Godless, Chapters 1-3

Godless, Book One of the Xaidra Cycle, First Three Chapters

Hello all! 

I'm finally dusting off this blog to share some chapters of my upcoming epic fantasy novel, "Godless: Book One of the Xaidra Cycle." 

This one's important to me. A story that's been swirling in my head for the better part of two decades, something larger and more ambitious than anything I've written before. In this novel, I've poured all of the skills I've honed across my previous books, from worldbuilding to character development and prose.  For the first time ever, I have also created the cover entirely myself, expanding my graphic design skills. The map is as always designed and drawn by me, as are all the symbols.

I've been uploading to my youtube channel and will continue to do so leading up to the May release of Godless.

Cheers all, and thank you!

-Ed Nile

Karn region, beholden to Belkas the War God.

A ballista shot crashed against the port side of the landbarge, rocking the giant vessel in place. Jarn knew men and women were dying out beyond the bulkheads. Cutting, stabbing, struggling in the dirt and blood of combat while he sheltered within the hulking vehicle. He attended a different kind of battle, a different struggle for life.

“Keep pushing, Mira. You can do this.”

Mira’s screams drowned out Jarn’s encouragements. He could do nothing else but hold her hand. Her grip was strong, the muscles of her arm corded tight. A woman from any other Faith would be unable to clutch the hardened leather and mail of an armored gauntlet so firmly. But like Jarn, the surgeon, and the midwives attending her, Mira was of Belkas. Before her belly swelled with this, their first child, Mira had fought and killed alongside Jarn. A warrioress loyal to Belkas’s red moon, her soul attuned to the War God’s Calling.

And she will fight again, Jarn thought. As will our child.

A fresh convulsion rocked Mira’s body, her back arching as another scream tore from her. Jarn traced the bulge of her belly with his other gauntlet. Two bumps poked from inside, stretching the skin as the unborn infant struggled.

“Already a fighter,” Jarn said. “A warrior in the womb.”

But he could not believe the boast. Something was wrong. Sometime between observing the battle outside his landbarge and now, a hopelessness Jarn could not describe had taken hold. Was this some sort of premonition? Were his wife and unborn doomed?

‘Let our child be born on the landbarge. Let our firstborn come into this world as we give worship to War so that our God might bless it.’ Mira had insisted, begged Jarn to allow her to give birth on the battlefield. How could a priest of Belkas refuse?

If this goes wrong, will it be my fault? He passed his hand over Mira’s belly again. This time, all he felt was her roundness, her warmth. Have I doomed all that I love?

The barge rocked to one side, its wooden construction creaking under its own weight. There was a crash and a rumble of great wheels as the vessel righted itself.

“Priest Jarn!” came a call from above. “Come quickly!”

Mira’s roving gray eyes, bloodshot and faded with the exhaustion of her labor, rolled to Jarn and held. “Go,” she panted. “I will be fine.”

Jarn wished he was as confident as his wife sounded. From the grimace of pain to the sheen of sweat on her bare body, she looked like she was already at Vortis’s gates.

After every war I’ve been in, the lives I’ve taken, can I really be so green to this battlefield? Jarn was in his thirty-third year, but this had him feeling like a youth engaging in his first infantry charge, spear ungainly in his clammy, terrified grip.

“Priest!”

By the Siblings. He kissed his wife’s hand and rose. “Take care of her,” he said to the midwives, putting all the command of a combat order behind the words. The effect was marred by the gruffness in his tone, the way his voice caught halfway through saying it. He’d never seen a birth before, but Jarn knew how dangerous the process could be. Even if his barge made it through what was happening outside, this could still be the last time he saw his wife alive.

Midwives moved about the small cabin by lantern light, changing out pots of water and bloody rags, wiping sweat and other fluids from their groaning patient. The stench of blood and sweat and sour breath, the screams and confused movement, indistinguishable from the closed quarters of a spear charge.

A battle, Jarn thought. It’s all just one battle. He felt like he was abandoning Mira to the blades of a host of enemies but knew there was nothing he could do for her in this fight. He needed to protect his army and this barge if their child was to have a chance.

“The Fates,” he heard one of the midwives say as he walked down the corridor. “Where are the Crones?”

The barge rocked again, sending Jarn crashing against reinforced bulkheads as he ascended the wooden ladder to the deck.

Wood gave way to charnel horror once Jarn was above. Gray skin peppered with scales and boils was stretched along railings set with the sharp, jagged teeth of chaos wraiths as a deterrent to boarders. Broken wraith teeth and bones formed tiles to cover the deck, while skin and bone coated the outer hulls and wheels. All this as well as the mottled, grotesque sails of wraith hide were made to shield the landbarges of Gratis the Harbinger from Nirem’s Wind. The Mad God’s traveling storm.

The pandemonium only grew worse on deck. Gale winds tore at sails and ballistas, sending tornadoes of harsh dust from the great churning wheels on either side. Jarn squinted through it and grabbed hold of a railing to look out on the battlefield.

Nirem’s Wind, also known as the chaos storm, was long behind Gratis’s caravan, a nightmare they had passed through with minor casualties thanks to their hideous shielding. One of many so-called blasphemies which had incited the other War priests to rebel against their Harbinger.

The red banner of Gratis’s crusade was the true blasphemy, an inversion of the flag of the Pantheon in which Belkas’s crest replaced that of the Day God in the prominent center. War's crest placed larger than the other Gods’ in declaration of impending conquest. The banner, the final straw, the proof that the Harbinger of War intended to deliberately upend the Balance among the Pantheon. It flapped and twisted violently in the gusts of a storm even more chaotic and unnatural than Nirem’s Wind.

Lightning split the air from rainless clouds, the bright, momentary bolts tinged crimson in the spinning miasma of arid dust kicked up by the winds. All of it seemed to have its nexus in a great pillar of swirling air, a mountainous tornado of crimson dust and fire that disappeared into the unfathomable sky. The base of the vortex churned through the ranks of armies which tried to scramble out of its path, each man and woman smaller than an insect compared to the impossible force that listed toward them. As small and insignificant as the soldiers appeared, their passing went with even less fanfare. The tornado erased them by the hundreds, and Jarn found himself scanning the vortex for some sign of the soldiers whipped into its wind. He saw no more of those lost.

By Belkas above, what is happening? No sprite could commit so much destruction. Not even a Harbinger could wield such force all at once. If it was an artifice of Lani or Raishar’s making, the storm made no effort to pick its targets. Men from Jarn’s army were swept away as surely as those of his enemies. Dozens of kilometers across the flattened bowl of Faelor Vale, Jarn saw landbarges flying both Gratis's colors and those of the opposing War priests torn asunder by these unnatural winds, their debris churned into the vortex. Others plummeted into fissures which opened below as Xaidra herself rumbled and shook.

What could cause this?

That sinking, empty feeling he’d noted earlier reached through the fog of confusion like a nagging question. It was more than dread, more than fear of an impending defeat or even of the loss of his wife and child. It felt as though all hope, even the possibility of hope, had been dampened. A wet cloth snuffing out the embers of his dreams, an anchor on his soul that tried to drag him down and drain away his will to live. He looked away from the tornado, from the destruction devouring his people across the plain. Jarn looked down to the rumbling wheels of his barge, their massive wraith-spiked treads chewing earth, throwing stones in all directions. He imagined jumping into that grinding churn, letting it destroy him. A moment of pain, and then the cold bliss of Vortis’s rivers.

“Priest Jarn . . .”

Jarn shook himself. One of his younger lieutenants was tugging at his armor’s red mantle. Baros was on his knees, clutching the railing with his other hand. The young man’s face was deathly pale, his lips bloodless and quivering, hands clenching and unclenching on the hardened wraith skin. He looked up at Jarn with haunted eyes, and Jarn realized the emptiness was not merely felt by him. Soldiers all along the barge’s deck were in similar condition, some collapsed on the planks, some wandering about in a daze. One thing they all did was look up to the sky. Jarn followed suit and regretted it.

Belkas’s moon was the home of the War God. It was one of the myriad celestial bodies that represented the Pantheon. The realms of the Gods which dotted the infinite Void, visible even during the Daymoon’s reign when the sparkling pinpoints of light that formed the starpath were hidden.

Though it was only in its ascendance one year out of every twenty, the red moon's glow had been a constant in Jarn’s life. Large or small, the War Moon made its path across Xaidra’s violet sky, hidden only by clouds which sometimes obscured every Godmoon.

There should have been clouds now, what with the raging winds and the tornado of dust churning between the titanmounts. But the sky was maddeningly clear beyond the tornado. Clear enough for Jarn to see how the light of Belkas’s moon flickered.

He watched it wink, dark and bright, dark and bright. Then, in one final blink, it went dim and stayed that way. A disk of dull maroon where a shining ruby had once loomed. A candle blown out, leaving naught but a dark ember in place of its flame.

The feeling that had plagued Jarn became horribly clear, recognizable even in its alieness. A feeling neither he nor any mortal of the Faiths could imagine, let alone understand.

Like all Faithful, Jarn had been born under the sign of his God, born connected to Belkas, feeling War’s influence within him even before the Crones declared which Faith was his. He’d never known an existence in which that voiceless, invisible, yet tangible presence was not felt in his soul. A warm glow within him, an assurance of his path and place in the world. It was as constant, real and vital as the air in his lungs, the blood in his veins.

And it was gone.

Not muted or lessened, not muffled as a voice heard through a wall. The War God’s presence was just . . . gone.

Jarn felt true panic for the first time in years. Primal terror, long ago controlled on the battlefield, tamed within the inescapable rush of combat where a well-placed spear or arrow could end him at any moment. That fear returned now, overshadowing the chaos around Jarn, making it all fade out to leave him alone in an unnatural bubble of silence.

He found himself absorbed by that dark disc, its dulled crimson tint the only thing differentiating it from the black moon of the Death God Vortis.

“Priest Jarn?”

Baros must have been speaking for a while, repeating Jarn’s title to his oblivious ears. He blinked at the lieutenant. Their gaze held a mutual understanding this time, a shared horror beyond anything the blood and gore of battle could induce.
“Yes?”

“The enemy . . .” Baros took in a gulp of air, wiped at a sweat-beaded brow. “They’re routing, Sir.”

Jarn blinked again, feeling dazed, and looked back onto the field. The storm tore through slit trenches and field weaponry, disintegrating landbarges in moments, their debris reduced to little more than added material in the growing tornado. Enemy barges, marked not so much by the banners of their priests but by the lack of chaos shielding. Gratis had been a madman and a genius, utilizing Nirem’s Wind as a causeway to flank his opponents, a way to speed his course and come at the enemy from directions they were not prepared for. The other clan priests refused to do the same.

Routing. What an understatement. A detached military term when compared with the mad panic of reality. Both sides were running for their lives except for some individuals who stood still, as transfixed by the darkened Godmoon as Jarn had been. Severed from all they’d known in one unfathomable stroke. But why? Why would their God turn away from them as they spilled blood in his name, carried forth the ritual for which he favored them?

“Gratis,” Jarn said. “The Harbinger, where is he?”

“He was down there, Sir, fighting with the men as always.”

