Author: Vainglory

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

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

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

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

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

“The wise ones knew.”

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

“The wise ones knew.”

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

“The wise ones knew.”

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

“The wise ones kn…”

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

“Where is the boy?” he growled.

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

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

“Kid!” he called. “Hey kid!”

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

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

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

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

“The boy,” he demanded.

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

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

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

“I’ve climbed scarier things than this.”

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

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

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

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

“Um,” said the Grangor.

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

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

The mage chewed with his mouth open.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Trying again?” replied the Grangor.

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

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

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

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

“What’s your name!”

“Samuel,” said the boy.

“And you consort with the filthy cats?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your son was Mageborn,” whispered Samuel.

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

“But my mother …”

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

The snow-blanketed silence filled the tent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lyra didn’t hesitate. “I am Gythian.”

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

“It’s time,” she said.

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s this?” asked the Grangor.

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

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

The boy held up four fingers.

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

“A letter came for you with breakfast.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I will not eat today,” said Samuel.

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

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

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

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

“People are not possessions,” replied Lance.

“Are these not your children?” sputtered Samuel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All things die.”

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

“That is no answer.”

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

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

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

“What did Archelon say to you?”

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

“You heard nothing in your heart?”

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

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

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

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

“Nothing like me then,” said Samuel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are he. I know it.”

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

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

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

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

“My thanks, Mother,” said Samuel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is that contraption?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Home. He almost missed what came after.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are Gythian.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

~

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

But the shadow could not learn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

“Go,” choked Lyra behind him. “Go!”

~

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Reconsider, my friend,” growled Lance.

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

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

“Magister,” he whispered.

“Run, you fool.”

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

“Do you like the islands, Grace?”

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

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

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

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

“These are nice people,” observed Grace.

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

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

“Oh yes.”

“You should tell them to stop, Papa.”

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

“But these are people.”

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

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

“Papa?” she whimpered.

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

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

“Which way is the fire?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s hurt,” said Grace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So he is dead.”

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

“He opened the Nether,” Grace whispered.

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

“His mother?” Grace’s heart fell.

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

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

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

“On your knees, Lance of Archelon.”

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

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

“I do.” His words cracked with emotion.

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

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

“Shall we call upon the Archmage, Domina?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The wise ones knew.”

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

“The wise ones knew.”

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

“The wise ones knew.”

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

“The wise ones kn…”

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

“Where is the boy?” he growled.

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

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

“Kid!” he called. “Hey kid!”

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

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

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

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

“The boy,” he demanded.

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

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

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

“I’ve climbed scarier things than this.”

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

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

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

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

“Um,” said the Grangor.

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

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

The mage chewed with his mouth open.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Trying again?” replied the Grangor.

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

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

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

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

“What’s your name!”

“Samuel,” said the boy.

“And you consort with the filthy cats?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your son was Mageborn,” whispered Samuel.

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

“But my mother …”

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

The snow-blanketed silence filled the tent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lyra didn’t hesitate. “I am Gythian.”

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

“It’s time,” she said.

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s this?” asked the Grangor.

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

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

The boy held up four fingers.

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

“A letter came for you with breakfast.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I will not eat today,” said Samuel.

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

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

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

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

“People are not possessions,” replied Lance.

“Are these not your children?” sputtered Samuel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All things die.”

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

“That is no answer.”

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

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

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

“What did Archelon say to you?”

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

“You heard nothing in your heart?”

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

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

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

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

“Nothing like me then,” said Samuel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are he. I know it.”

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

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

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

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

“My thanks, Mother,” said Samuel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is that contraption?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Home. He almost missed what came after.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are Gythian.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

~

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

But the shadow could not learn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

“Go,” choked Lyra behind him. “Go!”

~

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Reconsider, my friend,” growled Lance.

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

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

“Magister,” he whispered.

“Run, you fool.”

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

“Do you like the islands, Grace?”

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

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

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

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

“These are nice people,” observed Grace.

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

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

“Oh yes.”

“You should tell them to stop, Papa.”

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

“But these are people.”

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

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

“Papa?” she whimpered.

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

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

“Which way is the fire?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s hurt,” said Grace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So he is dead.”

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

“He opened the Nether,” Grace whispered.

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

“His mother?” Grace’s heart fell.

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

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

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

“On your knees, Lance of Archelon.”

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

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

“I do.” His words cracked with emotion.

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

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

“Shall we call upon the Archmage, Domina?”

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

No one has ever rebuilt the overgrown Old Quarter, where the stink of magic lingers in the destroyed buildings. The children dare one another to touch those still-crackling buildings for the shock. That shock was Kestrel’s first memory.

She wasn’t Kestrel then, but the name her parents gave her is classified.

Kestrel knew about the war, though she hadn’t been born yet, and she knew about the Storm Queen, who lived far away in Mont Lille. She knew never to bother the border guards, who the locals called blancorojos. She learned the rolling, throaty language of Mont Lille alongside her family’s dialect. She saluted the queen’s flag every morning at school. Every child had to take the queen’s aptitude tests; teachers and parents drilled them in mathematics, languages and geography for weeks preceding the test. Taxes were light on families whose children were chosen.

At six years of age, Kestrel took the first battery of tests: analogies, number series, mirroring patterns of blocks and solving puzzles. She did well. She loved the smell of pencil shavings and her examiner’s smart white lab coat trimmed with red. She loved how numbers fell into neat patterns, and she spoke Lilliaise with an adorable accent.

For the last test, the examiner placed a combination of black and white boxes before her with a candy under one. Kestrel’s task was to guess if it was under a black or a white box. At first, there were nine white boxes and one black box. She picked white and collected her candy. The next round, there were seven black boxes and three white ones. She picked black and earned more candy. Her cheeks were stuffed with candies after a few rounds of disproportionate numbers of one color box, then: betrayal. There were six white boxes, but the candy was under one of the four black ones.

Kestrel had never before doubted herself.

The examiner set out the boxes again: five of each.

“Choose,” she said.

“No.”

“Don’t you want the candy?”

“Yes.”

“Then, choose.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know where it is.”

“The test requires you to choose.”

“No.”

The examiner bent double so that she’d be at eye level with the little girl. Her voice was kind. “There is no punishment for guessing wrong, and a candy if you guess right. You must choose.”

“No.”

“The queen requires you to choose.”

“No.”

“Very well.” The examiner straightened and produced a stick the length of her arm. “If you do not choose, you will be struck on your palms.”

Kestrel looked straight ahead with her palms up while the stick smacked into them, remembering the surprising pain of the magic shock she’d given herself in the Old Quarter, how it had lessened into mild tingling after a time. The stick did not hurt that much.

She did not cry, and she did not choose.

The next day, two blancorojos came to her home. Kestrel escaped out the back and climbed a walnut tree, armed with a slingshot and enough underripe ammo to make a grand nuisance should her father seek to punish her for failing the test of the boxes. Instead, her parents coaxed her down with tears and kisses, for she had been called to continue her education in Mont Lille. Her parents had one hour to say goodbye.

The Storm Queen sat sideways on Catherine’s lounge chair, her legs slung over one arm, cloaked and hooded, a raven perched on her shoulder. With no lamps lit, the intruder was invisible in the windowless living quarters. Catherine was not a fan of extra entryways, yet the queen had made her way past the reinforced and locked front door. The queen swung her legs forward and lit the nearest lamp. The raven adjusted its feet but remained in place. “They are nearby. I assume this room is secure?”

“I thought so, yet here you are.”

The queen half-smiled. “You will assemble the Stormguard tonight.”

Catherine sheathed the sword she had been gripping with both fists since first entering her apartment. “Who is the target?”

“Targets. Twin targets, with remarkable magical abilities. You’ll remember their mother, my sister, Julia.”

“Your sister? She’s been dead for years.”

“So she would have us believe. Our spies have found her in southern Gythia.”

“That is tech territory now.”

“A hive of soulless machines and their engineers. Julia has made an alliance with them, hoping to supplant me. She’s even married one of their technologists and made some babies. Isn’t that sweet?”

“Twin babies?”

“Indeed. You will bring them to me so they can be trained.”

“Why is the traitor not a target?”

The queen stood, and the dim light seeped up into her hood, showing the stitches that crossed over the flesh where her eyes had been. They had been removed at birth, in the way of storm mages. “There are laws against royal murder, no matter how justified.” She stroked Catherine’s cheek with the back of her icy hand as she spoke, as if in lullabye. “I should execute you where you stand for suggesting it.”

It was said that evil doles out affection in tiny droplets, yet Catherine could not help her desperate thirst. In a frustrated whisper she said, “So, we take the children and leave their mother to plot your murder? Your sister will seek revenge. She will enlist the Gythians to help her if you do this thing.”

“Let us hope you are right. The Stormguard has never been stronger, and the Gythians are stretched thin fending off the technologists.”

“You wish for war again, my queen?”

“No, Catherine. I do not wish for war. I make it.” The queen’s hand dropped. “Now is the time. Now, while the technologists are a disjointed army of gadgets, while Gythia is an elderly collection of has-beens with shiny trinkets. They are a decade away from readiness and nothing without their toddling prodigies.”

Catherine stared into the raven’s eyes as she spoke. “As you will, my queen.”

“They have made their home in the farms northwest of Pompium. Vyn will accompany you.” Only then did the raven, the queen’s eyes and ears, move; with a quiet flap of its dark wings, it leapt from the queen’s shoulder to Catherine’s.

Catherine resisted the urge to shrug away the bird. “Yes, my queen.”

“I expect obedience.”

A single candle on the table at the back of the tavern flickered a light too weak to penetrate the heavy hood of a woman sitting alone, staring at the leaves swirling in her steaming cup of tea. She’d been sheltered all her young life from the roving bands of people whose old women wore clattering bangles up their arms and read the futures of gullible customers in tea leaves.

Despite her thorough education, Julia would have paid well, in that moment, for such a service.

Every head turned when Catherine entered. The red and white uniform was gone, but her drab hooded cloak failed to remove the disquieting sensation that a predator had stepped into the room. That heavy feeling did not waver despite the smile Catherine offered to Julia as she threaded through the tables to Julia’s booth, sweeping off her cloak to reveal a well-fitted dress true to the local style.

The serving-boy’s words stumbled like pebbles rolling downhill: “Good.. good even… how can I… would you like some… what can I…?”

Catherine stared the boy down, allowing him to stutter until he had found the end of a sentence. “Wine,” she said, a smile playing at one corner of her mouth.

“Right away… and you, ma’am? Can I get you more tea? Hey, aren’t you Jul…”

Catherine stepped close, one fingertip on the boy’s chin, turning his eyes back to her. “Red wine,” she murmured.

Julia exhaled a breath she hadn’t known she was holding as the serving-boy tripped away. “Oh great subterfuge, Cath. Let’s please be as memorable to our fellow patrons as much as possible.”

Catherine scoffed, feigning hurt. “You are so unkind. I am quite proud of my disguise. And look– buttons!” She winked, spreading her arms.

Julia laughed, but the sound was brittle, fighting not to become a sob. “Your disguise is as subtle as a hat on a tiger.”

Neither woman spoke while the wine was poured. Only after did Catherine lean forward in earnest. “She wants the twins, Lia, and you alive to make war before you can win it.”

Julia lifted her chin. “Gythia will aid me.”

Catherine shook her head. “Perhaps. Someday, if the time were right. But the Stormguard is here today. I couldn’t send word; I had Vyn on my shoulder the whole journey. He watches your family now.” Catherine clasped Julia’s shaking hand in hers. “This mission is happening tonight. The twins will come back with me to Mont Lille.”

Julia jerked her hand away and looked up at a cobwebby corner of the tavern. “No.”

Catherine’s spine straightened. “You know I would have it any other way if it could be. But you do not have a choice in this. I give my word, Lia, I will watch over them.”

“No!” Julia insisted. “My sister would make a tyrant of Celeste in her image, and you could not stop her.”

Catherine opened her callused palms. “So? What do you propose? You and Ardan cannot defeat the Stormguard tonight, not even with my help. Those not surrounding your farm have barricaded every road out of Pompium. Once we have completed our mission, we will disappear. Lia. Your only option is to trust me.”

“The way my sister trusts you?”

Catherine’s eyes narrowed. “You and I have been friends since we were children.”

“We were all three friends when we were children.” A long silence once again wedged itself between them. At length, Julia sighed. “I will warn Ardan that the Stormguard may be closeby. The children will go about their routine as usual; nothing will seem amiss from the outside. I will help Ardan escape with the twins when you attack.”

“There is no escape through the Stormguard.”

“There is one way. A mage is never more powerful than at the time of death. When you take my life, I will pass my gift to him. He will make it through.”

Catherine gripped her wine glass, her voice cold as frost. “I will not do this.”

“Make a show of it. Create a diversion.”

Catherine’s eyes sparkled wet, her teeth clenched. “I cannot.”

“And then, run. There is nothing more for you in Mont Lille. The Stormguard will chase Ardan; you must escape to our friends in Gythia.”

The glass in her hands exploded, shards of tinkling rain skittering across the table top. The tavern went quiet as all heads turned to Catherine as blood shimmering with halcyon dripped from her fist. “Neither you nor your sister ever consider the weight of your demands,” Catherine choked out, blinking away unshed tears.

Julia swallowed against the knot in her throat. She took Catherine’s bleeding hands with all the patience she’d learned as a mother. “I am touched by your devotion, but I am not a person. I am an empire.” She pulled glass from Catherine’s palms, her voice a sing-song whisper. “If you deliver my children to my sister, she will make a monster of my daughter, put my son at the front lines of her military, and gain territory at the mouth of Gythia.” Blood and wine dribbled onto the floor as Julia cupped Catherine’s hands inside her own. Green light glowed, Julia’s healing power drawing strength from the halcyon, the lacerations closing. “Never feel guilty for what must be done. And… and..” Julia faltered, then stopped.

“I will make it fast,” Catherine said softly.

Julia’s shoulders wilted. She released Catherine’s healed hands. They slid out of the booth and stood, regarding each other across a distance that had grown, in only a few moments, unspannable.

Catherine smiled and touched her hand to Julia’s cheek.

“Hey, Lia,” she whispered.

“Hey, Cath,” Julia whispered back, a sob and a laugh catching in her throat.

Catherine’s back straightened, her eyes cleared, and her hand returned to her side. She nodded once at Julia, grabbed her cloak, and stepped through her own spilled blood, past the silent patrons and their tracking stares, out the tavern door into the waiting night.

“It really is her.”

Kestrel shot a withering glare down at the swordswoman who’d whispered it from the brush below. A soldier of the Stormguard knew better than to speak after positions were taken. Still, every woman hiding outside the indistinct farmhouse that evening had stood watch over the burial of the blonde woman who now struggled to unload a goat from a battered old cart outside the farmhouse. Julia should have been a ghost.

The goat pulled at its rope, crying like a child.

Kestrel waited in the tangled branches of an olive tree for Catherine’s signal in the same position she’d held for hours. The feeling had gone out of her legs long before. Her bow laid out sidelong in front of her, stringed with steel. She rubbed her gloved thumb and fingerpads together, savoring the spark under her skin, but she wouldn’t use energy arrows that night. Metal shattered glass, if the bow was strung heavy enough, and the detached Stormguard unit hadn’t used magic since crossing into Gythian territory. Techies didn’t trust magic, and the last thing they needed in this land of smog and machines was attention.

Poking her tongue into her cheek, she watched the queen’s sister through her scope. Mothering twins had softened Julia’s body, and there were laugh lines by her eyes, but there was no doubt. After Julia went inside, Kestrel curled her toes to get the feeling back, rolled her right shoulder, sank her thigh into a knob in the branch, fit an arrow into the nock and hooted an owl call. Catherine whistled back the command to hold.

The goat bleated louder and sadder as the sun sank. Nothing stirred in the surrounding brush and trees. Inside the window, Julia argued with her husband, some nobody from the rebel tech army. The twins flashed by in their pajamas, chasing one another to their beds. The boy gave out a shout that shook the ground and the setting sun brightened, then dimmed. Mageborn, Kestrel mused in silence. No wonder the queen wanted them unharmed. She waited until the kids were tucked in, took aim at the left edge of a front window away from the bedrooms, then repeated her signal. Catherine whistled again to hold.

Night deepened, stars poking out that never showed above the bright light of Mont Lille. The man inside gestured with a wrench. Julia slammed a door. The goat’s shrieks twisted Kestrel’s nerves into a tight bundle. She’d hold position all night if needed, but every minute she waited was a minute something could go wrong.

The man clamped a gauntlet on one arm. Animalistic hoots and whistles sounded from varied positions. Catherine’s hold command repeated again and the goat cried and something wasn’t right; they should have attacked an hour ago. “What the hell is she waiting for?” the swordswoman grumbled. Kestrel was used to lone missions, not all of this group planning. Too many other people to depend on. Too much noise. Couldn’t think.

She let an arrow fly, and the goat shut up.

The signals paused; someone in the brush snickered. Kestrel fit another arrow into its nock. The man paused, looked at his own reflection in the nearest window, then raced across the farmhouse to Julia.

“He knows,” breathed the woman aground, bellying forward in the brush sword first.

The whispers of steel unsheathing sounded all over the olive grove. Somewhere, a blue wisp of magic snapped on and off in the air. A glowing blue shield hummed to life. Hearts pounded in throats. The man inside struggled into his armor, his wife pinching her fingers on the clamps trying to help. It was “go time,” and all they needed was Catherine’s whistle.

The whistle never came.

Kestrel pulled back, knuckles resting on the place where her jaw met her skull, three fingers under the knock, shoulderblade pinching her spine, and on her exhale …

… released.

By the time the front window shattered, Kestrel had swung down from the tree. Ignoring the burning pins and needles in her legs, she ducked low and closed in on the farmhouse.

Hanging from the windowsill by one hand, her bow slung over one shoulder, she glanced back at the storm of magic and steel following behind. Catherine stood behind the attack, tears in her eyes, a raven’s neck broken in her fist, another landing on her shoulder with an enraged scream.

“I do not need your permission to buy a goat,” Julia said. “Goat milk is delicious, and we can make cheese.”

They’d been arguing all evening. Ardan was hunched over his power gauntlet, sanding down the edges of a grill he’d removed to improve air flow. Outside in the yard, a goat shrieked into the moonless dark. “Goats stink and scream like fiends,” he grumped. “It hasn’t stopped for an hour. How will the twins sleep?”

“The kids need a pet. Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“And who will make this alleged cheese? When have you ever made cheese, your highness?”

“I could make cheese!” Julia shouted. She stomped out of the room and slammed the bedroom door behind her, the goat’s cries dramatizing her exit.

Celeste toddled out of her room, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Dadda? Is Mamma alright?”

She had her mother’s accent. Ardan plucked up the toddler in his unarmored arm and kissed her cheeks. “Mamma is being ridiculous.”

“What is ridick oo luss?”

“It means she brought a goat home without talking to me about it.”

“I like goats.” This from Vox, who wandered in after his sister. He seated himself on his father’s foot, wrapped his arms around Ardan’s leg and rode along as Ardan took Celeste back to bed, staring out the window toward the screams.

“You like the idea of goats. None of us actually know how to care for a goat.”

“There’s a baby crying outside,” said Celeste, half asleep.

“It’s the stupid goat,” said Ardan, planting her back in her bed.

Vox uncurled himself from his father’s leg. “He’s afraid,” he said. “Maybe lonely.”

“It’s a she, Vox. At least I hope it is a she, or your mother’s dreams of cheese are –”

Ardan paused, turned toward the window.

The goat had stopped screaming.

His adrenaline spiked.

“Hide, both of you. Do not open the door.”

There was no time to make sure they obeyed him. He ran to his bedroom. “Julia,” he hissed at the bedroom door. “They’re here.”

Julia opened the door. Her face had gone white. “Now?”

“Outside.”

The armor stood in pieces around the front room in various states of renovation. Tools littered the floor. “Legs first,” he grumbled, stepping into the sabatons. Julia scrambled to her knees in her nightdress, a poor but necessary replacement for a proper battle squire. She pinched her fingers on the knee clamps, struggled under the weight of the chest pieces.

The button panel whirred and crackled with static, then burped out: “System. Offline.” Ardan slammed his left fist onto it. “Worthless damn power source on this model…”

“Shh.” Julia’s hands were black with oil, her face smudged as she attached the generator to his back and connected it to the power gauntlet. She stared out the door, into the hall. There was no sound. No disturbance. No goat. “Are you sure they’re…”

“System. Online.”

Glass broke. Ardan turned sideways in time for a metal arrow to slice a scratch through his breastplate, just under his chin, and thud home in the wall opposite the front window. Ardan cursed and squared up, the wood floor creaking under his armored weight. “I’ll watch the front door.”

“But your cannon arm!”

“It’s useless, unless you want me to blow up the house. Stay behind me.”

Julia closed her eyes, turned her palms upward. “I’ll protect you,” she murmured, her voice dreamy, green light forming in her hands.

Ardan winced away from the twisted-guts feeling that magic always gave him. “I can handle myself,” he grunted.

A forearm appeared over the window, decorated in an archer’s gauntlet, and then the archer herself swung inside. Another woman followed and drew her sword. More came in behind her, magicians and assassins, all wearing the same insignia.

“Stormguard!” he yelled, but Julia was lost inside her trance, eyes rolled back.

Ardan’s armor groaned and buzzed as he moved forward, painfully slow, but he was grateful for it when the Stormguard attacked. They moved in tandem, each with a weapon they’d held since childhood. He ran forward, energy buzzing through the armor, propelling him, heating the metal to burning, steel cracking against the breastplate. When he backhanded the archer across her face, he left a burn mark. She crumpled, her bow clattering to the floor.

The others raised shields of wood, metal and magic to counter Julia’s trance and Ardan’s assault. He stomped forward and plowed into them, knocked them from their feet, sent them flying in a crunch of bones to the wall. Their blood spattered the divan. They rolled in shattered glass, discarded weapons and their own knocked-out teeth. He could not resist every attack: Blades sliced through his unprotected arm and his cheeks; magic stung and froze him with deafening whipcrack sounds. But he was a wall between the enemy and his wife, and all the while, he felt warmth coming from her, a blanket that enveloped him, closed his wounds, melted the ice and gave him strength. It churned his insides, these unnatural talents, but he’d deal with the sick when his family was safe.

Then, the blast.

All went silent and cold. His teeth clamped shut. A shock pulsed up through his legs, his arms, his throat. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t blink. Paintings slid from the wall and the bolts fell from the front door. He could hear the static noises from his armor display, the groans from the pile of wounded Stormguard, but he could not move. He could only watch as the front door opened and the last of the Stormguard stepped inside, as if invited. She surveyed the room, then snapped her fingers at two of the guard who were scrambling to their feet even as Ardan struggled to move. She pointed to the twins’ room and the two guards sprinted that way.

The woman walked from the door, past Ardan as if he didn’t exist, to Julia, who stood frozen in her nightdress and bare feet.

“Catherine,” gasped Julia.

“Such a shame,” whispered Catherine as she pressed her sword against Julia’s chest.

Ardan’s heart pounded out one beat. Another. Air filled his lungs and he coughed. To his right, the two Stormguard emerged carrying the twins, stunned as rigid as he. The other Stormguard rose, some shakily, some bleeding, all stone-eyed and with a firm grip on their weapons.

To his left, Julia stared into Catherine’s eyes.

His heart beat a third time.

In another heartbeat, his children or his wife would be dead, depending on which way he ran.

He ran.

The general’s sword, turned sideways, slid easily between Julia’s ribs. Her last breath was his name, and with it came the last otherworldly green swirl of her magic. It hit him, Julia’s last gift becoming part of him, wrapping around his insides, giving him the burst of strength he needed. Ardan wrapped the twins up in his arms and crashed out of the window. The two Stormguard who had taken the children lay unconscious. There hadn’t been time to kill them… or to hold his wife as she died.

He fled from the house into the dark, past the poor dead goat, whose screams had been silenced by one well-placed arrow through the throat. The children remained silent, in some lucky instinct, leaving the questions to the night owls in the trees.

“Do it!” roars the undead monster at the round metal eye of the turret, half grown over with brambles and rattan. “Put a hole in me! Blow me apart!”

If only it would work.

