with a quiet flap of its dark wings, it leapt from the queen’s shoulder to Catherine’s.

Catherine resisted the urge to shrug away the bird. “Yes, my queen.”

“I expect obedience.”

A single candle on the table at the back of the tavern flickered a light too weak to penetrate the heavy hood of a woman sitting alone, staring at the leaves swirling in her steaming cup of tea. She’d been sheltered all her young life from the roving bands of people whose old women wore clattering bangles up their arms and read the futures of gullible customers in tea leaves.

Despite her thorough education, Julia would have paid well, in that moment, for such a service.

Every head turned when Catherine entered. The red and white uniform was gone, but her drab hooded cloak failed to remove the disquieting sensation that a predator had stepped into the room. That heavy feeling did not waver despite the smile Catherine offered to Julia as she threaded through the tables to Julia’s booth, sweeping off her cloak to reveal a well-fitted dress true to the local style.

The serving-boy’s words stumbled like pebbles rolling downhill: “Good.. good even… how can I… would you like some… what can I…?”

Catherine stared the boy down, allowing him to stutter until he had found the end of a sentence. “Wine,” she said, a smile playing at one corner of her mouth.

“Right away… and you, ma’am? Can I get you more tea? Hey, aren’t you Jul…”

Catherine stepped close, one fingertip on the boy’s chin, turning his eyes back to her. “Red wine,” she murmured.

Julia exhaled a breath she hadn’t known she was holding as the serving-boy tripped away. “Oh great subterfuge, Cath. Let’s please be as memorable to our fellow patrons as much as possible.”

Catherine scoffed, feigning hurt. “You are so unkind. I am quite proud of my disguise. And look– buttons!” She winked, spreading her arms.

Julia laughed, but the sound was brittle, fighting not to become a sob. “Your disguise is as subtle as a hat on a tiger.”

Neither woman spoke while the wine was poured. Only after did Catherine lean forward in earnest. “She wants the twins, Lia, and you alive to make war before you can win it.”

Julia lifted her chin. “Gythia will aid me.”

Catherine shook her head. “Perhaps. Someday, if the time were right. But the Stormguard is here today. I couldn’t send word; I had Vyn on my shoulder the whole journey. He watches your family now.” Catherine clasped Julia’s shaking hand in hers. “This mission is happening tonight. The twins will come back with me to Mont Lille.”

Julia jerked her hand away and looked up at a cobwebby corner of the tavern. “No.”

Catherine’s spine straightened. “You know I would have it any other way if it could be. But you do not have a choice in this. I give my word, Lia, I will watch over them.”

“No!” Julia insisted. “My sister would make a tyrant of Celeste in her image, and you could not stop her.”

Catherine opened her callused palms. “So? What do you propose? You and Ardan cannot defeat the Stormguard tonight, not even with my help. Those not surrounding your farm have barricaded every road out of Pompium. Once we have completed our mission, we will disappear. Lia. Your only option is to trust me.”

“The way my sister trusts you?”

Catherine’s eyes narrowed. “You and I have been friends since we were children.”

“We were all three friends when we were children.” A long silence once again wedged itself between them. At length, Julia sighed. “I will warn Ardan that the Stormguard may be closeby. The children will go about their routine as usual; nothing will seem amiss from the outside. I will help Ardan escape with the twins when you attack.”

“There is no escape through the Stormguard.”

“There is one way. A mage is never more powerful than at the time of death. When you take my life, I will pass my gift to him. He will make it through.”

Catherine gripped her wine glass, her voice cold as frost. “I will not do this.”

“Make a show of it. Create a diversion.”

Catherine’s eyes sparkled wet, her teeth clenched. “I cannot.”

“And then, run. There is nothing more for you in Mont Lille. The Stormguard will chase Ardan; you must escape to our friends in Gythia.”

The glass in her hands exploded, shards of tinkling rain skittering across the table top. The tavern went quiet as all heads turned to Catherine as blood shimmering with halcyon dripped from her fist. “Neither you nor your sister ever consider the weight of your demands,” Catherine choked out, blinking away unshed tears.

Julia swallowed against the knot in her throat. She took Catherine’s bleeding hands with all the patience she’d learned as a mother. “I am touched by your devotion, but I am not a person. I am an empire.” She pulled glass from Catherine’s palms, her voice a sing-song whisper. “If you deliver my children to my sister, she will make a monster of my daughter, put my son at the front lines of her military, and gain territory at the mouth of Gythia.” Blood and wine dribbled onto the floor as Julia cupped Catherine’s hands inside her own. Green light glowed, Julia’s healing power drawing strength from the halcyon, the lacerations closing. “Never feel guilty for what must be done. And… and..” Julia faltered, then stopped.

“I will make it fast,” Catherine said softly.

Julia’s shoulders wilted. She released Catherine’s healed hands. They slid out of the booth and stood, regarding each other across a distance that had grown, in only a few moments, unspannable.

Catherine smiled and touched her hand to Julia’s cheek.

“Hey, Lia,” she whispered.

“Hey, Cath,” Julia whispered back, a sob and a laugh catching in her throat.

Catherine’s back straightened, her eyes cleared, and her hand returned to her side. She nodded once at Julia, grabbed her cloak, and stepped through her own spilled blood, past the silent patrons and their tracking stares, out the tavern door into the waiting night.

“It really is her.”

Kestrel shot a withering glare down at the swordswoman who’d whispered it from the brush below. A soldier of the Stormguard knew better than to speak after positions were taken. Still, every woman hiding outside the indistinct farmhouse that evening had stood watch over the burial of the blonde woman who now struggled to unload a goat from a battered old cart outside the farmhouse. Julia should have been a ghost.

The goat pulled at its rope, crying like a child.

Kestrel waited in the tangled branches of an olive tree for Catherine’s signal in the same position she’d held for hours. The feeling had gone out of her legs long before. Her bow laid out sidelong in front of her, stringed with steel. She rubbed her gloved thumb and fingerpads together, savoring the spark under her skin, but she wouldn’t use energy arrows that night. Metal shattered glass, if the bow was strung heavy enough, and the detached Stormguard unit hadn’t used magic since crossing into Gythian territory. Techies didn’t trust magic, and the last thing they needed in this land of smog and machines was attention.

Poking her tongue into her cheek, she watched the queen’s sister through her scope. Mothering twins had softened Julia’s body, and there were laugh lines by her eyes, but there was no doubt. After Julia went inside, Kestrel curled her toes to get the feeling back, rolled her right shoulder, sank her thigh into a knob in the branch, fit an arrow into the nock and hooted an owl call. Catherine whistled back the command to hold.

The goat bleated louder and sadder as the sun sank. Nothing stirred in the surrounding brush and trees. Inside the window, Julia argued with her husband, some nobody from the rebel tech army. The twins flashed by in their pajamas, chasing one another to their beds. The boy gave out a shout that shook the ground and the setting sun brightened, then dimmed. Mageborn, Kestrel mused in silence. No wonder the queen wanted them unharmed. She waited until the kids were tucked in, took aim at the left edge of a front window away from the bedrooms, then repeated her signal. Catherine whistled again to hold.

Night deepened, stars poking out that never showed above the bright light of Mont Lille. The man inside gestured with a wrench. Julia slammed a door. The goat’s shrieks twisted Kestrel’s nerves into a tight bundle. She’d hold position all night if needed, but every minute she waited was a minute something could go wrong.

The man clamped a gauntlet on one arm. Animalistic hoots and whistles sounded from varied positions. Catherine’s hold command repeated again and the goat cried and something wasn’t right; they should have attacked an hour ago. “What the hell is she waiting for?” the swordswoman grumbled. Kestrel was used to lone missions, not all of this group planning. Too many other people to depend on. Too much noise. Couldn’t think.

She let an arrow fly, and the goat shut up.

The signals paused; someone in the brush snickered. Kestrel fit another arrow into its nock. The man paused, looked at his own reflection in the nearest window, then raced across the farmhouse to Julia.

“He knows,” breathed the woman aground, bellying forward in the brush sword first.

The whispers of steel unsheathing sounded all over the olive grove. Somewhere, a blue wisp of magic snapped on and off in the air. A glowing blue shield hummed to life. Hearts pounded in throats. The man inside struggled into his armor, his wife pinching her fingers on the clamps trying to help. It was “go time,” and all they needed was Catherine’s whistle.

The whistle never came.

Kestrel pulled back, knuckles resting on the place where her jaw met her skull, three fingers under the knock, shoulderblade pinching her spine, and on her exhale …

… released.

By the time the front window shattered, Kestrel had swung down from the tree. Ignoring the burning pins and needles in her legs, she ducked low and closed in on the farmhouse.

Hanging from the windowsill by one hand, her bow slung over one shoulder, she glanced back at the storm of magic and steel following behind. Catherine stood behind the attack, tears in her eyes, a raven’s neck broken in her fist, another landing on her shoulder with an enraged scream.

“I do not need your permission to buy a goat,” Julia said. “Goat milk is delicious, and we can make cheese.”

They’d been arguing all evening. Ardan was hunched over his power gauntlet, sanding down the edges of a grill he’d removed to improve air flow. Outside in the yard, a goat shrieked into the moonless dark. “Goats stink and scream like fiends,” he grumped. “It hasn’t stopped for an hour. How will the twins sleep?”

“The kids need a pet. Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“And who will make this alleged cheese? When have you ever made cheese, your highness?”

“I could make cheese!” Julia shouted. She stomped out of the room and slammed the bedroom door behind her, the goat’s cries dramatizing her exit.

Celeste toddled out of her room, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Dadda? Is Mamma alright?”

She had her mother’s accent. Ardan plucked up the toddler in his unarmored arm and kissed her cheeks. “Mamma is being ridiculous.”

“What is ridick oo luss?”

“It means she brought a goat home without talking to me about it.”

“I like goats.” This from Vox, who wandered in after his sister. He seated himself on his father’s foot, wrapped his arms around Ardan’s leg and rode along as Ardan took Celeste back to bed, staring out the window toward the screams.

“You like the idea of goats. None of us actually know how to care for a goat.”

“There’s a baby crying outside,” said Celeste, half asleep.

“It’s the stupid goat,” said Ardan, planting her back in her bed.

Vox uncurled himself from his father’s leg. “He’s afraid,” he said. “Maybe lonely.”

“It’s a she, Vox. At least I hope it is a she, or your mother’s dreams of cheese are –”

Ardan paused, turned toward the window.

The goat had stopped screaming.

His adrenaline spiked.

“Hide, both of you. Do not open the door.”

There was no time to make sure they obeyed him. He ran to his bedroom. “Julia,” he hissed at the bedroom door. “They’re here.”

Julia opened the door. Her face had gone white. “Now?”

“Outside.”

The armor stood in pieces around the front room in various states of renovation. Tools littered the floor. “Legs first,” he grumbled, stepping into the sabatons. Julia scrambled to her knees in her nightdress, a poor but necessary replacement for a proper battle squire. She pinched her fingers on the knee clamps, struggled under the weight of the chest pieces.

The button panel whirred and crackled with static, then burped out: “System. Offline.” Ardan slammed his left fist onto it. “Worthless damn power source on this model…”

“Shh.” Julia’s hands were black with oil, her face smudged as she attached the generator to his back and connected it to the power gauntlet. She stared out the door, into the hall. There was no sound. No disturbance. No goat. “Are you sure they’re…”

“System. Online.”

Glass broke. Ardan turned sideways in time for a metal arrow to slice a scratch through his breastplate, just under his chin, and thud home in the wall opposite the front window. Ardan cursed and squared up, the wood floor creaking under his armored weight. “I’ll watch the front door.”