Jarn cursed under his breath. Only a Harbinger could make sense of this. One of the Chosen, who not only spoke to his God but heard War’s voice in turn. A Harbinger was imbued with long life, with strengths and powers beyond mortal men. Perhaps Gratis was unharmed amid the scrambling masses, but in any case he was beyond reach.

Someone cried out Jarn’s name, bringing his attention to the deck hatch. One of the midwives was waving for him, her hair a mess, her clothing torn. Torn and covered in fresh blood.

“Priest, hurry!”

“What should we do?” asked Baros to Jarn’s back. The man’s tone was flat, like a sleepwalker’s.

“Sound the horns. Bring our people back to the barges.” Jarn heard the same flatness in his own voice. He flung himself down the narrow ladder.

Jarn heard his child’s cries before he reached the birthing room. The infant was not the only one screaming. Jarn rushed down the tight corridor, spurred by scuffling noises, the crash of wooden furniture and shattering pottery.

He burst in to find a scene more chaotic and bloody than the one he’d just left. Tables and chairs lay toppled on a blood-speckled floor along with shards of a water basin, its contents sloshed about by the booted feet of a pair of soldiers who grappled with a slight figure. They stood between the figure and Mira, who lied unconscious on her cot, her legs propped open as the surgeon tended to her. Midwives wiped her body down with rags already pink and sodden with water and blood.

Jarn gulped. The gory mess the surgeon ministered to shocked him. He’d seen worse. Done worse to others by far. What follower of Belkas hadn’t? But it was too much to see his wife in that state, helpless and without a sword in hand as she bled. He knelt by Mira and pulled his right gauntlet free before taking her hand in his, feeling her palm and slender fingers. Mira’s skin was clammy, corpse-like, but she twitched in response to Jarn’s touch and drew in shallow, murmuring breaths.

“What happened?” he rasped. Somewhere in the room, a baby continued to cry. Their baby.

“Complications.” Ilaf drew out the word. The surgeon sounded perplexed. As though any part of the flesh could be mysterious to one who'd seen it cut to pieces as often as he had.

“What kind of complications? By all the Siblings, she looks like she’s been torn ope–” Jarn bit off the end of the sentence, finding the words hard to utter even in anger.

The scuffling continued, soldiers’ boots scraping shards of pottery as they readjusted their hold on whoever had threatened Jarn’s family.

“The child is not . . . typical.”

Jarn waited for elaboration, but received only the clack of surgical tools as Ilaf continued his work, refusing to look up and meet his gaze.

The baby kept crying, loud and hearty. But where was it? Jarn looked to the midwives, searching for a bundle, for a squirming form to be the source of the wails. They held nothing.

A tiny movement caught Jarn’s attention. He looked past the feet of a young midwife, one of Mira’s trusted fighting women. “Eivna, pick up my child.”

Eivna sidestepped away from the squirming bundle of cloth until she bumped against the wooden bedpost. “I’m s-sorry, Priest Jarn. But I can’t.”

Confusion quickly gave way to fury. “You left my child on the FLOOR?” He rose to his full height, towering over the woman. “And now you tell me ‘no’? Pick up the child.”

“I won’t touch that thing.” She spat out the final word, a vehemence in her tone and face that Jarn could tell masked something else. The warrioress was frightened. But what was there in a baby to be scared of?

He pushed past Eivna and bent over the squirming shape. Its mewling grew louder, a high-pitched noise that grated on the ear. Jarn put a hand on the infant and noticed how his breath misted before him.

“It must not be allowed to live!”

Jarn turned to the soldiers again and got his first clear look at what they were restraining.

Eyeless, rotten cavities looked at him from a stone-gray face as wrinkled as a crumpled sheet of parchment. Black veins pulsed from a pair of thin, obsidian lips. The thing’s nose was too narrow, too upturned, its nostrils thin slits. Irregularly shaped ears ended in jagged, upturned points alongside a bald head framed by the hood of the spindly creature’s tattered black cloak.

That explained the cold, and part of the dread in the air. The crying baby on the floor was Jarn’s first child, but he had seen what happened when others gave birth, felt this cold through the bulkheads of his cabin or the canvas of his field tent. Heard the hissing voices spell doom over parent and child alike.

Every community, regardless of Faith, found itself host to the Crones. They shuffled in unannounced, asking nothing but demanding respect as powerful servants of the Pantheon, creatures spawned from the Void Goddess Altess. Creatures answerable only to a deity more ancient and unfathomable than all of the Siblings.

An elongated hand clawed at the soldiers, black, sharp nails seeking flesh. Altess’s crest was a black mark on the Crone’s palm.

If one was unlucky, and the prophecy of the twin Fates placed their newborn beneath the sign of a different God, it was the Crones themselves who would see the child delivered to people of its Faith. Add that to their frightening appearance and these seldom occurrences were more than enough to spur folktales of eyeless monsters eating unruly children and cursing entire villages. Some claimed to have seen what was under a Fate’s cloak, but the story was always different. Leather wings like a plucked skrag, the spikes and bulbous exoskeleton of a chaos wraith.

For Jarn’s part, he wasn’t sure there was anything underneath the black garments, imagining instead that the hunched mockery of an old, eyeless woman hid something intangible beneath. A ghost, a sprite, a phantom. He didn’t want to know. Once, the Fates might have even been human as some said. Harbingers to the Void Goddess given over entirely to the power of their deity. If that were true, Jarn definitely didn’t want to know what could turn a person into . . . this.

“Tam, Yalgrin, where is its twin?” Jarn asked above the bundle’s cries and the Fate’s shrieking.

“We’re not sure, Priest!” Tam held the Crone’s wrist in a firm grip, keeping the black-nailed, hooked fingers clear of his face. Jarn would have to reward these men for the risk they took. He had seen what an enraged Fate could do to a human, the corruption their blight wreaked on mortal flesh.

Jarn met the Crone’s eyeless stare, knowing it could see him as clearly as he could see it.

“‘It must not live.’ That’s what you said, hag,” Jarn remarked. “Why?”

“A curse! Ruin! Dark vengeance!” The Crone’s voice came out doubled, as though it and its absent twin spoke in unison. Black spit flew from its lips to sizzle and smoke on the wooden floor, leaving tiny, round scorch marks. Only iron and stone could withstand the black spit of a Fate, and only then inscribed with the right Godscript verse.

The creature continued like this, interspersing common Myrian with a strange tongue unique to its kind. Its babbling was incoherent, rushed in the throes of some uncontrolled passion. As though it, like Eivna, was somehow afraid of a newborn.

Jarn turned his full attention to the bundle on the floor. He worked both hands beneath it and took the squirming form in his arms. The child felt warm and soft beneath the blanket but for a pair of hard objects which had somehow made it into the wrappings. The midwife had even covered the baby’s face. Again Jarn felt the urge to shove Eivna into the bulkhead for her carelessness to his firstborn. War was an exacting God, but only followers of Crimos, God of Cruelty, would discard an infant on the floor, wrapped like dirty laundry to suffocate as they cried.

She will be punished, Jarn promised himself. He started to peel back the bit of blanket covering his child’s face and froze. Had he not stopped to collect himself, Jarn was sure he would have dropped the infant. If that was truly what Mira had birthed.

“My . . . baby . . .” Mira reached for the child, touching the skirt of Jarn’s leather armor.

“Don’t try to move,” said Ilaf in a crisp tone. “I’ve numbed the tear, but you’re still not stitched up.”

Mira’s gray eyes focused, meeting Jarn’s. “Is it a boy?”

Jarn could not bring himself to check. He did not want to see more, not yet. “Yes, Love,” he said. “A boy.”

“Give him to me,” Mira begged. “Give me my son.” She could not keep herself awake. Her hand flopped along the side of the bed as her eyes drifted closed.
“Mira!” Jarn cradled the child against his breastplate with one hand and touched his wife’s face with the other.

“She lives.” The surgeon pressed two fingers to an artery along Mira’s inner thigh. “Whether she survives the night, however, only the Gods can know. Vortis is reaping a bountiful crop today.”

Jarn’s lip quivered. “See that her soul is not included in the harvest, or yours will be as well.” It was an empty threat and Jarn knew it. People died even under the best care, and good surgeons were hard to come by.

Ilaf did not react, his head bent to his work, cool and detached. If the nature of the infant he’d just delivered affected the surgeon, Jarn could not tell.

Soldiers crowded into the small doorway, their armor scratched and caked in dust and blood, faces dirty and tired.

“Report,” Jarn ordered.

The men had to visibly pull their attention to him and away from the snarling, hissing Crone. “Nearly all our men are on board the barges and ready to evacuate, Priest Jarn.”

“Nearly all those who still live,” added the other soldier.

“Our enemies?”

“The same. We heard their horns sound the retreat.”

“We march on the Harbinger’s orders. Where is Gratis?”

The men looked at one another.

Jarn hammered a fist against the wooden bulkhead. “Speak!”

“Killed, Priest. Several of our men witnessed it.”

“Dead?” Jarn breathed the word as the midwives gasped. Even the men busy holding back the Crone looked over.

“How?” Jarn pressed. A Harbinger was worth a thousand men or more in battle, with the strength to match. Jarn had never heard of one killed by a mere spear thrust or arrow before. Their lives were extended by their connection to their God, allowing them to stay young and hale for centuries.

“It was one of our men, Sir.” The soldier gulped as he spoke. “Though only his armor was seen, not his face. He cut Gratis’s head off.”

“Impossible . . .” But Jarn could not say that with confidence. Belkas’s Moon darkened above them. An unnatural upheaval of shaking earth, swirling wind, lightning and fire tearing their armies apart. A frightened Crone, one of the ancient Fates themselves reduced to a frantic, hissing animal. The malformed thing birthed from Mira’s womb that even Jarn’s most loyal warriors refused to touch. War’s Harbinger, slain. Nothing made sense.

“Dozens saw it, Sir.”

Jarn saw the same hopelessness in these men he’d first noticed in Baros above deck. The severing from Belkas, the sense that the War God had vanished.

If a Harbinger can die, what of a God? Would Vortis claim one of his own kind? COULD he?

Jarn looked down at his child. But how could it be his or Mira’s? How could this creature have come from them?

“Make way.” Jarn shoved past the men. He turned back to look at his unconscious wife with half a mind to threaten Ilaf once more. He decided not to waste his breath. “Keep the Crone under guard until I figure out what to do with it.” He was not sure if he meant the Fate or the squirming, crying bundle in the crook of his arm.

“What are we to do, Priest?” asked one of the newly arrived soldiers. Jarn struggled to come up with an answer.

“Get the deck cleared and sound the retreat.”

Great wheels rumbled, bringing the behemoth of wood and wraith flesh lumbering away from Faelor Vale. The tornado continued to swirl amid the titanmounts, rising toward Belkas’s dead moon as though being sucked into the Void.

Jarn probed that missing part of his soul, exploring the pain. His God had abandoned him, abandoned them all. The purpose for which every Belkan lived had been snuffed out. Part of why he wanted the deck to himself was to prevent his men from hurling themselves off the barge in despair. Having them all below to work the cranks and keep the vessel moving was an added boon.