The turret remains silent, but he can smell recent explosions. Someone is keeping it loaded. Someone is summoning the minions that come through the choke point beyond the turret, past the shambles of what must have once been a rock fortress, in waves. And beyond that someone may be what he seeks.

So close…

Krul drags his left leg, nursing a nagging sting of magic in his thigh where some spell hit him earlier. Another someone, now lost to the world. The smell of summoning drifts over the rock face and he grimaces, grinds his teeth. More minions coming. Ugly bastards, no necks, no language, nothing in them but fight. He punches his leg to get the sting out and takes an unnecessary deep breath. A habit from a former existence. The air leaks out through the sucking wound in his chest, fogging up the cold steel trapped there.

Every step is pain, and he runs hard. Catches the biggest of the idiot minions by surprise, flattens him fast, ignore the pain, ignore the pain, ignore the… Tearing into the minion’s belly is good, the only good thing. A distraction from the misery that threatens, in every moment, to lay him flat. The minion’s dark insides are slippery in his hands; their bellies come apart like cobwebs, their legs detach easy as fly wings. He screams into their faces, spewing spittle. His insane laughter echoes through the battleground. Their souls suck away from their dying carcasses and feed him. It is his only satiation.

There is blood, there are limbs, there are gurgling death-screams, there are pieces of once-living creatures clinging to Krul’s teeth and nails when he sees her standing atop the ruins of the fort. Human from the look of her, tall and still as morning, a sword buried between cracks in the rock, eyes impassive. His face, or what is left of it, cracks open into a grin.

“Hullo, beauty!” he calls.

Her response is the slow pulling of her weapon from the rocks, that shing of steel.

“You cannot protect it from me,” he growls. “Best run now and let me at it, before I destroy your best assets.”

She leaps, falling hard onto him, sword front, magic buzzing around her like bees. She is good with her weapon, well trained. He might have respected her, once. She gets a few slashes into him, his half-dead flesh sagging apart where she aims. He swings at her, hits only air, circling, snorting like a devil, dodging as best he can until she turns the sword over her shoulder and pounds him good in the brow with the hilt. He lunges, closes the gap between them, roaring his dead breath onto her, then her valiant cry is cut short by his fist round her throat.

“Pretty thing.” He licks her cheek while she squirms; her sword clatters on the stones between them and he kicks it away. He’s had enough of swords. A squeeze, and her neck breaks in his grip. Her life flows away from her and into him and she collapses, forgotten the moment he steps over her, toward the turret.

So close…

There is no one left to man the cannon, to feed it gunpowder and magic, no one to summon the thick-necked bastards. His right foot leaves bloody footprints and his left leg drags smears of minion gut all the way through the choke point, beyond the fortress, to the well.

To the dead well.

Perhaps once, the well had charged crystal; perhaps heroes had once guarded it. Perhaps he would once have found salvation here. But there is nothing now, nothing stirring in the well, only shards of broken crystal lying about, hardly anything worth defending.

Hope lost, the world comes back to him. The rhythmic bzzt bzzt of insects. Birds complaining. Cold coming on, sinking into his muscle, cramping him up all around his eternal wound, whatever is living about him trying to reject the foreign thing rammed through him. Pain and hatred.

He allows himself one agonized scream before stalking back into the bush. There is another road there, to the Halcyon Fold, that he must now take.

“Who am I?”

A little girl stands opposite her master at the center of the sparring circle holding a wooden shield. The sun sets behind the foothills to the west, but she knows better than to show the long day’s fatigue inside the circle. “You are Professor Marcel …”

The flat of the master’s blunted swordblade leaves a stinging red imprint on her left cheek before she can register that he has moved.

“In battle, there are no professors. There are no names.” The master circles her, and she moves with him as he taught her, her eyes watering. “No husbands, no brothers. No sisters. No friends.” He strikes again, his blade slapping the wound anew.

“Y.. yes, Professor.” The girl sniffs up the pain, forces herself to remain light on her toes as the master switches direction.

“Who am I?”

“You are…” The sword swings between them and cracks into the girl’s shield, sending splinters flying. “…the sword.”

“And who are you?”

The sword swings again, a deadly whip in the master’s hand, smashing again into the shield. “I am the shield.”

“Again.”

“I am the sh… shield.” The strikes come faster, arcing and crashing, no mercy given for her small arms struggling to raise the shield, welts and bruises rising on her skin when she is too slow.

“Again.”

“I am the shield!” Blunted steel on wood sends shocks up the girl’s arm; sweat pours down her brow, meets with tears, rolls down her cheeks and throat and into her uniform.

“Who?”

“I am the shield!” she sobs, falling to her knees, the shield over her head. “The shield! I am the -”

“…the shield!”

Catherine sits up straight in the general’s tent, gasping out of sleep, drenched in sweat despite the cold night. A magic arrow protrudes from the chest of the man beside her, glowing blue in the dark.

“Kestrel,” she whispers.

The fur beneath her dead lover squelches with his blood when she rises. She dresses in silence, though she knows there is no need for quiet; she is alive because they want her to be.

Not so for the rest of the camp. Squinting into the dark, she steps outside, her boots soundless in the fresh snow. The smaller infantry tents are sieved with sizzling arrow-holes. The cold masks the bloody smell of death, freezing time. It is as if the sun will never rise, the dead will never decay and spring will never end the Winter War. Half inside her dream, her nose and fingers pink and numb, it is as if she is not stepping toward her own end.

In the center of camp, thirty unfamiliar women in familiar uniforms poke at the fire with sticks. They are young in the way of soldiers; war has a high turnover rate. Six Swords, two Axes, two Daggers, two Polearms, eight varied Mages, nine Shields and one Bow.

“Salut, Kestrel.” Catherine steps into the light, resting her shield in the snowdrift before her.

“Catherine!” calls The Bow with a grin that does not reach her eyes. She lopes through the snow to clasp Catherine’s hand, setting her bow in the snow beside the shield. “Kind of a demotion, isn’t it, settling other countries’ border disputes?”

“It pays well.”

Kestrel drags her fingers up the wings of Catherine’s pauldron. Bump-bump-bump. “Did you leave your Sword in bed?”

“Indeed.” Catherine peers past the fire at the Stormguard as they move into position. “You rendered it quite useless.”

Kestrel smirks. “Rumor is, you gave up your blade in a fit of guilt.”

“You will soon find that I don’t need it.”

“Understandable. Weapons, armies, even whole institutions, outstay their welcomes.”

Catherine rests one arm atop her shield. “It is not like you to be so chatty.”

“Just catching up. Been a really long time.” Kestrel plucks up her weapon in her left hand. In her right, four glowing arrows snap into existence. On the other side of the fire, the others push back their white fur hoods and draw their weapons; fire and ice and energy form in the palms of the mages. With a nod, Catherine pulls her shield from the snow, and she is Catherine no longer, and Kestrel is no longer Kestrel, and a thin gray line of dawn forms at the edge of the sky.

In the moment before the chaos, a breeze swirls light snowflakes around the tents full of dead soldiers. Sparks explode above the fire. The Shield rises. The Bow fits the glowing arrow to the bowstring and pulls it back, her fingers resting on her cheek.

Then, she spins on her back foot and looses the arrow through the flames.

Sparks fly from Kestrel’s magic arrow as it sails past the fire, gliding through the narrow gap between two swordswomen and piercing straight into the Storm Queen’s raven. It lands with an undignified squawk and a floomph of powdered snow.

“You all can do what you want,” says Kestrel. “I’m not killing one of our own.”

The queen’s best killers, twitching with anticipation of battle, their trembling weapons thirsty for blood, dart their eyes from Kestrel, to Catherine, to the dead black thing in the white snow with horror. Their white-gloved grips loose and re-tighten as Kestrel steps back beside Catherine, who crouches in a defensive position behind her shield, her perplexed eyes shimmering. In that stunned silence, there is a moment when she sees beyond the white and red uniforms, beyond the weapons, to the faces of women she used to know. The closest thing she ever had to sisters, once.

The Guard’s best daggerwoman breaks the spell, darting forward, crossing the distance in a blinding blue flash, appearing a breath away from Kestrel, her blades crossed over the archer’s throat. “She is no longer one of us,” she hisses. “And now, neither are you.”

“Really, Livia?” Kestrel grins. “I put an arrow in the eye of a man at your flank at the last battle for Lionne.” There is a popping sound, and all that remains where Kestrel stood is a phosphorescent cloud. The daggerwoman jumps back from the glowing particles, her daggers in a defensive position. “I’ve saved every one of your lives at one point or another,” calls Kestrel’s voice, disembodied several steps away from the mist.

“We have orders,” calls a shieldbearer from the front line.

“Sure, Marelde, and we’re trained to kill, not think,” says Kestrel, reappearing with a new arrow fitted to the nock of her bow, “but it was Catherine who trained you with a shield when you were ten years old.”

“Eight,” whispers Marelde.

“And you, Amie.” Kestrel’s arrow points at the forehead of a mage holding a sputtering ball of blue light. “After the northern revolt, when you had night terrors, Catherine stayed up all night to comfort you. And you, Ivet, Catherine taught you to speak Lillaise.” Ivet nods, resting her axe over her shoulder, staring at the snow.

“I never knew her, and I don’t care what she taught Ivet to say,” scoffs Elena, the youngest of them, polearm at the ready, her stance low. “She’s a traitor. She disobeyed orders, ruined a mission and disgraced the Stormguard.”

“Toujours fidèle.” Catherine sighs as all eyes turn to her. “I swore loyalty, but in war, I was never loyal to the queen. I was loyal to the woman next to me. I had no thought for Mont Lille, or a unified Eventide, when the blades swung and the arrows flew. I fought because I was afraid of what the woman next to me would think if I did not.”

“Yet you abandoned us and fled like a coward,” snarls Livia.

Catherine shoots a glare at the daggerwoman. “There are no cowards in the Stormguard. I chose to disobey so that one day, you all would have another choice. But I have … I have lived with the shame of my disloyalty to you for more than a decade, Kestrel.”

“Then make it up to me now.” Kestrel lowers her bow. “We found Julia’s whole family alive and well in Taizen Gate. They escaped and disappeared with the help of Gythians.”

Catherine’s breath catches. “Then we can waste no more time. Make your choice, ladies, and make it before the queen’s ravens find you.”

When frozen tundra gave way to dense forest, the Stormguard traveled at night to evade the watchful eyes of nesting ravens. The country was at war, and the Storm Queen would be searching for them, but the freeze itself was their biggest enemy, and Kestrel was glad of her warm winter uniform.

On the last night of their trek, Catherine drew up near Kestrel and murmured, “I have not thanked you.”

“Don’t,” said Kestrel in her usual dry tone. She pulled her backpack around to the front and removed her night vision goggles. “I don’t care who sits on what throne, but I expect Gythia will advise their puppet monarch to free the Storm Queen’s territories.”

Catherine fell quiet, and while the moon rose there was no sound but their steps and their foggy breathing.

When she heard the rush of fast water, Kestrel climbed a tree on a steep hill and scanned the river through the goggles. The bridge below was the only border crossing that had not been destroyed in the Winter War, and their only chance to cross to friendlier territory. She whistled a signal and the others gathered below.

“Your employer’s enemies have taken the bridge, Catherine,” she said. “Twenty guards on either side and ten on bridge patrol.”

“We can take twenty at a time, if it comes to that,” murmured Catherine.

“The bridge patrol have snow beasts,” said Kestrel. She dropped to the ground, soundless except for the poofing of powdery snow, and Ivet scurried up to look. In a moment, the axewoman cursed under her breath at the ten giant, armored, white-furred beasts, their curled horns wrapped with spikes, their tusks protruding from metal helms. On their shoulders rode enemy soldiers.

“I’ve heard about snow beasts,” said Amie, shivering as she drew her mage cloak tighter around her. “They steal children and eat them.”

“Leave them to me.” Kestrel stood at the lip of the hill, the green laser light from her goggles sweeping along the border.

“We don’t have to kill them all. We just have to get across.” Catherine raised her arcshield and the hidden blades snapped out. “If we are separated, you all have your assignments.” She motioned Kestrel ahead, then followed down the dense forested hill until they could hear the rushing of the water and the grunts of the snow beasts, the other women snaking behind, pulling shields, blades and polearms from their backs and belts.

At the edge of the forest, Kestrel disappeared and the others fanned out behind rocks and trees, fighters and mages clumping close to their assigned shieldwomen. Catherine stood alone, her fur cloak waving in the frozen breeze, refusing to shiver, as the guards’ blinding searchlight swung toward her. There was a call in a language Kestrel didn’t understand, then an answer, and Catherine was surrounded by men in heavy wool coats and fur caps, their swords and rifles drawn.

Hidden inside shimmering phosphor, Kestrel slipped past the guards and onto the bridge. The snow beasts were larger than she’d thought from her high vantage point; their steps shook the wooden bridge, and their armor covered all the vital bits, but the plan was in motion and could not be changed. The Stormguard whistled their positions like nocturnal bird calls. Catherine held up her shield, and the first of the giant snow beasts stepped into the phosphorous cloud.

With all eyes on Catherine, it was a simple thing for Kestrel to put a sizzling, glowing arrow into the beast’s eye. It howled, stuck, and twisted about hard, its great hairy arms striking into the darkness, tossing its rider off the side of the bridge and into the river. By the time the nearby guards had reined their beasts around to face their aggressor, Kestrel and the arrow had disappeared, and the panicked beast clutching at its bleeding face could not be contained.

The Stormguard moved into action, shields flanking around Catherine, fighters taking out the unprepared guards, magic flashing, freezing, burning in the air. A flaming phoenix screamed, its wings spraying sparks onto the bridge; the guards leaped out of its way in terror. In the chaos, Kestrel left another cloud of phosphor in the path of the next beast and delivered two arrows under its arm. It stopped still and bellowed, but Kestrel had already disappeared again. Across the bridge she went, shooting and stunning the wild beasts, ducking and sprinting out of the way as they wavered and roared. She glanced over her shoulder to see Catherine’s bubble flash and spin, then back to the other side of the bridge, where they had no element of surprise. The guards there held positions with grim expressions and weapons drawn, eyes darting. She stood sideways and fired, releasing arrows for cover as the shields pushed onto the bridge.

Kestrel vanished and raced, avoiding the slick blood on the ice, to the other side. She reappeared in front of the highest ranking officer who blinked, his mouth open, still half-dreaming, his boots pulled on over his nightclothes. Her arrow nestled an inch from his eye, spitting blue magic onto his nose.

“You know who we are?” she asked.

The officer stuttered in his own language, then said in an accent, “Stormguard.”

“Just passing through.” Catherine’s voice was rich and slow as honey. Her hand rested on Kestrel’s back shoulder, and the rest of the women assembled in defensive positions behind them. “You’ll be a dear and let us by, won’t you?”

Something like hope flashed in Catherine’s eyes as the officer called for his troops to stand down. The Stormguard filed through the enemy’s line while the cavalry struggled to gain control of their wounded beasts. Kestrel walked backward, her bow pulled, until the last of the women had disappeared into friendly territory.

The dark room rippled with an eerie, surgical-bright glow centered on a glass tank at the center. Inside, a pale woman floated in a bowed shape, belly highest, swaying, her shaved head thrown back as if in laughter. Tubes snaked inside the glass and attached to nodes in her chest and temples. Great wounds in her torso had been stitched and bound together with white bandages. There was a low hum, the sour smell of chemicals and an echoing rhythmic beep that matched the slow beat of her heart.

In one corner of the room, under a glaring light, a dwarf in thick safety goggles stood on a stool next to a headless robot in the shape of a woman. His power drill revved and died, revved and died, as he worked.  

The door opened, startling him. The dwarf cursed and rubbed at a scratch on the white armor, ignoring the blind queen and the two guards who followed her. The queen pressed her fingertips to the tank. The raven on her shoulder glared through the glass.

“Ungrateful wenches,” she hissed. “What would they have been without me? Wives. Mothers. Forgotten grandmothers telling boring stories. I saved them from mediocrity. I made them dangerous. I gave them a skill, a purpose, a family … and how am I repaid?”

The two Stormguard women looked at one another, then back at the tank. “We returned -” began one, but the queen continued as if she hadn’t heard.

“Betrayal. For some romantic notion. For a child who knows nothing of building and guiding an empire. But not you, my child.” The queen rested her cheek against the glass. “You will be more powerful than any soldier. You will never tire. You will never question me. You will never betray me. Because you cannot.”

“Does that mean I have your permission to put her together?” called Frankie without turning around. “I can get her head off and have her configured by tomorrow.”

“Yes,” said the queen. She turned from the tank to smile in her terrifying, eyeless way, at the only two Stormguard who had chosen to return. “And you, my loyal girls, will help me test her strength.”

—— Hullo, Beauty…
—— Hullo…
—— Hullo Beaut-beaut-bee…
#~$ REBOOT INITIATED: STAND BY…
… BUFFERING…
… TARGET DETECTED
–> ENGAGING.

Frankie and the veiled queen stepped along the scuffs, slides and stomp-marks scattered across the packed-dirt training yard. Pools of blood hardened into dusty paste around the bodies of Livia and Elena, the two Stormguard who had chosen to return. Alpha stood at attention, still as death, her mask and armor undented.

“Harsh,” said Frankie.

“Necessary,” replied the queen, “and impressive. No one in the world could have defeated either one of them, and your creation ended them both in moments.”

“She’s unstoppable.” Frankie rapped his knuckles on Alpha’s knee. “Had some bugs to work out with her memory drive. Not easy, wiping everything except how to fight. I patched the issue with an automatic reboot…”

“Is she ready?”

“Yeah. Directive is uploaded.”

~

—— You cannot protect it from me.
—— Protect it. From me. Best run now. Destroy.
—— Now before I destroy…
—— …your best assets.
#~$ REBOOT INITIATED: STAND BY
… BUFFERING…
–> PATROL MODE ACTIVATED.

Quick as fire with wind behind it, word spread through the scattered Eventide cities that the blancorojos were not to be trusted, that a technological monster stalked the insubordinate Stormguard. The news came too late for two old families, former royalty who sought to conspire against the queen. They, and six mangled former Stormguard, were dragged out of hiding into the streets to be picked at by the ravens.

~

—— Pretty thing.
—— Pretty…
—— …thing. Pretty thing.
#~$ REBOOT INITIATED: STAND BY
… BUFFERING…
… STORMGUARD DETECTED…
… FULFILL DIRECTIVE…
–> ENGAGING.

Outside the oldest tea house in Taizen Gate, masked guards with curved swords stood shoulder-to-shoulder, silent. Inside, the Three Bosses knelt by a low table facing six former Stormguard, their palms facing down on the table according to local tradition.

“The Stormguard is known for causing trouble here,” said Second Boss, a four-armed bear hybrid whose pot belly rested atop the table by his paws and teacup.

“The Stormguard now serves the successor to Mont Lille,” replied Marelde.

“We have no stake in which queen rules the Eventides. Our international politics are neutral.” First Boss’ hologram flickered at the edges of her business suit.

Marelde bent her fingers, cracking each knuckle in turn, watching the Bosses’ eyes. “The queen’s ambition extends far beyond her shores.”

“If you lie, and we give you the location of this princess you seek, you will kill her, yes?” asked Third Boss, a slight man with an unnerving smile.

Marelde ached to look sidelong at the other women, but an unsteady gaze was a sign of weakness in Taizen Gate. Besides, she ever heard Catherine’s voice: A shieldbearer’s first line of defense is her eyes. She turned her hands over on the table, palms up. “I will not demand your trust, but for all things, there is a price. Use your best judgment and name yours.”

Screams, and the clashing of steel from outside, interrupted. The Stormguard jumped onto the low table, kicking away the teapots and arranging themselves in defensive position around the three mages. Second Boss rose with surprising speed and dropped to all fours. First Boss flickered and disappeared. Third Boss opened his kimono, revealing a vest covered in small blade sheaths.

“So much for no weapons allowed,” grumbled one mage, blue sparks exploding from her snapping fingers.

“Not yet,” said Marelde; magic conjuration would be detected all over Taizen Gate. What if your first line of defense is all you have, Catherine? she thought, but Catherine was far away, and she had no shield.

The screams outside stopped. The outer door slid open, letting in the night’s birdsongs and thick summer air.

“Now,” ordered Marelde, and the room filled with the snap and buzz of magic as a heavy sword split apart the room’s paper wall from ceiling to floor and a machine stepped inside.

The room erupted in flashing blue magic and the roars of Second Boss. The machine moved forward without pause, slicing through its former comrades, deflecting the magic bolts, Third Boss’ blades clinking off its armor. Within minutes, Alpha stood in the post-battle silence scanning the room with glowing eyes. Six women lay broken and bleeding at her feet; two bosses shook with terror in a corner. Her sword had cleaved the table, and Marelde with it, in half.

#~$ DIRECTIVE FULFILLED
… RECONNAISSANCE MODE ACTIVATED.
… DIRECTIVE: FIND STORMGUARD.
—— Pretty thing…

To be continued…

Daisy squeezes into a corner of the workout room, bare feet sunk into the mat, arms bent, hiding her face behind bruised forearms and thick leather boxing gloves. Kestrel, a year older at fifteen, weaves close and strikes Daisy’s obliques, tight to cramping; when her arms drop, the strikes come at her jaw and temples. Tears slide out of Daisy’s swollen eyes, mixing with blood and snot from her nose. A hit to the belly sucks the air out of her and she crumples, arms over her head.

Kestrel raises one glove. “Hey! Daisy’s cooked!”

The instructor stalks over, glaring at the folded-up girl. “Never get hit, you fear every strike!” she says in a brusque accent. “Today fall down, cry, skin turn purple, blood come out. Tomorrow, still alive.”

Kestrel winks through her own black-and-blue shiner. “Get up. It’s your turn next.”

“I can’t,” sobs Daisy. “I can’t.”

“Take your mind out of the pain.” Kestrel wipes at her nose with one leather glove. “I count the hits.”

Daisy looks up, wincing. “That works?”

Kestrel shrugs. “Get up and try.”

~

“Did you hear that?”

Atop an airship tower, the last of the Stormguard waited for death. Kestrel and Catherine stood on the landing pad; four kept watch in the windowed control room below.

Amie made a cat’s cradle out of stringy blue magic between her fingers, looking out at the winking lights twisting around the towers of the Royal Quarter. “Like a ding?”

Ivet pressed her nose flat on the window and sighed a big foggy spot. “Taizen Gate bosses are notorious for being full of crap. We’d have known if the queen had some killing machine.”

The ding came again, louder, from the elevator at the center of the room.

The guards crouched as the elevator rose up the levels of the tower. The swordswoman flipped her broadswords and caught them. “Now ladies,” she said, “that could be anybody. Let’s not go killing a pilot or something.”

A last ding and the elevator doors opened.

“It’s true,” whispered Amie, the magic strings disintegrating. “Catherine!”

“Too late,” said a shieldbearer, racing to the elevator. The shield burst into flames, slamming into the machine, pinning it to the far wall.

“ONE,” it said.

The shieldwoman flew back out of the elevator and slid along the floor to the glass wall, her shield and torso cut open, leaving a thick trail of blood behind.  

“I’ll make scrap out of that thing,” said Ivet, charging forward, axe flourishing with blinding fast speed.

The machine took the hit to its metal arm. “TWO,” it said in its mechanical voice, and pushed back. Ivet launched backward, her axe handle split in two, blood leaking from the top of her head.

The third Stormguard stumbled backward over control displays and chairs, her broadswords crossed in front of her face. The machine plucked up the woman by one arm and slammed her into the window, cracking the glass. The swords slipped to the floor.

Amie twisted her fingers, magic sputtering as she struggled to find her center in the swirling mess of panic. “Come on!” she cried as the machine drew near. The blue light solidified, formed wings, became a giant screeching phoenix in her arms. “Go!” she commanded, and the phoenix dived, grabbed the machine with its claws and dragged it back into the elevator.

“THREE,” said the machine, then, “FOUR-FIVE-SIX” when Amie chased after it, ball after ball of explosive magic flying from her fingers. The phoenix forced the machine onto the elevator floor, pecking at its mask, screeching to wake the dead.

~

“That’s Amie’s bird.” Kestrel lunged back, four energy arrows forming in her right hand. Catherine ran to the stairs, her shield thrumming, as the landing zone exploded in an eruption of concrete. The machine leaped through the roof, snapped elevator cables wrapped round its blade, the elevator freefalling through the tower with Amie inside.