“But your cannon arm!”

“It’s useless, unless you want me to blow up the house. Stay behind me.”

Julia closed her eyes, turned her palms upward. “I’ll protect you,” she murmured, her voice dreamy, green light forming in her hands.

Ardan winced away from the twisted-guts feeling that magic always gave him. “I can handle myself,” he grunted.

A forearm appeared over the window, decorated in an archer’s gauntlet, and then the archer herself swung inside. Another woman followed and drew her sword. More came in behind her, magicians and assassins, all wearing the same insignia.

“Stormguard!” he yelled, but Julia was lost inside her trance, eyes rolled back.

Ardan’s armor groaned and buzzed as he moved forward, painfully slow, but he was grateful for it when the Stormguard attacked. They moved in tandem, each with a weapon they’d held since childhood. He ran forward, energy buzzing through the armor, propelling him, heating the metal to burning, steel cracking against the breastplate. When he backhanded the archer across her face, he left a burn mark. She crumpled, her bow clattering to the floor.

The others raised shields of wood, metal and magic to counter Julia’s trance and Ardan’s assault. He stomped forward and plowed into them, knocked them from their feet, sent them flying in a crunch of bones to the wall. Their blood spattered the divan. They rolled in shattered glass, discarded weapons and their own knocked-out teeth. He could not resist every attack: Blades sliced through his unprotected arm and his cheeks; magic stung and froze him with deafening whipcrack sounds. But he was a wall between the enemy and his wife, and all the while, he felt warmth coming from her, a blanket that enveloped him, closed his wounds, melted the ice and gave him strength. It churned his insides, these unnatural talents, but he’d deal with the sick when his family was safe.

Then, the blast.

All went silent and cold. His teeth clamped shut. A shock pulsed up through his legs, his arms, his throat. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t blink. Paintings slid from the wall and the bolts fell from the front door. He could hear the static noises from his armor display, the groans from the pile of wounded Stormguard, but he could not move. He could only watch as the front door opened and the last of the Stormguard stepped inside, as if invited. She surveyed the room, then snapped her fingers at two of the guard who were scrambling to their feet even as Ardan struggled to move. She pointed to the twins’ room and the two guards sprinted that way.

The woman walked from the door, past Ardan as if he didn’t exist, to Julia, who stood frozen in her nightdress and bare feet.

“Catherine,” gasped Julia.

“Such a shame,” whispered Catherine as she pressed her sword against Julia’s chest.

Ardan’s heart pounded out one beat. Another. Air filled his lungs and he coughed. To his right, the two Stormguard emerged carrying the twins, stunned as rigid as he. The other Stormguard rose, some shakily, some bleeding, all stone-eyed and with a firm grip on their weapons.

To his left, Julia stared into Catherine’s eyes.

His heart beat a third time.

In another heartbeat, his children or his wife would be dead, depending on which way he ran.

He ran.

The general’s sword, turned sideways, slid easily between Julia’s ribs. Her last breath was his name, and with it came the last otherworldly green swirl of her magic. It hit him, Julia’s last gift becoming part of him, wrapping around his insides, giving him the burst of strength he needed. Ardan wrapped the twins up in his arms and crashed out of the window. The two Stormguard who had taken the children lay unconscious. There hadn’t been time to kill them… or to hold his wife as she died.

He fled from the house into the dark, past the poor dead goat, whose screams had been silenced by one well-placed arrow through the throat. The children remained silent, in some lucky instinct, leaving the questions to the night owls in the trees.

“Do it!” roars the undead monster at the round metal eye of the turret, half grown over with brambles and rattan. “Put a hole in me! Blow me apart!”

If only it would work.

The turret remains silent, but he can smell recent explosions. Someone is keeping it loaded. Someone is summoning the minions that come through the choke point beyond the turret, past the shambles of what must have once been a rock fortress, in waves. And beyond that someone may be what he seeks.

So close…

Krul drags his left leg, nursing a nagging sting of magic in his thigh where some spell hit him earlier. Another someone, now lost to the world. The smell of summoning drifts over the rock face and he grimaces, grinds his teeth. More minions coming. Ugly bastards, no necks, no language, nothing in them but fight. He punches his leg to get the sting out and takes an unnecessary deep breath. A habit from a former existence. The air leaks out through the sucking wound in his chest, fogging up the cold steel trapped there.

Every step is pain, and he runs hard. Catches the biggest of the idiot minions by surprise, flattens him fast, ignore the pain, ignore the pain, ignore the… Tearing into the minion’s belly is good, the only good thing. A distraction from the misery that threatens, in every moment, to lay him flat. The minion’s dark insides are slippery in his hands; their bellies come apart like cobwebs, their legs detach easy as fly wings. He screams into their faces, spewing spittle. His insane laughter echoes through the battleground. Their souls suck away from their dying carcasses and feed him. It is his only satiation.

There is blood, there are limbs, there are gurgling death-screams, there are pieces of once-living creatures clinging to Krul’s teeth and nails when he sees her standing atop the ruins of the fort. Human from the look of her, tall and still as morning, a sword buried between cracks in the rock, eyes impassive. His face, or what is left of it, cracks open into a grin.

“Hullo, beauty!” he calls.

Her response is the slow pulling of her weapon from the rocks, that shing of steel.

“You cannot protect it from me,” he growls. “Best run now and let me at it, before I destroy your best assets.”

She leaps, falling hard onto him, sword front, magic buzzing around her like bees. She is good with her weapon, well trained. He might have respected her, once. She gets a few slashes into him, his half-dead flesh sagging apart where she aims. He swings at her, hits only air, circling, snorting like a devil, dodging as best he can until she turns the sword over her shoulder and pounds him good in the brow with the hilt. He lunges, closes the gap between them, roaring his dead breath onto her, then her valiant cry is cut short by his fist round her throat.

“Pretty thing.” He licks her cheek while she squirms; her sword clatters on the stones between them and he kicks it away. He’s had enough of swords. A squeeze, and her neck breaks in his grip. Her life flows away from her and into him and she collapses, forgotten the moment he steps over her, toward the turret.

So close…

There is no one left to man the cannon, to feed it gunpowder and magic, no one to summon the thick-necked bastards. His right foot leaves bloody footprints and his left leg drags smears of minion gut all the way through the choke point, beyond the fortress, to the well.

To the dead well.

Perhaps once, the well had charged crystal; perhaps heroes had once guarded it. Perhaps he would once have found salvation here. But there is nothing now, nothing stirring in the well, only shards of broken crystal lying about, hardly anything worth defending.

Hope lost, the world comes back to him. The rhythmic bzzt bzzt of insects. Birds complaining. Cold coming on, sinking into his muscle, cramping him up all around his eternal wound, whatever is living about him trying to reject the foreign thing rammed through him. Pain and hatred.

He allows himself one agonized scream before stalking back into the bush. There is another road there, to the Halcyon Fold, that he must now take.

“Who am I?”

A little girl stands opposite her master at the center of the sparring circle holding a wooden shield. The sun sets behind the foothills to the west, but she knows better than to show the long day’s fatigue inside the circle. “You are Professor Marcel …”

The flat of the master’s blunted swordblade leaves a stinging red imprint on her left cheek before she can register that he has moved.

“In battle, there are no professors. There are no names.” The master circles her, and she moves with him as he taught her, her eyes watering. “No husbands, no brothers. No sisters. No friends.” He strikes again, his blade slapping the wound anew.

“Y.. yes, Professor.” The girl sniffs up the pain, forces herself to remain light on her toes as the master switches direction.

“Who am I?”

“You are…” The sword swings between them and cracks into the girl’s shield, sending splinters flying. “…the sword.”

“And who are you?”

The sword swings again, a deadly whip in the master’s hand, smashing again into the shield. “I am the shield.”

“Again.”

“I am the sh… shield.” The strikes come faster, arcing and crashing, no mercy given for her small arms struggling to raise the shield, welts and bruises rising on her skin when she is too slow.

“Again.”

“I am the shield!” Blunted steel on wood sends shocks up the girl’s arm; sweat pours down her brow, meets with tears, rolls down her cheeks and throat and into her uniform.

“Who?”

“I am the shield!” she sobs, falling to her knees, the shield over her head. “The shield! I am the -”

“…the shield!”

Catherine sits up straight in the general’s tent, gasping out of sleep, drenched in sweat despite the cold night. A magic arrow protrudes from the chest of the man beside her, glowing blue in the dark.

“Kestrel,” she whispers.

The fur beneath her dead lover squelches with his blood when she rises. She dresses in silence, though she knows there is no need for quiet; she is alive because they want her to be.

Not so for the rest of the camp. Squinting into the dark, she steps outside, her boots soundless in the fresh snow. The smaller infantry tents are sieved with sizzling arrow-holes. The cold masks the bloody smell of death, freezing time. It is as if the sun will never rise, the dead will never decay and spring will never end the Winter War. Half inside her dream, her nose and fingers pink and numb, it is as if she is not stepping toward her own end.

In the center of camp, thirty unfamiliar women in familiar uniforms poke at the fire with sticks. They are young in the way of soldiers; war has a high turnover rate. Six Swords, two Axes, two Daggers, two Polearms, eight varied Mages, nine Shields and one Bow.

“Salut, Kestrel.” Catherine steps into the light, resting her shield in the snowdrift before her.

“Catherine!” calls The Bow with a grin that does not reach her eyes. She lopes through the snow to clasp Catherine’s hand, setting her bow in the snow beside the shield. “Kind of a demotion, isn’t it, settling other countries’ border disputes?”

“It pays well.”

Kestrel drags her fingers up the wings of Catherine’s pauldron. Bump-bump-bump. “Did you leave your Sword in bed?”

“Indeed.” Catherine peers past the fire at the Stormguard as they move into position. “You rendered it quite useless.”

Kestrel smirks. “Rumor is, you gave up your blade in a fit of guilt.”

“You will soon find that I don’t need it.”

“Understandable. Weapons, armies, even whole institutions, outstay their welcomes.”

Catherine rests one arm atop her shield. “It is not like you to be so chatty.”

“Just catching up. Been a really long time.” Kestrel plucks up her weapon in her left hand. In her right, four glowing arrows snap into existence. On the other side of the fire, the others push back their white fur hoods and draw their weapons; fire and ice and energy form in the palms of the mages. With a nod, Catherine pulls her shield from the snow, and she is Catherine no longer, and Kestrel is no longer Kestrel, and a thin gray line of dawn forms at the edge of the sky.

In the moment before the chaos, a breeze swirls light snowflakes around the tents full of dead soldiers. Sparks explode above the fire. The Shield rises. The Bow fits the glowing arrow to the bowstring and pulls it back, her fingers resting on her cheek.

Then, she spins on her back foot and looses the arrow through the flames.

Sparks fly from Kestrel’s magic arrow as it sails past the fire, gliding through the narrow gap between two swordswomen and piercing straight into the Storm Queen’s raven. It lands with an undignified squawk and a floomph of powdered snow.

“You all can do what you want,” says Kestrel. “I’m not killing one of our own.”

The queen’s best killers, twitching with anticipation of battle, their trembling weapons thirsty for blood, dart their eyes from Kestrel, to Catherine, to the dead black thing in the white snow with horror. Their white-gloved grips loose and re-tighten as Kestrel steps back beside Catherine, who crouches in a defensive position behind her shield, her perplexed eyes shimmering. In that stunned silence, there is a moment when she sees beyond the white and red uniforms, beyond the weapons, to the faces of women she used to know. The closest thing she ever had to sisters, once.