But, truly, he’d ordered it cleared so that he could be alone. Alone with his child.

He peered down at the creature. It had stopped crying, tiny hands grasping the brooch of Jarn’s mantle. Its small, stubby arms matched the red fabric. The baby's skin was deep crimson.

A toothless mouth tried to suckle at hardened leather to no avail. The child cried anew. A baby. It was a baby. But of what species?

Pointed black horns scraped against Jarn’s armor. Feet with three fat toes apiece flailed free of the blanket as the child’s wails competed against the rumble of the great wheels. A cry like that from a newborn so small was considered a good sign. It showed health, a warrior’s strength, a soldier’s resolve.

Jarn felt the cold presence of the second Fate before it spoke.

“My sister spoke truly, Jarn.”

He glanced sideways at the Crone. It drifted toward him, feet hidden in the trailing black tatters of its cloak. Assuming it had feet. Whatever the cloth was made from was like nothing Jarn had seen elsewhere. It seemed to absorb all light around it, to shift irrespective of the wind or the motions of the wearer, jagged ribbons of the garment reaching toward Jarn and curling back. It was rare to see a Fate so exposed to the Daymoon’s violet light, and Jarn was fascinated and repulsed to witness just how inhuman the Crone truly was. If a physical difference existed between this creature and its twin below deck, Jarn had yet to observe it.

The day was warm, yet Jarn’s breath came out in white puffs of steam.

“Your sister.” Jarn put scorn into the word. “Has clearly lost its wits, hag. Whatever God-blighted force thrust you upon us, it was no desire of mine. Be gone.”

The Crone’s hairless eyebrows rose, stretching the empty sockets below in ghastly contortion.

“We come where we are needed, mortal. Safeguards of the Balance. You may question our usefulness all you wish, but you may not send us away lest you wish to be cursed by Creation itself.”

“And what does killing this creature have to do with the Balance? Crippled boys and girls are born every day. Missing limbs, splotched skin and worse. It is my choice whether I wish to rear a deformed child or not.”

“It will prove the death of you.” The Crone’s voice took on that echo as its sister’s had. The same voice with which Crones pronounced an infant’s Faith. The voice of doom, the tone of Prophecy. “It will prove the end of your lineage and the destruction of your Faith. Your people’s way of life will be no more.”

Jarn paused. He had never known one of the Fates to lie, nor for their proclamations to prove false when spoken in that voice. He looked to the creature in his arms and found it looking back at him with eyes as blue as pale sapphires. Like Jarn’s own, the feature Mira always said she admired most.

The thought of his wife choked Jarn. For all he knew, Mira was already dead below. Her life traded to bring this horned thing into existence.

It was the tail that shocked Jarn into what he did next. It slipped out from the blanket like a hairless red worm and draped itself over his vambrace.

Jarn shouted in disgust and thrust his arm out over the barge's railing. The blanket came free and drifted down into the meat grinder of the great vessel’s wheels so that only the baby remained, dangling from Jarn’s arm by its tail with nothing but the deadly fall beneath. It screamed. He screamed. Jarn had not lied to Mira about the child’s sex after all. The creature was male. A son, he and Mira had had a son. And it had already killed its mother. A son who would doom them all.

The boy squirmed, flailing small hands and feet. His three-toed feet, his horns, his tail and red skin were unnatural. But other than that, Jarn could see features of himself and Mira. Could this truly be their son?

“Do it,” the Crone’s doubled voice was a sibilant hiss in Jarn’s ear, its breath an icy wind that sent a shudder down his spine. “Do it for your people. For your God.”

His God. “What happened today?” Jarn nudged his chin toward the vortex shrinking away as the barges rolled. The vessels of the opposing army had already disappeared in another direction. “Belkas’s essence no longer speaks to me.”

The Crone recoiled, uttering a gurgling noise of disgust. Disgust or, again, fear. “A betrayal of the Gods,” its hiss rose in pitch until it was a shriek. “A WAR IN THE VOID.”

“And dropping this boy, will that bring Belkas back?”

There was no telling from beneath its cloak, but Jarn thought the Crone was fidgeting. “This is beyond our sight,” it said at last in a singular tone. “We know only the doom its life will bring upon you.”

It was the closest thing to a lie Jarn had ever heard one of its species utter. The Crone did know something. If killing this child would bring Belkas back, the Fates would be motivated to tell him, to influence him to kill the infant they so wanted dead.

The baby tried to pull itself up by its tail. It dropped after rising only an inch or two, left dangling upside down from Jarn’s arm. Even through his vambrace, Jarn could tell the newborn had a grip as strong as its hearty cries. The red infant’s bare form still glistened with Mira’s blood, where it had not dried to rusty ocher against its skin. A son. Mira had yearned after a son most of all.

Jarn pulled the baby from the edge of the barge and held it close.

“What are you doing?” the Crone demanded.

He walked to a pile of coiled rigging line and placed the boy atop it. This done, Jarn unclasped his cloak and tucked it around the child. The boy had stopped crying now. With the barge clear of the destruction of the battlefield, this left an odd cocoon of silence over the vessel’s deck.

“FOOL,” shrieked the Crone.

Jarn felt the creature pass by him. With all the reflexes born of a fighter’s life, he snatched the Crone’s bony wrist short of reaching his son. The tendrils of its cloak whipped out.

His unarmored right hand slammed against the Crone’s neck. Jarn clenched and lifted the creature by its clammy throat. He carried the thrashing Crone toward the edge of the landbarge and held it over the railing until even the cloak’s reach was well beyond his son. Jarn was amazed at the near weightlessness of the Fate, thinking back to his theory that the creature had no corporeal form beneath the garment.

The Fate fixed Jarn with its eyeless gaze, wrinkled face scrunched in fury. No, Jarn decided. This monster could never have been human. Slit nostrils flared from a nose now flattened against the Crone’s contorted face. Combined with the pointed ears and flowing black cloak, the effect made Jarn think of the nocturnal flying rodents which swarmed from titanmount caves with the sinking of the Daymoon.

“You dare!” the Crone snarled, as though Jarn’s crushing grip on its windpipe did nothing. “The curse of your Godless progeny will be nothing compared to what will rain upon you if you kill one of my kind, mortal.”

Jarn’s teeth bared in a furious grin. “So you can die,” he said. “That is good to know.”

Fury bled away from the Crone’s features. Jarn had heard legends of their kind being able to read human minds. He hoped it was true. He hoped this monstrous thing knew the strength of his conviction. “You cast your prophecies, cart away our newborns. Now, you try to kill my son. And despite all your wisdom, all your mystical sight, you cannot tell me where my God has gone nor guarantee his return.”

“Your creature is Godless!” The Crone’s tattered cloak whipped about. “It will be your undoing!”

“Godless?” Jarn raised his eyes to Belkas’s dark moon, listening with his heart for the warmth of the War God’s blessing. He felt only the emptiness inside.

Jarn looked down into the empty pits of the Crone’s eyes, letting the grin drop from his face. The fear in the Crone’s visage was unmistakable.

He leaned his head forward. “We are all Godless, now.”

Jarn let go.

The Crone’s fingernails clawed at his right arm, tearing through hardened leather and chainmail, leaving streaks of burning cold through the flesh beneath. The icy chill cut down to the bone and Jarn screamed, pulling the limb close to him even as he bent over the rail to watch the Crone fall.

Its black cloak flapped about like great wings. A horrid cackling rose as the Crone began to drift. Jarn gasped, certain the Fate would fly off to safety or zip back up to put those claws to his face.

One wraithskin-covered spoke caught on the cloak. The creature’s laugh cut short, its black-clad figure yanked down into the churning mess of earth and stone beneath the giant wheel. The eyeless creature let off a final deafening shriek before its voice was silenced.

The scream of its twin rose to replace it. Jarn collapsed to his knees, ears pierced by the high-pitched screeching, an inhuman keen that vibrated through the deck itself.

Eyes screwed shut, he clapped his left hand over an ear, mouth agape in a silent cry of pain.

The second Crone’s screaming cut short after an interminable stretch of time. Jarn took the hand away from his ear to find beads of fresh blood on the palm of his gauntlet. One of his men must have incapacitated or killed the remaining Crone.

His right arm throbbed with a blinding agony. A torturous pain Jarn had initially fought past now consumed him. He fell in on himself, his forearm a bright, all consuming flame of pain, so cold it felt as though he were being burned with ice.

Jarn was barely cognizant of what happened around him, only that the deck filled with the sound of boots and voices. When he did finally come to some sort of conscious state, it was to find himself being loaded onto a stretcher. The child, his child, placed in the crook of his good arm at his own delirious command.

The freezing agony had deadened his right hand and was spreading, creeping fresh pain up from flesh already lost to the Crone’s cursed touch. He risked a look at the injury and just as quickly screwed his eyes shut, though he knew the blackened rot of his arm would forever be etched in his mind.

Not all the voices he heard were the murmur of his men. Already the howling, echoing laughter of Nirem’s Wind began to surround the landbarge as it rolled into the chaos storm, the ever-moving realm of the Mad God.

“Mira,” he croaked. “Does she live?”

He wasn’t sure if anyone answered before a wave of fresh torment plunged Jarn into blackness.

Gulga region of northern Xaidra. The Godless Wastes.

Nirem’s Wind never ceased to fascinate Hara.

She knew its origin, knew it was the manifestation of the Mad God’s domain. Whatever strange, ancient force bound Xaidra to the Siblings allowed the chaos storm to exist, its movement across the world’s surface guided by Nirem’s insane whims. For a Faithful of Praetum the God of Knowledge, the genesis of this phenomenon was hardly worth studying. The only mystery in its existence lay in that same unanswerable enigma in which all Gods were shrouded.

No, it was what lived and moved within the chaos storm which enticed Hara and her colleagues. The reason they’d established this research outpost so far from the halls of the university of Myrr, in a Godless wasteland too close to the path of Nirem’s Wind for average denizens. The noise, the sight of the rushing black winds, and the fear, however unfounded, that the storm would branch out and obliterate a town were more than deterrent enough for the average Xaidran.

The chaos storm might have been created through God magic, but there was an ecosystem within Nirem’s ever-moving, transient wind. And Hara was determined to study and document every facet of it.

A flared pipe jutted from the rough plaster wall by her observation post. It fed out beyond the outpost’s walls, running beneath the rocky ground to its other end, where Gust waited to relay sound as clearly as if it were happening in this room.

The wind sprite was the most surprising bit of support given by the university of Myrr. Bonded sprites were valuable and extremely rare. The process of choosing the right chalice to seal the Elemental into, then of etching Godscript and sprite runes in exacting detail about the container were both difficult enough. After that came the real challenge. Getting a wild sprite into its new home. The whole ordeal was both difficult and dangerous enough to put a higher price on sprites than most goods.

The sale and use of captured sprites was also blasphemy. Banned by every Faith across the Pantheon. Only the Godless dealt in the contraband Elementals, people who relied on the power of sprites to supplement their lack of a God’s protection.

A wind sprite such as Gust would have thousands of uses for a thriving university, especially as the school at Myrr anticipated a vast expansion of its campus. Illegal or not, there must have been a more appropriate application to put the Elemental to. Yet Hara of all people had been entrusted with Gust’s chalice. A blessing from Praetum, a sign she was on the right path, seeking the right knowledge in adherence to her Faith.