The machine’s blank mask settled on Kestrel. “SCANNING. TARGET ZERO-TWO-THREE. STORMGUARD. EXTERMINATE.”

Kestrel let loose three arrows in quick succession that pierced into the machine’s knee and neck joints. “SEVEN-EIGHT-NINE,” said the machine.

Kestrel paused, an arrow in its nock.

Catherine sped in from behind, slamming her arcshield into the machine’s back, spinning it toward herself. She held her breath and formed the shimmering magic shield around her, watched from inside the curved, pulsing bubble as the machine stuttered, “TEN-EN-EN-EN. SCAN-AN-ANNING TARGET ZERO-ZERO-ONE. STORMGUARD. EXTERMINATE-ATE-ATE.” The sword arced through the air, slamming into the bubble. The shield shattered in a rain of energy shards but not before it reflected the strike back at the machine, crumpling it. “ERROR. ERROR.”

“Catherine, wait!” screamed Kestrel.

Catherine positioned sideways, shield high, back knee bent, jaw tight as the machine took a step toward Kestrel, one leg dragging. Kestrel loosed the arrow into the eye of the machine’s mask.

“ELEVEN,” said the machine, stepping like a broken doll as the arrow disintegrated. “COUNT… count the hits.” Her mechanical tone fell away. “I… can’t. Pretty thing. Daisy’s… Daisy’s cooked. I can’t. Kestrel?” The sword dropped from her hands.

“What the hell did she do to you?” cried Kestrel.

Catherine edged forward, shield up. “It could be a trap.”

“It’s Daisy,” said Kestrel, slamming her fist into the mask until it fell away, revealing a woman’s horrified face.

“Where am I?” whispered Daisy, clenching her fists. “Hurts. It hurts. Help… Kestrel, help-ELP-ELP-ELP…” Her eyes stared into the distance, her expression blank, her fists relaxing.

“What’s happening?” cried Kestrel in a panic. “Is she dying?”

“SYSTEM REBOOT. STANDBY,” said Daisy in pleasant monotone. Her eyes closed.

“No! No rebooting!” Kestrel slapped Daisy in her cheeks. “Stay here, Daisy.”

Daisy’s eyes opened. “I killed them,” said Daisy. “I killed all of them. Why did I kill them?”

“It’s not your fault,” said Kestrel, gathering up the machine into her arms.

“I can’t stop. It’s coming… back. I can feel it. Killed them. Best run now. Run. Run. I can end it but you have to RUN-UN-UN-UN can’t stop. STANDBY. Stop it. Can end it. Run. RUN TARGET ZERO-TWO-THREE. RUN, TARGET ZERO-ZERO-ONE. Pretty thing. TERMINATION PROTOCOL INITIATED. STANDBY.”

Daisy went still. There was a click, and an energy barrier appeared around her. Catherine grabbed Kestrel by her arm.

“We have to help her,” whimpered Kestrel, but Catherine yanked her away as blinding light shot out the seams in Daisy’s armor.

“There! Go!” Catherine pointed up, yelling over the sound of the airship that hovered above. A rope ladder fell from the deck and Catherine shoved Kestrel toward it before dropping under her shield. Her eyes squeezed shut as the blast shook the tower.

Kestrel clung for her life to the rope ladder as the explosion blew the ship sideways, the city spread out below, the sea ahead, the Halcyon Fold a dark strip of land in the far distance.

Catherine rose, shaking, to her knees. The arcshield smoldered. She tossed it down and looked up to where she knew the raven would be circling, watching.

#~$ SYSTEM REBOOT…
… IDENTITY: ALPHA, STORMGUARD.
… DIRECTIVE: ELIMINATE STORMGUARD.
… LOADING COORDINATES: HALCYON FOLD…

No one has ever rebuilt the overgrown Old Quarter, where the stink of magic lingers in the destroyed buildings. The children dare one another to touch those still-crackling buildings for the shock. That shock was Kestrel’s first memory.

She wasn’t Kestrel then, but the name her parents gave her is classified.

Kestrel knew about the war, though she hadn’t been born yet, and she knew about the Storm Queen, who lived far away in Mont Lille. She knew never to bother the border guards, who the locals called blancorojos. She learned the rolling, throaty language of Mont Lille alongside her family’s dialect. She saluted the queen’s flag every morning at school. Every child had to take the queen’s aptitude tests; teachers and parents drilled them in mathematics, languages and geography for weeks preceding the test. Taxes were light on families whose children were chosen.

At six years of age, Kestrel took the first battery of tests: analogies, number series, mirroring patterns of blocks and solving puzzles. She did well. She loved the smell of pencil shavings and her examiner’s smart white lab coat trimmed with red. She loved how numbers fell into neat patterns, and she spoke Lilliaise with an adorable accent.

For the last test, the examiner placed a combination of black and white boxes before her with a candy under one. Kestrel’s task was to guess if it was under a black or a white box. At first, there were nine white boxes and one black box. She picked white and collected her candy. The next round, there were seven black boxes and three white ones. She picked black and earned more candy. Her cheeks were stuffed with candies after a few rounds of disproportionate numbers of one color box, then: betrayal. There were six white boxes, but the candy was under one of the four black ones.

Kestrel had never before doubted herself.

The examiner set out the boxes again: five of each.

“Choose,” she said.

“No.”

“Don’t you want the candy?”

“Yes.”

“Then, choose.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know where it is.”

“The test requires you to choose.”

“No.”

The examiner bent double so that she’d be at eye level with the little girl. Her voice was kind. “There is no punishment for guessing wrong, and a candy if you guess right. You must choose.”

“No.”

“The queen requires you to choose.”

“No.”

“Very well.” The examiner straightened and produced a stick the length of her arm. “If you do not choose, you will be struck on your palms.”

Kestrel looked straight ahead with her palms up while the stick smacked into them, remembering the surprising pain of the magic shock she’d given herself in the Old Quarter, how it had lessened into mild tingling after a time. The stick did not hurt that much.

She did not cry, and she did not choose.

The next day, two blancorojos came to her home. Kestrel escaped out the back and climbed a walnut tree, armed with a slingshot and enough underripe ammo to make a grand nuisance should her father seek to punish her for failing the test of the boxes. Instead, her parents coaxed her down with tears and kisses, for she had been called to continue her education in Mont Lille. Her parents had one hour to say goodbye.

The Storm Queen sat sideways on Catherine’s lounge chair, her legs slung over one arm, cloaked and hooded, a raven perched on her shoulder. With no lamps lit, the intruder was invisible in the windowless living quarters. Catherine was not a fan of extra entryways, yet the queen had made her way past the reinforced and locked front door. The queen swung her legs forward and lit the nearest lamp. The raven adjusted its feet but remained in place. “They are nearby. I assume this room is secure?”

“I thought so, yet here you are.”

The queen half-smiled. “You will assemble the Stormguard tonight.”

Catherine sheathed the sword she had been gripping with both fists since first entering her apartment. “Who is the target?”

“Targets. Twin targets, with remarkable magical abilities. You’ll remember their mother, my sister, Julia.”

“Your sister? She’s been dead for years.”

“So she would have us believe. Our spies have found her in southern Gythia.”

“That is tech territory now.”

“A hive of soulless machines and their engineers. Julia has made an alliance with them, hoping to supplant me. She’s even married one of their technologists and made some babies. Isn’t that sweet?”

“Twin babies?”

“Indeed. You will bring them to me so they can be trained.”

“Why is the traitor not a target?”

The queen stood, and the dim light seeped up into her hood, showing the stitches that crossed over the flesh where her eyes had been. They had been removed at birth, in the way of storm mages. “There are laws against royal murder, no matter how justified.” She stroked Catherine’s cheek with the back of her icy hand as she spoke, as if in lullabye. “I should execute you where you stand for suggesting it.”

It was said that evil doles out affection in tiny droplets, yet Catherine could not help her desperate thirst. In a frustrated whisper she said, “So, we take the children and leave their mother to plot your murder? Your sister will seek revenge. She will enlist the Gythians to help her if you do this thing.”

“Let us hope you are right. The Stormguard has never been stronger, and the Gythians are stretched thin fending off the technologists.”

“You wish for war again, my queen?”

“No, Catherine. I do not wish for war. I make it.” The queen’s hand dropped. “Now is the time. Now, while the technologists are a disjointed army of gadgets, while Gythia is an elderly collection of has-beens with shiny trinkets. They are a decade away from readiness and nothing without their toddling prodigies.”

Catherine stared into the raven’s eyes as she spoke. “As you will, my queen.”

“They have made their home in the farms northwest of Pompium. Vyn will accompany you.” Only then did the raven, the queen’s eyes and ears, move; with a quiet flap of its dark wings, it leapt from the queen’s shoulder to Catherine’s.

Catherine resisted the urge to shrug away the bird. “Yes, my queen.”

“I expect obedience.”

A single candle on the table at the back of the tavern flickered a light too weak to penetrate the heavy hood of a woman sitting alone, staring at the leaves swirling in her steaming cup of tea. She’d been sheltered all her young life from the roving bands of people whose old women wore clattering bangles up their arms and read the futures of gullible customers in tea leaves.

Despite her thorough education, Julia would have paid well, in that moment, for such a service.

Every head turned when Catherine entered. The red and white uniform was gone, but her drab hooded cloak failed to remove the disquieting sensation that a predator had stepped into the room. That heavy feeling did not waver despite the smile Catherine offered to Julia as she threaded through the tables to Julia’s booth, sweeping off her cloak to reveal a well-fitted dress true to the local style.

The serving-boy’s words stumbled like pebbles rolling downhill: “Good.. good even… how can I… would you like some… what can I…?”

Catherine stared the boy down, allowing him to stutter until he had found the end of a sentence. “Wine,” she said, a smile playing at one corner of her mouth.

“Right away… and you, ma’am? Can I get you more tea? Hey, aren’t you Jul…”

Catherine stepped close, one fingertip on the boy’s chin, turning his eyes back to her. “Red wine,” she murmured.

Julia exhaled a breath she hadn’t known she was holding as the serving-boy tripped away. “Oh great subterfuge, Cath. Let’s please be as memorable to our fellow patrons as much as possible.”

Catherine scoffed, feigning hurt. “You are so unkind. I am quite proud of my disguise. And look– buttons!” She winked, spreading her arms.

Julia laughed, but the sound was brittle, fighting not to become a sob. “Your disguise is as subtle as a hat on a tiger.”

Neither woman spoke while the wine was poured. Only after did Catherine lean forward in earnest. “She wants the twins, Lia, and you alive to make war before you can win it.”

Julia lifted her chin. “Gythia will aid me.”

Catherine shook her head. “Perhaps. Someday, if the time were right. But the Stormguard is here today. I couldn’t send word; I had Vyn on my shoulder the whole journey. He watches your family now.” Catherine clasped Julia’s shaking hand in hers. “This mission is happening tonight. The twins will come back with me to Mont Lille.”

Julia jerked her hand away and looked up at a cobwebby corner of the tavern. “No.”

Catherine’s spine straightened. “You know I would have it any other way if it could be. But you do not have a choice in this. I give my word, Lia, I will watch over them.”

“No!” Julia insisted. “My sister would make a tyrant of Celeste in her image, and you could not stop her.”

Catherine opened her callused palms. “So? What do you propose? You and Ardan cannot defeat the Stormguard tonight, not even with my help. Those not surrounding your farm have barricaded every road out of Pompium. Once we have completed our mission, we will disappear. Lia. Your only option is to trust me.”

“The way my sister trusts you?”

Catherine’s eyes narrowed. “You and I have been friends since we were children.”

“We were all three friends when we were children.” A long silence once again wedged itself between them. At length, Julia sighed. “I will warn Ardan that the Stormguard may be closeby. The children will go about their routine as usual; nothing will seem amiss from the outside. I will help Ardan escape with the twins when you attack.”

“There is no escape through the Stormguard.”

“There is one way. A mage is never more powerful than at the time of death. When you take my life, I will pass my gift to him. He will make it through.”

Catherine gripped her wine glass, her voice cold as frost. “I will not do this.”

“Make a show of it. Create a diversion.”

Catherine’s eyes sparkled wet, her teeth clenched. “I cannot.”

“And then, run. There is nothing more for you in Mont Lille. The Stormguard will chase Ardan; you must escape to our friends in Gythia.”

The glass in her hands exploded, shards of tinkling rain skittering across the table top. The tavern went quiet as all heads turned to Catherine as blood shimmering with halcyon dripped from her fist. “Neither you nor your sister ever consider the weight of your demands,” Catherine choked out, blinking away unshed tears.

Julia swallowed against the knot in her throat. She took Catherine’s bleeding hands with all the patience she’d learned as a mother. “I am touched by your devotion, but I am not a person. I am an empire.” She pulled glass from Catherine’s palms, her voice a sing-song whisper. “If you deliver my children to my sister, she will make a monster of my daughter, put my son at the front lines of her military, and gain territory at the mouth of Gythia.” Blood and wine dribbled onto the floor as Julia cupped Catherine’s hands inside her own. Green light glowed, Julia’s healing power drawing strength from the halcyon, the lacerations closing. “Never feel guilty for what must be done. And… and..” Julia faltered, then stopped.

“I will make it fast,” Catherine said softly.

Julia’s shoulders wilted. She released Catherine’s healed hands. They slid out of the booth and stood, regarding each other across a distance that had grown, in only a few moments, unspannable.

Catherine smiled and touched her hand to Julia’s cheek.

“Hey, Lia,” she whispered.

“Hey, Cath,” Julia whispered back, a sob and a laugh catching in her throat.

Catherine’s back straightened, her eyes cleared, and her hand returned to her side. She nodded once at Julia, grabbed her cloak, and stepped through her own spilled blood, past the silent patrons and their tracking stares, out the tavern door into the waiting night.

“It really is her.”

Kestrel shot a withering glare down at the swordswoman who’d whispered it from the brush below. A soldier of the Stormguard knew better than to speak after positions were taken. Still, every woman hiding outside the indistinct farmhouse that evening had stood watch over the burial of the blonde woman who now struggled to unload a goat from a battered old cart outside the farmhouse. Julia should have been a ghost.

The goat pulled at its rope, crying like a child.

Kestrel waited in the tangled branches of an olive tree for Catherine’s signal in the same position she’d held for hours. The feeling had gone out of her legs long before. Her bow laid out sidelong in front of her, stringed with steel. She rubbed her gloved thumb and fingerpads together, savoring the spark under her skin, but she wouldn’t use energy arrows that night. Metal shattered glass, if the bow was strung heavy enough, and the detached Stormguard unit hadn’t used magic since crossing into Gythian territory. Techies didn’t trust magic, and the last thing they needed in this land of smog and machines was attention.

Poking her tongue into her cheek, she watched the queen’s sister through her scope. Mothering twins had softened Julia’s body, and there were laugh lines by her eyes, but there was no doubt. After Julia went inside, Kestrel curled her toes to get the feeling back, rolled her right shoulder, sank her thigh into a knob in the branch, fit an arrow into the nock and hooted an owl call. Catherine whistled back the command to hold.

The goat bleated louder and sadder as the sun sank. Nothing stirred in the surrounding brush and trees. Inside the window, Julia argued with her husband, some nobody from the rebel tech army. The twins flashed by in their pajamas, chasing one another to their beds. The boy gave out a shout that shook the ground and the setting sun brightened, then dimmed. Mageborn, Kestrel mused in silence. No wonder the queen wanted them unharmed. She waited until the kids were tucked in, took aim at the left edge of a front window away from the bedrooms, then repeated her signal. Catherine whistled again to hold.

Night deepened, stars poking out that never showed above the bright light of Mont Lille. The man inside gestured with a wrench. Julia slammed a door. The goat’s shrieks twisted Kestrel’s nerves into a tight bundle. She’d hold position all night if needed, but every minute she waited was a minute something could go wrong.

The man clamped a gauntlet on one arm. Animalistic hoots and whistles sounded from varied positions. Catherine’s hold command repeated again and the goat cried and something wasn’t right; they should have attacked an hour ago. “What the hell is she waiting for?” the swordswoman grumbled. Kestrel was used to lone missions, not all of this group planning. Too many other people to depend on. Too much noise. Couldn’t think.

She let an arrow fly, and the goat shut up.

The signals paused; someone in the brush snickered. Kestrel fit another arrow into its nock. The man paused, looked at his own reflection in the nearest window, then raced across the farmhouse to Julia.

“He knows,” breathed the woman aground, bellying forward in the brush sword first.

The whispers of steel unsheathing sounded all over the olive grove. Somewhere, a blue wisp of magic snapped on and off in the air. A glowing blue shield hummed to life. Hearts pounded in throats. The man inside struggled into his armor, his wife pinching her fingers on the clamps trying to help. It was “go time,” and all they needed was Catherine’s whistle.

The whistle never came.

Kestrel pulled back, knuckles resting on the place where her jaw met her skull, three fingers under the knock, shoulderblade pinching her spine, and on her exhale …

… released.

By the time the front window shattered, Kestrel had swung down from the tree. Ignoring the burning pins and needles in her legs, she ducked low and closed in on the farmhouse.

Hanging from the windowsill by one hand, her bow slung over one shoulder, she glanced back at the storm of magic and steel following behind. Catherine stood behind the attack, tears in her eyes, a raven’s neck broken in her fist, another landing on her shoulder with an enraged scream.

“I do not need your permission to buy a goat,” Julia said. “Goat milk is delicious, and we can make cheese.”

They’d been arguing all evening. Ardan was hunched over his power gauntlet, sanding down the edges of a grill he’d removed to improve air flow. Outside in the yard, a goat shrieked into the moonless dark. “Goats stink and scream like fiends,” he grumped. “It hasn’t stopped for an hour. How will the twins sleep?”

“The kids need a pet. Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“And who will make this alleged cheese? When have you ever made cheese, your highness?”

“I could make cheese!” Julia shouted. She stomped out of the room and slammed the bedroom door behind her, the goat’s cries dramatizing her exit.

Celeste toddled out of her room, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Dadda? Is Mamma alright?”

She had her mother’s accent. Ardan plucked up the toddler in his unarmored arm and kissed her cheeks. “Mamma is being ridiculous.”

“What is ridick oo luss?”

“It means she brought a goat home without talking to me about it.”

“I like goats.” This from Vox, who wandered in after his sister. He seated himself on his father’s foot, wrapped his arms around Ardan’s leg and rode along as Ardan took Celeste back to bed, staring out the window toward the screams.

“You like the idea of goats. None of us actually know how to care for a goat.”

“There’s a baby crying outside,” said Celeste, half asleep.

“It’s the stupid goat,” said Ardan, planting her back in her bed.

Vox uncurled himself from his father’s leg. “He’s afraid,” he said. “Maybe lonely.”

“It’s a she, Vox. At least I hope it is a she, or your mother’s dreams of cheese are –”

Ardan paused, turned toward the window.

The goat had stopped screaming.

His adrenaline spiked.

“Hide, both of you. Do not open the door.”

There was no time to make sure they obeyed him. He ran to his bedroom. “Julia,” he hissed at the bedroom door. “They’re here.”

Julia opened the door. Her face had gone white. “Now?”

“Outside.”

The armor stood in pieces around the front room in various states of renovation. Tools littered the floor. “Legs first,” he grumbled, stepping into the sabatons. Julia scrambled to her knees in her nightdress, a poor but necessary replacement for a proper battle squire. She pinched her fingers on the knee clamps, struggled under the weight of the chest pieces.

The button panel whirred and crackled with static, then burped out: “System. Offline.” Ardan slammed his left fist onto it. “Worthless damn power source on this model…”

“Shh.” Julia’s hands were black with oil, her face smudged as she attached the generator to his back and connected it to the power gauntlet. She stared out the door, into the hall. There was no sound. No disturbance. No goat. “Are you sure they’re…”

“System. Online.”

Glass broke. Ardan turned sideways in time for a metal arrow to slice a scratch through his breastplate, just under his chin, and thud home in the wall opposite the front window. Ardan cursed and squared up, the wood floor creaking under his armored weight. “I’ll watch the front door.”

“But your cannon arm!”

“It’s useless, unless you want me to blow up the house. Stay behind me.”

Julia closed her eyes, turned her palms upward. “I’ll protect you,” she murmured, her voice dreamy, green light forming in her hands.

Ardan winced away from the twisted-guts feeling that magic always gave him. “I can handle myself,” he grunted.

A forearm appeared over the window, decorated in an archer’s gauntlet, and then the archer herself swung inside. Another woman followed and drew her sword. More came in behind her, magicians and assassins, all wearing the same insignia.

“Stormguard!” he yelled, but Julia was lost inside her trance, eyes rolled back.

Ardan’s armor groaned and buzzed as he moved forward, painfully slow, but he was grateful for it when the Stormguard attacked. They moved in tandem, each with a weapon they’d held since childhood. He ran forward, energy buzzing through the armor, propelling him, heating the metal to burning, steel cracking against the breastplate. When he backhanded the archer across her face, he left a burn mark. She crumpled, her bow clattering to the floor.

The others raised shields of wood, metal and magic to counter Julia’s trance and Ardan’s assault. He stomped forward and plowed into them, knocked them from their feet, sent them flying in a crunch of bones to the wall. Their blood spattered the divan. They rolled in shattered glass, discarded weapons and their own knocked-out teeth. He could not resist every attack: Blades sliced through his unprotected arm and his cheeks; magic stung and froze him with deafening whipcrack sounds. But he was a wall between the enemy and his wife, and all the while, he felt warmth coming from her, a blanket that enveloped him, closed his wounds, melted the ice and gave him strength. It churned his insides, these unnatural talents, but he’d deal with the sick when his family was safe.

Then, the blast.

All went silent and cold. His teeth clamped shut. A shock pulsed up through his legs, his arms, his throat. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t blink. Paintings slid from the wall and the bolts fell from the front door. He could hear the static noises from his armor display, the groans from the pile of wounded Stormguard, but he could not move. He could only watch as the front door opened and the last of the Stormguard stepped inside, as if invited. She surveyed the room, then snapped her fingers at two of the guard who were scrambling to their feet even as Ardan struggled to move. She pointed to the twins’ room and the two guards sprinted that way.

The woman walked from the door, past Ardan as if he didn’t exist, to Julia, who stood frozen in her nightdress and bare feet.

“Catherine,” gasped Julia.

“Such a shame,” whispered Catherine as she pressed her sword against Julia’s chest.

Ardan’s heart pounded out one beat. Another. Air filled his lungs and he coughed. To his right, the two Stormguard emerged carrying the twins, stunned as rigid as he. The other Stormguard rose, some shakily, some bleeding, all stone-eyed and with a firm grip on their weapons.

To his left, Julia stared into Catherine’s eyes.

His heart beat a third time.

In another heartbeat, his children or his wife would be dead, depending on which way he ran.

He ran.

The general’s sword, turned sideways, slid easily between Julia’s ribs. Her last breath was his name, and with it came the last otherworldly green swirl of her magic. It hit him, Julia’s last gift becoming part of him, wrapping around his insides, giving him the burst of strength he needed. Ardan wrapped the twins up in his arms and crashed out of the window. The two Stormguard who had taken the children lay unconscious. There hadn’t been time to kill them… or to hold his wife as she died.

He fled from the house into the dark, past the poor dead goat, whose screams had been silenced by one well-placed arrow through the throat. The children remained silent, in some lucky instinct, leaving the questions to the night owls in the trees.

“Do it!” roars the undead monster at the round metal eye of the turret, half grown over with brambles and rattan. “Put a hole in me! Blow me apart!”

If only it would work.

The turret remains silent, but he can smell recent explosions. Someone is keeping it loaded. Someone is summoning the minions that come through the choke point beyond the turret, past the shambles of what must have once been a rock fortress, in waves. And beyond that someone may be what he seeks.

So close…

Krul drags his left leg, nursing a nagging sting of magic in his thigh where some spell hit him earlier. Another someone, now lost to the world. The smell of summoning drifts over the rock face and he grimaces, grinds his teeth. More minions coming. Ugly bastards, no necks, no language, nothing in them but fight. He punches his leg to get the sting out and takes an unnecessary deep breath. A habit from a former existence. The air leaks out through the sucking wound in his chest, fogging up the cold steel trapped there.