The Guard’s best daggerwoman breaks the spell, darting forward, crossing the distance in a blinding blue flash, appearing a breath away from Kestrel, her blades crossed over the archer’s throat. “She is no longer one of us,” she hisses. “And now, neither are you.”

“Really, Livia?” Kestrel grins. “I put an arrow in the eye of a man at your flank at the last battle for Lionne.” There is a popping sound, and all that remains where Kestrel stood is a phosphorescent cloud. The daggerwoman jumps back from the glowing particles, her daggers in a defensive position. “I’ve saved every one of your lives at one point or another,” calls Kestrel’s voice, disembodied several steps away from the mist.

“We have orders,” calls a shieldbearer from the front line.

“Sure, Marelde, and we’re trained to kill, not think,” says Kestrel, reappearing with a new arrow fitted to the nock of her bow, “but it was Catherine who trained you with a shield when you were ten years old.”

“Eight,” whispers Marelde.

“And you, Amie.” Kestrel’s arrow points at the forehead of a mage holding a sputtering ball of blue light. “After the northern revolt, when you had night terrors, Catherine stayed up all night to comfort you. And you, Ivet, Catherine taught you to speak Lillaise.” Ivet nods, resting her axe over her shoulder, staring at the snow.

“I never knew her, and I don’t care what she taught Ivet to say,” scoffs Elena, the youngest of them, polearm at the ready, her stance low. “She’s a traitor. She disobeyed orders, ruined a mission and disgraced the Stormguard.”

“Toujours fidèle.” Catherine sighs as all eyes turn to her. “I swore loyalty, but in war, I was never loyal to the queen. I was loyal to the woman next to me. I had no thought for Mont Lille, or a unified Eventide, when the blades swung and the arrows flew. I fought because I was afraid of what the woman next to me would think if I did not.”

“Yet you abandoned us and fled like a coward,” snarls Livia.

Catherine shoots a glare at the daggerwoman. “There are no cowards in the Stormguard. I chose to disobey so that one day, you all would have another choice. But I have … I have lived with the shame of my disloyalty to you for more than a decade, Kestrel.”

“Then make it up to me now.” Kestrel lowers her bow. “We found Julia’s whole family alive and well in Taizen Gate. They escaped and disappeared with the help of Gythians.”

Catherine’s breath catches. “Then we can waste no more time. Make your choice, ladies, and make it before the queen’s ravens find you.”

When frozen tundra gave way to dense forest, the Stormguard traveled at night to evade the watchful eyes of nesting ravens. The country was at war, and the Storm Queen would be searching for them, but the freeze itself was their biggest enemy, and Kestrel was glad of her warm winter uniform.

On the last night of their trek, Catherine drew up near Kestrel and murmured, “I have not thanked you.”

“Don’t,” said Kestrel in her usual dry tone. She pulled her backpack around to the front and removed her night vision goggles. “I don’t care who sits on what throne, but I expect Gythia will advise their puppet monarch to free the Storm Queen’s territories.”

Catherine fell quiet, and while the moon rose there was no sound but their steps and their foggy breathing.

When she heard the rush of fast water, Kestrel climbed a tree on a steep hill and scanned the river through the goggles. The bridge below was the only border crossing that had not been destroyed in the Winter War, and their only chance to cross to friendlier territory. She whistled a signal and the others gathered below.

“Your employer’s enemies have taken the bridge, Catherine,” she said. “Twenty guards on either side and ten on bridge patrol.”

“We can take twenty at a time, if it comes to that,” murmured Catherine.

“The bridge patrol have snow beasts,” said Kestrel. She dropped to the ground, soundless except for the poofing of powdery snow, and Ivet scurried up to look. In a moment, the axewoman cursed under her breath at the ten giant, armored, white-furred beasts, their curled horns wrapped with spikes, their tusks protruding from metal helms. On their shoulders rode enemy soldiers.

“I’ve heard about snow beasts,” said Amie, shivering as she drew her mage cloak tighter around her. “They steal children and eat them.”

“Leave them to me.” Kestrel stood at the lip of the hill, the green laser light from her goggles sweeping along the border.

“We don’t have to kill them all. We just have to get across.” Catherine raised her arcshield and the hidden blades snapped out. “If we are separated, you all have your assignments.” She motioned Kestrel ahead, then followed down the dense forested hill until they could hear the rushing of the water and the grunts of the snow beasts, the other women snaking behind, pulling shields, blades and polearms from their backs and belts.

At the edge of the forest, Kestrel disappeared and the others fanned out behind rocks and trees, fighters and mages clumping close to their assigned shieldwomen. Catherine stood alone, her fur cloak waving in the frozen breeze, refusing to shiver, as the guards’ blinding searchlight swung toward her. There was a call in a language Kestrel didn’t understand, then an answer, and Catherine was surrounded by men in heavy wool coats and fur caps, their swords and rifles drawn.

Hidden inside shimmering phosphor, Kestrel slipped past the guards and onto the bridge. The snow beasts were larger than she’d thought from her high vantage point; their steps shook the wooden bridge, and their armor covered all the vital bits, but the plan was in motion and could not be changed. The Stormguard whistled their positions like nocturnal bird calls. Catherine held up her shield, and the first of the giant snow beasts stepped into the phosphorous cloud.

With all eyes on Catherine, it was a simple thing for Kestrel to put a sizzling, glowing arrow into the beast’s eye. It howled, stuck, and twisted about hard, its great hairy arms striking into the darkness, tossing its rider off the side of the bridge and into the river. By the time the nearby guards had reined their beasts around to face their aggressor, Kestrel and the arrow had disappeared, and the panicked beast clutching at its bleeding face could not be contained.

The Stormguard moved into action, shields flanking around Catherine, fighters taking out the unprepared guards, magic flashing, freezing, burning in the air. A flaming phoenix screamed, its wings spraying sparks onto the bridge; the guards leaped out of its way in terror. In the chaos, Kestrel left another cloud of phosphor in the path of the next beast and delivered two arrows under its arm. It stopped still and bellowed, but Kestrel had already disappeared again. Across the bridge she went, shooting and stunning the wild beasts, ducking and sprinting out of the way as they wavered and roared. She glanced over her shoulder to see Catherine’s bubble flash and spin, then back to the other side of the bridge, where they had no element of surprise. The guards there held positions with grim expressions and weapons drawn, eyes darting. She stood sideways and fired, releasing arrows for cover as the shields pushed onto the bridge.

Kestrel vanished and raced, avoiding the slick blood on the ice, to the other side. She reappeared in front of the highest ranking officer who blinked, his mouth open, still half-dreaming, his boots pulled on over his nightclothes. Her arrow nestled an inch from his eye, spitting blue magic onto his nose.

“You know who we are?” she asked.

The officer stuttered in his own language, then said in an accent, “Stormguard.”

“Just passing through.” Catherine’s voice was rich and slow as honey. Her hand rested on Kestrel’s back shoulder, and the rest of the women assembled in defensive positions behind them. “You’ll be a dear and let us by, won’t you?”

Something like hope flashed in Catherine’s eyes as the officer called for his troops to stand down. The Stormguard filed through the enemy’s line while the cavalry struggled to gain control of their wounded beasts. Kestrel walked backward, her bow pulled, until the last of the women had disappeared into friendly territory.

The dark room rippled with an eerie, surgical-bright glow centered on a glass tank at the center. Inside, a pale woman floated in a bowed shape, belly highest, swaying, her shaved head thrown back as if in laughter. Tubes snaked inside the glass and attached to nodes in her chest and temples. Great wounds in her torso had been stitched and bound together with white bandages. There was a low hum, the sour smell of chemicals and an echoing rhythmic beep that matched the slow beat of her heart.

In one corner of the room, under a glaring light, a dwarf in thick safety goggles stood on a stool next to a headless robot in the shape of a woman. His power drill revved and died, revved and died, as he worked.  

The door opened, startling him. The dwarf cursed and rubbed at a scratch on the white armor, ignoring the blind queen and the two guards who followed her. The queen pressed her fingertips to the tank. The raven on her shoulder glared through the glass.

“Ungrateful wenches,” she hissed. “What would they have been without me? Wives. Mothers. Forgotten grandmothers telling boring stories. I saved them from mediocrity. I made them dangerous. I gave them a skill, a purpose, a family … and how am I repaid?”

The two Stormguard women looked at one another, then back at the tank. “We returned -” began one, but the queen continued as if she hadn’t heard.

“Betrayal. For some romantic notion. For a child who knows nothing of building and guiding an empire. But not you, my child.” The queen rested her cheek against the glass. “You will be more powerful than any soldier. You will never tire. You will never question me. You will never betray me. Because you cannot.”

“Does that mean I have your permission to put her together?” called Frankie without turning around. “I can get her head off and have her configured by tomorrow.”

“Yes,” said the queen. She turned from the tank to smile in her terrifying, eyeless way, at the only two Stormguard who had chosen to return. “And you, my loyal girls, will help me test her strength.”

—— Hullo, Beauty…
—— Hullo…
—— Hullo Beaut-beaut-bee…
#~$ REBOOT INITIATED: STAND BY…
… BUFFERING…
… TARGET DETECTED
–> ENGAGING.

Frankie and the veiled queen stepped along the scuffs, slides and stomp-marks scattered across the packed-dirt training yard. Pools of blood hardened into dusty paste around the bodies of Livia and Elena, the two Stormguard who had chosen to return. Alpha stood at attention, still as death, her mask and armor undented.

“Harsh,” said Frankie.

“Necessary,” replied the queen, “and impressive. No one in the world could have defeated either one of them, and your creation ended them both in moments.”

“She’s unstoppable.” Frankie rapped his knuckles on Alpha’s knee. “Had some bugs to work out with her memory drive. Not easy, wiping everything except how to fight. I patched the issue with an automatic reboot…”

“Is she ready?”

“Yeah. Directive is uploaded.”

~

—— You cannot protect it from me.
—— Protect it. From me. Best run now. Destroy.
—— Now before I destroy…
—— …your best assets.
#~$ REBOOT INITIATED: STAND BY
… BUFFERING…
–> PATROL MODE ACTIVATED.

Quick as fire with wind behind it, word spread through the scattered Eventide cities that the blancorojos were not to be trusted, that a technological monster stalked the insubordinate Stormguard. The news came too late for two old families, former royalty who sought to conspire against the queen. They, and six mangled former Stormguard, were dragged out of hiding into the streets to be picked at by the ravens.

~

—— Pretty thing.
—— Pretty…
—— …thing. Pretty thing.
#~$ REBOOT INITIATED: STAND BY
… BUFFERING…
… STORMGUARD DETECTED…
… FULFILL DIRECTIVE…
–> ENGAGING.

Outside the oldest tea house in Taizen Gate, masked guards with curved swords stood shoulder-to-shoulder, silent. Inside, the Three Bosses knelt by a low table facing six former Stormguard, their palms facing down on the table according to local tradition.

“The Stormguard is known for causing trouble here,” said Second Boss, a four-armed bear hybrid whose pot belly rested atop the table by his paws and teacup.

“The Stormguard now serves the successor to Mont Lille,” replied Marelde.

“We have no stake in which queen rules the Eventides. Our international politics are neutral.” First Boss’ hologram flickered at the edges of her business suit.

Marelde bent her fingers, cracking each knuckle in turn, watching the Bosses’ eyes. “The queen’s ambition extends far beyond her shores.”