Or was this a sign from another, unknown God? A trick of Nirem, a turn of luck from Fortunia, an omen from Vortis?

Theology, she thought with disdain. Hara was a biologist with a penchant for behavioral science. Let the Godscript students worry about interpreting the will of the Siblings. Hara was here to study the storm, and what lived within it.

Whispers of inane babble hissed from the windspeaker, accompanied by the howl of the winds themselves. Each sound carried through the windspeaker’s pipe by the sprite.

Imagine if a machine could do this, how far we could go. Hara often imagined a world where scholars could speak to one another across infinite distances, relay information from all corners of Xaidra with ease. Such a world would surely be a paradise, a realm of understanding and growth, unfettered by the barriers of titanmounts or oceans.

As it was, even the wind sprite could only reliably work for a few miles. Three miles away, deep in the roiling blackness of the rushing chaos storm, the sprite captured the cadence of a different world.

“Shiny lungs, shiny spleen, shiny shiny between my teeth!”

Hara jotted the words down in her own encrypted shorthand as she heard them. This kind of gibberish was common, though despite what sensationalists might say the speech of the chaos storm was not always violent. Hara was not certain the gory rantings were even malicious in their intent. The voices sounded almost human and spoke invariably in human speech. Yet they had a hollow, echoing quality which the professors at Myrr assured Hara was not an artifact of the windspeaker or the sprite.

Hara was convinced the voices did not derive from human consciousness at all. Rather that whatever sentience or facsimile of one lived in the storm was trying to contextualize human thoughts, to take the random errant words and images and string them together, rebuild them into something the entity or entities recognized. Which left the question, where did the chaos voices get those words and images to begin with?

Hara turned the cylinder of her telescope, wishing Gust could dispel the blackness of Nirem’s Wind. A vain desire. Sprites were as susceptible to the corrupting power of the Mad God as anything else if exposed to the storm for long enough. A mad sprite was no laughing matter. A force of elemental magic gone rogue could wreak havoc, cause untold destruction.

Knowing this made Hara question the viability of their outpost’s second purpose. Many of her colleagues here thanked the university’s paranoia for the granted resources more than any compelling argument on the part of the researchers. Paranoia born of rumors from the Godless countryside.

Rumors claimed that the disciples of War were on a campaign of conquest, even using the chaos storms to move their giant landbarges from settlement to settlement, raiding and enslaving as they went.

Hara always rolled her eyes when she heard these stories. Whatever had happened to Belkas twenty years ago, a year before Hara’s birth, was another thing for the theologians to ponder. Enough was known about the Belkans that the War God’s disappearance was at least considered real. Belkas’s red moon was dim even now, in the first year of its ascent in two decades.

Whether through some machinations among the Siblings or to spite his own Faithful, the War God had vanished, leaving his people to wander Xaidra without Faith to give them purpose. That first year since the fading of the red moon had been a time of great change not just among the Belkans but, according to Hara's mother, across all of Xaidra. Warriors bled into settlements by the hundreds, many even attempting to convert to Faiths they were not born to. Hoping if they planted enough crops, loved enough lovers, or studied enough scrolls that they would be favored by another deity. It was rare, but such conversions could happen.

The prophecies of the Fates were open to interpretation. Before their own vanishing act, the Crones would proclaim the Faith of a newborn. But foretelling what God a child was born to did not set in stone what God that child would die following.

The diaspora had been an upset across Xaidra. Men and women who’d spent a lifetime training for warfare, often with children reared with spears in their little hands all struggling to adjust to lives as farmers and weavers. It was no wonder so many Belkans had devolved to bandits or sellswords.

Most Belkans clung to their Faith, following three War priests who had never disbanded their armies. Jarn One-Arm, Lani Trueshot, and Raishar the Branded. Three commanders who’d led their armies into wild territory and kept Belkan traditions, fighting one another in massive battles across northern Xaidra. A twenty-year campaign to subdue and unite the clans under one leader. The ruler of an army in exile from its own Faith.

Just more bandits putting on airs, Hara always thought. Godless in all but name.

But something about the rumors had aroused mutterings in Myrr, lit a fire under the backsides of those who ran the university, though the professors claimed the concern trickled from the Harbingers themselves. Could they actually believe the tall tales floating among travelers? That roving Belkan raiders had taken to sailing the chaos storms, risking madness for the chance to ambush unwary settlements? It was preposterous, impossible. But if fear gave Hara the chance to study Nirem’s Wind in comfort, she was glad for the stories. Maybe she would invent a few tales of her own and keep the trend going.

Hara adjusted the telescope again. Her eyes were tired from a long night poring over scrolls, books and notes by candlelight. She wished the university’s heresy had gone so far as to supply a lightning sprite for those important hours after the Daymoon dipped behind Xaidra’s edge. Not that that would help her cramped writing hand, which felt the long hours of work all the more.

Hara blinked. What was that?

She rubbed her eye, certain she’d seen a break in the rushing darkness of the chaos storm, so fleeting she could not be sure it wasn’t a trick of her exhausted vision. Sometimes a chaos wraith could be glimpsed in an active storm. That was always an exciting event, as their only other exposure to the creatures was scavenging for their bodies after the Wind’s passing.

Hara still remembered the way the compound had buzzed when they found a wraith that was not quite dead. That day was when they became certain, or nearly certain, that the voices of the chaos storm did not belong to the twisted creatures. One half-dead monster had answered centuries-old questions pertaining to the nature of a God’s domain. And had it been found by the theologians?

Hara thought not.

As fast as the shape flitted into view, it was gone in the rushing nothingness of the storm. A trick of pre-dawn light against the cloudy edge of the opaque winds.

Still, Hara pulled herself from the telescope, hand seeking her nub of charcoal to sketch out the shape she thought she had seen. A pale speck against the dingy, muted tone of the chaos storm. Too vague and too fleeting to even hope to ascribe a recognizable form to it. Hara would try all the same.

She began to sketch, her hand moving along the cheap paper as though with a will of its own. Like all devoted scholars in Praetum’s Faith, she’d learned to memorize details on an instinctual level, to hold a clear and immediate picture of what she saw in her mind.

Her charcoal scratched away while the wind sprite continued to relay the howling storm and its cacophony of disembodied voices. That, and a strange combination of rumblings and squeaks. The sounds were almost mechanical to Hara’s ear.

She kept glancing back to the telescope as she finished the sketch, still only seeing the rushing wall of the black winds. What she wouldn’t give to capture an exact replica of what the eye saw, but despite theories using light to burn images to paper, no scholar had figured out a better way than the artist’s hand. A skill Hara had taken great pains to hone over her young years.

At last, the charcoal stopped scratching, and Hara held the sketch out toward her candles, little more than formless blobs of melted and re-melted wax fused to her table, their wicks the barest flickering nubs.

The shape in the drawing had uniform lines and slight curves that made it appear as though it was by design. It was also exceedingly large.

Like a building, she thought, knowing there was no structure there.

Or a ship . . .

The sprite’s relayed sound died with one last whistle of wind, one last whisper of the mad voices. Then, Hara found herself in complete silence. The chaos storm was over.

She bent to her telescope and looked out.

Belkas’s red Godmoon was in its ascent, a dark red orb, a dead object whose light was a fraction of what it should have been. Hara waited for her candle-burned retinas to adjust to the dim light. When they did, she did not believe what she saw through the magnifying lens.

Arrayed along the path of Nirem’s storm, across the chaos-scoured strip of land that informally marked the western border of the outpost, sat three Belkan landbarges.

Except they weren’t the behemoths of wood Hara had heard about.

“Gust,” she cried. “Gust, answer me!”

A whistling breeze came from the windspeaker in her wall, rustling her papers.

“Sound the alarm.” Hara bolted upright, knocking her chair over behind her. Her inkpot toppled, staining her notes and sketches black. “We’re under att—”

A short cry sounded along one of the compound walls and was quickly stifled. Flashes of orange light against wooden observation posts flickered, casting confused shadows. Feet in soft shoes slapped about on wooden flooring. The compound was waking up.

Gust blew from the room, his unseen force opening a window pane. Moments later, the alarm bell clanged to life.

Hara bent to the telescope again, straining her eye. What was on those barges? The wood, if it was wood, had been draped in something dark and misshapen, creating confused forms replete with spikes and sweeping shapes no vessel would have. It was when she focused the lens with a shaking hand and saw the large skull mounted on the prow of the middle barge that it became clear.

This is how they’ve used the storms. How they’ve survived Nirem’s Wind. The stories were true, yet they’d all failed to mention how the Belkans achieved this. They were shielding their barges with the flesh of dead chaos wraiths.

Gong. Gong. Gong, went the alarm bell. It was hardly necessary. People were rousing throughout the compound, their shouts filling the courtyard, their feet hammering the floors. Right now scholars, students who had never so much as been in a fist fight outside an exercise ground, were collecting crossbows and spears which had never seen use in battle. A few dozen students arming themselves against what had to be at least a thousand Belkan warriors, men and women literally born and raised for combat. Hara knew which side her coins would be on, were she a disciple of Fortunia.

She needed to get out of here with Gust.

My research… Under her bunk in the women’s quarters sat a trunk filled with her journals and samples. Years of work.

The alarm bell rang a few times more and went silent. A rush of wind told Hara that Gust was back.

“We need to go,” Hara hissed. She twisted the cap on the end of Gust’s chalice, a ceramic flute etched in intricate Godscript, the language of the Siblings themselves. The inscriptions spelled out commands which bound the sprite within, told the Elemental that this was where it belonged and whoever held the flute was its master. A piece of theological trickery, using the language of the Gods to convince sprites that the rule of mere humans was in fact something divine. Etched bold across the cap at the top of the flute, surrounded by a circle of Godscript, a wind sprite crest completed the seal:

The chalice whistled as Gust entered it. Hara screwed the cap back on and tucked the flute into her belt. This done, she pressed her ear to the door of the observation room. She heard the slap of sandals and bare feet on wood, the rattle of crossbow bolts in quivers. She cracked the door open.

A man looked her way just long enough to lose his footing in his mad dash down the hall. He sprawled to the floor in a heap, his crossbow skidding away from him.

Hara bent to help the man up. It was Delad, an incorrigible geology scholar there to study the nature of rock sediment on the titanmounts. He’d uncovered some interesting fossils a month or two back which had set the entire compound astir and had even riled enough excitement from academic journals in Myrr to earn their group an extension on their stipend.

“Hara.” He squeezed her hand between his. “You have to hide yourself quickly. It isn’t safe.” Hara had always suspected the geologist was sweet for her, and the pressure of his hands all but confirmed it.

“The barges, I know.” She pulled her hand free and scooped Delad’s crossbow from the floor. “Hiding won’t do. We need to leave before the Belkans get here.”

“That’s just it, Hara.” Delad’s eyes widened. “They’re already inside.”

“What? How?” The chaos storm had only just passed.

“They brought some kind of monster with them. Set it loose on us ahead of the barges.”