Every step is pain, and he runs hard. Catches the biggest of the idiot minions by surprise, flattens him fast, ignore the pain, ignore the pain, ignore the… Tearing into the minion’s belly is good, the only good thing. A distraction from the misery that threatens, in every moment, to lay him flat. The minion’s dark insides are slippery in his hands; their bellies come apart like cobwebs, their legs detach easy as fly wings. He screams into their faces, spewing spittle. His insane laughter echoes through the battleground. Their souls suck away from their dying carcasses and feed him. It is his only satiation.

There is blood, there are limbs, there are gurgling death-screams, there are pieces of once-living creatures clinging to Krul’s teeth and nails when he sees her standing atop the ruins of the fort. Human from the look of her, tall and still as morning, a sword buried between cracks in the rock, eyes impassive. His face, or what is left of it, cracks open into a grin.

“Hullo, beauty!” he calls.

Her response is the slow pulling of her weapon from the rocks, that shing of steel.

“You cannot protect it from me,” he growls. “Best run now and let me at it, before I destroy your best assets.”

She leaps, falling hard onto him, sword front, magic buzzing around her like bees. She is good with her weapon, well trained. He might have respected her, once. She gets a few slashes into him, his half-dead flesh sagging apart where she aims. He swings at her, hits only air, circling, snorting like a devil, dodging as best he can until she turns the sword over her shoulder and pounds him good in the brow with the hilt. He lunges, closes the gap between them, roaring his dead breath onto her, then her valiant cry is cut short by his fist round her throat.

“Pretty thing.” He licks her cheek while she squirms; her sword clatters on the stones between them and he kicks it away. He’s had enough of swords. A squeeze, and her neck breaks in his grip. Her life flows away from her and into him and she collapses, forgotten the moment he steps over her, toward the turret.

So close…

There is no one left to man the cannon, to feed it gunpowder and magic, no one to summon the thick-necked bastards. His right foot leaves bloody footprints and his left leg drags smears of minion gut all the way through the choke point, beyond the fortress, to the well.

To the dead well.

Perhaps once, the well had charged crystal; perhaps heroes had once guarded it. Perhaps he would once have found salvation here. But there is nothing now, nothing stirring in the well, only shards of broken crystal lying about, hardly anything worth defending.

Hope lost, the world comes back to him. The rhythmic bzzt bzzt of insects. Birds complaining. Cold coming on, sinking into his muscle, cramping him up all around his eternal wound, whatever is living about him trying to reject the foreign thing rammed through him. Pain and hatred.

He allows himself one agonized scream before stalking back into the bush. There is another road there, to the Halcyon Fold, that he must now take.

“Who am I?”

A little girl stands opposite her master at the center of the sparring circle holding a wooden shield. The sun sets behind the foothills to the west, but she knows better than to show the long day’s fatigue inside the circle. “You are Professor Marcel …”

The flat of the master’s blunted swordblade leaves a stinging red imprint on her left cheek before she can register that he has moved.

“In battle, there are no professors. There are no names.” The master circles her, and she moves with him as he taught her, her eyes watering. “No husbands, no brothers. No sisters. No friends.” He strikes again, his blade slapping the wound anew.

“Y.. yes, Professor.” The girl sniffs up the pain, forces herself to remain light on her toes as the master switches direction.

“Who am I?”

“You are…” The sword swings between them and cracks into the girl’s shield, sending splinters flying. “…the sword.”

“And who are you?”

The sword swings again, a deadly whip in the master’s hand, smashing again into the shield. “I am the shield.”

“Again.”

“I am the sh… shield.” The strikes come faster, arcing and crashing, no mercy given for her small arms struggling to raise the shield, welts and bruises rising on her skin when she is too slow.

“Again.”

“I am the shield!” Blunted steel on wood sends shocks up the girl’s arm; sweat pours down her brow, meets with tears, rolls down her cheeks and throat and into her uniform.

“Who?”

“I am the shield!” she sobs, falling to her knees, the shield over her head. “The shield! I am the -”

“…the shield!”

Catherine sits up straight in the general’s tent, gasping out of sleep, drenched in sweat despite the cold night. A magic arrow protrudes from the chest of the man beside her, glowing blue in the dark.

“Kestrel,” she whispers.

The fur beneath her dead lover squelches with his blood when she rises. She dresses in silence, though she knows there is no need for quiet; she is alive because they want her to be.

Not so for the rest of the camp. Squinting into the dark, she steps outside, her boots soundless in the fresh snow. The smaller infantry tents are sieved with sizzling arrow-holes. The cold masks the bloody smell of death, freezing time. It is as if the sun will never rise, the dead will never decay and spring will never end the Winter War. Half inside her dream, her nose and fingers pink and numb, it is as if she is not stepping toward her own end.

In the center of camp, thirty unfamiliar women in familiar uniforms poke at the fire with sticks. They are young in the way of soldiers; war has a high turnover rate. Six Swords, two Axes, two Daggers, two Polearms, eight varied Mages, nine Shields and one Bow.

“Salut, Kestrel.” Catherine steps into the light, resting her shield in the snowdrift before her.

“Catherine!” calls The Bow with a grin that does not reach her eyes. She lopes through the snow to clasp Catherine’s hand, setting her bow in the snow beside the shield. “Kind of a demotion, isn’t it, settling other countries’ border disputes?”

“It pays well.”

Kestrel drags her fingers up the wings of Catherine’s pauldron. Bump-bump-bump. “Did you leave your Sword in bed?”

“Indeed.” Catherine peers past the fire at the Stormguard as they move into position. “You rendered it quite useless.”

Kestrel smirks. “Rumor is, you gave up your blade in a fit of guilt.”

“You will soon find that I don’t need it.”

“Understandable. Weapons, armies, even whole institutions, outstay their welcomes.”

Catherine rests one arm atop her shield. “It is not like you to be so chatty.”

“Just catching up. Been a really long time.” Kestrel plucks up her weapon in her left hand. In her right, four glowing arrows snap into existence. On the other side of the fire, the others push back their white fur hoods and draw their weapons; fire and ice and energy form in the palms of the mages. With a nod, Catherine pulls her shield from the snow, and she is Catherine no longer, and Kestrel is no longer Kestrel, and a thin gray line of dawn forms at the edge of the sky.

In the moment before the chaos, a breeze swirls light snowflakes around the tents full of dead soldiers. Sparks explode above the fire. The Shield rises. The Bow fits the glowing arrow to the bowstring and pulls it back, her fingers resting on her cheek.

Then, she spins on her back foot and looses the arrow through the flames.

Sparks fly from Kestrel’s magic arrow as it sails past the fire, gliding through the narrow gap between two swordswomen and piercing straight into the Storm Queen’s raven. It lands with an undignified squawk and a floomph of powdered snow.

“You all can do what you want,” says Kestrel. “I’m not killing one of our own.”

The queen’s best killers, twitching with anticipation of battle, their trembling weapons thirsty for blood, dart their eyes from Kestrel, to Catherine, to the dead black thing in the white snow with horror. Their white-gloved grips loose and re-tighten as Kestrel steps back beside Catherine, who crouches in a defensive position behind her shield, her perplexed eyes shimmering. In that stunned silence, there is a moment when she sees beyond the white and red uniforms, beyond the weapons, to the faces of women she used to know. The closest thing she ever had to sisters, once.

The Guard’s best daggerwoman breaks the spell, darting forward, crossing the distance in a blinding blue flash, appearing a breath away from Kestrel, her blades crossed over the archer’s throat. “She is no longer one of us,” she hisses. “And now, neither are you.”

“Really, Livia?” Kestrel grins. “I put an arrow in the eye of a man at your flank at the last battle for Lionne.” There is a popping sound, and all that remains where Kestrel stood is a phosphorescent cloud. The daggerwoman jumps back from the glowing particles, her daggers in a defensive position. “I’ve saved every one of your lives at one point or another,” calls Kestrel’s voice, disembodied several steps away from the mist.

“We have orders,” calls a shieldbearer from the front line.

“Sure, Marelde, and we’re trained to kill, not think,” says Kestrel, reappearing with a new arrow fitted to the nock of her bow, “but it was Catherine who trained you with a shield when you were ten years old.”

“Eight,” whispers Marelde.

“And you, Amie.” Kestrel’s arrow points at the forehead of a mage holding a sputtering ball of blue light. “After the northern revolt, when you had night terrors, Catherine stayed up all night to comfort you. And you, Ivet, Catherine taught you to speak Lillaise.” Ivet nods, resting her axe over her shoulder, staring at the snow.

“I never knew her, and I don’t care what she taught Ivet to say,” scoffs Elena, the youngest of them, polearm at the ready, her stance low. “She’s a traitor. She disobeyed orders, ruined a mission and disgraced the Stormguard.”

“Toujours fidèle.” Catherine sighs as all eyes turn to her. “I swore loyalty, but in war, I was never loyal to the queen. I was loyal to the woman next to me. I had no thought for Mont Lille, or a unified Eventide, when the blades swung and the arrows flew. I fought because I was afraid of what the woman next to me would think if I did not.”

“Yet you abandoned us and fled like a coward,” snarls Livia.

Catherine shoots a glare at the daggerwoman. “There are no cowards in the Stormguard. I chose to disobey so that one day, you all would have another choice. But I have … I have lived with the shame of my disloyalty to you for more than a decade, Kestrel.”

“Then make it up to me now.” Kestrel lowers her bow. “We found Julia’s whole family alive and well in Taizen Gate. They escaped and disappeared with the help of Gythians.”

Catherine’s breath catches. “Then we can waste no more time. Make your choice, ladies, and make it before the queen’s ravens find you.”

When frozen tundra gave way to dense forest, the Stormguard traveled at night to evade the watchful eyes of nesting ravens. The country was at war, and the Storm Queen would be searching for them, but the freeze itself was their biggest enemy, and Kestrel was glad of her warm winter uniform.

On the last night of their trek, Catherine drew up near Kestrel and murmured, “I have not thanked you.”

“Don’t,” said Kestrel in her usual dry tone. She pulled her backpack around to the front and removed her night vision goggles. “I don’t care who sits on what throne, but I expect Gythia will advise their puppet monarch to free the Storm Queen’s territories.”

Catherine fell quiet, and while the moon rose there was no sound but their steps and their foggy breathing.

When she heard the rush of fast water, Kestrel climbed a tree on a steep hill and scanned the river through the goggles. The bridge below was the only border crossing that had not been destroyed in the Winter War, and their only chance to cross to friendlier territory. She whistled a signal and the others gathered below.

“Your employer’s enemies have taken the bridge, Catherine,” she said. “Twenty guards on either side and ten on bridge patrol.”

“We can take twenty at a time, if it comes to that,” murmured Catherine.

“The bridge patrol have snow beasts,” said Kestrel. She dropped to the ground, soundless except for the poofing of powdery snow, and Ivet scurried up to look. In a moment, the axewoman cursed under her breath at the ten giant, armored, white-furred beasts, their curled horns wrapped with spikes, their tusks protruding from metal helms. On their shoulders rode enemy soldiers.

“I’ve heard about snow beasts,” said Amie, shivering as she drew her mage cloak tighter around her. “They steal children and eat them.”

“Leave them to me.” Kestrel stood at the lip of the hill, the green laser light from her goggles sweeping along the border.

“We don’t have to kill them all. We just have to get across.” Catherine raised her arcshield and the hidden blades snapped out. “If we are separated, you all have your assignments.” She motioned Kestrel ahead, then followed down the dense forested hill until they could hear the rushing of the water and the grunts of the snow beasts, the other women snaking behind, pulling shields, blades and polearms from their backs and belts.

At the edge of the forest, Kestrel disappeared and the others fanned out behind rocks and trees, fighters and mages clumping close to their assigned shieldwomen. Catherine stood alone, her fur cloak waving in the frozen breeze, refusing to shiver, as the guards’ blinding searchlight swung toward her. There was a call in a language Kestrel didn’t understand, then an answer, and Catherine was surrounded by men in heavy wool coats and fur caps, their swords and rifles drawn.

Hidden inside shimmering phosphor, Kestrel slipped past the guards and onto the bridge. The snow beasts were larger than she’d thought from her high vantage point; their steps shook the wooden bridge, and their armor covered all the vital bits, but the plan was in motion and could not be changed. The Stormguard whistled their positions like nocturnal bird calls. Catherine held up her shield, and the first of the giant snow beasts stepped into the phosphorous cloud.

With all eyes on Catherine, it was a simple thing for Kestrel to put a sizzling, glowing arrow into the beast’s eye. It howled, stuck, and twisted about hard, its great hairy arms striking into the darkness, tossing its rider off the side of the bridge and into the river. By the time the nearby guards had reined their beasts around to face their aggressor, Kestrel and the arrow had disappeared, and the panicked beast clutching at its bleeding face could not be contained.

The Stormguard moved into action, shields flanking around Catherine, fighters taking out the unprepared guards, magic flashing, freezing, burning in the air. A flaming phoenix screamed, its wings spraying sparks onto the bridge; the guards leaped out of its way in terror. In the chaos, Kestrel left another cloud of phosphor in the path of the next beast and delivered two arrows under its arm. It stopped still and bellowed, but Kestrel had already disappeared again. Across the bridge she went, shooting and stunning the wild beasts, ducking and sprinting out of the way as they wavered and roared. She glanced over her shoulder to see Catherine’s bubble flash and spin, then back to the other side of the bridge, where they had no element of surprise. The guards there held positions with grim expressions and weapons drawn, eyes darting. She stood sideways and fired, releasing arrows for cover as the shields pushed onto the bridge.

Kestrel vanished and raced, avoiding the slick blood on the ice, to the other side. She reappeared in front of the highest ranking officer who blinked, his mouth open, still half-dreaming, his boots pulled on over his nightclothes. Her arrow nestled an inch from his eye, spitting blue magic onto his nose.

“You know who we are?” she asked.

The officer stuttered in his own language, then said in an accent, “Stormguard.”

“Just passing through.” Catherine’s voice was rich and slow as honey. Her hand rested on Kestrel’s back shoulder, and the rest of the women assembled in defensive positions behind them. “You’ll be a dear and let us by, won’t you?”

Something like hope flashed in Catherine’s eyes as the officer called for his troops to stand down. The Stormguard filed through the enemy’s line while the cavalry struggled to gain control of their wounded beasts. Kestrel walked backward, her bow pulled, until the last of the women had disappeared into friendly territory.

The dark room rippled with an eerie, surgical-bright glow centered on a glass tank at the center. Inside, a pale woman floated in a bowed shape, belly highest, swaying, her shaved head thrown back as if in laughter. Tubes snaked inside the glass and attached to nodes in her chest and temples. Great wounds in her torso had been stitched and bound together with white bandages. There was a low hum, the sour smell of chemicals and an echoing rhythmic beep that matched the slow beat of her heart.

In one corner of the room, under a glaring light, a dwarf in thick safety goggles stood on a stool next to a headless robot in the shape of a woman. His power drill revved and died, revved and died, as he worked.  

The door opened, startling him. The dwarf cursed and rubbed at a scratch on the white armor, ignoring the blind queen and the two guards who followed her. The queen pressed her fingertips to the tank. The raven on her shoulder glared through the glass.

“Ungrateful wenches,” she hissed. “What would they have been without me? Wives. Mothers. Forgotten grandmothers telling boring stories. I saved them from mediocrity. I made them dangerous. I gave them a skill, a purpose, a family … and how am I repaid?”

The two Stormguard women looked at one another, then back at the tank. “We returned -” began one, but the queen continued as if she hadn’t heard.

“Betrayal. For some romantic notion. For a child who knows nothing of building and guiding an empire. But not you, my child.” The queen rested her cheek against the glass. “You will be more powerful than any soldier. You will never tire. You will never question me. You will never betray me. Because you cannot.”

“Does that mean I have your permission to put her together?” called Frankie without turning around. “I can get her head off and have her configured by tomorrow.”

“Yes,” said the queen. She turned from the tank to smile in her terrifying, eyeless way, at the only two Stormguard who had chosen to return. “And you, my loyal girls, will help me test her strength.”

—— Hullo, Beauty…
—— Hullo…
—— Hullo Beaut-beaut-bee…
#~$ REBOOT INITIATED: STAND BY…
… BUFFERING…
… TARGET DETECTED
–> ENGAGING.

Frankie and the veiled queen stepped along the scuffs, slides and stomp-marks scattered across the packed-dirt training yard. Pools of blood hardened into dusty paste around the bodies of Livia and Elena, the two Stormguard who had chosen to return. Alpha stood at attention, still as death, her mask and armor undented.

“Harsh,” said Frankie.

“Necessary,” replied the queen, “and impressive. No one in the world could have defeated either one of them, and your creation ended them both in moments.”

“She’s unstoppable.” Frankie rapped his knuckles on Alpha’s knee. “Had some bugs to work out with her memory drive. Not easy, wiping everything except how to fight. I patched the issue with an automatic reboot…”

“Is she ready?”

“Yeah. Directive is uploaded.”

~

—— You cannot protect it from me.
—— Protect it. From me. Best run now. Destroy.
—— Now before I destroy…
—— …your best assets.
#~$ REBOOT INITIATED: STAND BY
… BUFFERING…
–> PATROL MODE ACTIVATED.

Quick as fire with wind behind it, word spread through the scattered Eventide cities that the blancorojos were not to be trusted, that a technological monster stalked the insubordinate Stormguard. The news came too late for two old families, former royalty who sought to conspire against the queen. They, and six mangled former Stormguard, were dragged out of hiding into the streets to be picked at by the ravens.

~

—— Pretty thing.
—— Pretty…
—— …thing. Pretty thing.
#~$ REBOOT INITIATED: STAND BY
… BUFFERING…
… STORMGUARD DETECTED…
… FULFILL DIRECTIVE…
–> ENGAGING.

Outside the oldest tea house in Taizen Gate, masked guards with curved swords stood shoulder-to-shoulder, silent. Inside, the Three Bosses knelt by a low table facing six former Stormguard, their palms facing down on the table according to local tradition.

“The Stormguard is known for causing trouble here,” said Second Boss, a four-armed bear hybrid whose pot belly rested atop the table by his paws and teacup.

“The Stormguard now serves the successor to Mont Lille,” replied Marelde.

“We have no stake in which queen rules the Eventides. Our international politics are neutral.” First Boss’ hologram flickered at the edges of her business suit.

Marelde bent her fingers, cracking each knuckle in turn, watching the Bosses’ eyes. “The queen’s ambition extends far beyond her shores.”

“If you lie, and we give you the location of this princess you seek, you will kill her, yes?” asked Third Boss, a slight man with an unnerving smile.

Marelde ached to look sidelong at the other women, but an unsteady gaze was a sign of weakness in Taizen Gate. Besides, she ever heard Catherine’s voice: A shieldbearer’s first line of defense is her eyes. She turned her hands over on the table, palms up. “I will not demand your trust, but for all things, there is a price. Use your best judgment and name yours.”

Screams, and the clashing of steel from outside, interrupted. The Stormguard jumped onto the low table, kicking away the teapots and arranging themselves in defensive position around the three mages. Second Boss rose with surprising speed and dropped to all fours. First Boss flickered and disappeared. Third Boss opened his kimono, revealing a vest covered in small blade sheaths.

“So much for no weapons allowed,” grumbled one mage, blue sparks exploding from her snapping fingers.

“Not yet,” said Marelde; magic conjuration would be detected all over Taizen Gate. What if your first line of defense is all you have, Catherine? she thought, but Catherine was far away, and she had no shield.

The screams outside stopped. The outer door slid open, letting in the night’s birdsongs and thick summer air.

“Now,” ordered Marelde, and the room filled with the snap and buzz of magic as a heavy sword split apart the room’s paper wall from ceiling to floor and a machine stepped inside.

The room erupted in flashing blue magic and the roars of Second Boss. The machine moved forward without pause, slicing through its former comrades, deflecting the magic bolts, Third Boss’ blades clinking off its armor. Within minutes, Alpha stood in the post-battle silence scanning the room with glowing eyes. Six women lay broken and bleeding at her feet; two bosses shook with terror in a corner. Her sword had cleaved the table, and Marelde with it, in half.

#~$ DIRECTIVE FULFILLED
… RECONNAISSANCE MODE ACTIVATED.
… DIRECTIVE: FIND STORMGUARD.
—— Pretty thing…

To be continued…

Daisy squeezes into a corner of the workout room, bare feet sunk into the mat, arms bent, hiding her face behind bruised forearms and thick leather boxing gloves. Kestrel, a year older at fifteen, weaves close and strikes Daisy’s obliques, tight to cramping; when her arms drop, the strikes come at her jaw and temples. Tears slide out of Daisy’s swollen eyes, mixing with blood and snot from her nose. A hit to the belly sucks the air out of her and she crumples, arms over her head.

Kestrel raises one glove. “Hey! Daisy’s cooked!”

The instructor stalks over, glaring at the folded-up girl. “Never get hit, you fear every strike!” she says in a brusque accent. “Today fall down, cry, skin turn purple, blood come out. Tomorrow, still alive.”

Kestrel winks through her own black-and-blue shiner. “Get up. It’s your turn next.”

“I can’t,” sobs Daisy. “I can’t.”

“Take your mind out of the pain.” Kestrel wipes at her nose with one leather glove. “I count the hits.”

Daisy looks up, wincing. “That works?”

Kestrel shrugs. “Get up and try.”

~

“Did you hear that?”

Atop an airship tower, the last of the Stormguard waited for death. Kestrel and Catherine stood on the landing pad; four kept watch in the windowed control room below.

Amie made a cat’s cradle out of stringy blue magic between her fingers, looking out at the winking lights twisting around the towers of the Royal Quarter. “Like a ding?”

Ivet pressed her nose flat on the window and sighed a big foggy spot. “Taizen Gate bosses are notorious for being full of crap. We’d have known if the queen had some killing machine.”

The ding came again, louder, from the elevator at the center of the room.

The guards crouched as the elevator rose up the levels of the tower. The swordswoman flipped her broadswords and caught them. “Now ladies,” she said, “that could be anybody. Let’s not go killing a pilot or something.”

A last ding and the elevator doors opened.

“It’s true,” whispered Amie, the magic strings disintegrating. “Catherine!”

“Too late,” said a shieldbearer, racing to the elevator. The shield burst into flames, slamming into the machine, pinning it to the far wall.

“ONE,” it said.

The shieldwoman flew back out of the elevator and slid along the floor to the glass wall, her shield and torso cut open, leaving a thick trail of blood behind.  

“I’ll make scrap out of that thing,” said Ivet, charging forward, axe flourishing with blinding fast speed.

The machine took the hit to its metal arm. “TWO,” it said in its mechanical voice, and pushed back. Ivet launched backward, her axe handle split in two, blood leaking from the top of her head.

The third Stormguard stumbled backward over control displays and chairs, her broadswords crossed in front of her face. The machine plucked up the woman by one arm and slammed her into the window, cracking the glass. The swords slipped to the floor.

Amie twisted her fingers, magic sputtering as she struggled to find her center in the swirling mess of panic. “Come on!” she cried as the machine drew near. The blue light solidified, formed wings, became a giant screeching phoenix in her arms. “Go!” she commanded, and the phoenix dived, grabbed the machine with its claws and dragged it back into the elevator.

“THREE,” said the machine, then, “FOUR-FIVE-SIX” when Amie chased after it, ball after ball of explosive magic flying from her fingers. The phoenix forced the machine onto the elevator floor, pecking at its mask, screeching to wake the dead.

~

“That’s Amie’s bird.” Kestrel lunged back, four energy arrows forming in her right hand. Catherine ran to the stairs, her shield thrumming, as the landing zone exploded in an eruption of concrete. The machine leaped through the roof, snapped elevator cables wrapped round its blade, the elevator freefalling through the tower with Amie inside.

The machine’s blank mask settled on Kestrel. “SCANNING. TARGET ZERO-TWO-THREE. STORMGUARD. EXTERMINATE.”

Kestrel let loose three arrows in quick succession that pierced into the machine’s knee and neck joints. “SEVEN-EIGHT-NINE,” said the machine.

Kestrel paused, an arrow in its nock.