“If you lie, and we give you the location of this princess you seek, you will kill her, yes?” asked Third Boss, a slight man with an unnerving smile.

Marelde ached to look sidelong at the other women, but an unsteady gaze was a sign of weakness in Taizen Gate. Besides, she ever heard Catherine’s voice: A shieldbearer’s first line of defense is her eyes. She turned her hands over on the table, palms up. “I will not demand your trust, but for all things, there is a price. Use your best judgment and name yours.”

Screams, and the clashing of steel from outside, interrupted. The Stormguard jumped onto the low table, kicking away the teapots and arranging themselves in defensive position around the three mages. Second Boss rose with surprising speed and dropped to all fours. First Boss flickered and disappeared. Third Boss opened his kimono, revealing a vest covered in small blade sheaths.

“So much for no weapons allowed,” grumbled one mage, blue sparks exploding from her snapping fingers.

“Not yet,” said Marelde; magic conjuration would be detected all over Taizen Gate. What if your first line of defense is all you have, Catherine? she thought, but Catherine was far away, and she had no shield.

The screams outside stopped. The outer door slid open, letting in the night’s birdsongs and thick summer air.

“Now,” ordered Marelde, and the room filled with the snap and buzz of magic as a heavy sword split apart the room’s paper wall from ceiling to floor and a machine stepped inside.

The room erupted in flashing blue magic and the roars of Second Boss. The machine moved forward without pause, slicing through its former comrades, deflecting the magic bolts, Third Boss’ blades clinking off its armor. Within minutes, Alpha stood in the post-battle silence scanning the room with glowing eyes. Six women lay broken and bleeding at her feet; two bosses shook with terror in a corner. Her sword had cleaved the table, and Marelde with it, in half.

#~$ DIRECTIVE FULFILLED
… RECONNAISSANCE MODE ACTIVATED.
… DIRECTIVE: FIND STORMGUARD.
—— Pretty thing…

To be continued…

Daisy squeezes into a corner of the workout room, bare feet sunk into the mat, arms bent, hiding her face behind bruised forearms and thick leather boxing gloves. Kestrel, a year older at fifteen, weaves close and strikes Daisy’s obliques, tight to cramping; when her arms drop, the strikes come at her jaw and temples. Tears slide out of Daisy’s swollen eyes, mixing with blood and snot from her nose. A hit to the belly sucks the air out of her and she crumples, arms over her head.

Kestrel raises one glove. “Hey! Daisy’s cooked!”

The instructor stalks over, glaring at the folded-up girl. “Never get hit, you fear every strike!” she says in a brusque accent. “Today fall down, cry, skin turn purple, blood come out. Tomorrow, still alive.”

Kestrel winks through her own black-and-blue shiner. “Get up. It’s your turn next.”

“I can’t,” sobs Daisy. “I can’t.”

“Take your mind out of the pain.” Kestrel wipes at her nose with one leather glove. “I count the hits.”

Daisy looks up, wincing. “That works?”

Kestrel shrugs. “Get up and try.”

~

“Did you hear that?”

Atop an airship tower, the last of the Stormguard waited for death. Kestrel and Catherine stood on the landing pad; four kept watch in the windowed control room below.

Amie made a cat’s cradle out of stringy blue magic between her fingers, looking out at the winking lights twisting around the towers of the Royal Quarter. “Like a ding?”

Ivet pressed her nose flat on the window and sighed a big foggy spot. “Taizen Gate bosses are notorious for being full of crap. We’d have known if the queen had some killing machine.”

The ding came again, louder, from the elevator at the center of the room.

The guards crouched as the elevator rose up the levels of the tower. The swordswoman flipped her broadswords and caught them. “Now ladies,” she said, “that could be anybody. Let’s not go killing a pilot or something.”

A last ding and the elevator doors opened.

“It’s true,” whispered Amie, the magic strings disintegrating. “Catherine!”

“Too late,” said a shieldbearer, racing to the elevator. The shield burst into flames, slamming into the machine, pinning it to the far wall.

“ONE,” it said.

The shieldwoman flew back out of the elevator and slid along the floor to the glass wall, her shield and torso cut open, leaving a thick trail of blood behind.  

“I’ll make scrap out of that thing,” said Ivet, charging forward, axe flourishing with blinding fast speed.

The machine took the hit to its metal arm. “TWO,” it said in its mechanical voice, and pushed back. Ivet launched backward, her axe handle split in two, blood leaking from the top of her head.

The third Stormguard stumbled backward over control displays and chairs, her broadswords crossed in front of her face. The machine plucked up the woman by one arm and slammed her into the window, cracking the glass. The swords slipped to the floor.

Amie twisted her fingers, magic sputtering as she struggled to find her center in the swirling mess of panic. “Come on!” she cried as the machine drew near. The blue light solidified, formed wings, became a giant screeching phoenix in her arms. “Go!” she commanded, and the phoenix dived, grabbed the machine with its claws and dragged it back into the elevator.

“THREE,” said the machine, then, “FOUR-FIVE-SIX” when Amie chased after it, ball after ball of explosive magic flying from her fingers. The phoenix forced the machine onto the elevator floor, pecking at its mask, screeching to wake the dead.

~

“That’s Amie’s bird.” Kestrel lunged back, four energy arrows forming in her right hand. Catherine ran to the stairs, her shield thrumming, as the landing zone exploded in an eruption of concrete. The machine leaped through the roof, snapped elevator cables wrapped round its blade, the elevator freefalling through the tower with Amie inside.

The machine’s blank mask settled on Kestrel. “SCANNING. TARGET ZERO-TWO-THREE. STORMGUARD. EXTERMINATE.”

Kestrel let loose three arrows in quick succession that pierced into the machine’s knee and neck joints. “SEVEN-EIGHT-NINE,” said the machine.

Kestrel paused, an arrow in its nock.

Catherine sped in from behind, slamming her arcshield into the machine’s back, spinning it toward herself. She held her breath and formed the shimmering magic shield around her, watched from inside the curved, pulsing bubble as the machine stuttered, “TEN-EN-EN-EN. SCAN-AN-ANNING TARGET ZERO-ZERO-ONE. STORMGUARD. EXTERMINATE-ATE-ATE.” The sword arced through the air, slamming into the bubble. The shield shattered in a rain of energy shards but not before it reflected the strike back at the machine, crumpling it. “ERROR. ERROR.”

“Catherine, wait!” screamed Kestrel.

Catherine positioned sideways, shield high, back knee bent, jaw tight as the machine took a step toward Kestrel, one leg dragging. Kestrel loosed the arrow into the eye of the machine’s mask.

“ELEVEN,” said the machine, stepping like a broken doll as the arrow disintegrated. “COUNT… count the hits.” Her mechanical tone fell away. “I… can’t. Pretty thing. Daisy’s… Daisy’s cooked. I can’t. Kestrel?” The sword dropped from her hands.

“What the hell did she do to you?” cried Kestrel.

Catherine edged forward, shield up. “It could be a trap.”

“It’s Daisy,” said Kestrel, slamming her fist into the mask until it fell away, revealing a woman’s horrified face.

“Where am I?” whispered Daisy, clenching her fists. “Hurts. It hurts. Help… Kestrel, help-ELP-ELP-ELP…” Her eyes stared into the distance, her expression blank, her fists relaxing.

“What’s happening?” cried Kestrel in a panic. “Is she dying?”

“SYSTEM REBOOT. STANDBY,” said Daisy in pleasant monotone. Her eyes closed.

“No! No rebooting!” Kestrel slapped Daisy in her cheeks. “Stay here, Daisy.”

Daisy’s eyes opened. “I killed them,” said Daisy. “I killed all of them. Why did I kill them?”

“It’s not your fault,” said Kestrel, gathering up the machine into her arms.

“I can’t stop. It’s coming… back. I can feel it. Killed them. Best run now. Run. Run. I can end it but you have to RUN-UN-UN-UN can’t stop. STANDBY. Stop it. Can end it. Run. RUN TARGET ZERO-TWO-THREE. RUN, TARGET ZERO-ZERO-ONE. Pretty thing. TERMINATION PROTOCOL INITIATED. STANDBY.”

Daisy went still. There was a click, and an energy barrier appeared around her. Catherine grabbed Kestrel by her arm.

“We have to help her,” whimpered Kestrel, but Catherine yanked her away as blinding light shot out the seams in Daisy’s armor.

“There! Go!” Catherine pointed up, yelling over the sound of the airship that hovered above. A rope ladder fell from the deck and Catherine shoved Kestrel toward it before dropping under her shield. Her eyes squeezed shut as the blast shook the tower.

Kestrel clung for her life to the rope ladder as the explosion blew the ship sideways, the city spread out below, the sea ahead, the Halcyon Fold a dark strip of land in the far distance.

Catherine rose, shaking, to her knees. The arcshield smoldered. She tossed it down and looked up to where she knew the raven would be circling, watching.

#~$ SYSTEM REBOOT…
… IDENTITY: ALPHA, STORMGUARD.
… DIRECTIVE: ELIMINATE STORMGUARD.
… LOADING COORDINATES: HALCYON FOLD…

No one has ever rebuilt the overgrown Old Quarter, where the stink of magic lingers in the destroyed buildings. The children dare one another to touch those still-crackling buildings for the shock. That shock was Kestrel’s first memory.

She wasn’t Kestrel then, but the name her parents gave her is classified.

Kestrel knew about the war, though she hadn’t been born yet, and she knew about the Storm Queen, who lived far away in Mont Lille. She knew never to bother the border guards, who the locals called blancorojos. She learned the rolling, throaty language of Mont Lille alongside her family’s dialect. She saluted the queen’s flag every morning at school. Every child had to take the queen’s aptitude tests; teachers and parents drilled them in mathematics, languages and geography for weeks preceding the test. Taxes were light on families whose children were chosen.

At six years of age, Kestrel took the first battery of tests: analogies, number series, mirroring patterns of blocks and solving puzzles. She did well. She loved the smell of pencil shavings and her examiner’s smart white lab coat trimmed with red. She loved how numbers fell into neat patterns, and she spoke Lilliaise with an adorable accent.

For the last test, the examiner placed a combination of black and white boxes before her with a candy under one. Kestrel’s task was to guess if it was under a black or a white box. At first, there were nine white boxes and one black box. She picked white and collected her candy. The next round, there were seven black boxes and three white ones. She picked black and earned more candy. Her cheeks were stuffed with candies after a few rounds of disproportionate numbers of one color box, then: betrayal. There were six white boxes, but the candy was under one of the four black ones.

Kestrel had never before doubted herself.

The examiner set out the boxes again: five of each.

“Choose,” she said.

“No.”

“Don’t you want the candy?”

“Yes.”

“Then, choose.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know where it is.”

“The test requires you to choose.”

“No.”

The examiner bent double so that she’d be at eye level with the little girl. Her voice was kind. “There is no punishment for guessing wrong, and a candy if you guess right. You must choose.”

“No.”

“The queen requires you to choose.”

“No.”

“Very well.” The examiner straightened and produced a stick the length of her arm. “If you do not choose, you will be struck on your palms.”

Kestrel looked straight ahead with her palms up while the stick smacked into them, remembering the surprising pain of the magic shock she’d given herself in the Old Quarter, how it had lessened into mild tingling after a time. The stick did not hurt that much.

She did not cry, and she did not choose.

The next day, two blancorojos came to her home. Kestrel escaped out the back and climbed a walnut tree, armed with a slingshot and enough underripe ammo to make a grand nuisance should her father seek to punish her for failing the test of the boxes. Instead, her parents coaxed her down with tears and kisses, for she had been called to continue her education in Mont Lille. Her parents had one hour to say goodbye.