Hara opened her mouth to ask for more details, but was interjected by a cry from the other end of the hall behind her. She and Delad looked that way and quickly averted their eyes when a flash of bright fire engulfed the opening.

“Go!” Delad shoved himself in front of Hara, clumsily stringing his crossbow. “Get word to Myrr. The Harbingers must know about this. They’ll have to send help.”

“But what will happen to all of y—”

“Go, Hara!”

Delad took off in the direction the fire had come from. Hara had always been uncomfortable with his stares and awkward compliments. To see how unflinchingly he ran toward danger struck her with a newfound and unexpected respect for the young man.

Hara turned and trotted for her rooms around the next bend in the hexagonal compound. Panicked shouts and the whoosh of flames followed her. Forty-two souls in confused panic, scrambling around in the dark as they were hunted by . . . what? Delad had said something about a monster. Hara wasn’t sure about that, but something had produced those flames. A new Belkan weapon, perhaps?

It doesn’t matter what they’re using. Hara felt along the corridors, all but blind without the candle she’d foolishly left behind in her rush. What matters is that we are under attack.

The hall and its doorways revealed themselves to Hara in brief flashes of firelight from the viewports on her left. Whatever was wreaking havoc here was getting around fast. A monster. That was what Delad said. Whatever manner of assailant was here, there had to be more than one of it.

People cried out, their shouts followed by the thwack of crossbow bolts being let loose. Many of these cries cut short as their source was struck down. Hara had horrifying visions of Delad and her other colleagues left incinerated, their forms nothing more than blackened skeletons curled among the garden boxes of the courtyard, all while she ran for a few papers. They would understand. They were scholars, Faithful to Praetum. Most if not all would do the same, in her position.

Nerves had nearly left her legs immobile by the time Hara took her last shaky step to her unassuming doorway. She fumbled her key ring from the pouch at her waist and unlocked the door. The bunks inside were empty. Her bunkmates had also been on night watch, taking their own notes of Nirem’s Wind and the terrain from the wooden battlements of the compound walls. Were they already dead?

Something thudded behind Hara, making her jump. She turned, but of course could see nothing. The chaos and violence was all outside for the moment. She’d have her chance to leave via the small east gate if it stayed that way. The passage was only accessible from inside the compound walls.

She yanked the trunk from under her bed, wincing at the scrape of the heavy chest’s metal bindings against rough wood. Of course, no one was likely to hear that amid the din.

She selected the key to the chest from her ring. Theft of valuables was not a concern among them, but one never knew when a rival might want to pilfer notes or samples in order to get their piece published ahead of a peer. It was both the worst and best part of having multiple students pursuing the same subjects in close proximity. They might be overzealous in their desire to be first, but that competition could and often did lead to discoveries which might otherwise not have been made.

The hinges creaked when Hara opened the chest. By the faint light of the starpath filtering through the small window, she gazed upon the most precious belongings she owned. The only possessions she really owned since her clothes, boots, and even her toothbrush were technically loans from the university of Myrr.

Scrolls banded in wooden sleeves, books of cloth and leather, glass inkpots and soft rolls of pens, pencils and charcoal sticks. Almost all of the paper and parchment was covered in her sketches and handwriting, the culmination of a lifetime of study going back to when she’d first learned her letters and scripts sixteen years ago. She was nineteen now, and all she had, all she needed, was in this trunk. And she could not take it all with her. Not if she wanted to escape whatever fate the Belkans had in mind for the outpost.

Hara dove in, pulling out books and scrolls. Her nose filled with the smells of old parchment and dry ink. Aromas as comforting as the sound of rustling paper. Savoring familiar comforts she knew would soon be gone, Hara started placing them aside in neat rows, stroking book spines and pages, the cool glass of ink bottles with the assorted colors of their contents glittering like exotic jewels in the ghostly luminescence of the Godmoons. A muffled scream sent a jolt through Hara. The bottle of red ink she’d been holding toppled out of her hand to crack and spill onto the wooden floor. More cries, more thuds of bodies and arrows hitting walls.

Hara tossed papers and books, tearing through the trunk’s contents with no further regard for the careful order she’d placed them in. Only one item mattered. The one object she could never bring herself to leave behind.

At last she felt what she was seeking. Hara’s hand came out of the trunk clutching a notebook. Its creased cover of waxed paper was cracked and peeling, its edges bent and torn. The pages within were browned pulp. A cheap thing worth less than a clipped copper at a Myrian bookseller even new. Worthless in this condition. Hara flipped the pages with reverent care, smiling to herself. All blank. No one would want to take this even for academic purposes unless they guessed her technique. Here it was, the book in which her most important findings and conclusions were inscribed and updated in an invisible ink she’d devised herself, detectable under a specific shade of tinted glass. If Hara made it out of here with nothing else, she would at least have this.

She stuffed the notebook into her belt pouch and crept on her knees to her bunk, where her satchel hung on a hook above the thin mattress. She’d pack a few more valued tomes, then make for the east gate.

Her movement knocked over a precarious pile she’d made while searching the chest. Another inkpot pinged against the floor, loud enough to make her catch her breath.

The inkpot rolled against hard planks. Hara heard every centimeter it crossed. What was it about that which filled her with such dread?

Hara realized the answer when the bottle stopped rolling. She knelt in complete silence. The shouting, the crossbows, the thuds and grunts of the fighting were all gone, replaced with a heavy, dead quiet.

A quiet soon broken by the steady tread of feet just outside Hara’s open door.

She scooted back, hands searching the dark for a weapon, anything she might use to defend herself. Her gaze was fixed on the black rectangle of the doorway, on the darkness the sliver of purple sky from the window could not elucidate.

The footsteps continued for interminable seconds. Unhurried, unconcerned. Hara could not see into the corridor, but she felt the difference when the walker stepped before the door, heard the difference as they passed the wall into her blind line of sight. There, the footsteps stopped.

Hara felt the silent pressure of the walker, felt the figure’s eyes on her. But she could not see them yet.

“Wh-who’s there?” Staying silent would do her no good. Her visitor was shrouded in blackness while Hara knelt in the light of the stars, a perfect silhouette in their luminescence.

There was no answer for a moment. Hara began to think she could make out a shape in the maw of her doorway, imagined that a head tilted to regard her.

“Please, step out here with me.” The voice was calm, male, and entirely alien to her. She didn’t know all of her fellow students that well, but Hara would bet every copper she had that this was not one of them.

“And w-where would I be going?” As she spoke, Hara fumbled in her pouch. She winced as her finger pricked against what passed for a knife among her possessions, a tiny wedge of sharpened metal for shaving the end of a quill. She gripped this between her fingers, then closed her hand on the cool cylinder of Gust’s chalice. Wind sprites weren’t much for fighting, and certainly not a lesser Elemental like this. But knowing she had someone with her, human or not, made Hara feel a bit better in the face of this unseen assailant.

Again, that imagined head tilt. “To join your friends, of course.”

It was the worst thing Hara could hear. She was going to die, her body piled with those of her colleagues to be burned or buried in a mass grave.

Panicked adrenaline took hold, spurred her to her feet. She brought Gust’s flute before her with an animal cry, twisted and yanked the cap off. “GUST, ATTACK!”

The sprite whistled free with a cool breeze, shifting sheets of paper about in a pale tornado. That breeze turned, though. Hara felt its touch against her cheek, heard the creak of a window hinge. Gust had abandoned her.

Hara heard the shuffle of the figure’s feet. A scream tore from her unlike anything she’d heard outside of a chaos storm. She hurled the empty flute at the unseen figure and rushed at him, spurred by mortal terror, not bravery. The quill knife came up in her hand, poised to stab. She’d puncture his throat, take out an eye. Anything.

In a sudden flash, Hara was blind.

She stumbled back, raising a hand to shield her face. Intense heat scalded her. Hara blinked rapidly but could not dispel the brightness which had overtaken her vision. Terror began to take hold that her eyes had been burned out.

Shapes began to form within moments, proving otherwise.

Hara yelled and the knife fell from her hand, the metal too hot to handle.

Two figures stepped into her dormitory.

“My my, Kael. This little mouse got closer to taking you out than all the others combined. And here I thought you’d trained for this sort of thing.” The voice was perfectly articulate, yet impossible. There were no vocal chords in the shape wreathed of living flame, only fluttering inflections of blue fire within a part analogous to a throat, flaring and shrinking with each syllable.

It looked as if a child had drawn a wavy stick figure, then set it on fire. A burning man trying to stand and walk without bones, whooshing limbs of flame flapping about. Bright orange splotches outlined lopsided eyes and a toothless, lipless mouth that moved in time with fluttering intonations, a voice like the soft roar of a well-fed fireplace. Nubs of fire which served for the being's feet stood in growing circles of blackened wood as its heat singed the floor, sending pungent smoke weaving about it.

The thing leaned forward as though to stare at Hara with those orange coals. “Say, is that paper I smell on you?”

It was a fire sprite. A sprite was talking to her.

“Time enough for that later, Flint,” said the other being. “Or are you going to fleece the entire compound for a snack?”

The Elemental scoffed, a crackling that sent tiny embers flying to burn holes in Hara’s bedsheets. “I would not need to if you didn’t starve me so, but she’s got a good morsel on her, I can smell it.” The sprite held out a flaming hand. “If you would not mind feeding a poor sprite, I would be in your debt. Let’s have a look.”

“I-I . . .” Hara stammered as she pulled her precious notebook from her pouch, holding it out in a shaking hand. She wanted to point out that there was paper all over the dormitory, that this sprite, this ‘Flint’ could ‘eat’ his fill. But she was too dumbfounded to try debating with a talking sprite. Not even wind sprites could talk except in mimicry of something their master wanted relayed. They were elemental ghosts, manifestations of nature, not conscious, self-aware individuals. At least that was the prevailing wisdom regarding sprites. This turned so much traditional knowledge on its head, undermined everything Praetum’s Faithful or anyone else knew about sprites. It might even call into question the intrinsic nature of the elements sprites coalesced from to begin with.

And it did not hold a candle against the alien nature of the creature Flint walked in with.

This was no incorporeal spirit. It walked on two legs, had two arms, a head, eyes, nose, ears and mouth. All made of physical flesh in the shape of a man.

But it was not human.

It stepped around the fire sprite, causing the living flame’s glow to shine against it, revealing more ghastly details. Hara had to squint and focus through her surreal, nightmarish fugue to parse details. She soon realized that some of the creature’s more hideous characteristics belonged only to its cloak, a thing of skins and scales in various drab colors stitched together, still festooned with the twisted protrusions, spikes and boils of the monsters the material had been stripped from. The creature was wearing a cloak sewn from the hides of chaos wraiths.

The bare feet that poked from under the uneven edge of the cloak had only three large toes apiece, each ending in a black talon that clicked softly as the creature paced. A long red tail flicked from beneath the cloak. Two long, curved horns curled back from the top of the creature’s brow, the shining obsidian of their material broken in overlapping ridges. Long black hair hung limply to frame a thin, angular face.

A face which, like all of the creature’s skin, was blood red.