Catherine sped in from behind, slamming her arcshield into the machine’s back, spinning it toward herself. She held her breath and formed the shimmering magic shield around her, watched from inside the curved, pulsing bubble as the machine stuttered, “TEN-EN-EN-EN. SCAN-AN-ANNING TARGET ZERO-ZERO-ONE. STORMGUARD. EXTERMINATE-ATE-ATE.” The sword arced through the air, slamming into the bubble. The shield shattered in a rain of energy shards but not before it reflected the strike back at the machine, crumpling it. “ERROR. ERROR.”

“Catherine, wait!” screamed Kestrel.

Catherine positioned sideways, shield high, back knee bent, jaw tight as the machine took a step toward Kestrel, one leg dragging. Kestrel loosed the arrow into the eye of the machine’s mask.

“ELEVEN,” said the machine, stepping like a broken doll as the arrow disintegrated. “COUNT… count the hits.” Her mechanical tone fell away. “I… can’t. Pretty thing. Daisy’s… Daisy’s cooked. I can’t. Kestrel?” The sword dropped from her hands.

“What the hell did she do to you?” cried Kestrel.

Catherine edged forward, shield up. “It could be a trap.”

“It’s Daisy,” said Kestrel, slamming her fist into the mask until it fell away, revealing a woman’s horrified face.

“Where am I?” whispered Daisy, clenching her fists. “Hurts. It hurts. Help… Kestrel, help-ELP-ELP-ELP…” Her eyes stared into the distance, her expression blank, her fists relaxing.

“What’s happening?” cried Kestrel in a panic. “Is she dying?”

“SYSTEM REBOOT. STANDBY,” said Daisy in pleasant monotone. Her eyes closed.

“No! No rebooting!” Kestrel slapped Daisy in her cheeks. “Stay here, Daisy.”

Daisy’s eyes opened. “I killed them,” said Daisy. “I killed all of them. Why did I kill them?”

“It’s not your fault,” said Kestrel, gathering up the machine into her arms.

“I can’t stop. It’s coming… back. I can feel it. Killed them. Best run now. Run. Run. I can end it but you have to RUN-UN-UN-UN can’t stop. STANDBY. Stop it. Can end it. Run. RUN TARGET ZERO-TWO-THREE. RUN, TARGET ZERO-ZERO-ONE. Pretty thing. TERMINATION PROTOCOL INITIATED. STANDBY.”

Daisy went still. There was a click, and an energy barrier appeared around her. Catherine grabbed Kestrel by her arm.

“We have to help her,” whimpered Kestrel, but Catherine yanked her away as blinding light shot out the seams in Daisy’s armor.

“There! Go!” Catherine pointed up, yelling over the sound of the airship that hovered above. A rope ladder fell from the deck and Catherine shoved Kestrel toward it before dropping under her shield. Her eyes squeezed shut as the blast shook the tower.

Kestrel clung for her life to the rope ladder as the explosion blew the ship sideways, the city spread out below, the sea ahead, the Halcyon Fold a dark strip of land in the far distance.

Catherine rose, shaking, to her knees. The arcshield smoldered. She tossed it down and looked up to where she knew the raven would be circling, watching.

#~$ SYSTEM REBOOT…
… IDENTITY: ALPHA, STORMGUARD.
… DIRECTIVE: ELIMINATE STORMGUARD.
… LOADING COORDINATES: HALCYON FOLD…

To His Highness King Gnottingham Catchfly III, Lord of Starlight, He of the Two Moons, Ruler of the Night Blossoms,

The Meekos territory expedition was an enormous success. Eighteen specimens of wild stinging and non-stinging fairy were collected and documented for the first time in their egg, larva, chrysalis and adult-life stages. I also gathered four interesting species of spiked scuttlers that I anticipate will interbreed well with our indigenous species in the laboratory (ref. attached sketches).

I hypothesized previous to this expedition that further research would result in stronger fighting fairies with venomous stings, but deep in the Meekos jungle I made a fascinating discovery: a radioactive crystal substance that causes unique metamorphoses in the local flora and fauna. Since the last expedition three years ago, the plant life has grown at an astounding rate, far faster than possible according to the laws of evolution, and more dangerous. The Meekos have used this powerful crystal to their militaristic advantage, growing an arsenal of poisonous spikes, sticky tanglers and exploding bulbs. It took one hundred generations to breed our giant beetle cavalry, but the uneducated Meekos have managed in a few short years to create plants sentient enough to serve as ludicrous bouncing vehicles. The fairies have taken to it as well, using crystal splinters and gems as decoration; their ongoing exposure to this substance and its radiation has affected the fairies in coloration, bioluminescence and increasing size. Further study and dissection may yet reveal many more variations.

The possibilities of this mysterious crystal are immeasurable. I’m afraid I quite overburdened my expedition with samples of it. With your highness’ permission (and generous funding), I shall proceed forthwith to my laboratory for intense experimentation for the practical application of this crystal. I believe another expedition shall soon be in order for the purposes of biomonitoring and mapping the limits of the expanding Meekos territory.

We lost several soldiers in minor scuffles with the Meekos savages, but we can all agree that is a small price to pay for science, yes?

My thanks for your continued patronage, my king.

Signed, your loyal subject,

Flitwick “Flicker” Stingsplatter IV, Doctor of Entomology

“Shoo Ethel, shoo, you damnable ingrate,” lectured Flicker, swiping at one of his fuzzy ears.

Out of the ear flew a fairy. “I like it in there,” she whined. “It’s warm. Plus I’m not an ingrate. I have a spine. That’s some science you taught me.”

“Ingrate, I said, not invertebrate,” explained Flicker as he held a second fairy down on an examination table. “Ingrate means ungrateful, which you are, and if you do not stop your incessant ear tickling I shall lock you up with the others, or pin you to the board.” Flicker nodded his snout toward the shelves of stoppered jars. In the fairy laboratory were jarred fairies of all kinds: Majestic Violet Bottlewhispers and Heart-faced Bandyhoos glared at one another through the curved glass while a Spotted Dandywing napped with her toes in her mouth. Furious at her captivity, a Crystal-eyed Wiggler bonked her pink head against the cork stopper, her belly blinking green and gold light. A larger terrarium housed an air sprite named Loo who spent her days finger-combing her long hair and gazing at her reflection. Many more were posed and pinned to boards on the walls, sorted taxonomically, named and labeled with care by Flicker himself. There was another laboratory dedicated to termite mounds and a soundproof chamber where the noisiest crickets were stored; running along all the ceilings was a flat glass-walled ant farm; a sandy lab was full of burrowing scorpions; and smoke could be piped into the beehive yard to put them to sleep during comb examinations.

All available wall space was covered with Flicker’s drawings, notes and blueprints.

Ethel, a Bulbous-bottomed Gigglefly, stuck her tongue out at the captive fairies and floated to the beetles and scuttles, her fangs dug deep into a mealworm, her oversized golden wings battering the air with a buzz. Her bum squished down onto the hard back of a small beetle; it spun in circles with annoyance. Dozens more, displaying a rainbow of colors and sizes all the way up to the Bleekos’ mount size, scuttled around wire cages. Ethel petted her ride’s spikes and horns until its course straightened. “The new beetle eggs are way bigger than the old ones,” she said.

“An astute observation,” said Flicker. He bent over the Striped Whistler fairy, spread one of its wings out wide with a tweezer and swept a tiny brush across it. “I must breed mounts big enough for the new weaponry I’ve devised. With this crystalline material I discovered in the Meekos territory, years of breeding can be accomplished in a matter of days. Days, Ethel!”

Ethel rode her little beetle up a wall and along a blueprint, peering at it while crunching down on her worm. “What’s this gumball machine for?”

“That is not a gumball machine. It is a fairy launcher.” Fairy dust swirled away from Flicker’s brush, then burst into flame with a puhhh sound, singeing the scientist’s cheek fur. He cursed and the fairy sneered at him. “You… you… Lucy, darling, you must stay still while I collect the dust and stop igniting it, or the Bleekos army shall not have the weaponry it needs for the border wars.”

“Why would you launch fairies?” cried Ethel.

“Fairies are quite useful weapons,” muttered Flicker. “The stinging, the choking dust and the hypnotic effect of the light patterns have destroyed many a malevolent Meekos.”

Ethel dismounted and flew back into Flicker’s ear, having forgotten all about his earlier threat. “Why are the Bleekos at war with the Meekos anyway?”

Flicker continued, with great concentration, to sweep Lucy’s wing dust into a test tube. “The Meekos are an abhorrent race of nefarious plant life. Creepy daytime creatures who use photosynthesis to abuse civilized, educated nocturnal life. Get out of my ear.”

Ethel ignored him, pulling the sides of his ear around her like a cozy blanket. “But who started it?” she yawned.

“I don’t… Nobody knows really… What would you know of the intricacies of interspecies politics? We are at war because we have always been at war, as the moon wars with the sun.”

But Ethel did not answer, and her snoring resounded around Flicker’s brain.

“Another expedition is what I need,” whispered Flicker, so as not to wake her. “I must have more crystal. Then the moonlight shall prevail.”

“And then I went like, Pow! Pow! Pow! with sunbeams, and the baddies were running around in circles – all blind – and they bonked their heads together, and fell down kicking their stubby little legs and whining like babies!”

Petal’s little fists smash together, mimicking the monster heads. The munions watch with wide eyes, mouths gaping, as her fingers wiggle like monster legs.

Petal plucks at the wayward tendril of a rattan plant so tall that they call them Ent’s Walking sticks. She winds it around a nearby smilax vine, so it will get more sun. “The monsters out there are big. Bigger than all of you on toppa one another. Can’t kill ‘em with just a few sun blasts.”

The arsenal is abloom. Bugs sing in the shadows; fat palms unfold atop the rattan. Super poisonous bleeding heart flowers burst out of thorny stems. Stinging Bushes, their leaves hairy with glass-like spikes, bump up next to the Sleepies and the Sneeze Weed and Wait-a-Whiles. This is Petal’s favorite garden, a free-for-all of spines, spikes, and prickles. In the distance is the rhythmic sound of a guardian ent circling the Meekos village. Three munions follow Petal about, bouncing and orbiting her, as always.

“We will eat them up if you take us! You could enchant us up out of the bramblethorn seeds!”

“You know what happened last time.” Petal sighs and looks at her feet, her sprout drooping in shame. “Nothing.”

“Maybe if you try harder!”

“Yes, just concentrate super-duper hard!”

She plops down and closes her eyes. Her forehead bunches up. She gathers all the sunbeams, just like before. Heat builds up in her hands, and the munions cheer and spin in frantic circles. Finally, it’s too hot to bear; she lets it go with a shriek. Purple Solanum petals explode into the air, and then…

Boom!
Boom!
Boom!

When all is calm, she is standing alone in a rain of purple blooms and dew bubbles, three little bramblethorn seeds where the munions had once been.

“Oh no! I’m so sorry!” Then she wonders…

Maybe if she has explosives, she can beat up any of those jungle baddies. They’ll send her to scout all the wells! She’ll be a hero!

With a shout, she blasts a sunbeam into the still-smoking bramblethorn seeds, and:

Pop!
Pop!
Pop!

Out comes the three munions, good as new. “What happened!” “You farted!” “I did not, I went kablooie!” “That’s what I meant!” “That’s stupid!” “No, you’re stupid!”

Petal whistles, and her lotus flower bounds back to her. “Come on, munnies,” she says in a brand-new, commanding voice. “We are going outside.”

Out! Out! Petal takes us to the outside places today! You don’t get to come. You’re just a dumb giant ent. You have to stay here and guard the hatchery… but we three get to go out when Petal scouts! Ha!

You never saw the far outside place. There are not so many seeds and sprouts. Things don’t all grow from the ground. There are creatures that make shiny magic and there are glow-glow crystals that we bring back and plant in the earth. It helps grow new brothers for you!

And there are baddies! Baddies are favorite.

Yes! Favorite! Petal says we can eat the baddies. Chomp! Chomp! We take big bites from the baddies. We eat and they fall down and then when we are very full we get to nap in the bramblethorn. Also Petal throws the sun at the baddies. Sparkle, pow!

What’s that? You say Petal can’t throw the sun?! …that the sun is way up high, maybe three ents higher than you? She does throw the sun, and then the baddies run. Don’t call me stupid! You’re stupid! Ents are stupid! Yes, ents are the stupidest.

Sometimes we go boom. Can you go boom, mister ent? Didn’t think so.

All three of us. Boom! Boom! Boom! Even more roasted baddies. Then Petal grows us back again.

She is the best Meekos scout ever. One day she will grow more things. Maybe big, dumb ents.

You stay here, big dumb ent. You protect the village, and we will go chomp!

“And then I went like, Pow! Pow! Pow! with sunbeams, and the baddies were running around in circles – all blind – and they bonked their heads together, and fell down kicking their stubby little legs and whining like babies!”

Petal’s little fists smash together, mimicking the monster heads. The munions watch with wide eyes, mouths gaping, as her fingers wiggle like monster legs.

Petal plucks at the wayward tendril of a rattan plant so tall that they call them Ent’s Walking sticks. She winds it around a nearby smilax vine, so it will get more sun. “The monsters out there are big. Bigger than all of you on toppa one another. Can’t kill ‘em with just a few sun blasts.”

The arsenal is abloom. Bugs sing in the shadows; fat palms unfold atop the rattan. Super poisonous bleeding heart flowers burst out of thorny stems. Stinging Bushes, their leaves hairy with glass-like spikes, bump up next to the Sleepies and the Sneeze Weed and Wait-a-Whiles. This is Petal’s favorite garden, a free-for-all of spines, spikes, and prickles. In the distance is the rhythmic sound of a guardian ent circling the Meekos village. Three munions follow Petal about, bouncing and orbiting her, as always.

“We will eat them up if you take us! You could enchant us up out of the bramblethorn seeds!”

“You know what happened last time.” Petal sighs and looks at her feet, her sprout drooping in shame. “Nothing.”

“Maybe if you try harder!”

“Yes, just concentrate super-duper hard!”

She plops down and closes her eyes. Her forehead bunches up. She gathers all the sunbeams, just like before. Heat builds up in her hands, and the munions cheer and spin in frantic circles. Finally, it’s too hot to bear; she lets it go with a shriek. Purple Solanum petals explode into the air, and then…

Boom!
Boom!
Boom!

When all is calm, she is standing alone in a rain of purple blooms and dew bubbles, three little bramblethorn seeds where the munions had once been.

“Oh no! I’m so sorry!” Then she wonders…

Maybe if she has explosives, she can beat up any of those jungle baddies. They’ll send her to scout all the wells! She’ll be a hero!

With a shout, she blasts a sunbeam into the still-smoking bramblethorn seeds, and:

Pop!
Pop!
Pop!

Out comes the three munions, good as new. “What happened!” “You farted!” “I did not, I went kablooie!” “That’s what I meant!” “That’s stupid!” “No, you’re stupid!”

Petal whistles, and her lotus flower bounds back to her. “Come on, munnies,” she says in a brand-new, commanding voice. “We are going outside.”

Out! Out! Petal takes us to the outside places today! You don’t get to come. You’re just a dumb giant ent. You have to stay here and guard the hatchery… but we three get to go out when Petal scouts! Ha!

You never saw the far outside place. There are not so many seeds and sprouts. Things don’t all grow from the ground. There are creatures that make shiny magic and there are glow-glow crystals that we bring back and plant in the earth. It helps grow new brothers for you!

And there are baddies! Baddies are favorite.

Yes! Favorite! Petal says we can eat the baddies. Chomp! Chomp! We take big bites from the baddies. We eat and they fall down and then when we are very full we get to nap in the bramblethorn. Also Petal throws the sun at the baddies. Sparkle, pow!

What’s that? You say Petal can’t throw the sun?! …that the sun is way up high, maybe three ents higher than you? She does throw the sun, and then the baddies run. Don’t call me stupid! You’re stupid! Ents are stupid! Yes, ents are the stupidest.

Sometimes we go boom. Can you go boom, mister ent? Didn’t think so.

All three of us. Boom! Boom! Boom! Even more roasted baddies. Then Petal grows us back again.

She is the best Meekos scout ever. One day she will grow more things. Maybe big, dumb ents.

You stay here, big dumb ent. You protect the village, and we will go chomp!

To His Highness King Gnottingham Catchfly III, Lord of Starlight, He of the Two Moons, Ruler of the Night Blossoms,

The Meekos territory expedition was an enormous success. Eighteen specimens of wild stinging and non-stinging fairy were collected and documented for the first time in their egg, larva, chrysalis and adult-life stages. I also gathered four interesting species of spiked scuttlers that I anticipate will interbreed well with our indigenous species in the laboratory (ref. attached sketches).

I hypothesized previous to this expedition that further research would result in stronger fighting fairies with venomous stings, but deep in the Meekos jungle I made a fascinating discovery: a radioactive crystal substance that causes unique metamorphoses in the local flora and fauna. Since the last expedition three years ago, the plant life has grown at an astounding rate, far faster than possible according to the laws of evolution, and more dangerous. The Meekos have used this powerful crystal to their militaristic advantage, growing an arsenal of poisonous spikes, sticky tanglers and exploding bulbs. It took one hundred generations to breed our giant beetle cavalry, but the uneducated Meekos have managed in a few short years to create plants sentient enough to serve as ludicrous bouncing vehicles. The fairies have taken to it as well, using crystal splinters and gems as decoration; their ongoing exposure to this substance and its radiation has affected the fairies in coloration, bioluminescence and increasing size. Further study and dissection may yet reveal many more variations.

The possibilities of this mysterious crystal are immeasurable. I’m afraid I quite overburdened my expedition with samples of it. With your highness’ permission (and generous funding), I shall proceed forthwith to my laboratory for intense experimentation for the practical application of this crystal. I believe another expedition shall soon be in order for the purposes of biomonitoring and mapping the limits of the expanding Meekos territory.

We lost several soldiers in minor scuffles with the Meekos savages, but we can all agree that is a small price to pay for science, yes?

My thanks for your continued patronage, my king.

Signed, your loyal subject,

Flitwick “Flicker” Stingsplatter IV, Doctor of Entomology

“Shoo Ethel, shoo, you damnable ingrate,” lectured Flicker, swiping at one of his fuzzy ears.

Out of the ear flew a fairy. “I like it in there,” she whined. “It’s warm. Plus I’m not an ingrate. I have a spine. That’s some science you taught me.”

“Ingrate, I said, not invertebrate,” explained Flicker as he held a second fairy down on an examination table. “Ingrate means ungrateful, which you are, and if you do not stop your incessant ear tickling I shall lock you up with the others, or pin you to the board.” Flicker nodded his snout toward the shelves of stoppered jars. In the fairy laboratory were jarred fairies of all kinds: Majestic Violet Bottlewhispers and Heart-faced Bandyhoos glared at one another through the curved glass while a Spotted Dandywing napped with her toes in her mouth. Furious at her captivity, a Crystal-eyed Wiggler bonked her pink head against the cork stopper, her belly blinking green and gold light. A larger terrarium housed an air sprite named Loo who spent her days finger-combing her long hair and gazing at her reflection. Many more were posed and pinned to boards on the walls, sorted taxonomically, named and labeled with care by Flicker himself. There was another laboratory dedicated to termite mounds and a soundproof chamber where the noisiest crickets were stored; running along all the ceilings was a flat glass-walled ant farm; a sandy lab was full of burrowing scorpions; and smoke could be piped into the beehive yard to put them to sleep during comb examinations.

All available wall space was covered with Flicker’s drawings, notes and blueprints.

Ethel, a Bulbous-bottomed Gigglefly, stuck her tongue out at the captive fairies and floated to the beetles and scuttles, her fangs dug deep into a mealworm, her oversized golden wings battering the air with a buzz. Her bum squished down onto the hard back of a small beetle; it spun in circles with annoyance. Dozens more, displaying a rainbow of colors and sizes all the way up to the Bleekos’ mount size, scuttled around wire cages. Ethel petted her ride’s spikes and horns until its course straightened. “The new beetle eggs are way bigger than the old ones,” she said.

“An astute observation,” said Flicker. He bent over the Striped Whistler fairy, spread one of its wings out wide with a tweezer and swept a tiny brush across it. “I must breed mounts big enough for the new weaponry I’ve devised. With this crystalline material I discovered in the Meekos territory, years of breeding can be accomplished in a matter of days. Days, Ethel!”

Ethel rode her little beetle up a wall and along a blueprint, peering at it while crunching down on her worm. “What’s this gumball machine for?”

“That is not a gumball machine. It is a fairy launcher.” Fairy dust swirled away from Flicker’s brush, then burst into flame with a puhhh sound, singeing the scientist’s cheek fur. He cursed and the fairy sneered at him. “You… you… Lucy, darling, you must stay still while I collect the dust and stop igniting it, or the Bleekos army shall not have the weaponry it needs for the border wars.”

“Why would you launch fairies?” cried Ethel.

“Fairies are quite useful weapons,” muttered Flicker. “The stinging, the choking dust and the hypnotic effect of the light patterns have destroyed many a malevolent Meekos.”

Ethel dismounted and flew back into Flicker’s ear, having forgotten all about his earlier threat. “Why are the Bleekos at war with the Meekos anyway?”

Flicker continued, with great concentration, to sweep Lucy’s wing dust into a test tube. “The Meekos are an abhorrent race of nefarious plant life. Creepy daytime creatures who use photosynthesis to abuse civilized, educated nocturnal life. Get out of my ear.”

Ethel ignored him, pulling the sides of his ear around her like a cozy blanket. “But who started it?” she yawned.

“I don’t… Nobody knows really… What would you know of the intricacies of interspecies politics? We are at war because we have always been at war, as the moon wars with the sun.”

But Ethel did not answer, and her snoring resounded around Flicker’s brain.

“Another expedition is what I need,” whispered Flicker, so as not to wake her. “I must have more crystal. Then the moonlight shall prevail.”

“You aren’t supposed to be here today.” The general’s long shadow stretched into the hangar from the rolled-up garage door.

Skye peeked out from the cockpit of a mech with half its front armor blown out, metal blackened and curling in from the impact point. With a screwdriver between her teeth, she tossed a charred actuator onto the ground and called out, “I’m glad you’re here, Appa. I want to show you my plans for the decommissioned exosuits.”

“You promised your mother.”

“The engines are okay. The shields cause all the issues.” She hunched down behind what was left of the front armor, only slices of her showing in the blasted-out hole. “Every new generation of these machines, we add more armor, which means more weight, which means bigger engines and more crystal power …”

“…which means more dependence on the crystal mines, which means more war.” The general’s face was hard-lined, but his eyes and voice softened. “This is not the time for this discussion.”

“The mechs take fire because they’re too slow.” Loosened screws tink-tink-tinked to the ground, then Skye kicked at the wrecked armor from the inside. “We’re going about it the wrong way. We need … more… mobility.” A word for every kick with her combat boots, until the front armor crashed to the ground, exposing her in the cockpit. “We should be going lighter on the mechs and heavier on the firepower. I put the 25-millimeter autocannons on this one. With the vectored thrust jet nozzles on an integrated airfoil on the back, it’s light enough for halcyon-tipped rockets. I know it’s a risk, but …”

“Skye. She is coming.”

“Where? Here?”

“Ah. Here she is. Go to work, people.” A dozen clattering footsteps accompanied a shrill voice from the garage door. Two men dragged a full-length mirror to a workbench. A dressmaker and his assistants, pins poking from their pressed lips, set up a mannequin. The manicurist, hairstylist and makeup bot took over the workbench. The voice followed behind, barking out orders; it belonged to a small woman with tall, upknotted hair and black eyes. “Mind the grease. That silk cost more than your monthly wages.”

“Umma, what are you doing here?” Skye whined, slumping in the cockpit.

“Your name will be chosen from the tiles tonight. Get out of that thing.” Skye’s mother stood next to her husband at a stern parade rest.

“I don’t want to be chosen. There’s a war happening.” But Skye obeyed, climbing down to join the crowd, casting a betrayed glance at her father.

He shrugged. “There is always war. You cannot be a soldier forever.”

“I’m a pilot, Appa. And I’m the best pilot you’ve… ow!” She winced as the makeup bot attacked her eyebrows with tweezers. The manicurist sat on a stool beside her and clucked under her breath at the broken nails and calluses. The hairstylist pulled Skye’s hair out of its knot and yanked through the tangles with a comb.