The Storm Queen sat sideways on Catherine’s lounge chair, her legs slung over one arm, cloaked and hooded, a raven perched on her shoulder. With no lamps lit, the intruder was invisible in the windowless living quarters. Catherine was not a fan of extra entryways, yet the queen had made her way past the reinforced and locked front door. The queen swung her legs forward and lit the nearest lamp. The raven adjusted its feet but remained in place. “They are nearby. I assume this room is secure?”

“I thought so, yet here you are.”

The queen half-smiled. “You will assemble the Stormguard tonight.”

Catherine sheathed the sword she had been gripping with both fists since first entering her apartment. “Who is the target?”

“Targets. Twin targets, with remarkable magical abilities. You’ll remember their mother, my sister, Julia.”

“Your sister? She’s been dead for years.”

“So she would have us believe. Our spies have found her in southern Gythia.”

“That is tech territory now.”

“A hive of soulless machines and their engineers. Julia has made an alliance with them, hoping to supplant me. She’s even married one of their technologists and made some babies. Isn’t that sweet?”

“Twin babies?”

“Indeed. You will bring them to me so they can be trained.”

“Why is the traitor not a target?”

The queen stood, and the dim light seeped up into her hood, showing the stitches that crossed over the flesh where her eyes had been. They had been removed at birth, in the way of storm mages. “There are laws against royal murder, no matter how justified.” She stroked Catherine’s cheek with the back of her icy hand as she spoke, as if in lullabye. “I should execute you where you stand for suggesting it.”

It was said that evil doles out affection in tiny droplets, yet Catherine could not help her desperate thirst. In a frustrated whisper she said, “So, we take the children and leave their mother to plot your murder? Your sister will seek revenge. She will enlist the Gythians to help her if you do this thing.”

“Let us hope you are right. The Stormguard has never been stronger, and the Gythians are stretched thin fending off the technologists.”

“You wish for war again, my queen?”

“No, Catherine. I do not wish for war. I make it.” The queen’s hand dropped. “Now is the time. Now, while the technologists are a disjointed army of gadgets, while Gythia is an elderly collection of has-beens with shiny trinkets. They are a decade away from readiness and nothing without their toddling prodigies.”

Catherine stared into the raven’s eyes as she spoke. “As you will, my queen.”

“They have made their home in the farms northwest of Pompium. Vyn will accompany you.” Only then did the raven, the queen’s eyes and ears, move; with a quiet flap of its dark wings, it leapt from the queen’s shoulder to Catherine’s.

Catherine resisted the urge to shrug away the bird. “Yes, my queen.”

“I expect obedience.”

A single candle on the table at the back of the tavern flickered a light too weak to penetrate the heavy hood of a woman sitting alone, staring at the leaves swirling in her steaming cup of tea. She’d been sheltered all her young life from the roving bands of people whose old women wore clattering bangles up their arms and read the futures of gullible customers in tea leaves.

Despite her thorough education, Julia would have paid well, in that moment, for such a service.

Every head turned when Catherine entered. The red and white uniform was gone, but her drab hooded cloak failed to remove the disquieting sensation that a predator had stepped into the room. That heavy feeling did not waver despite the smile Catherine offered to Julia as she threaded through the tables to Julia’s booth, sweeping off her cloak to reveal a well-fitted dress true to the local style.

The serving-boy’s words stumbled like pebbles rolling downhill: “Good.. good even… how can I… would you like some… what can I…?”

Catherine stared the boy down, allowing him to stutter until he had found the end of a sentence. “Wine,” she said, a smile playing at one corner of her mouth.

“Right away… and you, ma’am? Can I get you more tea? Hey, aren’t you Jul…”

Catherine stepped close, one fingertip on the boy’s chin, turning his eyes back to her. “Red wine,” she murmured.

Julia exhaled a breath she hadn’t known she was holding as the serving-boy tripped away. “Oh great subterfuge, Cath. Let’s please be as memorable to our fellow patrons as much as possible.”

Catherine scoffed, feigning hurt. “You are so unkind. I am quite proud of my disguise. And look– buttons!” She winked, spreading her arms.

Julia laughed, but the sound was brittle, fighting not to become a sob. “Your disguise is as subtle as a hat on a tiger.”

Neither woman spoke while the wine was poured. Only after did Catherine lean forward in earnest. “She wants the twins, Lia, and you alive to make war before you can win it.”

Julia lifted her chin. “Gythia will aid me.”

Catherine shook her head. “Perhaps. Someday, if the time were right. But the Stormguard is here today. I couldn’t send word; I had Vyn on my shoulder the whole journey. He watches your family now.” Catherine clasped Julia’s shaking hand in hers. “This mission is happening tonight. The twins will come back with me to Mont Lille.”

Julia jerked her hand away and looked up at a cobwebby corner of the tavern. “No.”

Catherine’s spine straightened. “You know I would have it any other way if it could be. But you do not have a choice in this. I give my word, Lia, I will watch over them.”

“No!” Julia insisted. “My sister would make a tyrant of Celeste in her image, and you could not stop her.”

Catherine opened her callused palms. “So? What do you propose? You and Ardan cannot defeat the Stormguard tonight, not even with my help. Those not surrounding your farm have barricaded every road out of Pompium. Once we have completed our mission, we will disappear. Lia. Your only option is to trust me.”

“The way my sister trusts you?”

Catherine’s eyes narrowed. “You and I have been friends since we were children.”

“We were all three friends when we were children.” A long silence once again wedged itself between them. At length, Julia sighed. “I will warn Ardan that the Stormguard may be closeby. The children will go about their routine as usual; nothing will seem amiss from the outside. I will help Ardan escape with the twins when you attack.”

“There is no escape through the Stormguard.”

“There is one way. A mage is never more powerful than at the time of death. When you take my life, I will pass my gift to him. He will make it through.”

Catherine gripped her wine glass, her voice cold as frost. “I will not do this.”

“Make a show of it. Create a diversion.”

Catherine’s eyes sparkled wet, her teeth clenched. “I cannot.”

“And then, run. There is nothing more for you in Mont Lille. The Stormguard will chase Ardan; you must escape to our friends in Gythia.”

The glass in her hands exploded, shards of tinkling rain skittering across the table top. The tavern went quiet as all heads turned to Catherine as blood shimmering with halcyon dripped from her fist. “Neither you nor your sister ever consider the weight of your demands,” Catherine choked out, blinking away unshed tears.

Julia swallowed against the knot in her throat. She took Catherine’s bleeding hands with all the patience she’d learned as a mother. “I am touched by your devotion, but I am not a person. I am an empire.” She pulled glass from Catherine’s palms, her voice a sing-song whisper. “If you deliver my children to my sister, she will make a monster of my daughter, put my son at the front lines of her military, and gain territory at the mouth of Gythia.” Blood and wine dribbled onto the floor as Julia cupped Catherine’s hands inside her own. Green light glowed, Julia’s healing power drawing strength from the halcyon, the lacerations closing. “Never feel guilty for what must be done. And… and..” Julia faltered, then stopped.

“I will make it fast,” Catherine said softly.

Julia’s shoulders wilted. She released Catherine’s healed hands. They slid out of the booth and stood, regarding each other across a distance that had grown, in only a few moments, unspannable.

Catherine smiled and touched her hand to Julia’s cheek.

“Hey, Lia,” she whispered.

“Hey, Cath,” Julia whispered back, a sob and a laugh catching in her throat.

Catherine’s back straightened, her eyes cleared, and her hand returned to her side. She nodded once at Julia, grabbed her cloak, and stepped through her own spilled blood, past the silent patrons and their tracking stares, out the tavern door into the waiting night.

“It really is her.”

Kestrel shot a withering glare down at the swordswoman who’d whispered it from the brush below. A soldier of the Stormguard knew better than to speak after positions were taken. Still, every woman hiding outside the indistinct farmhouse that evening had stood watch over the burial of the blonde woman who now struggled to unload a goat from a battered old cart outside the farmhouse. Julia should have been a ghost.

The goat pulled at its rope, crying like a child.

Kestrel waited in the tangled branches of an olive tree for Catherine’s signal in the same position she’d held for hours. The feeling had gone out of her legs long before. Her bow laid out sidelong in front of her, stringed with steel. She rubbed her gloved thumb and fingerpads together, savoring the spark under her skin, but she wouldn’t use energy arrows that night. Metal shattered glass, if the bow was strung heavy enough, and the detached Stormguard unit hadn’t used magic since crossing into Gythian territory. Techies didn’t trust magic, and the last thing they needed in this land of smog and machines was attention.

Poking her tongue into her cheek, she watched the queen’s sister through her scope. Mothering twins had softened Julia’s body, and there were laugh lines by her eyes, but there was no doubt. After Julia went inside, Kestrel curled her toes to get the feeling back, rolled her right shoulder, sank her thigh into a knob in the branch, fit an arrow into the nock and hooted an owl call. Catherine whistled back the command to hold.

The goat bleated louder and sadder as the sun sank. Nothing stirred in the surrounding brush and trees. Inside the window, Julia argued with her husband, some nobody from the rebel tech army. The twins flashed by in their pajamas, chasing one another to their beds. The boy gave out a shout that shook the ground and the setting sun brightened, then dimmed. Mageborn, Kestrel mused in silence. No wonder the queen wanted them unharmed. She waited until the kids were tucked in, took aim at the left edge of a front window away from the bedrooms, then repeated her signal. Catherine whistled again to hold.

Night deepened, stars poking out that never showed above the bright light of Mont Lille. The man inside gestured with a wrench. Julia slammed a door. The goat’s shrieks twisted Kestrel’s nerves into a tight bundle. She’d hold position all night if needed, but every minute she waited was a minute something could go wrong.

The man clamped a gauntlet on one arm. Animalistic hoots and whistles sounded from varied positions. Catherine’s hold command repeated again and the goat cried and something wasn’t right; they should have attacked an hour ago. “What the hell is she waiting for?” the swordswoman grumbled. Kestrel was used to lone missions, not all of this group planning. Too many other people to depend on. Too much noise. Couldn’t think.

She let an arrow fly, and the goat shut up.

The signals paused; someone in the brush snickered. Kestrel fit another arrow into its nock. The man paused, looked at his own reflection in the nearest window, then raced across the farmhouse to Julia.

“He knows,” breathed the woman aground, bellying forward in the brush sword first.

The whispers of steel unsheathing sounded all over the olive grove. Somewhere, a blue wisp of magic snapped on and off in the air. A glowing blue shield hummed to life. Hearts pounded in throats. The man inside struggled into his armor, his wife pinching her fingers on the clamps trying to help. It was “go time,” and all they needed was Catherine’s whistle.

The whistle never came.

Kestrel pulled back, knuckles resting on the place where her jaw met her skull, three fingers under the knock, shoulderblade pinching her spine, and on her exhale …

… released.

By the time the front window shattered, Kestrel had swung down from the tree. Ignoring the burning pins and needles in her legs, she ducked low and closed in on the farmhouse.

Hanging from the windowsill by one hand, her bow slung over one shoulder, she glanced back at the storm of magic and steel following behind. Catherine stood behind the attack, tears in her eyes, a raven’s neck broken in her fist, another landing on her shoulder with an enraged scream.

“I do not need your permission to buy a goat,” Julia said. “Goat milk is delicious, and we can make cheese.”

