The Henge Hold Scroll (Part 4–Final)

Who is the Hermit of Henge Hold, the narrator of these events? He is a mad Iosan prophet who has seen many possible futures for the Iron Kingdoms, many of them foretelling the end of the lands. The things that he sees are invaluable to every king, queen, ruler, or invader of the Iron Kingdoms. As he has traveled the land, spreading word of his prophecies, many kingdoms have received him, whether they accepted his visions or not, and now the time is at had when the truth of his words will be revealed.

The question at hand is simple: will anyone live to validate what he foretold?

PART 4

***

Tristan Durant pulled a hand through his hair as he studied the ledger before him. The scroll detailed recent deaths needing final rites.

It was far too long.

Whole towns’ worth of names written out, with little art or care, another tally of victims to cross his path.

“What troubles you?” asked Nadira Ad-Bukhari. The Idrian monk of the Order of the Fist had taken to acting as his personal guard, keeping watch over Tristan both day and night.

He looked at her, shaking away his clouded thoughts. “Nothing. Some bookkeeping.”

She studied him, paring one nail down with a short knife. “Troublesome books, Sovereign? You curse under your breath when you read them.”

Tristan furled the scroll and pressed it back into its case. “You could call it an… unbalanced amount.”

Days later, they walked among the people again. Survivors from the outlands, refugees who fled the encroaching infernal menace, reached for the hem of his robes. They wept and begged for his aid.

Tristan’s escort brushed another hand aside. “There are more than usual.”

“Many,” Tristan said, voice muffled by his mask. “Infernals have reached the Erud Hills.”

“Kreoss and Feora defend the city,” Nadira said.

“But not the people.”

The pair reached the steps of the temple where he was to perform yet another funeral rite.

Tristan looked down at the congregation. Dirty, bloody, desperate souls, all their shining eyes turned up to him for hope. No matter how deep he reached, he could find none to offer them.

He was silent, thoughtful, and then he spoke.

“Be joyful,” Tristan began the familiar words, “for those we see to the other side did not die — ”

His voice faltered. The ceremony no longer sufficed.

Tristan cleared his throat and started anew.

“Your family and friends did not die in vain. They gave themselves to show you, show us, that our salvation does not lie behind walls of stone or within old words. They sacrificed themselves so we all may yet live.”

The exemplars in the crowd stirred.

“I have heard, as have we all, of those among the cities who seek out refugees. Though their god is not our own, they offer hope and mercy where there is none. They exhort us all to join them!” Tristan’s volume increased until he was shouting at the throng.

“I have seen too many widows and orphans,” he shouted, “too many abandoned souls! I beg you all, if there is hope, you must grasp it. If there is survival, you must chase it! Let not this moment escape you!”

Nadira grabbed him by his elbow.

“Do you want to die?” the Idrian hissed in his ear. Already, the exemplars worked their way through the crowd toward him.

Tristan turned to her. His mask was too heavy. It had always been.

“No,” he said. “I want them to live.”

***

For weeks, Aurora had been on high alert as her mother sent attackers against her growing ranks. So engineers and priests could continue their desperate work, she patrolled the skies in a constant vigil. But now she was cold and exhausted from so many days spent aloft.

It was near twilight, and Aurora had readied to return to the temple when a ragged shape appeared on the horizon. It was like a winged serpent, flying erratically on half-broken wings. It descended sharply and crashed south of the temple among the trees.

She instructed her clockwork angel cohorts to keep their distance and flew down to where the thing had fallen. Snapped branches clung to a body of rotting meat and tarnished metal. Its skull-like face jawed weakly at the air.

The figure of a woman was slumped on its back, clutching something to her chest.

The woman stirred.

“Who are you?” Aurora demanded.

The woman looked up, her face corpse white. “I seek Ghil Lucant. Mortenebra said he might be here.”

The name conjured stories from Aurora’s youth. Dark fables Axis would tell her about the Convergence’s earliest days.

“You won’t find him here,” she replied, keeping her thermionuc lance level with the woman’s heart.

“Please. He needs help,” the woman begged.

Aurora looked at the stranger’s mount. “Whatever this thing is, you won’t find help for it here.”

“No,” the woman said. She revealed her cargo: a bleached white skull with an eyepiece bolted over one socket. She also held a small piece of jewelry, like volcanic glass framed in black iron.

The way she held the objects reminded Aurora of her with Nemo’s soul vessel.

The woman said, “I bring you Lich Lord Asphyxious, and I beg you to help me restore him.”

***

A dirty and callused throng shuffled to the western gate of Sul. The dust of the marches and the smoke of the pyres stained their skin. Something much deeper stained their spirit.