“No black around her eyes,” Skye’s mother said to the makeup bot. “It makes them small. And overdraw her lips; they are too thin.”

The makeup bot bowed and rummaged through its box of powders and creams while Skye scowled. “What happens if you’re lucky tonight, and some high-placed family chooses me for their son? What will he say when he sees me without all this stuff on my face?”

“A fish is not kept the same way it is caught.”

“Great,” grumbled Skye. “So men are fish.”

“Gold rings and orchids for her hair,” mused Skye’s mother, peering down at a velvet-lined box of decorations. “You know, Skye, Baron’s mother will choose a tile tonight.”

Skye went still. “She … she would never choose me. There are many highborn girls in the tiles this year.” The hairstylist stood on a stool behind her and pulled Skye’s hair into braids, weaving in the rings.

“The politics of the choosing are complex. A choice for the general’s daughter would send a message,” replied her mother.

“It would be an overt act of war not to join Baron with one of the marriageable girls of Silk or Tiger House.” The general’s brow wrinkled with worry.

“If it is war they want, my new mech design will win it.” Skye’s flight jacket was removed, and the dress draped around her. The dressmakers knelt, pins sticking out from their mouths, to correct the hem.

“Stand up straight,” barked her mother. “Your overcoat will be hemmed too short.”

Skye strafed her way through the dense crowd of nervous girls surrounding the choosing table where the silver tiles laid, each engraved with a name. The marriageable young men crowded in corners playing Yunnori and howling at the results, seeming to care little for the outcome of the Choosing, but the young ladies ran their fingers over their own names and gossipped about which girl the house mothers would choose for their sons in the ceremony. Skye closed one eye and targeted the smug first daughter of Tiger House, a pretty girl named Nari. Around one delicate wrist, Nari held the velvet leash of a drugged and declawed tiger that blinked with confusion at the guests.

“I hope you are chosen by a good house, Skye,” she said. “It would disrupt the tedium of these things if a house mother cooked up a surprise.” It was well known that a daughter of Tiger House was a wise diplomatic choice for Baron Silver. Tiger House had been at all-out war with Silver House that year; destroying  much of the Silvers’ cavalry of mechs …

… but with Skye’s renovations …

A finger jabbing into her spine straightened Skye’s posture. Her mother had shadowed her all night, correcting with bruising pokes and hissed instructions. Skye plastered a disingenuous monster of a smile on her face and neglected to answer, choosing instead to hold Nari’s lazy gaze until the high-born girl looked away.

“I need air,” Skye said to no one in particular. She hid two honey pastries in the sleeve of her overcoat on her way outside to the dark balcony. In the far distance, down the great hill upon which the Silver House stood, past the outlying village, past the farmland and minion camps, the crystal mines glowed a calm, eerie blue in the night sky. She stuffed a pastry whole in her mouth.

“You smell of grease.”

Baron stepped close behind her, his words tickling the skin on her neck. He plucked the other pastry from her hand and popped it into his mouth. He wore the silver-embroidered robes of his house and his knuckles were crowded with silver rings. He wore his wealth as was fitting; after all, it was his great-grandfather’s mining that had unearthed the powerful crystal. Other houses had vied for it, battled for it and died for it, but Silver House had held it.

“You’re mistaken,” Skye said, crossing her arms in an act of defiance meant to calm her shaking. “It is the latest perfume. All the ladies are wearing it this season.”

“I do like your hair.”

“I plan on doing it up like this every morning from now on.”

Baron rested his forearms on the balcony wall. “It seems not so long ago that you and I were children together, playing while our fathers pored over maps, or planned jungle battles …”

“And soon your father’s battles will be yours.”

“It is absurd that so many have died for those glowing blue stones.”

Skye peered out at the mines in the distance. “What happens when the mine is depleted?”

“We will own nothing but a pile of empty crystals, their power drained long ago in our war machines. We will dig farther into the farmland, feeding fewer people every year.”

Skye could not look at his eyes. She stared instead at his hands, at the scars from fighting that crosshaired his knuckles. “My father is collecting information about powerful energy wells where crystals may be recharged,” she offered, but Baron shook his head.

“The wells are too far to be of use to us. There are times I wish that the mines would disappear. Then, we would have no need of mechs and tanks, nor the filthy minions, nor this ridiculous choosing ceremony.”

“The choice would be ours,” whispered Skye. She covered Baron’s hand with one of hers and jolted with the electricity of it.

“Yes.” Baron turned his hand under hers and opened it. In his palm, a shining silver tile nestled. Skye inhaled the honey from his breath as she drew her fingertips over the tile, over the deep groove of her own name on it. “One day, the army will be mine, and I will need you to be my general.” He curled his fingers around the tile, gripping it, as Skye shivered. “Sometimes, despite everything, a man must choose for himself.”

“The Silver family is honored to choose…”

Skye stepped forward, trying to catch Baron’s eye, as his mother reached toward the tile table.

“… Nari Tiger.”

There was only one astonished gasp in the crowd when Nari’s tile was plucked up. Baron’s eyes did not waver from his newly chosen bride-to-be. Skye’s own tile was still encased inside Baron’s fist, to be chosen that night by no one. Realization gathered like rocks in her throat.

I will need you to be my general.

He hadn’t said wife.

Skye dissolved backward into the crowd, then sprinted out the door and down the hill alone, into the deep night, yanking the rings from her hair. She ran to run, something primal within her chest demanding escape.

At the giant rolling door of the hangar she stopped, her hair wild around her face. Another girl might have gone home to weep into her mother’s arms, but Skye had always felt more at home in the garage with her father, fixing things or, when she was little, breaking them.

It felt good … No. Nothing felt good, but it felt right to get out of the hanbok, to tie her hair up the way she liked it, to rub off the makeup. The familiar grease and gunpowder smell of her jacket soothed her. She climbed up into the mech she’d reappropriated to figure out how she’d ever show her face among the other pilots. How she’d apologize to umma for running out like a minion on fire.

But she could only think about what Baron had said.

There are times I wish that the mines would disappear.

In the quiet, dark hangar, encased in the machine, Skye heard his voice as if he were still close by.

…we would have no need of mechs and tanks, nor the filthy minions, nor this ridiculous choosing ceremony…

“The choice would be ours,” whispered Skye.

Baron no longer had a choice, but there was a way she could choose for him.

She powered up the mech, pulled on her gloves, and gripped the handles. Before anyone could stop her, before she thought long enough to stop herself, she walked the mech outside.

Despite the humiliation of the night, despite the gravity of what she was going to do, driving the lighter mech was a thrill. So agile, so fast. She avoided the main gate — unauthorized use of a mech was still a crime, general’s daughter or no — and tip-toed the mech through the minion camp. The beasts slept in haphazard piles, their snores warbling; they were known for brute toughness and obeying orders, not thinking fast, so they gave her no trouble. She shot over the security gate, zig-zagged through a mandarin orchard, hovered over rice paddies and cabbage fields. Here and there laid the rusted and broken remains of rice transplanters and plows, the first machines that had evolved into blasthole drills and frontloaders when Baron’s ancestors had struck silver. When they’d hit crystal, and the other houses discovered the power of the halcyon within the crystals, the mining machines had been repurposed for war. Farmland gave way to trampled dead battleground, brown with bloody mud.

The mech glided over coiled barbed wire and then landed, strong as an eagle perching, on the reinforced wall. Ball-shaped security bots buzzed around her, scanning the mech code, then her retinas.

“Pilot seven-zero-five, you are not authorized for the use of decommissioned mech one-eight-six-four. Please return to headquarters immed-”

With a squeeze of the trigger, Skye strafed to the left and fired. One by one, the bots burst apart and fell, crackling, to the mud.

Staring down into the glowing blue, she flicked a switch to arm the missiles.

“Okay.” She patted an autocannon. “Let’s end this war.” The jet nozzles activated. The mech rose, then hovered over the mine.

The first missile shot deep inside.

The explosion rocked the ground and blasted out millions of tiny crystal shards. Skye ducked behind her arms as the shards pinned themselves into her jacket, poked her legs.

There was no time to lose. She had to complete her mission before anyone could stop her. She strafed and fired, let loose salvo after salvo of missiles, rained death from above into the mines, destroying the crystals that had powered a civilization for generations. The halcyon power that so many had fought and died to possess bloomed into the night sky, then dispersed into the night air.

Baron rolled up the door to the hangar’s private garage. The glowing blue of his skin illuminated the Heavy Armor Rapid Deployment armor parked inside. It had been commissioned for his family’s new alliance, with helmet and joints sculpted into roaring tiger heads, power amplification haptic controls and reinforced plating built to withstand heavy kinetic rounds. He pressed his thumb to the lockpad and the exoframe opened with a quiet hum.

He realized then that he was still holding the silver cage. He lowered it down and swung open the door. The goose lectured him with furious honks before escaping out of the hangar.

~

At the Choosing, a servant had handed the large silver cage to him and guided him with deep backward-walking bows to the line of betrothed young men. Inside the cage, an angry goose flapped and hissed. The other grooms held wooden geese, representing the bird’s tendency to mate for life, but Baron’s mother had insisted that her eldest son have a live goose to present to his future in-laws.

It seemed to bother no one that the goose had been taken from her lifelong mate for the purposes of the ceremony.

Some of the betrothed young women forced their gracious smiles, their sad eyes darting across the room to the men they’d hoped to marry. Nari Tiger’s expression gave away nothing as she bowed before his parents with her two cupped hands full of chestnuts and dates, symbolizing the many children she would bear for him. Baron supposed he’d never know whether he’d been her first choice. It didn’t matter.

“The fireworks are early!” cried Baron’s mother in dismay, pointing at the windows, and a greedy murmur sounded among the guests as they crowded to get outside. Baron’s father chuckled, taking his son by the shoulders and guiding him along with the crowd.

“Your mother will have the pyrotechnicians beheaded,” he murmured.

“As well she should,” said Baron. “The other mothers watch for any mistake.”

They were met at the door by the general. “Sir,” he said, leaning in close to Baron’s father, “it is not fireworks.”

The three men stepped outside together, watching the night sky light up over the distant crystal mines.

“Who would attack the mines?” whispered Baron’s father.

“No one on the peninsula,” said the general. “but the Tigers…”

“They are united with us now.”

“And they do not have this kind of firepower.”

The sky burst with blue fire and smoke billowed up from the source of the land’s only power, its only wealth. “No,” said Baron as understanding sank down his spine. “But we do.”

The general locked eyes with Baron and he turned around, scanning the room for someone he would not find.

Out of the house Baron went, into the smoke roiling with tiny crystal splinters that slid under his skin and glowed blue. Behind him, the families gathered, their growing panic a low murmur. He followed the trail of wilted orchids, loose screws and gold rings to Skye’s repair lift. The blue overcoat Skye had worn to the Choosing lay crumpled there.

There are times I wish that the mines would disappear.

~

He placed his rings and silver-threaded overcoat aside and settled into his exosuit. It locked into place around him, helmet last, the HUD blinking awake as the skydoor whirred open. The jump jets activated with a vibrating rumble that chattered his teeth. He bent his knees and the exoframe bent with him, a powerful extension of his every move; he jumped, launching through the skydoor, high over the hangar, high enough for his visor to register in infrared the scramble of minions in their pens, the burning mines, and all the way at the shoreline of the peninsula, one lone heat signature where he’d known she would be waiting for him.

As always there was a moment when he wished he did not have to come back down.

“Sierra Kilo Yankee Echo,” he said, “do you copy?”

Baron sailed over the orange groves and landed hard on the jagged cliff that overlooked islets surrounded with docked fishing boats. The stone ground split under the weight of his exoframe, sending loose stones tumbling down to the sea. Skye waited there in her renovated mech, guns aimed at the tiger’s mouth framing his helmet.

He lowered the barrel of his grenade launcher. The HUD on his visor targeted around Skye’s face and identified her by name and rank; the serial number of her decommissioned exosuit threaded along the bottom.

“You humiliated me,” whispered Skye; her canned voice echoed from his radio through his helmet.

“Any woman can be a wife.” Baron’s tone was angrier than he’d meant. “I thought you wanted to be a pilot.”

“I thought you wanted to end the war.” Skye glared at her own reflection in his visor, then jammed her elbow back into the throttle; the airjets switched on and lifted her off the ground.

“You have three seconds to exit the vehicle with your hands up,” grunted Baron. “Three.”

“You always said you were afraid you’d never leave the peninsula.” She set the target and the rockets locked into position.

“Two.”

“You told me that war has kept our people ignorant of the outside world. I thought you wanted to change that. I thought you wanted to change it with me.”

“One.”

A mortar shot from Baron’s launcher and the night erupted in blinding light. From inside his helmet the muted explosion was a deep bass roar. The place where Skye had stood was a black blasted hole in the ground.

As the smoke cleared, he took heavy steps to the jagged edge of the cliff and opened his visor. He unclenched his armored fist and looked at the tile there, the one with her name. “I wanted you,” he said to no one. He couldn’t look down. Instead, he turned his wrist to drop the tile over the edge.

“Then you should’ve chosen me.”

With a whoosh, Skye’s mech darted out from behind him and hovered in the air just over the cliff’s edge. Balancing on one foot and holding on with one hand, Skye reached out and snatched the tile out of the air, then dashed back to land at his flank before his HUD could register her movement. He turned, clunky and slow compared to her sleek, open-faced exosuit, lowering his visor just in time to catch a bullet in the glass. A jagged crack formed through her name in the HUD as she let loose with a forward barrage of bullets that pinged off his armor. One embedded in his power panel and set off alarms; his HUD wavered and blinked as she swung around to his back and shot off one of his energy packs; the crystal batteries leaked blue down his leg armor.

“What did you do to that exosuit?” he transmitted.

Her crackling laughter echoed in his helmet. His jump jets activated just in time to escape a rocket artillery strike; the missiles exploded into one another below him. Through the heavy smoke he lobbed down mortar after mortar but he’d lost too much energy to maintain the jump; he crash-landed, rolled onto his side and punched at the pressure-sealed neckring until his helmet came loose. A hundred yards off, Skye’s mech stumbled and shot without aiming into the smoke; her stabilizers were cooked.

Baron overrode the emergency shutdown and triggered the ion cannon, aimed it to where Skye’s mech wobbled. From his helmet, where the HUD blinked with the target coordinates, he heard her voice through the radio. “Baron,” she whimpered. “I’ll fix it. I’ll search for the energy wells. Let me go and I’ll find the tech. I’ll fix it …”

Baron slammed into her and the two careened off the cliff’s edge, his jets on full blast, the ion cannon projecting its devastating beam back to the target location, detonating everything between the cliffs and the groves.

Holding on to one another, their crystal-splintered faces grubby with smoke, their mechs leaking and broken, they coughed and laughed.

“We’ll find the wells together,” he said, watching the ground’s slow approach. “But the mechs are wrecked.”

“I’ll fix that too,” said Skye, and pressed her tile back into his hand.

“I do not need your permission to buy a goat,” Julia said. “Goat milk is delicious, and we can make cheese.”

They’d been arguing all evening. Ardan was hunched over his power gauntlet, sanding down the edges of a grill he’d removed to improve air flow. Outside in the yard, a goat shrieked into the moonless dark. “Goats stink and scream like fiends,” he grumped. “It hasn’t stopped for an hour. How will the twins sleep?”

“The kids need a pet. Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“And who will make this alleged cheese? When have you ever made cheese, your highness?”

“I could make cheese!” Julia shouted. She stomped out of the room and slammed the bedroom door behind her, the goat’s cries dramatizing her exit.

Celeste toddled out of her room, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Dadda? Is Mamma alright?”

She had her mother’s accent. Ardan plucked up the toddler in his unarmored arm and kissed her cheeks. “Mamma is being ridiculous.”

“What is ridick oo luss?”

“It means she brought a goat home without talking to me about it.”

“I like goats.” This from Vox, who wandered in after his sister. He seated himself on his father’s foot, wrapped his arms around Ardan’s leg and rode along as Ardan took Celeste back to bed, staring out the window toward the screams.

“You like the idea of goats. None of us actually know how to care for a goat.”

“There’s a baby crying outside,” said Celeste, half asleep.

“It’s the stupid goat,” said Ardan, planting her back in her bed.

Vox uncurled himself from his father’s leg. “He’s afraid,” he said. “Maybe lonely.”

“It’s a she, Vox. At least I hope it is a she, or your mother’s dreams of cheese are –”

Ardan paused, turned toward the window.

The goat had stopped screaming.

His adrenaline spiked.

“Hide, both of you. Do not open the door.”

There was no time to make sure they obeyed him. He ran to his bedroom. “Julia,” he hissed at the bedroom door. “They’re here.”

Julia opened the door. Her face had gone white. “Now?”

“Outside.”

The armor stood in pieces around the front room in various states of renovation. Tools littered the floor. “Legs first,” he grumbled, stepping into the sabatons. Julia scrambled to her knees in her nightdress, a poor but necessary replacement for a proper battle squire. She pinched her fingers on the knee clamps, struggled under the weight of the chest pieces.

The button panel whirred and crackled with static, then burped out: “System. Offline.” Ardan slammed his left fist onto it. “Worthless damn power source on this model…”

“Shh.” Julia’s hands were black with oil, her face smudged as she attached the generator to his back and connected it to the power gauntlet. She stared out the door, into the hall. There was no sound. No disturbance. No goat. “Are you sure they’re…”

“System. Online.”

Glass broke. Ardan turned sideways in time for a metal arrow to slice a scratch through his breastplate, just under his chin, and thud home in the wall opposite the front window. Ardan cursed and squared up, the wood floor creaking under his armored weight. “I’ll watch the front door.”

“But your cannon arm!”

“It’s useless, unless you want me to blow up the house. Stay behind me.”

Julia closed her eyes, turned her palms upward. “I’ll protect you,” she murmured, her voice dreamy, green light forming in her hands.

Ardan winced away from the twisted-guts feeling that magic always gave him. “I can handle myself,” he grunted.

A forearm appeared over the window, decorated in an archer’s gauntlet, and then the archer herself swung inside. Another woman followed and drew her sword. More came in behind her, magicians and assassins, all wearing the same insignia.

“Stormguard!” he yelled, but Julia was lost inside her trance, eyes rolled back.

Ardan’s armor groaned and buzzed as he moved forward, painfully slow, but he was grateful for it when the Stormguard attacked. They moved in tandem, each with a weapon they’d held since childhood. He ran forward, energy buzzing through the armor, propelling him, heating the metal to burning, steel cracking against the breastplate. When he backhanded the archer across her face, he left a burn mark. She crumpled, her bow clattering to the floor.

The others raised shields of wood, metal and magic to counter Julia’s trance and Ardan’s assault. He stomped forward and plowed into them, knocked them from their feet, sent them flying in a crunch of bones to the wall. Their blood spattered the divan. They rolled in shattered glass, discarded weapons and their own knocked-out teeth. He could not resist every attack: Blades sliced through his unprotected arm and his cheeks; magic stung and froze him with deafening whipcrack sounds. But he was a wall between the enemy and his wife, and all the while, he felt warmth coming from her, a blanket that enveloped him, closed his wounds, melted the ice and gave him strength. It churned his insides, these unnatural talents, but he’d deal with the sick when his family was safe.

Then, the blast.

All went silent and cold. His teeth clamped shut. A shock pulsed up through his legs, his arms, his throat. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t blink. Paintings slid from the wall and the bolts fell from the front door. He could hear the static noises from his armor display, the groans from the pile of wounded Stormguard, but he could not move. He could only watch as the front door opened and the last of the Stormguard stepped inside, as if invited. She surveyed the room, then snapped her fingers at two of the guard who were scrambling to their feet even as Ardan struggled to move. She pointed to the twins’ room and the two guards sprinted that way.

The woman walked from the door, past Ardan as if he didn’t exist, to Julia, who stood frozen in her nightdress and bare feet.

“Catherine,” gasped Julia.

“Such a shame,” whispered Catherine as she pressed her sword against Julia’s chest.

Ardan’s heart pounded out one beat. Another. Air filled his lungs and he coughed. To his right, the two Stormguard emerged carrying the twins, stunned as rigid as he. The other Stormguard rose, some shakily, some bleeding, all stone-eyed and with a firm grip on their weapons.

To his left, Julia stared into Catherine’s eyes.

His heart beat a third time.

In another heartbeat, his children or his wife would be dead, depending on which way he ran.

He ran.

The general’s sword, turned sideways, slid easily between Julia’s ribs. Her last breath was his name, and with it came the last otherworldly green swirl of her magic. It hit him, Julia’s last gift becoming part of him, wrapping around his insides, giving him the burst of strength he needed. Ardan wrapped the twins up in his arms and crashed out of the window. The two Stormguard who had taken the children lay unconscious. There hadn’t been time to kill them… or to hold his wife as she died.

He fled from the house into the dark, past the poor dead goat, whose screams had been silenced by one well-placed arrow through the throat. The children remained silent, in some lucky instinct, leaving the questions to the night owls in the trees.

“Stop swinging.”

From the top car of the rusted-out Carnie Wheel in the abandoned amusement park, Celeste gazes down at the mismatched buildings and colorful blinking lights of Taizen Gate. Up there, she can almost forget what it’s like to bump through the crowds, her fingers curled up tight in her brother’s so as not to lose him. How the merchants shove dead fish and live chickens and beeping gadgets in her face in the markets. How she never sleeps well thanks to the MECHANIC sign over her father’s garage that pulses red through her curtains. How the few stars that appear above the bright city call to her.

Vox grins, not even holding on, shifting his weight back and forth hard. “What? Like this? Is this what’s scaring you?”

“I’m not scared.”

“Because if you’re scared, I’ll stop.”

“Shush.”

During the day, she keeps one hand buried in her pocket, a warm sphere of light like a marble clenched in her fist. Just to feel right.

“Admit you’re scared and I’ll stop.”

“When you fall, I’ll laugh.”

Above the noxious halcyon smog that burps its way out of Boiling Bay, the sun sets in dirty oranges and reds. Through the haze that roils a mile inland, giant churn cranes wander, their heads poking up above it to breathe, making swirling valleys that fold in on themselves and disappear. By nightfall, the ground will be packed with the Taizen teenaged underground, shoulder to shoulder, cheering through gas masks. Atop the Carnie Wheel, though, the twins breathe easy.

The amusement car creaks and moans as it swings. “Do you think they’ve found us?” asks Celeste. Everyone in the Taizen underground knows when “tourists” arrive. They try to be stealthy, but no matter how well they imitate the fashion, no matter how good their accent, when they start asking questions, locals spread the word. And when they have rune tattoos, or the sulphur-smelling snap of magic about them, the back tables of the tea rooms buzz with talk, none of it friendly.

“I hope so.” Vox shrugs. “Tired of hiding anyway. Let them come. I want to look in their eyes.”

“You want revenge for Mamma.”

“Don’t you?”

“I want us safe, same as Dad.”

“Safe is no fun.” Vox takes up the swinging with renewed violence. Celeste’s annoyed protests resound below the smog.

THE MASKER RAGE

 00:00.05

It takes five seconds to fall from the top of the Carnie Wheel.

At first Celeste flails, her hands pinwheeling through empty air, the deafening squeal of metal rods shearing apart drown out the hammering beat of her heart.

But then, falling through the bright burning magic of her own design, her eyes close. Her arms relax. In five seconds, every bone in her body will splinter and she will die. Her overprotective father has been right all along, and there’s nothing she can do. Time slows, loses meaning.

Five seconds.

Celeste’s mind wanders.

00:00:04

For years they braved the noxious-aired abandoned carnival to climb up the Carnie Wheel where they could be alone and play with magic. “Do the thing,” Vox said, then watched as a little swirl appeared in the air over Celeste’s outstretched palm. The air there became not-air, and her hand under it became not-a-hand, and what they stared at became not-a-thing, an absence of a thing, the end of a thing, the last dying breath of a tiny star, collapsing in on itself.

“My turn,” he said, and closed his eyes, raised up his hands. For a few seconds, nothing. Then, Celeste heard it. Sparrows that had been calling out of sync sang together, this little melody, and Vox hummed along. He sang little lyrics with it to crack Celeste up. “This is the Celeste song, I made up a Celeste song, everybody sing the Celeste song…”

00:00:03

Stars slide between her fingers as she falls and falls and below, their eighteenth birthday rave churns with chaos, the desperate screams muted inside gas masks.