They’d been arguing all evening. Ardan was hunched over his power gauntlet, sanding down the edges of a grill he’d removed to improve air flow. Outside in the yard, a goat shrieked into the moonless dark. “Goats stink and scream like fiends,” he grumped. “It hasn’t stopped for an hour. How will the twins sleep?”

“The kids need a pet. Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“And who will make this alleged cheese? When have you ever made cheese, your highness?”

“I could make cheese!” Julia shouted. She stomped out of the room and slammed the bedroom door behind her, the goat’s cries dramatizing her exit.

Celeste toddled out of her room, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Dadda? Is Mamma alright?”

She had her mother’s accent. Ardan plucked up the toddler in his unarmored arm and kissed her cheeks. “Mamma is being ridiculous.”

“What is ridick oo luss?”

“It means she brought a goat home without talking to me about it.”

“I like goats.” This from Vox, who wandered in after his sister. He seated himself on his father’s foot, wrapped his arms around Ardan’s leg and rode along as Ardan took Celeste back to bed, staring out the window toward the screams.

“You like the idea of goats. None of us actually know how to care for a goat.”

“There’s a baby crying outside,” said Celeste, half asleep.

“It’s the stupid goat,” said Ardan, planting her back in her bed.

Vox uncurled himself from his father’s leg. “He’s afraid,” he said. “Maybe lonely.”

“It’s a she, Vox. At least I hope it is a she, or your mother’s dreams of cheese are –”

Ardan paused, turned toward the window.

The goat had stopped screaming.

His adrenaline spiked.

“Hide, both of you. Do not open the door.”

There was no time to make sure they obeyed him. He ran to his bedroom. “Julia,” he hissed at the bedroom door. “They’re here.”

Julia opened the door. Her face had gone white. “Now?”

“Outside.”

The armor stood in pieces around the front room in various states of renovation. Tools littered the floor. “Legs first,” he grumbled, stepping into the sabatons. Julia scrambled to her knees in her nightdress, a poor but necessary replacement for a proper battle squire. She pinched her fingers on the knee clamps, struggled under the weight of the chest pieces.

The button panel whirred and crackled with static, then burped out: “System. Offline.” Ardan slammed his left fist onto it. “Worthless damn power source on this model…”

“Shh.” Julia’s hands were black with oil, her face smudged as she attached the generator to his back and connected it to the power gauntlet. She stared out the door, into the hall. There was no sound. No disturbance. No goat. “Are you sure they’re…”

“System. Online.”

Glass broke. Ardan turned sideways in time for a metal arrow to slice a scratch through his breastplate, just under his chin, and thud home in the wall opposite the front window. Ardan cursed and squared up, the wood floor creaking under his armored weight. “I’ll watch the front door.”

“But your cannon arm!”

“It’s useless, unless you want me to blow up the house. Stay behind me.”

Julia closed her eyes, turned her palms upward. “I’ll protect you,” she murmured, her voice dreamy, green light forming in her hands.

Ardan winced away from the twisted-guts feeling that magic always gave him. “I can handle myself,” he grunted.

A forearm appeared over the window, decorated in an archer’s gauntlet, and then the archer herself swung inside. Another woman followed and drew her sword. More came in behind her, magicians and assassins, all wearing the same insignia.

“Stormguard!” he yelled, but Julia was lost inside her trance, eyes rolled back.

Ardan’s armor groaned and buzzed as he moved forward, painfully slow, but he was grateful for it when the Stormguard attacked. They moved in tandem, each with a weapon they’d held since childhood. He ran forward, energy buzzing through the armor, propelling him, heating the metal to burning, steel cracking against the breastplate. When he backhanded the archer across her face, he left a burn mark. She crumpled, her bow clattering to the floor.

The others raised shields of wood, metal and magic to counter Julia’s trance and Ardan’s assault. He stomped forward and plowed into them, knocked them from their feet, sent them flying in a crunch of bones to the wall. Their blood spattered the divan. They rolled in shattered glass, discarded weapons and their own knocked-out teeth. He could not resist every attack: Blades sliced through his unprotected arm and his cheeks; magic stung and froze him with deafening whipcrack sounds. But he was a wall between the enemy and his wife, and all the while, he felt warmth coming from her, a blanket that enveloped him, closed his wounds, melted the ice and gave him strength. It churned his insides, these unnatural talents, but he’d deal with the sick when his family was safe.

Then, the blast.

All went silent and cold. His teeth clamped shut. A shock pulsed up through his legs, his arms, his throat. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t blink. Paintings slid from the wall and the bolts fell from the front door. He could hear the static noises from his armor display, the groans from the pile of wounded Stormguard, but he could not move. He could only watch as the front door opened and the last of the Stormguard stepped inside, as if invited. She surveyed the room, then snapped her fingers at two of the guard who were scrambling to their feet even as Ardan struggled to move. She pointed to the twins’ room and the two guards sprinted that way.

The woman walked from the door, past Ardan as if he didn’t exist, to Julia, who stood frozen in her nightdress and bare feet.

“Catherine,” gasped Julia.

“Such a shame,” whispered Catherine as she pressed her sword against Julia’s chest.

Ardan’s heart pounded out one beat. Another. Air filled his lungs and he coughed. To his right, the two Stormguard emerged carrying the twins, stunned as rigid as he. The other Stormguard rose, some shakily, some bleeding, all stone-eyed and with a firm grip on their weapons.

To his left, Julia stared into Catherine’s eyes.

His heart beat a third time.

In another heartbeat, his children or his wife would be dead, depending on which way he ran.

He ran.

The general’s sword, turned sideways, slid easily between Julia’s ribs. Her last breath was his name, and with it came the last otherworldly green swirl of her magic. It hit him, Julia’s last gift becoming part of him, wrapping around his insides, giving him the burst of strength he needed. Ardan wrapped the twins up in his arms and crashed out of the window. The two Stormguard who had taken the children lay unconscious. There hadn’t been time to kill them… or to hold his wife as she died.

He fled from the house into the dark, past the poor dead goat, whose screams had been silenced by one well-placed arrow through the throat. The children remained silent, in some lucky instinct, leaving the questions to the night owls in the trees.

“Do it!” roars the undead monster at the round metal eye of the turret, half grown over with brambles and rattan. “Put a hole in me! Blow me apart!”

If only it would work.

The turret remains silent, but he can smell recent explosions. Someone is keeping it loaded. Someone is summoning the minions that come through the choke point beyond the turret, past the shambles of what must have once been a rock fortress, in waves. And beyond that someone may be what he seeks.

So close…

Krul drags his left leg, nursing a nagging sting of magic in his thigh where some spell hit him earlier. Another someone, now lost to the world. The smell of summoning drifts over the rock face and he grimaces, grinds his teeth. More minions coming. Ugly bastards, no necks, no language, nothing in them but fight. He punches his leg to get the sting out and takes an unnecessary deep breath. A habit from a former existence. The air leaks out through the sucking wound in his chest, fogging up the cold steel trapped there.

Every step is pain, and he runs hard. Catches the biggest of the idiot minions by surprise, flattens him fast, ignore the pain, ignore the pain, ignore the… Tearing into the minion’s belly is good, the only good thing. A distraction from the misery that threatens, in every moment, to lay him flat. The minion’s dark insides are slippery in his hands; their bellies come apart like cobwebs, their legs detach easy as fly wings. He screams into their faces, spewing spittle. His insane laughter echoes through the battleground. Their souls suck away from their dying carcasses and feed him. It is his only satiation.

There is blood, there are limbs, there are gurgling death-screams, there are pieces of once-living creatures clinging to Krul’s teeth and nails when he sees her standing atop the ruins of the fort. Human from the look of her, tall and still as morning, a sword buried between cracks in the rock, eyes impassive. His face, or what is left of it, cracks open into a grin.

“Hullo, beauty!” he calls.

Her response is the slow pulling of her weapon from the rocks, that shing of steel.

“You cannot protect it from me,” he growls. “Best run now and let me at it, before I destroy your best assets.”

She leaps, falling hard onto him, sword front, magic buzzing around her like bees. She is good with her weapon, well trained. He might have respected her, once. She gets a few slashes into him, his half-dead flesh sagging apart where she aims. He swings at her, hits only air, circling, snorting like a devil, dodging as best he can until she turns the sword over her shoulder and pounds him good in the brow with the hilt. He lunges, closes the gap between them, roaring his dead breath onto her, then her valiant cry is cut short by his fist round her throat.

“Pretty thing.” He licks her cheek while she squirms; her sword clatters on the stones between them and he kicks it away. He’s had enough of swords. A squeeze, and her neck breaks in his grip. Her life flows away from her and into him and she collapses, forgotten the moment he steps over her, toward the turret.

So close…

There is no one left to man the cannon, to feed it gunpowder and magic, no one to summon the thick-necked bastards. His right foot leaves bloody footprints and his left leg drags smears of minion gut all the way through the choke point, beyond the fortress, to the well.

To the dead well.

Perhaps once, the well had charged crystal; perhaps heroes had once guarded it. Perhaps he would once have found salvation here. But there is nothing now, nothing stirring in the well, only shards of broken crystal lying about, hardly anything worth defending.

Hope lost, the world comes back to him. The rhythmic bzzt bzzt of insects. Birds complaining. Cold coming on, sinking into his muscle, cramping him up all around his eternal wound, whatever is living about him trying to reject the foreign thing rammed through him. Pain and hatred.

He allows himself one agonized scream before stalking back into the bush. There is another road there, to the Halcyon Fold, that he must now take.

“Who am I?”

A little girl stands opposite her master at the center of the sparring circle holding a wooden shield. The sun sets behind the foothills to the west, but she knows better than to show the long day’s fatigue inside the circle. “You are Professor Marcel …”

The flat of the master’s blunted swordblade leaves a stinging red imprint on her left cheek before she can register that he has moved.

“In battle, there are no professors. There are no names.” The master circles her, and she moves with him as he taught her, her eyes watering. “No husbands, no brothers. No sisters. No friends.” He strikes again, his blade slapping the wound anew.

“Y.. yes, Professor.” The girl sniffs up the pain, forces herself to remain light on her toes as the master switches direction.

“Who am I?”

“You are…” The sword swings between them and cracks into the girl’s shield, sending splinters flying. “…the sword.”

“And who are you?”

The sword swings again, a deadly whip in the master’s hand, smashing again into the shield. “I am the shield.”

“Again.”

“I am the sh… shield.” The strikes come faster, arcing and crashing, no mercy given for her small arms struggling to raise the shield, welts and bruises rising on her skin when she is too slow.

“Again.”

“I am the shield!” Blunted steel on wood sends shocks up the girl’s arm; sweat pours down her brow, meets with tears, rolls down her cheeks and throat and into her uniform.

“Who?”

“I am the shield!” she sobs, falling to her knees, the shield over her head. “The shield! I am the -”

“…the shield!”

Catherine sits up straight in the general’s tent, gasping out of sleep, drenched in sweat despite the cold night. A magic arrow protrudes from the chest of the man beside her, glowing blue in the dark.

“Kestrel,” she whispers.

The fur beneath her dead lover squelches with his blood when she rises. She dresses in silence, though she knows there is no need for quiet; she is alive because they want her to be.

Not so for the rest of the camp. Squinting into the dark, she steps outside, her boots soundless in the fresh snow. The smaller infantry tents are sieved with sizzling arrow-holes. The cold masks the bloody smell of death, freezing time. It is as if the sun will never rise, the dead will never decay and spring will never end the Winter War. Half inside her dream, her nose and fingers pink and numb, it is as if she is not stepping toward her own end.