Loss. So much of it stacked so high that it bent the backs of the strongest among them.

Tristan walked at the heart of this flock. Many eyes looked upon him, glistening and expectant. They eyes of the saved looking upon the savior.

They approached the outer wall, where a cadre of Exemplar and Flameguard waited. Astride her horse, Feora was wreathed in fire and glory. Intercessor Kreoss lacked her ostentation but made up for it with his steely presence.

Feora spoke before Kreoss could. “Your companions look tired, Durant,” she said. “Perhaps they should return to their homes and rest.”

“We are leaving, Feora,” he said, gently making his way to the fore. “You know why.”

“Stories from heretics’ mouths? We expected better of you.”

Tristan gripped Veritas. The weight of people behind him was crushing. “And we of you, mistress.”

Feora spurred her mount, summoning flames from its barding. A corona of fire sprung to life on its mane and tail.

The priestess and protector of the Flame rode up to meet him. The might of the scrutators’ iron fist waited behind. It was an impossible union, forged by his own actions.

“You will not lead my people to death,” she snarled.

“All life belongs to Menoth,” came another voice, heavy as stone, echoing from the very walls of Sul.

High Paladin Dartan Vilmon emerged from the crowd at Tristan’s side, his sword gleaming in his hands.

Dozens of other paladins came forward, moving between the throng.

Vilmon’s eyes locked on Feora’s. “You harm no one today, priestess.”

The warcaster Durst moved up on Tristan’s other flank, gaze hard as flint. Heavy warjacks pressed forward at their sides, creating a wall of iron.

Feora silently regarded the high paladin for a moment. Tristan could feel her assessing and calculating their two forces.

In a low tone, she asked, “Is this what you want?”

Dartan Vilmon’s face split with a smile.

***

The sad truth of the world is this; no hero lives to see the end of their story. Some must vanish to the world beyond, not knowing if their actions added more goodness or misery to the final tally.

Worse yet, others outlive their moment, that time when they had the chance to save the world. They must endure with the ghosts of everyone they could have saved, and didn’t, calling to them in their sleep.

— Hermit of Henge Hold

***

Ashlynn d’Elyse had long ago decided that her last moments in life would not be spent in fear. Yet as the nightmarish horrors with slobbering, fang-filled mouths swarmed the corridors of the queen’s palace, she had to remind herself forcefully of this decision.

So much blood. Deep-water blue from the infernal monsters, bright red from the Llaelese soldiers. All of it spilled for the most brutal of reasons. Not for land, not for patriotism, not for power, not for revenge. All of it spilled for bloodlust. An eagerness to kill.

The invading infernals cracked men open as if they had seams. They devoured men like meat on a stick until those men screamed themselves to death, watching limbs with old familiar scars from their childhood chewed to pulp.

They were completely overwhelmed, Ashlynn already knew. And for all the times she’d acknowledged death was inevitable for everyone and she would face it with a specific mindset, she couldn’t find it now. Speculation had finally become fact.

She was about to die.

The queen cried as Ashlynn barred the door to the throne room. It wouldn’t hold back the tentacles and claws and mouths like abysses lined with fangs, but it would give them another minute to pray for the least pain in giving up their lives for Llael.

“You know, my Queen,” she said to Kaetlyn de la Martyn, “your tears are just going to make my death worse.”

The queen choked but nodded, trembling as she dried her eyes with the back of one hand. Ashlynn was surprised to see a slender dagger in that hand.

“Is that for them,” she asked, “or for us?”

“For me,” Kaetlyn admitted. She tried to smile. “I know it is a coward’s way and beneath you, my Blade. But I’m scared.”

Ashlynn could not argue as a loud clamor of approaching killers rose on the other side of the great doors.

“They’re here.”

Kaetlyn groaned, head back, eyes closed. “I wish I’d gone to Henge Hold.”

Ashlynn bit her tongue; shaming her queen for such words in these last moments wouldn’t ease the girl’s terror. She could only offer different comfort.

“I’ll tell you when.”

“Thank you, Ashlynn,” Kaetlyn whispered. Ashlynn could not recall having heard the queen speak her name since taking the throne.

“You’re welcome, Kaetlyn,” she answered.

Something boomed against the doors.

“Ready your blade,” Ashlynn said. She lifted her estoc and assumed a battle stance to face whatever came through. Behind her, the queen murmured a prayer. When Ashlynn glanced back, she saw Kaetlyn press the edge of her dagger to her own throat.

The doors rattled in their frames as something huge and heavy crashed into them.

“Goodbye, my Queen,” Ashlynn said.