The Masker Rage began at nightfall, the smog layer blinking with the raver kids’ glimmering crystal necklaces and the glowing designs they’d painted on their skin. Carnies had cut open the security fences and charged admission; they snaked through the crowd selling drinks spiked with who-knows-what, their pickpocket kids cleaning up.

“Wait,” whispered Vox. Celeste’s hands radiated with heat. Vox nodded to a beat coming from inside of him, then inside her, then inside of everyone on the ground, their heartbeats pounding in tandem. His fingers snapped and the sound was a crack that scared the cranes. Their wide wings stirred up the smog, pulled it back like a stage curtain, revealing the twins’ faraway silhouettes to the crowd. “Okay. Do the thing,” sang Vox, so Celeste held out her palms and

let

go.

The stars above coiled, then their hot light fell, bursting into spirals. Vox sped up the beat, and from nowhere and everywhere there was music, and the ravers danced, wild with elation and anticipation and whatever was spiked into the Carnie drinks.

Stars shot through her and exploded from her hands into fountains and geometric patterns that danced along to the music, and inside of that blaze of light and sound the twins were free.

00:00:02

The ground flies up to meet her, littered with the scattered bodies of ravers who’d gotten in the way. They fell in clumps, trampled under swords and shields and blasts of blue magic. The tourists threw off their cloaks, revealing uniforms in Gythian gold and Stormguard white. The singing turned into panicked shrieks and Vox’s song became a march, music for unifying armies and terrifying enemies.

As the music mutated, the starlight moving through Celeste’s hands turned into searing drops that incinerated whatever they touched. Showers of pain. On the ground, puddles of starlight exploded. The fighters lunged out of the way of the spraying light. Sparks burst on one another, lighting up terrified people running toward the city.

“What’s happening?” Vox screamed, and the sound came out in song, another layer to the music.

Celeste tried to answer, but her tongue crackled with light, like popping candy sparklers, and below them, the ground under the Carnie Wheel became not-ground, the absence of ground, the death of the falling stars, just like the baby black holes she had always made to delight Vox, but big and churning, swallowing.

Vox clapped his hands once. “Celeste!” he cried,

“STOP!”

The world rumbled with Vox’s sonic boom, and an explosion of starlight blasted from below. Cracks splintered underground and the Carnie Wheel tilted hard, jerked out from under their feet.

00:00:01

Celeste searches among the faces of the Stormguard for the one who killed her mother, but finds instead the red shapes of her father’s armor, scorched black in places, surrounded by charred, crumpled people. His hand reaches out. There’s a look on his face she’s seen before only once.

00:00:00

Ardan slammed his fist into the armor’s control panel.

“Command?” responded the computer voice.

“Vanguard up!” he screamed.

*

It hadn’t been enough, Ardan thought, running with sidewalk-splitting clomps toward the cracked, tilting Carnie Wheel, clutching the tattered Masker-Rage poster in his free fist. It hadn’t been enough to escape the Stormguard by the dead of night. It hadn’t been enough to use assumed names and hide every day for more than a decade. It hadn’t been enough for the kids to watch their mother die.

Had his rules been so impossible? Don’t draw attention to yourselves. Don’t let anyone see you playing with that magic stuff. Don’t tell anyone where you’re from. Don’t show anyone the curtained-off part of the garage where he modified the power armor after hours, adding generators and liquid coolants and boosters. He’d always known that his rules wouldn’t be enough.

And now, his children were falling.

Don’t draw attention to yourselves. And they’d put up posters.

*

Breathing hard through his respirator, Ardan raced through piles of trash and wild churn cranes, knocked over a few fleeing raver kids and carnies and winced at the battle sounds he’d hoped never to hear again – pained screams, weapons clashing, explosions – but louder than that, the reverberation of a sonic boom that had cracked the wheel at its base. The boom echoed off every surrounding surface. They’d probably heard it at the other end of Taizen Gate.

Damn it, Vox.

Getting close to the wheel meant dodging the sparking, falling stars that burned and exploded together. One flew past Ardan’s face, struck a burn mark onto his cheek.

Celeste!

Ardan roared, bursting through the soldiers gripping Gythian steel, men and women who wanted what Julia had wanted: Celeste on the throne of the Storm Queen.

Over my dead…

White-clothed Stormguard swarmed up the Carnie Wheel to escape a sickening nothing into which anything closeby sank. It had been more than ten years, and still the Storm Queen would risk her best soldiers to end his family.

Ardan squinted up through the falling starlight at the shadows plummeting toward him.

“Vanguard confirmed,” the control panel responded.

“Please, be enough,” whispered Ardan, as the holographic barriers crackled to life a few feet from the ground.

The barriers bent but held fast as the twins slammed into them.

Gythians closed in tight as the barriers dissipated and the twins rolled safely onto the pavement.

“We have to fall back, your highness!” cried a Gythian battle mage, blue electric currents moving up his arms. “Retreat!”

“Stay away from my children,” grunted Ardan, swallowing down the sob in his throat, grabbing Celeste’s elbow as the soldiers fled.

Celeste pulled away from him, trembling. “We can’t hide anymore, Dadda,” she said, and ran.

Ardan cursed, but Vox was running after his sister. Close behind, the Stormguard regrouped. Ardan followed, and together they dashed toward the bay, surrounded by what was left of the allied Gythians. Behind them, the Carnie Wheel continued to fall, rusted metal screeching, collapsing on itself, slow as a dream.

A single raven circled above them, camouflaged against the now-dark sky, watching.

So we’re headed out of Boiling Bay at top speed, right? Carnie Wheel cars are coming unbolted and like BAM-CRUSH smashing to the left and right of us, and the Stormguard chase after us with these shields that make this ZAP-BZZT-ZAP-BZZT sound, and we’re taking fire over those shields, like magic bolts are slamming into people, and a fireball goes WHOOMSHHHHH through us and creates this freaking puddle of flame that we have to jump over. Dad’s armor is overheating, and this old Gythian war mage who’s doing all the talking is like, “We must escape to the barge!” and Dad’s like, “My daughter will have nothing to do with your old-world politics!” and I’m like, “Can we discuss this later when we aren’t, you know, about to die?”

We race down this old creaking dock toward the RAAAAAHHHHHRRR of these titanbacks that pull the barges. While the soldiers yank on the ropes to float a beast close enough for us to board, the Stormguard march closer, singing a creepy war song. An arrow goes SHTOOMP into the spine of the guy next to me. What’s left of the first line of Gythian defense stabs at the shields like zzzppttt–zzppptt, and Celeste holds my elbow and leans in.

“Do the thing,” she says. Then she smiles at me like everything isn’t chaos, like it’s just us on top of the world again.

So I gather up all the sound I feel. The titanback’s mouth yawns without a sound. The water doesn’t lap-lap-lap against the dock. This energy I’m gathering, it sucks up the Stormguard’s song. The flying arrows don’t whistle. The fireballs don’t crack. The Gythians yelling orders and instructions, they’re silenced. I grab it all, every sound I can find, and ball it all up into my hands. It feels like a beating heart.

I aim it, then I let it go.

It blasts in waves like WUB-WUB-WUB-WUB right at the line of Stormguard. Then the Gythians go to town on those dangerous dames, slice-n-dicing, and the Stormguard retreat, Gythians chasing after them.

I’m expecting accolades, like at least someone could act impressed? But the titanback burps out this big noise and the war mage is already trying to get Celeste onto the barge. Dad isn’t having it. He grabs Celeste back by her wrist. “She isn’t going,” he says.

The war mage goes on about how Celeste has to fulfill her destiny and take the throne blah blah blah, but Dad is having none of it. He even fakes a punch at the Gythian mage to make him flinch. Dad says the Storm Queen is threatening their dying civilization and they think throwing Sis at the problem will fix it. Celeste and I are like whoa. We learned about the tyrant queen in school, how her armies mow down and pillage other cities, killing dissenters and kidnapping talented kids to be raised as Stormguard soldiers.

It gets crazy-tense, and everyone’s talking about what’s best for Celeste. But it feels like my future’s being decided too. And I got a decision to make…

“If there is a way to end her tyranny, shouldn’t I do it?” Celeste says in that calm way that always winds Dad up even worse.

“Your mother thought she could supplant the Storm Queen with technologist help, and look what happened to her.”

Wrong thing to say to Celeste. The girl is hella stubborn on the subject of Mom. “I love you, Dadda, but I won’t ask permission. They’re my people.”

“And you are going to save them, your highness?” Dad scoffs.

“Dad.” I put my hand on his arm. He shakes me off, so I put it back. “Listen.” And I let him hear.

An echo comes from all around us, a voice from a long time ago. It says,

“The kids need a pet.”

Dad spins around, staring all wild-eyed around the dock. “Where…”

“Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“Julia?” he whispers. It’s the first time I’ve heard him say her name since that night.

Then I play Dad’s voice from that night, the part where he’s yelling at Mom.

Dad freezes, his mouth a little open.

“Dad,” I say again. “Celeste is gonna go. This could be the last time you see her. You really want this to be the last conversation you two have?”

There’s this long awkward silent moment where it would be cool of him to say, You’re right, Vox, but no. He just gathers Celeste up into a big metal hug. “You’ll always have me,” he says. He’s the first on the barge, then he helps Celeste get on.

“You’ll always have me, too,” I say while hopping onto the barge, though no one hears me, it being such a weepy father-daughter moment, but whatevs.

I’m the only one who hears the last echo, just a whisper, as I’m following my family out of Boiling Bay:

“Such a shame…”

*

There’s all these rumors and tales about how Celeste is gonna challenge the throne of the Storm Queen (which is still weird for me), and they’re all epic, about how the Gythians and the Stormguard found out where Dad was hiding her, and they battled it out, and the Gythians took us here to the Halcyon Fold to recruit heroes to her cause, and now she’s dropping stars and taking names. But they leave out all the cool stuff I did. At least now you know the full story… and it’s not the last you’ll hear from me.

“I do not need your permission to buy a goat,” Julia said. “Goat milk is delicious, and we can make cheese.”

They’d been arguing all evening. Ardan was hunched over his power gauntlet, sanding down the edges of a grill he’d removed to improve air flow. Outside in the yard, a goat shrieked into the moonless dark. “Goats stink and scream like fiends,” he grumped. “It hasn’t stopped for an hour. How will the twins sleep?”

“The kids need a pet. Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“And who will make this alleged cheese? When have you ever made cheese, your highness?”

“I could make cheese!” Julia shouted. She stomped out of the room and slammed the bedroom door behind her, the goat’s cries dramatizing her exit.

Celeste toddled out of her room, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Dadda? Is Mamma alright?”

She had her mother’s accent. Ardan plucked up the toddler in his unarmored arm and kissed her cheeks. “Mamma is being ridiculous.”

“What is ridick oo luss?”

“It means she brought a goat home without talking to me about it.”

“I like goats.” This from Vox, who wandered in after his sister. He seated himself on his father’s foot, wrapped his arms around Ardan’s leg and rode along as Ardan took Celeste back to bed, staring out the window toward the screams.

“You like the idea of goats. None of us actually know how to care for a goat.”

“There’s a baby crying outside,” said Celeste, half asleep.

“It’s the stupid goat,” said Ardan, planting her back in her bed.

Vox uncurled himself from his father’s leg. “He’s afraid,” he said. “Maybe lonely.”

“It’s a she, Vox. At least I hope it is a she, or your mother’s dreams of cheese are –”

Ardan paused, turned toward the window.

The goat had stopped screaming.

His adrenaline spiked.

“Hide, both of you. Do not open the door.”

There was no time to make sure they obeyed him. He ran to his bedroom. “Julia,” he hissed at the bedroom door. “They’re here.”

Julia opened the door. Her face had gone white. “Now?”

“Outside.”

The armor stood in pieces around the front room in various states of renovation. Tools littered the floor. “Legs first,” he grumbled, stepping into the sabatons. Julia scrambled to her knees in her nightdress, a poor but necessary replacement for a proper battle squire. She pinched her fingers on the knee clamps, struggled under the weight of the chest pieces.

The button panel whirred and crackled with static, then burped out: “System. Offline.” Ardan slammed his left fist onto it. “Worthless damn power source on this model…”

“Shh.” Julia’s hands were black with oil, her face smudged as she attached the generator to his back and connected it to the power gauntlet. She stared out the door, into the hall. There was no sound. No disturbance. No goat. “Are you sure they’re…”

“System. Online.”

Glass broke. Ardan turned sideways in time for a metal arrow to slice a scratch through his breastplate, just under his chin, and thud home in the wall opposite the front window. Ardan cursed and squared up, the wood floor creaking under his armored weight. “I’ll watch the front door.”

“But your cannon arm!”

“It’s useless, unless you want me to blow up the house. Stay behind me.”

Julia closed her eyes, turned her palms upward. “I’ll protect you,” she murmured, her voice dreamy, green light forming in her hands.

Ardan winced away from the twisted-guts feeling that magic always gave him. “I can handle myself,” he grunted.

A forearm appeared over the window, decorated in an archer’s gauntlet, and then the archer herself swung inside. Another woman followed and drew her sword. More came in behind her, magicians and assassins, all wearing the same insignia.

“Stormguard!” he yelled, but Julia was lost inside her trance, eyes rolled back.

Ardan’s armor groaned and buzzed as he moved forward, painfully slow, but he was grateful for it when the Stormguard attacked. They moved in tandem, each with a weapon they’d held since childhood. He ran forward, energy buzzing through the armor, propelling him, heating the metal to burning, steel cracking against the breastplate. When he backhanded the archer across her face, he left a burn mark. She crumpled, her bow clattering to the floor.

The others raised shields of wood, metal and magic to counter Julia’s trance and Ardan’s assault. He stomped forward and plowed into them, knocked them from their feet, sent them flying in a crunch of bones to the wall. Their blood spattered the divan. They rolled in shattered glass, discarded weapons and their own knocked-out teeth. He could not resist every attack: Blades sliced through his unprotected arm and his cheeks; magic stung and froze him with deafening whipcrack sounds. But he was a wall between the enemy and his wife, and all the while, he felt warmth coming from her, a blanket that enveloped him, closed his wounds, melted the ice and gave him strength. It churned his insides, these unnatural talents, but he’d deal with the sick when his family was safe.

Then, the blast.

All went silent and cold. His teeth clamped shut. A shock pulsed up through his legs, his arms, his throat. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t blink. Paintings slid from the wall and the bolts fell from the front door. He could hear the static noises from his armor display, the groans from the pile of wounded Stormguard, but he could not move. He could only watch as the front door opened and the last of the Stormguard stepped inside, as if invited. She surveyed the room, then snapped her fingers at two of the guard who were scrambling to their feet even as Ardan struggled to move. She pointed to the twins’ room and the two guards sprinted that way.

The woman walked from the door, past Ardan as if he didn’t exist, to Julia, who stood frozen in her nightdress and bare feet.

“Catherine,” gasped Julia.

“Such a shame,” whispered Catherine as she pressed her sword against Julia’s chest.

Ardan’s heart pounded out one beat. Another. Air filled his lungs and he coughed. To his right, the two Stormguard emerged carrying the twins, stunned as rigid as he. The other Stormguard rose, some shakily, some bleeding, all stone-eyed and with a firm grip on their weapons.

To his left, Julia stared into Catherine’s eyes.

His heart beat a third time.

In another heartbeat, his children or his wife would be dead, depending on which way he ran.

He ran.

The general’s sword, turned sideways, slid easily between Julia’s ribs. Her last breath was his name, and with it came the last otherworldly green swirl of her magic. It hit him, Julia’s last gift becoming part of him, wrapping around his insides, giving him the burst of strength he needed. Ardan wrapped the twins up in his arms and crashed out of the window. The two Stormguard who had taken the children lay unconscious. There hadn’t been time to kill them… or to hold his wife as she died.

He fled from the house into the dark, past the poor dead goat, whose screams had been silenced by one well-placed arrow through the throat. The children remained silent, in some lucky instinct, leaving the questions to the night owls in the trees.

“Stop swinging.”

From the top car of the rusted-out Carnie Wheel in the abandoned amusement park, Celeste gazes down at the mismatched buildings and colorful blinking lights of Taizen Gate. Up there, she can almost forget what it’s like to bump through the crowds, her fingers curled up tight in her brother’s so as not to lose him. How the merchants shove dead fish and live chickens and beeping gadgets in her face in the markets. How she never sleeps well thanks to the MECHANIC sign over her father’s garage that pulses red through her curtains. How the few stars that appear above the bright city call to her.

Vox grins, not even holding on, shifting his weight back and forth hard. “What? Like this? Is this what’s scaring you?”

“I’m not scared.”

“Because if you’re scared, I’ll stop.”

“Shush.”

During the day, she keeps one hand buried in her pocket, a warm sphere of light like a marble clenched in her fist. Just to feel right.

“Admit you’re scared and I’ll stop.”

“When you fall, I’ll laugh.”

Above the noxious halcyon smog that burps its way out of Boiling Bay, the sun sets in dirty oranges and reds. Through the haze that roils a mile inland, giant churn cranes wander, their heads poking up above it to breathe, making swirling valleys that fold in on themselves and disappear. By nightfall, the ground will be packed with the Taizen teenaged underground, shoulder to shoulder, cheering through gas masks. Atop the Carnie Wheel, though, the twins breathe easy.

The amusement car creaks and moans as it swings. “Do you think they’ve found us?” asks Celeste. Everyone in the Taizen underground knows when “tourists” arrive. They try to be stealthy, but no matter how well they imitate the fashion, no matter how good their accent, when they start asking questions, locals spread the word. And when they have rune tattoos, or the sulphur-smelling snap of magic about them, the back tables of the tea rooms buzz with talk, none of it friendly.

“I hope so.” Vox shrugs. “Tired of hiding anyway. Let them come. I want to look in their eyes.”

“You want revenge for Mamma.”

“Don’t you?”

“I want us safe, same as Dad.”

“Safe is no fun.” Vox takes up the swinging with renewed violence. Celeste’s annoyed protests resound below the smog.

THE MASKER RAGE

 00:00.05

It takes five seconds to fall from the top of the Carnie Wheel.

At first Celeste flails, her hands pinwheeling through empty air, the deafening squeal of metal rods shearing apart drown out the hammering beat of her heart.

But then, falling through the bright burning magic of her own design, her eyes close. Her arms relax. In five seconds, every bone in her body will splinter and she will die. Her overprotective father has been right all along, and there’s nothing she can do. Time slows, loses meaning.

Five seconds.

Celeste’s mind wanders.

00:00:04

For years they braved the noxious-aired abandoned carnival to climb up the Carnie Wheel where they could be alone and play with magic. “Do the thing,” Vox said, then watched as a little swirl appeared in the air over Celeste’s outstretched palm. The air there became not-air, and her hand under it became not-a-hand, and what they stared at became not-a-thing, an absence of a thing, the end of a thing, the last dying breath of a tiny star, collapsing in on itself.

“My turn,” he said, and closed his eyes, raised up his hands. For a few seconds, nothing. Then, Celeste heard it. Sparrows that had been calling out of sync sang together, this little melody, and Vox hummed along. He sang little lyrics with it to crack Celeste up. “This is the Celeste song, I made up a Celeste song, everybody sing the Celeste song…”

00:00:03

Stars slide between her fingers as she falls and falls and below, their eighteenth birthday rave churns with chaos, the desperate screams muted inside gas masks.

The Masker Rage began at nightfall, the smog layer blinking with the raver kids’ glimmering crystal necklaces and the glowing designs they’d painted on their skin. Carnies had cut open the security fences and charged admission; they snaked through the crowd selling drinks spiked with who-knows-what, their pickpocket kids cleaning up.

“Wait,” whispered Vox. Celeste’s hands radiated with heat. Vox nodded to a beat coming from inside of him, then inside her, then inside of everyone on the ground, their heartbeats pounding in tandem. His fingers snapped and the sound was a crack that scared the cranes. Their wide wings stirred up the smog, pulled it back like a stage curtain, revealing the twins’ faraway silhouettes to the crowd. “Okay. Do the thing,” sang Vox, so Celeste held out her palms and

let

go.

The stars above coiled, then their hot light fell, bursting into spirals. Vox sped up the beat, and from nowhere and everywhere there was music, and the ravers danced, wild with elation and anticipation and whatever was spiked into the Carnie drinks.

Stars shot through her and exploded from her hands into fountains and geometric patterns that danced along to the music, and inside of that blaze of light and sound the twins were free.

00:00:02

The ground flies up to meet her, littered with the scattered bodies of ravers who’d gotten in the way. They fell in clumps, trampled under swords and shields and blasts of blue magic. The tourists threw off their cloaks, revealing uniforms in Gythian gold and Stormguard white. The singing turned into panicked shrieks and Vox’s song became a march, music for unifying armies and terrifying enemies.

As the music mutated, the starlight moving through Celeste’s hands turned into searing drops that incinerated whatever they touched. Showers of pain. On the ground, puddles of starlight exploded. The fighters lunged out of the way of the spraying light. Sparks burst on one another, lighting up terrified people running toward the city.

“What’s happening?” Vox screamed, and the sound came out in song, another layer to the music.

Celeste tried to answer, but her tongue crackled with light, like popping candy sparklers, and below them, the ground under the Carnie Wheel became not-ground, the absence of ground, the death of the falling stars, just like the baby black holes she had always made to delight Vox, but big and churning, swallowing.

Vox clapped his hands once. “Celeste!” he cried,

“STOP!”

The world rumbled with Vox’s sonic boom, and an explosion of starlight blasted from below. Cracks splintered underground and the Carnie Wheel tilted hard, jerked out from under their feet.

00:00:01

Celeste searches among the faces of the Stormguard for the one who killed her mother, but finds instead the red shapes of her father’s armor, scorched black in places, surrounded by charred, crumpled people. His hand reaches out. There’s a look on his face she’s seen before only once.

00:00:00

Ardan slammed his fist into the armor’s control panel.

“Command?” responded the computer voice.

“Vanguard up!” he screamed.

*

It hadn’t been enough, Ardan thought, running with sidewalk-splitting clomps toward the cracked, tilting Carnie Wheel, clutching the tattered Masker-Rage poster in his free fist. It hadn’t been enough to escape the Stormguard by the dead of night. It hadn’t been enough to use assumed names and hide every day for more than a decade. It hadn’t been enough for the kids to watch their mother die.

Had his rules been so impossible? Don’t draw attention to yourselves. Don’t let anyone see you playing with that magic stuff. Don’t tell anyone where you’re from. Don’t show anyone the curtained-off part of the garage where he modified the power armor after hours, adding generators and liquid coolants and boosters. He’d always known that his rules wouldn’t be enough.

And now, his children were falling.

Don’t draw attention to yourselves. And they’d put up posters.

*

Breathing hard through his respirator, Ardan raced through piles of trash and wild churn cranes, knocked over a few fleeing raver kids and carnies and winced at the battle sounds he’d hoped never to hear again – pained screams, weapons clashing, explosions – but louder than that, the reverberation of a sonic boom that had cracked the wheel at its base. The boom echoed off every surrounding surface. They’d probably heard it at the other end of Taizen Gate.

Damn it, Vox.

Getting close to the wheel meant dodging the sparking, falling stars that burned and exploded together. One flew past Ardan’s face, struck a burn mark onto his cheek.

Celeste!

Ardan roared, bursting through the soldiers gripping Gythian steel, men and women who wanted what Julia had wanted: Celeste on the throne of the Storm Queen.

Over my dead…

White-clothed Stormguard swarmed up the Carnie Wheel to escape a sickening nothing into which anything closeby sank. It had been more than ten years, and still the Storm Queen would risk her best soldiers to end his family.

Ardan squinted up through the falling starlight at the shadows plummeting toward him.

“Vanguard confirmed,” the control panel responded.

“Please, be enough,” whispered Ardan, as the holographic barriers crackled to life a few feet from the ground.

The barriers bent but held fast as the twins slammed into them.

Gythians closed in tight as the barriers dissipated and the twins rolled safely onto the pavement.

“We have to fall back, your highness!” cried a Gythian battle mage, blue electric currents moving up his arms. “Retreat!”

“Stay away from my children,” grunted Ardan, swallowing down the sob in his throat, grabbing Celeste’s elbow as the soldiers fled.