The creature walked a small half-circle around the fire sprite, its red feet avoiding the smoking wood as though by habit. He carried a staff that thudded against the floor with each pacing step. Not a staff, Hara corrected herself. It was a spear, with a worn nub of broken wood and a leather binding where the blade had once been.

The creature which the sprite had called Kael plucked Hara’s notebook from her limp hand and flipped through it, staring at the pages with a dispassionate, faraway gaze.

“Blue,” Hara whispered to herself.

“Hm?” Kael raised a brow at her.

“Your eyes,” she mumbled. “They’re blue, they look…” she trailed off, leaving the word ‘human’ unsaid. The last thing she wanted was to anger the creature. Or could this Kael be a man after all? Some kind of advanced deformity? Part of Hara, the part bound to her Faith, wanted nothing more than to snatch her book back, grab a charcoal nub, and sketch this anomaly to add to her notes and research.

Other than one wincing glance, Kael barely looked at her. The horned creature flipped through the rest of her secret notebook and blew a breath through his nose. “Here you go, Flint.” He tossed the book to the fire sprite.

Hara gasped and started forward, but it was too late. Flint snatched the notebook out of the air with a whip of flame that brought the flapping bundle of pulp to the fire sprite’s glowing face.

She remembered the first thing she wrote in those yellowed pages, the glint of the freshly-inked words and symbols in her candlelight, transparent but for when Hara looked through her special glass and saw each line in purple against a green tint. It had been an old Godscript lexicon, a copied fragment of a copied fragment from deep in the university library, a tome so eaten by mold it was unlikely to ever be salvaged. A different language, written in the same symbols with which sprites were bonded and sacred objects anointed. The implication that even the Gods might have different dialects and what that could mean about life, Faith, and the voracity of the Pantheon Scriptures had been a revelation to her.

She had had many more such revelations, tidbits of knowledge none of her peers seemed to have gleaned. Fossil patterns from titanmount samples ignored as mere rocks by the geologists. Verses in ancient caves and upon titanmount cliffs so worn away by time and wind that even the theologians ignored it, only for Hara to quietly figure out how the broken pieces of the written puzzle came together. Drawings of chaos wraiths in all manner of shapes and forms, quotes from the voices of Nirem’s Wind that spoke of a higher intelligence than anyone gave the disembodied rantings credit for.

There was a flare of brighter fire as the gash of the sprite’s mouth consumed the book whole. Hara got a brief look at her life’s work blackening and curling before it was swallowed by living fire, leaving only the acrid smell of its consumption to join the sickly sweet fumes of scorched floorboards filling the room.

Brighter fire moved down the sprite’s body and spread out, until Flint’s flickering light increased by a fraction across his whole body.

“Much obliged,” said the sprite in his whooshing, fluttering voice. “A whole fortress made of kindling, and this red boy won’t let me have so much as a ceiling beam. Can you believe that?”

All at once the entire ordeal overtook Hara. Minutes ago she’d been having a normal night in the observation room, taking mundane notes, collecting humdrum details that changed at glacial paces if at all. Now she was perhaps the only survivor of an an attack by a fire sprite and a horned red man with a tail. The Belkan army was approaching from where they had blown in from Nirem’s Wind like chaos wraiths on wheels. On top of all these impossibilities, the research Hara had compiled and kept safe for her entire scholarly life had just been swallowed by sentient flame, an intelligent sprite who was already eyeing the rest of the papers in her dormitory with hungry, glowing orbs and a toothless grin of orange fire.

Her eyes fluttered closed, then her knees gave way. She did not feel herself hit the floor. The last thing she remembered before unconsciousness took her were the voices of her unlikely assailants.

“Frightened another one, Kael. Maybe you should file those antlers down?”

“I don’t think it was me this time, you flaming glut.”

“You could at least tuck in the tail. Say, think she’ll be needing the rest of this paper?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Kael replied.

Hara drifted away with a sensation of weightlessness as though she were being lifted.

“They won’t let her keep any of it. Eat up.”

“Hara? Hara!” a high, nasally voice repeated her name. “By the Siblings, if these forsaken beasts hurt you I’ll— you’re awake!”

Her bleary eyes opened to an all-too-bright sky. Hara blinked to dispel the blurriness, bringing an ink-stained hand up to shield her face. A shadow moved to block the light.

Delad leaned over her with an expression equal parts relief and worry. By the shade of violet above, the Daymoon had just crested Xaidra’s edge, its light overtaking that of the Godmoons and the shimmering trail of the starpath between them. Only the rust-colored, dark circle of Belkas’s moon could be clearly seen, hovering at its zenith in this, its year of ascent.

Hara blinked again and focused on Delad. She thought he’d been killed the night before, engulfed in the fire sprite’s inferno. There was an angry red splotch on Delad’s right cheek and it was clear some pale hair had been singed away near his temple. A dark bruise was spreading on his left brow and, by his congested voice, Hara would guess his nose had been broken. He’d been struck down, that was for certain. Beaten, but not killed.

“What happened? Where are we?” Hara’s mouth was dry, each word feeling as though she were forcing it through wadded cotton.

“Here, drink.” Delad lifted a waterskin to her lips. “That horned demon took our weapons, the ones he didn’t let his pet sprite burn, but he left us all water.”

Hara drank gratefully. “Us . . .” She wiped her mouth with a dusty sleeve. It seemed she’d been lying on the dirt floor of the courtyard all night and her back felt it. The garden boxes had been pushed aside to the outpost’s inner walls, leaving a cleared space where other students lied or sat. What looked like the entire outpost was gathered here. Many were just waking to the Daymoon’s glare, others held bandaged heads in their hands as they whispered to whoever was closest to them.

The scholars had been corralled into two groups, leaving a roughly-defined path through the center of the courtyard. Hara did a rough head count. “Everyone’s here,” she said.

Delad voiced agreement, glancing about in turn. “The creature wants to deliver us to the Belkan head collectors, I suppose.”

Hara’s throat tightened. A lifetime of slavery turning the crank on a landbarge’s wheels, breaking her back in hard labor. It flashed into her mind, all too vivid, all too inevitable.

The sound of the west gate called her attention. Pulleys squealed and gears clacked as none other than Kael himself pushed a lever that normally took three men to even budge. It was remarkable just how small of frame he was in the full light of day. The tall, imposing demon of her living nightmare was gone. The red creature was still the horned abomination who’d fed her notebook to a fire sprite, from his cloak of chaos wraith hides to his pointed tail, but he was no seven-foot monstrosity. Yet he’d carried Hara and others here, moved the garden boxes, and was now opening the gate, all by himself.

“I still say it’s impossible,” Delad murmured.

“Well, he is clearly strong,” Hara replied. But Delad wasn’t looking at Kael.

The fire sprite sauntered in front of the group opposite Hara’s, his fluttering limbs of fire flailing bonelessly in nonsensical directions.

“It talks,” Delad hissed. “It thinks.”

Hara nodded without taking her eyes from the sprite. The courtyard was full of the hushed conversations of scholars squatting on the dirt. Some had their hands tied behind their backs with rope. Presumably these had been the ones not adequately cowed by Kael and Flint’s night assault. Her hands were free, and their attackers had even let people keep waterskins.

“Papers!” Flint barked, putting a strange, thick accent into the flickering whoosh of his voice. The sprite bent over a bespectacled young man named Jon who cowered back from Flint’s heat. Hara saw that the fire sprite had grown brighter and taller since last night, fed on the wood and paper of her peers’ belongings. His floppy humanoid form took on characteristics of a uniform, with flame forming the shape of a squared hat and a rigid coat.

Jon fumbled a little book from his tunic which Flint grabbed up and incinerated the same as he’d done to Hara’s notes.

Her gut clenched, remembering the loss. If they all made it out of here free, that would still be a devastation to haunt her for years. But they weren’t going to be freed. The squeak of the opening gate as Kael pushed the crank guaranteed that.

Flint continued down the line, his flaming feet performing a flapping imitation of a soldier’s march. A wavy spear of fire grew from the sprite’s hand, and the strange hat of fire morphed into the shape of a plumed helmet to compliment the act.

They took our weapons, but didn’t search us for everything. Hara’s pouch was still at her belt.

Everyone whispered who could, speculating on what would befall them or hypothesizing a way out. Delad did much the same, but Hara found nothing feasible in his suggestions and tuned his voice out. By the scorched ring of blackened earth around them all, Flint had demonstrated the futility of trying to run. He took on a humanoid form, but unlike people the sprite was not limited in his senses. Eyes in the back of his head was an understatement. A sprite was all eyes, all ears. An elemental ghost, an ethereal, ancient being unbound by a physical form. What hope could any of them have? Only one of Flint’s own kind, a sprite could have any hope of . . .

Hara hissed between her teeth to stifle an excited sound and rummaged about herself.

“What is it?” Delad asked. “What are you thinking?”

Her hand brushed across bits of charcoal, scraps of paper, a handkerchief for wiping ink from quill nibs. What Hara did not feel was the cool cylinder of Gust’s chalice.

That’s right. She remembered now. Remembered opening the flute, remembered the breeze of Gust’s passing as the wind sprite abandoned her to her fate and fled out the dormitory window. Hara had thrown the ceramic flute at Kael after that to no effect.

The gate continued to clank, nearly open now. Beyond, the forward-facing prows of the Belkan barges grew incrementally larger as they lumbered toward the compound.

Kael bent to his task, pushing the rungs of the crank wheel one after the other, breathing heavily through puffing cheeks as perspiration glinted visibly on his red brow. Hara noticed this, and the tip of his right horn which ended in a jagged, blunted end where the point had broken off. She took relief in these observations. The creature was mortal, not some God-wrought, invincible entity. With that came a piqued interest, a scholar’s need to know more. Where did this strange man come from, and why did he look like this? In all of Hara’s biological study of chaos wraiths and other creatures across known Xaidra, this Kael was perhaps the most unique specimen she’d ever seen, stranger even than the enigmatic, feathered sky dwellers known as skrag.

Kael pushed the crank with a grunt, and a shift of his chaos wraith cloak showed an earthenware jug tied to his belt, heavily versed in Godscript. Flint’s container. For all the talking fire sprite’s perplexities, he was still bound to the limitations of his species. That, too, came as a relief.

Gust’s flute dangled beside the jug.

Are you in there, Gust? Hara wondered how long her wind sprite could be away from its chalice. How far could it go before the inscriptions on the cylinder pulled it back into its bonded vessel? The illicit nature of sprite taming among Faithful made that question hard to answer. Another gap in experimentation and documentation Hara could blame on theology. In any case, the wind sprite could not help her now.

Flint spun about in a whoosh of flame, his glowing eyes fixing on her past the rows of her peers. “What have you got there?” the sprite demanded.

“N-nothing,” Hara answered, her voice small and weak from her parched throat.

Flint’s humanoid form collapsed as though turned to jelly in an instant. The fire sped in a formless mass toward Hara as other scholars screamed and dove for cover.

Flint shot up in front of her, taking the form of a winged creature with a long snout, its outstretched wings of fire spanning six feet apiece as narrow eyes flickered their fiery gaze down at her.

A strand of dark hair blew across Hara’s vision from the wave of heat that wafted over her, intense enough to create a ripple in the air. She squinted through the blaze, trying not to wince back from the fire’s crackling a mere two or three feet away.