Kaetlyn said, “Goodbye, my Blade.”

And then the fear savaged both their souls as the doors burst open to admit their infernal murderers…

***

As the ancestors promised, the wounded gods of the Lyossans’ offspring proved the perfect bait.

A pale ocean of beasts rolled on the border of their kingdom. They trampled the forests flat, snapped the trees, stirred the land like the storm that split the world.

Morghoul waited.

The Supreme Archdomina’s desires were clear. Only the worthy would face the fangs of these beasts.

Warriors waited in blocks, ancestral statues before them, and a wave of slaved beasts behind. As the wave of trembling trees grew closer, tyrants exhorted their soldiers to glory, to exultation.

Morghoul waited.

A snarling wave of flesh emerged from Ios’ forests to hit the defenders with the sound of a falling meteor. Venators’ reivers whined. Catapults thudded. Streaks of starlight arced from the Iosan forces behind them to fall on the mob.

Soulless Iosans emerged from the shadows. The void beasts seemed blind to these assassins, who plucked the mortal servants like ripe mazakh fruit.

Still, Morghoul waited.

His escorts honed his sword, Mercy, and tightened his boots. Thousands of warriors fell to the void creatures, their souls plucked and devoured. Titans waded through the carnage, scattering bodies to vanish among the trees.

At the rear of the void-borne army, a slender figure emerged from the trees. Swaddled in shadow, it watched dispassionately as the battle waged.

Morghoul shed his cloak. It was a dominar’s garment. Tonight, he was an assassin. He gripped his sword and bade his escort farewell with a silent nod.

Drawing on a battlefield of pain, he flashed forward in mystic shadows. The world drew distant as he leapt from one darkness to the next, a storm of vanishing souls boiling around him.

The chosen would die. It was their privilege. But Makeda was a skorne of her word. Their deaths would preserve the get of Lyoss. The Gate of Mists would remain. Morghoul’s undertaking would ensure it.

He stepped between shadows until the figure of the infernal master loomed large. With the instincts sharpened from a lifetime of murder, Morghoul sprang from the darkness. His sword streaked at the creature, driven by every ounce of his spirit.

It intercepted him, palm slapping into his throat, as if it knew the attack was coming. The void creature let Morghoul dangle in its grip and whispered to him, “Tad kar m’wrii.”

Old words in an old tongue. Remember, you will die.

Morghoul dropped his sword. He would not need it.

The dying members of the warrior caste had opened the gate. As a paingiver, he had walked through the door. The final piece fell to Zaal and the extollers.

He held a cracked sacral stone up to the infernal’s face.

The dominar of the paingivers crushed the stone in his fist. It exploded like a vat of venohar, hurling his body back. The spirit within howled out, an ancient kovaas from old Halaak, mad and starving from the weight of generations.

Morghoul watched the creature as it learned the true horror of the void.

***

Asphyxious learned that transcendence worked a transformation on those who underwent it. Nemo, for instance, claimed to feel the tides of time and space as they moved around him. That his new form offered him understanding beyond that of his mortal life.

Of course, this was Nemo’s first time dying; Asphyxious had experienced such a change long, long ago. He didn’t feel a transcendent uplifting from the prison of mortal flesh. His perspective had merely sharpened.

The fighting below him was beautiful in its own way. Two armies like silvery serpents wound around each other, swallowing each other’s tails. Fleshless bodies turned to broken bits lay on the ground. The glitter of blade on blade, glinting in the shallow light.

As the serpents wound tighter below, Asphyxious soared above the battle. His attendant angels cut a path of annihilation that he flowed along, stopping momentarily to pierce a soul vessel left unwatched. To his pleasure, he could still harvest the spirit within.

“The battle bodes ill,” he said to his companions. Ill for thee, he silently added. The clockwork armies would dash each other to bits, but Asphyxious would prevail, no matter the outcome.

“The Archnumen calls for aid,” called the one named Hypatia.

So she did. The woman cut her way to the head of the serpent. Blood from her living flesh stood out against her steel armor. She was relentless, pressing forward to where her mother stood like a machine goddess in Henge Hold’s heart.

He considered leaving the Archnumen to her fate.

“Movement to the north,” one of the other angels said.

“To the east!” cried another.

Friend or foe, Asphyxious wondered. If the former, it would be better to be seen by Aurora’s side.

If the latter, he suspected it wouldn’t matter soon.

***

Aurora climbed the stone steps leading to the heart of Henge Hold. The gate her mother built filled the air with a thin wail and warped the light like a lens.

“Stand down, Mother!” she shouted.