Celeste pulled away from him, trembling. “We can’t hide anymore, Dadda,” she said, and ran.

Ardan cursed, but Vox was running after his sister. Close behind, the Stormguard regrouped. Ardan followed, and together they dashed toward the bay, surrounded by what was left of the allied Gythians. Behind them, the Carnie Wheel continued to fall, rusted metal screeching, collapsing on itself, slow as a dream.

A single raven circled above them, camouflaged against the now-dark sky, watching.

So we’re headed out of Boiling Bay at top speed, right? Carnie Wheel cars are coming unbolted and like BAM-CRUSH smashing to the left and right of us, and the Stormguard chase after us with these shields that make this ZAP-BZZT-ZAP-BZZT sound, and we’re taking fire over those shields, like magic bolts are slamming into people, and a fireball goes WHOOMSHHHHH through us and creates this freaking puddle of flame that we have to jump over. Dad’s armor is overheating, and this old Gythian war mage who’s doing all the talking is like, “We must escape to the barge!” and Dad’s like, “My daughter will have nothing to do with your old-world politics!” and I’m like, “Can we discuss this later when we aren’t, you know, about to die?”

We race down this old creaking dock toward the RAAAAAHHHHHRRR of these titanbacks that pull the barges. While the soldiers yank on the ropes to float a beast close enough for us to board, the Stormguard march closer, singing a creepy war song. An arrow goes SHTOOMP into the spine of the guy next to me. What’s left of the first line of Gythian defense stabs at the shields like zzzppttt–zzppptt, and Celeste holds my elbow and leans in.

“Do the thing,” she says. Then she smiles at me like everything isn’t chaos, like it’s just us on top of the world again.

So I gather up all the sound I feel. The titanback’s mouth yawns without a sound. The water doesn’t lap-lap-lap against the dock. This energy I’m gathering, it sucks up the Stormguard’s song. The flying arrows don’t whistle. The fireballs don’t crack. The Gythians yelling orders and instructions, they’re silenced. I grab it all, every sound I can find, and ball it all up into my hands. It feels like a beating heart.

I aim it, then I let it go.

It blasts in waves like WUB-WUB-WUB-WUB right at the line of Stormguard. Then the Gythians go to town on those dangerous dames, slice-n-dicing, and the Stormguard retreat, Gythians chasing after them.

I’m expecting accolades, like at least someone could act impressed? But the titanback burps out this big noise and the war mage is already trying to get Celeste onto the barge. Dad isn’t having it. He grabs Celeste back by her wrist. “She isn’t going,” he says.

The war mage goes on about how Celeste has to fulfill her destiny and take the throne blah blah blah, but Dad is having none of it. He even fakes a punch at the Gythian mage to make him flinch. Dad says the Storm Queen is threatening their dying civilization and they think throwing Sis at the problem will fix it. Celeste and I are like whoa. We learned about the tyrant queen in school, how her armies mow down and pillage other cities, killing dissenters and kidnapping talented kids to be raised as Stormguard soldiers.

It gets crazy-tense, and everyone’s talking about what’s best for Celeste. But it feels like my future’s being decided too. And I got a decision to make…

“If there is a way to end her tyranny, shouldn’t I do it?” Celeste says in that calm way that always winds Dad up even worse.

“Your mother thought she could supplant the Storm Queen with technologist help, and look what happened to her.”

Wrong thing to say to Celeste. The girl is hella stubborn on the subject of Mom. “I love you, Dadda, but I won’t ask permission. They’re my people.”

“And you are going to save them, your highness?” Dad scoffs.

“Dad.” I put my hand on his arm. He shakes me off, so I put it back. “Listen.” And I let him hear.

An echo comes from all around us, a voice from a long time ago. It says,

“The kids need a pet.”

Dad spins around, staring all wild-eyed around the dock. “Where…”

“Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“Julia?” he whispers. It’s the first time I’ve heard him say her name since that night.

Then I play Dad’s voice from that night, the part where he’s yelling at Mom.

Dad freezes, his mouth a little open.

“Dad,” I say again. “Celeste is gonna go. This could be the last time you see her. You really want this to be the last conversation you two have?”

There’s this long awkward silent moment where it would be cool of him to say, You’re right, Vox, but no. He just gathers Celeste up into a big metal hug. “You’ll always have me,” he says. He’s the first on the barge, then he helps Celeste get on.

“You’ll always have me, too,” I say while hopping onto the barge, though no one hears me, it being such a weepy father-daughter moment, but whatevs.

I’m the only one who hears the last echo, just a whisper, as I’m following my family out of Boiling Bay:

“Such a shame…”

*

There’s all these rumors and tales about how Celeste is gonna challenge the throne of the Storm Queen (which is still weird for me), and they’re all epic, about how the Gythians and the Stormguard found out where Dad was hiding her, and they battled it out, and the Gythians took us here to the Halcyon Fold to recruit heroes to her cause, and now she’s dropping stars and taking names. But they leave out all the cool stuff I did. At least now you know the full story… and it’s not the last you’ll hear from me.

“I do not need your permission to buy a goat,” Julia said. “Goat milk is delicious, and we can make cheese.”

They’d been arguing all evening. Ardan was hunched over his power gauntlet, sanding down the edges of a grill he’d removed to improve air flow. Outside in the yard, a goat shrieked into the moonless dark. “Goats stink and scream like fiends,” he grumped. “It hasn’t stopped for an hour. How will the twins sleep?”

“The kids need a pet. Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“And who will make this alleged cheese? When have you ever made cheese, your highness?”

“I could make cheese!” Julia shouted. She stomped out of the room and slammed the bedroom door behind her, the goat’s cries dramatizing her exit.

Celeste toddled out of her room, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Dadda? Is Mamma alright?”

She had her mother’s accent. Ardan plucked up the toddler in his unarmored arm and kissed her cheeks. “Mamma is being ridiculous.”

“What is ridick oo luss?”

“It means she brought a goat home without talking to me about it.”

“I like goats.” This from Vox, who wandered in after his sister. He seated himself on his father’s foot, wrapped his arms around Ardan’s leg and rode along as Ardan took Celeste back to bed, staring out the window toward the screams.

“You like the idea of goats. None of us actually know how to care for a goat.”

“There’s a baby crying outside,” said Celeste, half asleep.

“It’s the stupid goat,” said Ardan, planting her back in her bed.

Vox uncurled himself from his father’s leg. “He’s afraid,” he said. “Maybe lonely.”

“It’s a she, Vox. At least I hope it is a she, or your mother’s dreams of cheese are –”

Ardan paused, turned toward the window.

The goat had stopped screaming.

His adrenaline spiked.

“Hide, both of you. Do not open the door.”

There was no time to make sure they obeyed him. He ran to his bedroom. “Julia,” he hissed at the bedroom door. “They’re here.”

Julia opened the door. Her face had gone white. “Now?”

“Outside.”

The armor stood in pieces around the front room in various states of renovation. Tools littered the floor. “Legs first,” he grumbled, stepping into the sabatons. Julia scrambled to her knees in her nightdress, a poor but necessary replacement for a proper battle squire. She pinched her fingers on the knee clamps, struggled under the weight of the chest pieces.

The button panel whirred and crackled with static, then burped out: “System. Offline.” Ardan slammed his left fist onto it. “Worthless damn power source on this model…”

“Shh.” Julia’s hands were black with oil, her face smudged as she attached the generator to his back and connected it to the power gauntlet. She stared out the door, into the hall. There was no sound. No disturbance. No goat. “Are you sure they’re…”

“System. Online.”

Glass broke. Ardan turned sideways in time for a metal arrow to slice a scratch through his breastplate, just under his chin, and thud home in the wall opposite the front window. Ardan cursed and squared up, the wood floor creaking under his armored weight. “I’ll watch the front door.”

“But your cannon arm!”

“It’s useless, unless you want me to blow up the house. Stay behind me.”

Julia closed her eyes, turned her palms upward. “I’ll protect you,” she murmured, her voice dreamy, green light forming in her hands.

Ardan winced away from the twisted-guts feeling that magic always gave him. “I can handle myself,” he grunted.

A forearm appeared over the window, decorated in an archer’s gauntlet, and then the archer herself swung inside. Another woman followed and drew her sword. More came in behind her, magicians and assassins, all wearing the same insignia.

“Stormguard!” he yelled, but Julia was lost inside her trance, eyes rolled back.

Ardan’s armor groaned and buzzed as he moved forward, painfully slow, but he was grateful for it when the Stormguard attacked. They moved in tandem, each with a weapon they’d held since childhood. He ran forward, energy buzzing through the armor, propelling him, heating the metal to burning, steel cracking against the breastplate. When he backhanded the archer across her face, he left a burn mark. She crumpled, her bow clattering to the floor.

The others raised shields of wood, metal and magic to counter Julia’s trance and Ardan’s assault. He stomped forward and plowed into them, knocked them from their feet, sent them flying in a crunch of bones to the wall. Their blood spattered the divan. They rolled in shattered glass, discarded weapons and their own knocked-out teeth. He could not resist every attack: Blades sliced through his unprotected arm and his cheeks; magic stung and froze him with deafening whipcrack sounds. But he was a wall between the enemy and his wife, and all the while, he felt warmth coming from her, a blanket that enveloped him, closed his wounds, melted the ice and gave him strength. It churned his insides, these unnatural talents, but he’d deal with the sick when his family was safe.

Then, the blast.

All went silent and cold. His teeth clamped shut. A shock pulsed up through his legs, his arms, his throat. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t blink. Paintings slid from the wall and the bolts fell from the front door. He could hear the static noises from his armor display, the groans from the pile of wounded Stormguard, but he could not move. He could only watch as the front door opened and the last of the Stormguard stepped inside, as if invited. She surveyed the room, then snapped her fingers at two of the guard who were scrambling to their feet even as Ardan struggled to move. She pointed to the twins’ room and the two guards sprinted that way.

The woman walked from the door, past Ardan as if he didn’t exist, to Julia, who stood frozen in her nightdress and bare feet.

“Catherine,” gasped Julia.

“Such a shame,” whispered Catherine as she pressed her sword against Julia’s chest.

Ardan’s heart pounded out one beat. Another. Air filled his lungs and he coughed. To his right, the two Stormguard emerged carrying the twins, stunned as rigid as he. The other Stormguard rose, some shakily, some bleeding, all stone-eyed and with a firm grip on their weapons.

To his left, Julia stared into Catherine’s eyes.

His heart beat a third time.

In another heartbeat, his children or his wife would be dead, depending on which way he ran.

He ran.

The general’s sword, turned sideways, slid easily between Julia’s ribs. Her last breath was his name, and with it came the last otherworldly green swirl of her magic. It hit him, Julia’s last gift becoming part of him, wrapping around his insides, giving him the burst of strength he needed. Ardan wrapped the twins up in his arms and crashed out of the window. The two Stormguard who had taken the children lay unconscious. There hadn’t been time to kill them… or to hold his wife as she died.

He fled from the house into the dark, past the poor dead goat, whose screams had been silenced by one well-placed arrow through the throat. The children remained silent, in some lucky instinct, leaving the questions to the night owls in the trees.

“Stop swinging.”

From the top car of the rusted-out Carnie Wheel in the abandoned amusement park, Celeste gazes down at the mismatched buildings and colorful blinking lights of Taizen Gate. Up there, she can almost forget what it’s like to bump through the crowds, her fingers curled up tight in her brother’s so as not to lose him. How the merchants shove dead fish and live chickens and beeping gadgets in her face in the markets. How she never sleeps well thanks to the MECHANIC sign over her father’s garage that pulses red through her curtains. How the few stars that appear above the bright city call to her.

Vox grins, not even holding on, shifting his weight back and forth hard. “What? Like this? Is this what’s scaring you?”

“I’m not scared.”

“Because if you’re scared, I’ll stop.”

“Shush.”

During the day, she keeps one hand buried in her pocket, a warm sphere of light like a marble clenched in her fist. Just to feel right.

“Admit you’re scared and I’ll stop.”

“When you fall, I’ll laugh.”

Above the noxious halcyon smog that burps its way out of Boiling Bay, the sun sets in dirty oranges and reds. Through the haze that roils a mile inland, giant churn cranes wander, their heads poking up above it to breathe, making swirling valleys that fold in on themselves and disappear. By nightfall, the ground will be packed with the Taizen teenaged underground, shoulder to shoulder, cheering through gas masks. Atop the Carnie Wheel, though, the twins breathe easy.

The amusement car creaks and moans as it swings. “Do you think they’ve found us?” asks Celeste. Everyone in the Taizen underground knows when “tourists” arrive. They try to be stealthy, but no matter how well they imitate the fashion, no matter how good their accent, when they start asking questions, locals spread the word. And when they have rune tattoos, or the sulphur-smelling snap of magic about them, the back tables of the tea rooms buzz with talk, none of it friendly.

“I hope so.” Vox shrugs. “Tired of hiding anyway. Let them come. I want to look in their eyes.”

“You want revenge for Mamma.”

“Don’t you?”

“I want us safe, same as Dad.”

“Safe is no fun.” Vox takes up the swinging with renewed violence. Celeste’s annoyed protests resound below the smog.

THE MASKER RAGE

 00:00.05

It takes five seconds to fall from the top of the Carnie Wheel.

At first Celeste flails, her hands pinwheeling through empty air, the deafening squeal of metal rods shearing apart drown out the hammering beat of her heart.

But then, falling through the bright burning magic of her own design, her eyes close. Her arms relax. In five seconds, every bone in her body will splinter and she will die. Her overprotective father has been right all along, and there’s nothing she can do. Time slows, loses meaning.

Five seconds.

Celeste’s mind wanders.

00:00:04

For years they braved the noxious-aired abandoned carnival to climb up the Carnie Wheel where they could be alone and play with magic. “Do the thing,” Vox said, then watched as a little swirl appeared in the air over Celeste’s outstretched palm. The air there became not-air, and her hand under it became not-a-hand, and what they stared at became not-a-thing, an absence of a thing, the end of a thing, the last dying breath of a tiny star, collapsing in on itself.

“My turn,” he said, and closed his eyes, raised up his hands. For a few seconds, nothing. Then, Celeste heard it. Sparrows that had been calling out of sync sang together, this little melody, and Vox hummed along. He sang little lyrics with it to crack Celeste up. “This is the Celeste song, I made up a Celeste song, everybody sing the Celeste song…”

00:00:03

Stars slide between her fingers as she falls and falls and below, their eighteenth birthday rave churns with chaos, the desperate screams muted inside gas masks.

The Masker Rage began at nightfall, the smog layer blinking with the raver kids’ glimmering crystal necklaces and the glowing designs they’d painted on their skin. Carnies had cut open the security fences and charged admission; they snaked through the crowd selling drinks spiked with who-knows-what, their pickpocket kids cleaning up.

“Wait,” whispered Vox. Celeste’s hands radiated with heat. Vox nodded to a beat coming from inside of him, then inside her, then inside of everyone on the ground, their heartbeats pounding in tandem. His fingers snapped and the sound was a crack that scared the cranes. Their wide wings stirred up the smog, pulled it back like a stage curtain, revealing the twins’ faraway silhouettes to the crowd. “Okay. Do the thing,” sang Vox, so Celeste held out her palms and

let

go.

The stars above coiled, then their hot light fell, bursting into spirals. Vox sped up the beat, and from nowhere and everywhere there was music, and the ravers danced, wild with elation and anticipation and whatever was spiked into the Carnie drinks.

Stars shot through her and exploded from her hands into fountains and geometric patterns that danced along to the music, and inside of that blaze of light and sound the twins were free.

00:00:02

The ground flies up to meet her, littered with the scattered bodies of ravers who’d gotten in the way. They fell in clumps, trampled under swords and shields and blasts of blue magic. The tourists threw off their cloaks, revealing uniforms in Gythian gold and Stormguard white. The singing turned into panicked shrieks and Vox’s song became a march, music for unifying armies and terrifying enemies.

As the music mutated, the starlight moving through Celeste’s hands turned into searing drops that incinerated whatever they touched. Showers of pain. On the ground, puddles of starlight exploded. The fighters lunged out of the way of the spraying light. Sparks burst on one another, lighting up terrified people running toward the city.

“What’s happening?” Vox screamed, and the sound came out in song, another layer to the music.

Celeste tried to answer, but her tongue crackled with light, like popping candy sparklers, and below them, the ground under the Carnie Wheel became not-ground, the absence of ground, the death of the falling stars, just like the baby black holes she had always made to delight Vox, but big and churning, swallowing.

Vox clapped his hands once. “Celeste!” he cried,

“STOP!”

The world rumbled with Vox’s sonic boom, and an explosion of starlight blasted from below. Cracks splintered underground and the Carnie Wheel tilted hard, jerked out from under their feet.

00:00:01

Celeste searches among the faces of the Stormguard for the one who killed her mother, but finds instead the red shapes of her father’s armor, scorched black in places, surrounded by charred, crumpled people. His hand reaches out. There’s a look on his face she’s seen before only once.

00:00:00

Ardan slammed his fist into the armor’s control panel.

“Command?” responded the computer voice.

“Vanguard up!” he screamed.

*

It hadn’t been enough, Ardan thought, running with sidewalk-splitting clomps toward the cracked, tilting Carnie Wheel, clutching the tattered Masker-Rage poster in his free fist. It hadn’t been enough to escape the Stormguard by the dead of night. It hadn’t been enough to use assumed names and hide every day for more than a decade. It hadn’t been enough for the kids to watch their mother die.

Had his rules been so impossible? Don’t draw attention to yourselves. Don’t let anyone see you playing with that magic stuff. Don’t tell anyone where you’re from. Don’t show anyone the curtained-off part of the garage where he modified the power armor after hours, adding generators and liquid coolants and boosters. He’d always known that his rules wouldn’t be enough.

And now, his children were falling.

Don’t draw attention to yourselves. And they’d put up posters.

*

Breathing hard through his respirator, Ardan raced through piles of trash and wild churn cranes, knocked over a few fleeing raver kids and carnies and winced at the battle sounds he’d hoped never to hear again – pained screams, weapons clashing, explosions – but louder than that, the reverberation of a sonic boom that had cracked the wheel at its base. The boom echoed off every surrounding surface. They’d probably heard it at the other end of Taizen Gate.

Damn it, Vox.

Getting close to the wheel meant dodging the sparking, falling stars that burned and exploded together. One flew past Ardan’s face, struck a burn mark onto his cheek.

Celeste!

Ardan roared, bursting through the soldiers gripping Gythian steel, men and women who wanted what Julia had wanted: Celeste on the throne of the Storm Queen.

Over my dead…

White-clothed Stormguard swarmed up the Carnie Wheel to escape a sickening nothing into which anything closeby sank. It had been more than ten years, and still the Storm Queen would risk her best soldiers to end his family.

Ardan squinted up through the falling starlight at the shadows plummeting toward him.

“Vanguard confirmed,” the control panel responded.

“Please, be enough,” whispered Ardan, as the holographic barriers crackled to life a few feet from the ground.

The barriers bent but held fast as the twins slammed into them.

Gythians closed in tight as the barriers dissipated and the twins rolled safely onto the pavement.

“We have to fall back, your highness!” cried a Gythian battle mage, blue electric currents moving up his arms. “Retreat!”

“Stay away from my children,” grunted Ardan, swallowing down the sob in his throat, grabbing Celeste’s elbow as the soldiers fled.

Celeste pulled away from him, trembling. “We can’t hide anymore, Dadda,” she said, and ran.

Ardan cursed, but Vox was running after his sister. Close behind, the Stormguard regrouped. Ardan followed, and together they dashed toward the bay, surrounded by what was left of the allied Gythians. Behind them, the Carnie Wheel continued to fall, rusted metal screeching, collapsing on itself, slow as a dream.

A single raven circled above them, camouflaged against the now-dark sky, watching.

So we’re headed out of Boiling Bay at top speed, right? Carnie Wheel cars are coming unbolted and like BAM-CRUSH smashing to the left and right of us, and the Stormguard chase after us with these shields that make this ZAP-BZZT-ZAP-BZZT sound, and we’re taking fire over those shields, like magic bolts are slamming into people, and a fireball goes WHOOMSHHHHH through us and creates this freaking puddle of flame that we have to jump over. Dad’s armor is overheating, and this old Gythian war mage who’s doing all the talking is like, “We must escape to the barge!” and Dad’s like, “My daughter will have nothing to do with your old-world politics!” and I’m like, “Can we discuss this later when we aren’t, you know, about to die?”

We race down this old creaking dock toward the RAAAAAHHHHHRRR of these titanbacks that pull the barges. While the soldiers yank on the ropes to float a beast close enough for us to board, the Stormguard march closer, singing a creepy war song. An arrow goes SHTOOMP into the spine of the guy next to me. What’s left of the first line of Gythian defense stabs at the shields like zzzppttt–zzppptt, and Celeste holds my elbow and leans in.

“Do the thing,” she says. Then she smiles at me like everything isn’t chaos, like it’s just us on top of the world again.

So I gather up all the sound I feel. The titanback’s mouth yawns without a sound. The water doesn’t lap-lap-lap against the dock. This energy I’m gathering, it sucks up the Stormguard’s song. The flying arrows don’t whistle. The fireballs don’t crack. The Gythians yelling orders and instructions, they’re silenced. I grab it all, every sound I can find, and ball it all up into my hands. It feels like a beating heart.

I aim it, then I let it go.

It blasts in waves like WUB-WUB-WUB-WUB right at the line of Stormguard. Then the Gythians go to town on those dangerous dames, slice-n-dicing, and the Stormguard retreat, Gythians chasing after them.

I’m expecting accolades, like at least someone could act impressed? But the titanback burps out this big noise and the war mage is already trying to get Celeste onto the barge. Dad isn’t having it. He grabs Celeste back by her wrist. “She isn’t going,” he says.

The war mage goes on about how Celeste has to fulfill her destiny and take the throne blah blah blah, but Dad is having none of it. He even fakes a punch at the Gythian mage to make him flinch. Dad says the Storm Queen is threatening their dying civilization and they think throwing Sis at the problem will fix it. Celeste and I are like whoa. We learned about the tyrant queen in school, how her armies mow down and pillage other cities, killing dissenters and kidnapping talented kids to be raised as Stormguard soldiers.

It gets crazy-tense, and everyone’s talking about what’s best for Celeste. But it feels like my future’s being decided too. And I got a decision to make…

“If there is a way to end her tyranny, shouldn’t I do it?” Celeste says in that calm way that always winds Dad up even worse.

“Your mother thought she could supplant the Storm Queen with technologist help, and look what happened to her.”

Wrong thing to say to Celeste. The girl is hella stubborn on the subject of Mom. “I love you, Dadda, but I won’t ask permission. They’re my people.”

“And you are going to save them, your highness?” Dad scoffs.

“Dad.” I put my hand on his arm. He shakes me off, so I put it back. “Listen.” And I let him hear.

An echo comes from all around us, a voice from a long time ago. It says,

“The kids need a pet.”

Dad spins around, staring all wild-eyed around the dock. “Where…”

“Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“Julia?” he whispers. It’s the first time I’ve heard him say her name since that night.

Then I play Dad’s voice from that night, the part where he’s yelling at Mom.

Dad freezes, his mouth a little open.

“Dad,” I say again. “Celeste is gonna go. This could be the last time you see her. You really want this to be the last conversation you two have?”

There’s this long awkward silent moment where it would be cool of him to say, You’re right, Vox, but no. He just gathers Celeste up into a big metal hug. “You’ll always have me,” he says. He’s the first on the barge, then he helps Celeste get on.

“You’ll always have me, too,” I say while hopping onto the barge, though no one hears me, it being such a weepy father-daughter moment, but whatevs.

I’m the only one who hears the last echo, just a whisper, as I’m following my family out of Boiling Bay:

“Such a shame…”

*

There’s all these rumors and tales about how Celeste is gonna challenge the throne of the Storm Queen (which is still weird for me), and they’re all epic, about how the Gythians and the Stormguard found out where Dad was hiding her, and they battled it out, and the Gythians took us here to the Halcyon Fold to recruit heroes to her cause, and now she’s dropping stars and taking names. But they leave out all the cool stuff I did. At least now you know the full story… and it’s not the last you’ll hear from me.