A tendril of fire flicked out and burned through her belt, dislodging it and the pouch which hung from it. The sharp stench of burnt leather hit her as the fire sprite brought the scorched parcel toward itself. She felt the spot at her hip where the fire had grazed just short of burning her and felt scorched cotton disintegrate between her fingers. This had been her favorite tunic.

Flint turned back into his humanoid form, the pouch held in his facsimile of a hand, dangling above his false face as he made a show of studying the meager contents. He shook the burning pouch upside down, casually grabbing bits of paper from the air as they fell with tiny whips of flame. Like a dog lapping up crumbs.

“Hmph.” Flint tossed the empty and ruined pouch aside. “You humans hold onto the strangest things.” He flapped away on his boneless legs of fire. Hara hung her head. No weapons, no Gust. No hope.

The gate finished opening with a booming retort. Kael fell back on his rear, sweat plastering his black hair to his face, his breathing audibly heavy.

“I’m relieved to see the monster isn’t invincible,” said Garan, a wide-faced physicist squatting behind her and Delad. His sentiments echoed Hara’s thoughts from earlier. “I just wish he’d shown that kind of vulnerability while he was waylaying the entire outpost.” Of all Hara’s peers here, the heavyset scholar was the most interested in affairs of military history, taking keen interest in the violence wrought by Nirem’s Wind when it affected human behavior.

“How’d he get everyone here?” Hara asked. “Strong or not, he’s not omniscient. Someone should have been able to escape him and the fire sprite.” She wished she had. “And how’d they do it without killing anyone?” For she saw that even among the injured there were no corpses. Those who had been unconscious were beginning to wake up to the ministrations of their neighbors.

Garan adjusted himself where he sat, his hands bound behind him with rope. “The sprite blocked people’s exits and distracted those of us who fought,” he explained. “The ones it didn’t half-blind, it scared into groups. But that horned thing was what dealt the real blows.”

“You call it a thing. Delad called it a monster. But are we sure it isn’t just a deformed man?” Hara asked.

Garan let out a dry chuckle. “Men can’t move the way it did. The way it leapt about, the way it flipped and dodged. I haven’t seen or even read about any man moving like that, let alone pushing open a thousand-pound gate.”

“A Harbinger could,” Delad mumbled with something in his voice approaching awe.

Garan scoffed. “The Belkans have one Harbinger, same as any Faith, and I think we’d know if he had red skin and horns.”

Hara continued to watch Kael as Garan talked. Something caught her eye above the open gate. A white bedsheet tied to the flag pole, replacing the banner of Praetum’s crest. Kael must have placed it there while Hara was unconscious, to tell the Belkans the outpost was ready for them.

The sheet rippled about, the wind that caught it so strong that for a moment it turned into a perfect, smooth-faced rectangle sticking out into open air. Except the wisps of cloud in the sky hung still. There was no wind.

Hara watched the flag ripple, then abruptly go limp. Gust had not returned to his chalice. Was he trying to signal her? Did the wind sprite even have the cognitive awareness to do so? Before today, before seeing and hearing Flint walk and talk like a person, Hara would have thought not. She wasn’t so sure anymore.

Rumble. Rumble. The sound reached her like a slow avalanche. Shadows touched the earthen threshold of the outpost entrance. The Belkan landbarges were nearly upon the compound.

Kael leapt to his feet. “Flint,” he called.

“Must I?” sighed the fire sprite. “There’s so much left to burn.”

“Now, Flint.” The horned devil swung the clay jug in front of him. It hung from a strap of braided cloth, its stopper dangling from a leather cord.

Flint blew out a puff of bright sparks. “Alright, then.” The fire sprite dissolved into formless flame and shot toward the jug, condensing himself into a narrow tendril to fit into the chalice’s spout. The effect was that the jug appeared to be sucking fire into itself. When the last embers disappeared into the Godscript-etched container, Kael slipped a few slivers of wood into it and stuffed the cork back in place. This done, the red devil tucked the jug under his hideous wraithskin cloak and swept a look around the courtyard, fixing the kneeling and sitting scholars with his strangely human eyes. All the while, the rumbling wheels of the barges grew louder, their shadows encroaching further in.

“For your own goods, stay still, and stay quiet.” The horned creature’s tail scratch nervously in the dirt as he spoke. “Don’t give them any reason to hurt you and you’ll be fine.”

Hara saw shoulders relax a little around the courtyard at this promise. And why should they not feel relieved? This Kael and his sprite had not killed any of them, only inflicting minor wounds on the scholars who’d fought him in his effort to gather them here.

Herd us here, Hara corrected herself. Like cattle. And what tended to happen to livestock after they were penned in?

“Maybe they’ll ransom us back to the university,” whispered Delad. “Or better yet, they might not want us at all. They could just want the fort. It’ll be a long journey back to Myrr, but better than being slaves . . .”

Hara wanted to share in Delad’s optimism, but she was not assured by Kael’s statement. Whether it was the swishing of his tail or the way his hand fidgeted on the haft of his bladeless spear, Hara did not think the horned creature believed what he was saying.

‘Don’t give them a reason to hurt you and you’ll be fine.’ Kael did not sound sure when he said that. He sounded hopeful.

Rumble. Rumble. Rumble. Squeak. The wheels were slowing, grinding to a bare crawl, their shadows cutting a dusky line across the cleared space in the courtyard between the two groups of captive scholars.

Some inched their way backward, perhaps thinking of a last minute escape while many more-far too many in Hara’s opinion- seemed mollified by Kael’s statement.

Hara knew flight was a wasted effort. Kael and Flint had beaten them all into submission once and they could do it again. If they failed in that, the barge whose prow filled the open gate promised more assailants that would succeed.

Dust rolled in a thick haze between giant wheels which spewed rocks and other debris across the courtyard. Scholars flinched back and coughed, covering their faces. Above the outpost walls, rails draped in gray wraith hide and brimming with spikes and teeth loomed, crowded with the helmeted silhouettes of watchers on the deck. Belkan soldiers, Faithful to the War God. Fanatics to a vacant deity.

The barge’s wheels rumbled to a halt all at once, leaving a hush across the compound in their wake.

There was a creak and a clang beyond the walls, then the quick tread of boots. Kael stood and took position between the herds of men and women he had captured. The horned devil himself seemed the one subdued, his head down, arms slack at his sides. His broken spear stood grounded in the dirt beside him.

Warriors boiled in like a human wave. They spread out to either side, crossbows and spears at the ready, a blade or arrow trained on every Praetian soul.

Hara kept sill and forced herself to take in deep breaths as panic rose in her heart. A warm hand took hers, and she leaned against Delad. She’d never been interested in him the way he was in her. But in what could be her last moments as a free woman, perhaps her last moments alive, Delad’s familiarity came as an unexpected comfort.

Doors were kicked in with the crash of splintering wood as dozens upon dozens of Belkans rampaged through the halls and rooms of the octagonal outpost, scouring the structure for anyone who might be hiding. Their armor was not the shining steel plates of stories but somehow more impressive and more fearsome in its crudeness. Leather jerkins sewn with plates of dull and sometimes rust-spotted metal, dark chainmail with patches of brighter rings where new material had been woven in to fix tears from old injuries. Scabbards clattered against hardened leather skirting, short swords with worn grips and tarnished hilts hanging off some while most were armed with only a dagger in compliment to their spear or crossbow.

There were mud and dust stains, holes patched and sewn, and an overall impression of long use and decay in everything these men and women carried and wore. This was not just their clothing and equipment, however. The weariness was in their bodies, their hard-bitten faces and remorseless eyes, as though they had all been on one great long trek, a famished slog through inhospitable lands. Kael had terrified Hara because he looked so alien, appeared other than human. These Belkans were all too human, and that scared her even more.

Hara observed knee-high boots with holes worn into the toes and thought of an army of paupers, a legion of beggars riding the erratic tides of Nirem’s Wind from one potential oasis to another. But that imagery did not quit fit. These warriors were not here to beg.

Bandits, she thought. That’s what the servants of War have become.

Kael remained fixed in place throughout all this activity. That may have had something to do with the dozen crossbows pointed at him. The Belkans had surrounded him on sight and put the horned man under guard. By the stern expressions Hara could see in the shadows of their helmets, they recognized this creature. Recognized him, and were not pleased to find him here.

Kael lifted his head, a defiant coolness plastered across his face. His mouth twisted in nervous, nearly imperceptible movements, however, and the knuckles of the fists he clenched at his sides were a paler red than the deep crimson of his skin.

A middle-aged woman with prematurely gray hair sneered at him with particular vehemence. The expression exacerbated the black scar which marred her left cheek. Hara had never seen such an injury before. It was the scarred woman’s gaze Kael seemed the most intent on defying.

It was not nervousness, Hara realized, but rage undermining the horned devil’s calm mask.

“I’m right here, Eivna,” Kael said, breaking the bubble of silence which shrouded the courtyard. “Why not do what you want to do before your master comes and stops you?”

Eivna spat. “Jarn will dispatch with you himself, creature. You’ve gone too far this time. Might have lived, had you smartened up and stayed disappeared.”

Kael flicked his wraith cloak aside, ignoring the way the crossbowmen shifted in response. “I have a gift for Jarn,” he said. “This outpost, and the wind sprite it harbored. He can add it to his collection and these people,” he spread his hands to emphasize the captives around him. “Will make fine additions of their own. And none of you had to kill or die for any of it.”

Eivna threw up her head and laughed. Her comrades chuckled alongside her, their mockery filling the courtyard. “As if these book lovers would have been able to do anything against us. Might as well have snatched a toad and presented it as a prize.”

Kael’s mouth drew to a line, his jaw working. His tail flicked in the dust beneath him. “I trust you and Jarn to get your own toads.”

Eivna’s sneer was full of malicious glee. “I've more of an appetite for goat.”

More laughter, but this time Hara saw hands tighten on weapons, as though the soldiers thought this might evoke a violent reaction from Kael. Was goat an insult to him? Something about his horns?

Kael did not move, but continued to meet Eivna’s gaze, his incongruously blue eyes dead. There was old hurt there, Hara would bet on it. This taunt had been used before, often enough that the red devil anticipated it.

They knew each other, had a history. The horned boy had delivered this outpost to the Belkans and was clearly skilled in combat. So, what was the problem? Why did the soldiers teeter on the verge of turning Kael into a scrawny red pincushion at the slightest provocation?

What did it all mean?

A commotion began beyond the open gate, soldiers shoving themselves to either side, crowding away to clear room for a new procession.

Men and women snapped to salute as one body. Spear hafts cracked against shields and pauldrons. Boots thumped in place. It all unified into one bark of noise.

Hara caught her breath as the newcomers marched down the human causeway created for them. Spear-wielding footsoldiers in armor which was visibly better kempt than that of the men lining the courtyard flanked a man and woman in polished plate and mail, each with a red mantle pinned to their breastplates with fixings of gleaming bronze.

“Jarn One-Arm, the high priest of War,” said Garan in a low voice. “And his wife, Mira the Sickly.”

“I hear he has a different nickname,” said Delad.