In the center of camp, thirty unfamiliar women in familiar uniforms poke at the fire with sticks. They are young in the way of soldiers; war has a high turnover rate. Six Swords, two Axes, two Daggers, two Polearms, eight varied Mages, nine Shields and one Bow.

“Salut, Kestrel.” Catherine steps into the light, resting her shield in the snowdrift before her.

“Catherine!” calls The Bow with a grin that does not reach her eyes. She lopes through the snow to clasp Catherine’s hand, setting her bow in the snow beside the shield. “Kind of a demotion, isn’t it, settling other countries’ border disputes?”

“It pays well.”

Kestrel drags her fingers up the wings of Catherine’s pauldron. Bump-bump-bump. “Did you leave your Sword in bed?”

“Indeed.” Catherine peers past the fire at the Stormguard as they move into position. “You rendered it quite useless.”

Kestrel smirks. “Rumor is, you gave up your blade in a fit of guilt.”

“You will soon find that I don’t need it.”

“Understandable. Weapons, armies, even whole institutions, outstay their welcomes.”

Catherine rests one arm atop her shield. “It is not like you to be so chatty.”

“Just catching up. Been a really long time.” Kestrel plucks up her weapon in her left hand. In her right, four glowing arrows snap into existence. On the other side of the fire, the others push back their white fur hoods and draw their weapons; fire and ice and energy form in the palms of the mages. With a nod, Catherine pulls her shield from the snow, and she is Catherine no longer, and Kestrel is no longer Kestrel, and a thin gray line of dawn forms at the edge of the sky.

In the moment before the chaos, a breeze swirls light snowflakes around the tents full of dead soldiers. Sparks explode above the fire. The Shield rises. The Bow fits the glowing arrow to the bowstring and pulls it back, her fingers resting on her cheek.

Then, she spins on her back foot and looses the arrow through the flames.

Sparks fly from Kestrel’s magic arrow as it sails past the fire, gliding through the narrow gap between two swordswomen and piercing straight into the Storm Queen’s raven. It lands with an undignified squawk and a floomph of powdered snow.

“You all can do what you want,” says Kestrel. “I’m not killing one of our own.”

The queen’s best killers, twitching with anticipation of battle, their trembling weapons thirsty for blood, dart their eyes from Kestrel, to Catherine, to the dead black thing in the white snow with horror. Their white-gloved grips loose and re-tighten as Kestrel steps back beside Catherine, who crouches in a defensive position behind her shield, her perplexed eyes shimmering. In that stunned silence, there is a moment when she sees beyond the white and red uniforms, beyond the weapons, to the faces of women she used to know. The closest thing she ever had to sisters, once.

The Guard’s best daggerwoman breaks the spell, darting forward, crossing the distance in a blinding blue flash, appearing a breath away from Kestrel, her blades crossed over the archer’s throat. “She is no longer one of us,” she hisses. “And now, neither are you.”

“Really, Livia?” Kestrel grins. “I put an arrow in the eye of a man at your flank at the last battle for Lionne.” There is a popping sound, and all that remains where Kestrel stood is a phosphorescent cloud. The daggerwoman jumps back from the glowing particles, her daggers in a defensive position. “I’ve saved every one of your lives at one point or another,” calls Kestrel’s voice, disembodied several steps away from the mist.

“We have orders,” calls a shieldbearer from the front line.

“Sure, Marelde, and we’re trained to kill, not think,” says Kestrel, reappearing with a new arrow fitted to the nock of her bow, “but it was Catherine who trained you with a shield when you were ten years old.”

“Eight,” whispers Marelde.

“And you, Amie.” Kestrel’s arrow points at the forehead of a mage holding a sputtering ball of blue light. “After the northern revolt, when you had night terrors, Catherine stayed up all night to comfort you. And you, Ivet, Catherine taught you to speak Lillaise.” Ivet nods, resting her axe over her shoulder, staring at the snow.

“I never knew her, and I don’t care what she taught Ivet to say,” scoffs Elena, the youngest of them, polearm at the ready, her stance low. “She’s a traitor. She disobeyed orders, ruined a mission and disgraced the Stormguard.”

“Toujours fidèle.” Catherine sighs as all eyes turn to her. “I swore loyalty, but in war, I was never loyal to the queen. I was loyal to the woman next to me. I had no thought for Mont Lille, or a unified Eventide, when the blades swung and the arrows flew. I fought because I was afraid of what the woman next to me would think if I did not.”

“Yet you abandoned us and fled like a coward,” snarls Livia.

Catherine shoots a glare at the daggerwoman. “There are no cowards in the Stormguard. I chose to disobey so that one day, you all would have another choice. But I have … I have lived with the shame of my disloyalty to you for more than a decade, Kestrel.”

“Then make it up to me now.” Kestrel lowers her bow. “We found Julia’s whole family alive and well in Taizen Gate. They escaped and disappeared with the help of Gythians.”

Catherine’s breath catches. “Then we can waste no more time. Make your choice, ladies, and make it before the queen’s ravens find you.”

When frozen tundra gave way to dense forest, the Stormguard traveled at night to evade the watchful eyes of nesting ravens. The country was at war, and the Storm Queen would be searching for them, but the freeze itself was their biggest enemy, and Kestrel was glad of her warm winter uniform.

On the last night of their trek, Catherine drew up near Kestrel and murmured, “I have not thanked you.”

“Don’t,” said Kestrel in her usual dry tone. She pulled her backpack around to the front and removed her night vision goggles. “I don’t care who sits on what throne, but I expect Gythia will advise their puppet monarch to free the Storm Queen’s territories.”

Catherine fell quiet, and while the moon rose there was no sound but their steps and their foggy breathing.

When she heard the rush of fast water, Kestrel climbed a tree on a steep hill and scanned the river through the goggles. The bridge below was the only border crossing that had not been destroyed in the Winter War, and their only chance to cross to friendlier territory. She whistled a signal and the others gathered below.

“Your employer’s enemies have taken the bridge, Catherine,” she said. “Twenty guards on either side and ten on bridge patrol.”

“We can take twenty at a time, if it comes to that,” murmured Catherine.

“The bridge patrol have snow beasts,” said Kestrel. She dropped to the ground, soundless except for the poofing of powdery snow, and Ivet scurried up to look. In a moment, the axewoman cursed under her breath at the ten giant, armored, white-furred beasts, their curled horns wrapped with spikes, their tusks protruding from metal helms. On their shoulders rode enemy soldiers.

“I’ve heard about snow beasts,” said Amie, shivering as she drew her mage cloak tighter around her. “They steal children and eat them.”

“Leave them to me.” Kestrel stood at the lip of the hill, the green laser light from her goggles sweeping along the border.

“We don’t have to kill them all. We just have to get across.” Catherine raised her arcshield and the hidden blades snapped out. “If we are separated, you all have your assignments.” She motioned Kestrel ahead, then followed down the dense forested hill until they could hear the rushing of the water and the grunts of the snow beasts, the other women snaking behind, pulling shields, blades and polearms from their backs and belts.

At the edge of the forest, Kestrel disappeared and the others fanned out behind rocks and trees, fighters and mages clumping close to their assigned shieldwomen. Catherine stood alone, her fur cloak waving in the frozen breeze, refusing to shiver, as the guards’ blinding searchlight swung toward her. There was a call in a language Kestrel didn’t understand, then an answer, and Catherine was surrounded by men in heavy wool coats and fur caps, their swords and rifles drawn.

Hidden inside shimmering phosphor, Kestrel slipped past the guards and onto the bridge. The snow beasts were larger than she’d thought from her high vantage point; their steps shook the wooden bridge, and their armor covered all the vital bits, but the plan was in motion and could not be changed. The Stormguard whistled their positions like nocturnal bird calls. Catherine held up her shield, and the first of the giant snow beasts stepped into the phosphorous cloud.

With all eyes on Catherine, it was a simple thing for Kestrel to put a sizzling, glowing arrow into the beast’s eye. It howled, stuck, and twisted about hard, its great hairy arms striking into the darkness, tossing its rider off the side of the bridge and into the river. By the time the nearby guards had reined their beasts around to face their aggressor, Kestrel and the arrow had disappeared, and the panicked beast clutching at its bleeding face could not be contained.

The Stormguard moved into action, shields flanking around Catherine, fighters taking out the unprepared guards, magic flashing, freezing, burning in the air. A flaming phoenix screamed, its wings spraying sparks onto the bridge; the guards leaped out of its way in terror. In the chaos, Kestrel left another cloud of phosphor in the path of the next beast and delivered two arrows under its arm. It stopped still and bellowed, but Kestrel had already disappeared again. Across the bridge she went, shooting and stunning the wild beasts, ducking and sprinting out of the way as they wavered and roared. She glanced over her shoulder to see Catherine’s bubble flash and spin, then back to the other side of the bridge, where they had no element of surprise. The guards there held positions with grim expressions and weapons drawn, eyes darting. She stood sideways and fired, releasing arrows for cover as the shields pushed onto the bridge.

Kestrel vanished and raced, avoiding the slick blood on the ice, to the other side. She reappeared in front of the highest ranking officer who blinked, his mouth open, still half-dreaming, his boots pulled on over his nightclothes. Her arrow nestled an inch from his eye, spitting blue magic onto his nose.

“You know who we are?” she asked.

The officer stuttered in his own language, then said in an accent, “Stormguard.”

“Just passing through.” Catherine’s voice was rich and slow as honey. Her hand rested on Kestrel’s back shoulder, and the rest of the women assembled in defensive positions behind them. “You’ll be a dear and let us by, won’t you?”

Something like hope flashed in Catherine’s eyes as the officer called for his troops to stand down. The Stormguard filed through the enemy’s line while the cavalry struggled to gain control of their wounded beasts. Kestrel walked backward, her bow pulled, until the last of the women had disappeared into friendly territory.

The dark room rippled with an eerie, surgical-bright glow centered on a glass tank at the center. Inside, a pale woman floated in a bowed shape, belly highest, swaying, her shaved head thrown back as if in laughter. Tubes snaked inside the glass and attached to nodes in her chest and temples. Great wounds in her torso had been stitched and bound together with white bandages. There was a low hum, the sour smell of chemicals and an echoing rhythmic beep that matched the slow beat of her heart.

In one corner of the room, under a glaring light, a dwarf in thick safety goggles stood on a stool next to a headless robot in the shape of a woman. His power drill revved and died, revved and died, as he worked.  

The door opened, startling him. The dwarf cursed and rubbed at a scratch on the white armor, ignoring the blind queen and the two guards who followed her. The queen pressed her fingertips to the tank. The raven on her shoulder glared through the glass.

“Ungrateful wenches,” she hissed. “What would they have been without me? Wives. Mothers. Forgotten grandmothers telling boring stories. I saved them from mediocrity. I made them dangerous. I gave them a skill, a purpose, a family … and how am I repaid?”

The two Stormguard women looked at one another, then back at the tank. “We returned -” began one, but the queen continued as if she hadn’t heard.

“Betrayal. For some romantic notion. For a child who knows nothing of building and guiding an empire. But not you, my child.” The queen rested her cheek against the glass. “You will be more powerful than any soldier. You will never tire. You will never question me. You will never betray me. Because you cannot.”

“Does that mean I have your permission to put her together?” called Frankie without turning around. “I can get her head off and have her configured by tomorrow.”

“Yes,” said the queen. She turned from the tank to smile in her terrifying, eyeless way, at the only two Stormguard who had chosen to return. “And you, my loyal girls, will help me test her strength.”