“Be quiet,” a soldier hissed, punctuating the order with a jab of his spear butt to Garan’s stomach.

Garan doubled over with a dry heave. Hara kept her gaze averted from the soldier’s glare and watched him turn away out the corner of her eye. Her knees hurt, the hot gravel of the courtyard digging into her. She focused on Jarn’s procession, not daring to readjust.

The War priest was a man in his fifties, tall, strongly built, with shoulder-length black hair and striking blue eyes. His trimmed beard was speckled with gray. True to his title, Jarn was missing his right arm below the elbow.

Legends and rumors swirled about all three of the Belkan priests. Even those of the other Faiths could not help but be sucked into the tales, following the drama of distant raids and battles told and retold until they doubtless had nothing in common with the truth. None of the stories agreed on what had happened to Jarn’s right arm. Hacked off by a battle ax? Bitten by a Voidbeast or chaos wraith? Incinerated by a fire sprite wielded by one of his victims somewhere in the Godless lands? There was even one legend, surely false, that one of the Crones had done the deed. That somehow Jarn One-Arm was the reason no one had seen the Fates in twenty years. Ridiculous, but only as ridiculous as what Hara had already seen happen this past night. She studied the woman at Jarn’s side in turn.

Mira the Sickly looked anything but at first glance. The blonde warrioress was nearly as tall as her husband, with a strong, broad-shouldered frame that tapered to a narrow waist. There was power in her form that somehow managed not to detract from a femininity that even layers of armor could not fully conceal. The War priest’s wife held her head high in its gleaming helmet. It took a keener look, a woman’s searching gaze, to see the exhaustion taking its toll beneath Mira’s proud exterior, a tiredness which belied her years when all else would have her pass for a woman a decade younger.

The procession stopped at the edge of the circle of soldiers surrounding Kael. Eivna snapped a terse salute, gauntleted fist clacking against her breastplate as she turned aside to make way.

Mira broke off from her husband and stepped toward Kael, removing her helmet to let long golden curls flow about.

The horned devil started toward the War priest’s wife, but was waylaid by the raised spears around him, their points hemming him in.

About half of these soldiers were distracted a moment later, along with Jarn himself, when Mira wobbled and fell.

The War priest grabbed his wife about the waist and lifted her, propping Mira at his side. Her eyes fluttered and Hara could see the sweat beading her brow even from a dozen yards away.

Kael stepped forward a foot or two in the commotion.

The motion of Eivna’s gladius from its scabbard was too fast for the naked eye to see. One moment she was standing aside to clear the path for Jarn, the next she was blocking Kael, the point of her blade pressed against his neck.

She wants to kill him, Hara thought. She’s itching for any excuse. But why?

Kael remained still, looking past Eivna as though neither her nor her weapon existed. “She should be back on the barge, resting,” he said to Jarn. “There’s nothing to prove here. This place and these people belong to you now.”

Another round of laughter greeted this, only this time the mirth was sporadic and tinged with a palpable tension as other Belkans scowled and spat. Jarn was among those unamused.

Hara’s heart beat rapidly, her breaths shallow and desperate as her suspicions proved true. The red devil, the creature who’d captured them all, was not in control of the situation. Their attacker and captor had turned into their only hope, only to be cast in with them as just another prisoner. The fates of Hara and her colleagues were entirely in Jarn’s hand. And he seemed to be in anything but a generous mood.

Jarn barked a command for silence, shutting down the laughter in an instant.

A chair was brought from somewhere inside the compound walls for Mira. Once she was seated, her husband strode toward Kael, pushing Eivna’s sword aside with two mail-clad fingers.

Then, he struck the red devil across the mouth with the back of his gauntlet.

Jarn was a large man. Every Belkan Hara had seen so far was tall and solidly-built save for Kael. She imagined what a blow like that would do, how it would send her to the ground, probably knock her unconscious. The thwack of the blow filled the courtyard and seemed to echo, to linger in the air for an impossible stretch.

Kael’s chin turned with the strike, and the wad of spit he hocked out was tinted pink with blood. However, he kept his feet, his concerned gaze fixed on Mira

“You betrayed us all, betrayed your God and ran like a coward to escape rightful punishment.” Jarn did not need to raise his voice for it to carry. “Now you interfere and undermine our ways even further.”

“What’s betrayed? What’s undermined? F–”

A fist to Kael’s gut doubled him over.

Jarn grabbed the red devil by a curved horn and used it to throw Kael to the ground, where Eivna’s iron-clad boot pinned him by the side of his neck.

The soldiers were shifting in place now, a sense of excited anticipation growing.

“You will not escape judgment this time, creature,” Jarn said, his voice rising to a commanding boom. “This time, I will see your sentence carried out myself.”

“Search the beast.” Mira’s voice was a cool, clear sound that cut through the air.

Soldiers cut pouches loose as well as a leather rucksack. Lastly, they removed the sprite chalices from Kael’s belt.

“Bring them to me,” Mira commanded. “Let’s see what the treacherous abomination stole when he slunk away.”

Jarn shot his wife a quick, searching look, but did not challenge her request as one of his men dutifully carried the lot to her chair.

“Put it on its knees.” Jarn turned about with a sweep of his red cloak. A man from the War priest’s honor guard knelt before him, holding up a long, shining object upon the palms of his open hands. It was the largest sword Hara had ever seen, its blade straight and ending in a squared, blunted point.

“A headsman’s blade,” Garan whispered unhelpfully. “For executions.”

Kael was yanked off the dusty ground and forced to kneel, his horned head down, his red hands sunk into the dirt. All the fight seemed to have gone out of him. His tail drooped behind him like some dead thing.

Hara wondered how the creature could suddenly be so docile after what he’d done. True, a group of inexperienced scholars assaulted in the dead of night was quite different from heavily armed Belkans in force. But for Kael to kneel and do nothing? It belied everything Hara had seen.

A drum beat began somewhere, steady and slow at first, joined by the tamp of boots and spear butts against gravel as Jarn approached the kneeling captive with the executioner’s blade in hand. Hara couldn’t imagine most men carrying that sword with both arms let alone one, but the War priest did not drag the weapon behind him. He held it aloft, leaning its flat against his armored shoulder.

The sight of this horned devil kneeling, about to meet his end, filled Hara with dread for what might happen to them all later. She’d been terrified of Kael, he and his fire sprite emerging from the darkness into her room like predatory monsters from story books. The thought of him dying now filled her with more fear under the care of these human monsters armored in steel.

The cadence of the drums increased with each tread Jarn took toward his victim.

No one was going to stop this, no one cared. The men and women all looked upon the upcoming death with nothing but amusement and impatient leers. Only one or two averted their gazes for one reason or another, including a man from Jarn’s procession, the one who’d handed him the headsman’s blade. A squat soldier with a blackened slash of scar tissue where a nose once was, similar to Eivna’s scars.

The drum beat grew louder, more insistent. Jarn was only a few steps away now, already hefting the great blade, preparing for the swing. His face was as impassive and unreadable as carved stone.

Mira’s disinterest caught Hara’s notice. Rather than watching like the others, the sickly woman turned over Flint’s chalice in her hand, her mouth moving as though whispering to herself as she studied the clay jug.

The gleam of the raised sword flashed Hara in the face, and she turned to see the blade raised above Kael. The drumbeats reached a crescendo, then stopped.

Fire erupted in front of Jarn, a vortex of flame that swept about the courtyard, leaving its insufferable heat and the stench of burnt earth in its wake along with singed fabric from where it caught Jarn’s cloak. The War priest fell back with a shout. Crossbow bolts flew from shocked soldiers as men and women averted their eyes or fell back from the burning heat, many dropping their weapons. Hara looked to Jarn’s wife through squinted eyes. The jug lay open at the foot of her empty chair. The blonde warrioress herself was walking away toward the barges without a second glance as the fire sprite continued to swirl.

More arrows and thrown spears sailed through the air, blind attacks trying to pierce the chaos of flame and kill the horned devil. A scholar cried out as a blade or bolt found flesh.

Hara ducked beneath a tongue of fire. The courtyard was a milling bedlam of running feet and flashing weapons. Scholars were taking their chances, making mad dashes for doors to the compound halls or even trying to flit past the soldiers to get out through the open gate.

Bolts and arrows shot into the air, thudding against wood near the top of the wall where a red-faced figure disappeared over the edge on the eastern side. The flame followed in a bright stream.

The scholars were all gathered back, beaten and trussed within minutes while Belkans raced around the compound exterior in pursuit of Kael. They came back less than an hour later, empty-handed and visibly livid. None so much as Jarn, who stared toward the landbarge, fury etched into his stance.

Kael had escaped his fate, but it gave Hara no relief.

Jarn swept his blade around the courtyard, his bearded jaw opening in a deafening command.

“Line them up!”

The drums started again, their beat stirring something in Hara. An urgency, a race to make sense of the world around her which had changed so much in just a few hours. A lifetime trying to piece together the mystery of the chaos storm only for the final questions of her life to materialize out of its rushing miasma. A divine punishment for her curiosity manifested from the lens of her telescope.

“He’ll come back,” Delad said. Hara wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or himself.

They were pulled apart in a daze and led to their places. Delad was forced to kneel to Hara's right separated by two or three sobbing peers. Others begged and pleaded through their own blubbering masks of terror.

Fear gripped her heart as well. But when the first head came free under Jarn’s blade, it was another sensation which took over, banishing the dread as though flooding it out, replacing all else with its insistence.

She looked up in a sudden rapture, taken by the draw of her Faith as she’d never experienced it before, taken by Praetum’s inner light glowing within her. The attention of her God was not merely a comfort, but also an urging, a command as sure as those the War priest gave to his warriors. The seeking of knowledge, the quest for answers was Hara’s life’s purpose, the impetus of all born within the Teacher’s Faith. She had only moments in which to fulfill this divine mandate and the only question left, the only one that mattered, was why?

Jarn hacked and stepped, beheading one scholar after another, silent and immune to their begging, their screams. His single arm swung in practiced, almost mechanical motions. Blood geysered from open necks to pool in the dust, gathering dry gravel in pale clumps then carrying it down a growing river of crimson which carved a gory channel through the courtyard before Hara’s agonized knees. She lost track of time, lost track of what was happening until she blinked and was looking down at Delad. His blank face rolled over to stare at her from the ground above the red second mouth of his neck.

She should have screamed, but her Faith spurred her to save her breath, to conserve her last bit of strength and sanity.

Another chop, another thud. Again. Again.

Hara felt Jarn’s shadow fall on her and snapped her head up to look at the priest. “Please,” she said. “I must know one thing.”

The headsman’s sword hesitated above her. Jarn regarded her with eyes of piercing blue, eyes made of ice. Where had she seen those eyes before?

Hara took his pause as her opening. “That red creature, Kael. What is he to you? Why did you want to kill him?”

Jarn’s jaw twitched. For a moment Hara thought he would not speak and braced for the sword’s impact.

“He is my son,” Jarn said. “Does that answer satisfy you, scholar?”

Hara frowned and shook her head. “No, it doesn't.”

“Me neither.”

She felt the wind of the descending blade before it struck her neck.