—— Hullo, Beauty…
—— Hullo…
—— Hullo Beaut-beaut-bee…
#~$ REBOOT INITIATED: STAND BY…
… BUFFERING…
… TARGET DETECTED
–> ENGAGING.

Frankie and the veiled queen stepped along the scuffs, slides and stomp-marks scattered across the packed-dirt training yard. Pools of blood hardened into dusty paste around the bodies of Livia and Elena, the two Stormguard who had chosen to return. Alpha stood at attention, still as death, her mask and armor undented.

“Harsh,” said Frankie.

“Necessary,” replied the queen, “and impressive. No one in the world could have defeated either one of them, and your creation ended them both in moments.”

“She’s unstoppable.” Frankie rapped his knuckles on Alpha’s knee. “Had some bugs to work out with her memory drive. Not easy, wiping everything except how to fight. I patched the issue with an automatic reboot…”

“Is she ready?”

“Yeah. Directive is uploaded.”

~

—— You cannot protect it from me.
—— Protect it. From me. Best run now. Destroy.
—— Now before I destroy…
—— …your best assets.
#~$ REBOOT INITIATED: STAND BY
… BUFFERING…
–> PATROL MODE ACTIVATED.

Quick as fire with wind behind it, word spread through the scattered Eventide cities that the blancorojos were not to be trusted, that a technological monster stalked the insubordinate Stormguard. The news came too late for two old families, former royalty who sought to conspire against the queen. They, and six mangled former Stormguard, were dragged out of hiding into the streets to be picked at by the ravens.

~

—— Pretty thing.
—— Pretty…
—— …thing. Pretty thing.
#~$ REBOOT INITIATED: STAND BY
… BUFFERING…
… STORMGUARD DETECTED…
… FULFILL DIRECTIVE…
–> ENGAGING.

Outside the oldest tea house in Taizen Gate, masked guards with curved swords stood shoulder-to-shoulder, silent. Inside, the Three Bosses knelt by a low table facing six former Stormguard, their palms facing down on the table according to local tradition.

“The Stormguard is known for causing trouble here,” said Second Boss, a four-armed bear hybrid whose pot belly rested atop the table by his paws and teacup.

“The Stormguard now serves the successor to Mont Lille,” replied Marelde.

“We have no stake in which queen rules the Eventides. Our international politics are neutral.” First Boss’ hologram flickered at the edges of her business suit.

Marelde bent her fingers, cracking each knuckle in turn, watching the Bosses’ eyes. “The queen’s ambition extends far beyond her shores.”

“If you lie, and we give you the location of this princess you seek, you will kill her, yes?” asked Third Boss, a slight man with an unnerving smile.

Marelde ached to look sidelong at the other women, but an unsteady gaze was a sign of weakness in Taizen Gate. Besides, she ever heard Catherine’s voice: A shieldbearer’s first line of defense is her eyes. She turned her hands over on the table, palms up. “I will not demand your trust, but for all things, there is a price. Use your best judgment and name yours.”

Screams, and the clashing of steel from outside, interrupted. The Stormguard jumped onto the low table, kicking away the teapots and arranging themselves in defensive position around the three mages. Second Boss rose with surprising speed and dropped to all fours. First Boss flickered and disappeared. Third Boss opened his kimono, revealing a vest covered in small blade sheaths.

“So much for no weapons allowed,” grumbled one mage, blue sparks exploding from her snapping fingers.

“Not yet,” said Marelde; magic conjuration would be detected all over Taizen Gate. What if your first line of defense is all you have, Catherine? she thought, but Catherine was far away, and she had no shield.

The screams outside stopped. The outer door slid open, letting in the night’s birdsongs and thick summer air.

“Now,” ordered Marelde, and the room filled with the snap and buzz of magic as a heavy sword split apart the room’s paper wall from ceiling to floor and a machine stepped inside.

The room erupted in flashing blue magic and the roars of Second Boss. The machine moved forward without pause, slicing through its former comrades, deflecting the magic bolts, Third Boss’ blades clinking off its armor. Within minutes, Alpha stood in the post-battle silence scanning the room with glowing eyes. Six women lay broken and bleeding at her feet; two bosses shook with terror in a corner. Her sword had cleaved the table, and Marelde with it, in half.

#~$ DIRECTIVE FULFILLED
… RECONNAISSANCE MODE ACTIVATED.
… DIRECTIVE: FIND STORMGUARD.
—— Pretty thing…

To be continued…

Daisy squeezes into a corner of the workout room, bare feet sunk into the mat, arms bent, hiding her face behind bruised forearms and thick leather boxing gloves. Kestrel, a year older at fifteen, weaves close and strikes Daisy’s obliques, tight to cramping; when her arms drop, the strikes come at her jaw and temples. Tears slide out of Daisy’s swollen eyes, mixing with blood and snot from her nose. A hit to the belly sucks the air out of her and she crumples, arms over her head.

Kestrel raises one glove. “Hey! Daisy’s cooked!”

The instructor stalks over, glaring at the folded-up girl. “Never get hit, you fear every strike!” she says in a brusque accent. “Today fall down, cry, skin turn purple, blood come out. Tomorrow, still alive.”

Kestrel winks through her own black-and-blue shiner. “Get up. It’s your turn next.”

“I can’t,” sobs Daisy. “I can’t.”

“Take your mind out of the pain.” Kestrel wipes at her nose with one leather glove. “I count the hits.”

Daisy looks up, wincing. “That works?”

Kestrel shrugs. “Get up and try.”

~

“Did you hear that?”

Atop an airship tower, the last of the Stormguard waited for death. Kestrel and Catherine stood on the landing pad; four kept watch in the windowed control room below.

Amie made a cat’s cradle out of stringy blue magic between her fingers, looking out at the winking lights twisting around the towers of the Royal Quarter. “Like a ding?”

Ivet pressed her nose flat on the window and sighed a big foggy spot. “Taizen Gate bosses are notorious for being full of crap. We’d have known if the queen had some killing machine.”

The ding came again, louder, from the elevator at the center of the room.

The guards crouched as the elevator rose up the levels of the tower. The swordswoman flipped her broadswords and caught them. “Now ladies,” she said, “that could be anybody. Let’s not go killing a pilot or something.”

A last ding and the elevator doors opened.

“It’s true,” whispered Amie, the magic strings disintegrating. “Catherine!”

“Too late,” said a shieldbearer, racing to the elevator. The shield burst into flames, slamming into the machine, pinning it to the far wall.

“ONE,” it said.

The shieldwoman flew back out of the elevator and slid along the floor to the glass wall, her shield and torso cut open, leaving a thick trail of blood behind.  

“I’ll make scrap out of that thing,” said Ivet, charging forward, axe flourishing with blinding fast speed.

The machine took the hit to its metal arm. “TWO,” it said in its mechanical voice, and pushed back. Ivet launched backward, her axe handle split in two, blood leaking from the top of her head.

The third Stormguard stumbled backward over control displays and chairs, her broadswords crossed in front of her face. The machine plucked up the woman by one arm and slammed her into the window, cracking the glass. The swords slipped to the floor.

Amie twisted her fingers, magic sputtering as she struggled to find her center in the swirling mess of panic. “Come on!” she cried as the machine drew near. The blue light solidified, formed wings, became a giant screeching phoenix in her arms. “Go!” she commanded, and the phoenix dived, grabbed the machine with its claws and dragged it back into the elevator.

“THREE,” said the machine, then, “FOUR-FIVE-SIX” when Amie chased after it, ball after ball of explosive magic flying from her fingers. The phoenix forced the machine onto the elevator floor, pecking at its mask, screeching to wake the dead.

~

“That’s Amie’s bird.” Kestrel lunged back, four energy arrows forming in her right hand. Catherine ran to the stairs, her shield thrumming, as the landing zone exploded in an eruption of concrete. The machine leaped through the roof, snapped elevator cables wrapped round its blade, the elevator freefalling through the tower with Amie inside.

The machine’s blank mask settled on Kestrel. “SCANNING. TARGET ZERO-TWO-THREE. STORMGUARD. EXTERMINATE.”

Kestrel let loose three arrows in quick succession that pierced into the machine’s knee and neck joints. “SEVEN-EIGHT-NINE,” said the machine.

Kestrel paused, an arrow in its nock.

Catherine sped in from behind, slamming her arcshield into the machine’s back, spinning it toward herself. She held her breath and formed the shimmering magic shield around her, watched from inside the curved, pulsing bubble as the machine stuttered, “TEN-EN-EN-EN. SCAN-AN-ANNING TARGET ZERO-ZERO-ONE. STORMGUARD. EXTERMINATE-ATE-ATE.” The sword arced through the air, slamming into the bubble. The shield shattered in a rain of energy shards but not before it reflected the strike back at the machine, crumpling it. “ERROR. ERROR.”

“Catherine, wait!” screamed Kestrel.

Catherine positioned sideways, shield high, back knee bent, jaw tight as the machine took a step toward Kestrel, one leg dragging. Kestrel loosed the arrow into the eye of the machine’s mask.

“ELEVEN,” said the machine, stepping like a broken doll as the arrow disintegrated. “COUNT… count the hits.” Her mechanical tone fell away. “I… can’t. Pretty thing. Daisy’s… Daisy’s cooked. I can’t. Kestrel?” The sword dropped from her hands.

“What the hell did she do to you?” cried Kestrel.

Catherine edged forward, shield up. “It could be a trap.”

“It’s Daisy,” said Kestrel, slamming her fist into the mask until it fell away, revealing a woman’s horrified face.

“Where am I?” whispered Daisy, clenching her fists. “Hurts. It hurts. Help… Kestrel, help-ELP-ELP-ELP…” Her eyes stared into the distance, her expression blank, her fists relaxing.

“What’s happening?” cried Kestrel in a panic. “Is she dying?”

“SYSTEM REBOOT. STANDBY,” said Daisy in pleasant monotone. Her eyes closed.

“No! No rebooting!” Kestrel slapped Daisy in her cheeks. “Stay here, Daisy.”

Daisy’s eyes opened. “I killed them,” said Daisy. “I killed all of them. Why did I kill them?”

“It’s not your fault,” said Kestrel, gathering up the machine into her arms.

“I can’t stop. It’s coming… back. I can feel it. Killed them. Best run now. Run. Run. I can end it but you have to RUN-UN-UN-UN can’t stop. STANDBY. Stop it. Can end it. Run. RUN TARGET ZERO-TWO-THREE. RUN, TARGET ZERO-ZERO-ONE. Pretty thing. TERMINATION PROTOCOL INITIATED. STANDBY.”

Daisy went still. There was a click, and an energy barrier appeared around her. Catherine grabbed Kestrel by her arm.

“We have to help her,” whimpered Kestrel, but Catherine yanked her away as blinding light shot out the seams in Daisy’s armor.

“There! Go!” Catherine pointed up, yelling over the sound of the airship that hovered above. A rope ladder fell from the deck and Catherine shoved Kestrel toward it before dropping under her shield. Her eyes squeezed shut as the blast shook the tower.

Kestrel clung for her life to the rope ladder as the explosion blew the ship sideways, the city spread out below, the sea ahead, the Halcyon Fold a dark strip of land in the far distance.

Catherine rose, shaking, to her knees. The arcshield smoldered. She tossed it down and looked up to where she knew the raven would be circling, watching.

#~$ SYSTEM REBOOT…
… IDENTITY: ALPHA, STORMGUARD.
… DIRECTIVE: ELIMINATE STORMGUARD.
… LOADING COORDINATES: HALCYON FOLD…