Iron Mother was flanked by a throng of clockwork priests. Lucant was among them, as was Orion. An army of vectors held their weapons steady on Aurora.

“I have tolerated your childishness for far too long,” Iron Mother said. “You will not rob us of this moment.”

“You will not rob us of a future,” Aurora shouted back.

“Enough. Axis, deal with her,” her mother said. He moved forward, hammers ready to strike her down.

The clockwork priests turned back to the gate, preparing it to call Cyriss. Its sound rose from a whine to a roar.

“Guard up. Watch your opponent, not his weapon,” Axis rumbled, still treating her like his charge.

Aurora readied her lance. “Shut up, old man.”

***

Asphyxious and the angels descended like falling stars.

First, among the clockwork priests, who fell like grass beneath the scythe. Too focused on carrying out their mistress’ orders to keep watch on the skies.

Then, to the warcasters. Flocks of angels swooped around them, pulses of energy scorching and blades flashing.

Asphyxious was much more selective.

His annihilation servitors struck Iron Mother in quick succession, a moment before he plunged his spear through her body. A mortal wound against a mortal target, yet Iron Mother was anything but. She fought back, slashing at him with her cloak of blades.

He flickered behind her before they could land, turning to unleash hellfire. The flames rendered Iron Mother’s blades to slag, leaving her open to a thrust at her soul vessel.

Aurora watched Asphyxious about to destroy Iron Mother.

“Stop!” she cried. Axis turned his attention to the damaged Iron Mother.

“Look thee beyond the battlefield,” Asphyxious said. “Others draw near. We must be swift.”

Iron Mother cast her eyes on Aurora. “Do it. We both know it is what you want.”

Before Aurora could respond, voices called out. The fighting slowed as both forces saw what approached.

Machines glided forward, strange masses of Convergence machinery bearing erratically built structures akin to steamships. Before them was a whirl of colors. Cygnaran blue and Khadoran red to the west. The yellow of Ord to the north. A drab procession of citizens among them.

Thousands moved on the gate. Tired, dirty refugees drawn by their courage and a faint glimmer of hope.

Aurora and the others were silent for a while, watching the masses congregate. There were more people than she could have imagined; there were fewer than she desired.

Aurora turned to her wounded mother. In a voice just above a whisper, she said, “This, Mother. This is what I want.”

***

In the bowels of forgotten Ios, two figures awaited their captive. The tools that had once held a dragon’s soulstone prisoner were ready. The unlikely pair, Lord Arbiter Hexeris and Lord Ghyrrshyld, both possessed unique experience suited to the task ahead.

The door to the chamber opened.

The hooded Iosan in the door spoke, “Morghoul has succeeded. He’s bringing the prisoner now.”

Ghyrrshyld remained emotionless. Hexeris could not say the same.

“Let us see what this creature can tell us about the soul,” he said.

His Iosan companion turned his empty eyes on the lord arbiter.

“Remember our agreement. The gods come first. You may have what remains.”

***

Ashlynn expected fangs and tentacles. She was prepared to confront the most horrific nightmares possible, the kind that are even more terrifying when seen than when imagined. She assumed her killers would be agony to watch as they bore down on her.

It was worse.

Beyond the throne room door, drenched in infernal blood, stood armored men. Red armor. Men in Khadoran armor led by a smiling homicidal maniac who had devastated Llael years ago with his brutal military invasion. Beside him, a massive bald man, blood covered, in blue armor.

“No,” she hissed. “Not you. Never you.”

“I suppose that means you know me,” said Supreme Kommandant Gurvaldt Irusk, removing his headgear. He gestured to the bald man. “Have you met Major Brisbane of Cygnar?”

“We,” Brisbane grunted, “are familiar.”

***

Behind Ashlynn, the queen suddenly cried out, “For Llael!”

Ashlynn whirled to face her as Kaetlyn de la Martyn drew her dagger across her own throat. “I did not give the word, my Queen!”

Red flashed on both sides of her — a bright line formed across the queen’s throat, expanding rapidly, as a rush of soldiers crushed past Ashlynn and surged toward Kaetlyn as she fell. Ashlynn moved then, barring Irusk with her estoc.

“I know that blade,” Irusk said.

She pointed it at his heart. “You should — it was my father’s. You are the one who killed him. So, I intend to sheath it in your chest.”

Irusk’s infuriating smile didn’t fade. “Perhaps after we save your queen and your people.”

All that kept her from eviscerating the Khadoran was the presence of Brisbane, who watched stoically as Irusk’s soldiers tended the queen’s self-inflicted wound. Still, Ashlynn felt her lip curl in disgust.

“When did you become a part of the Khadoran Empire?” she asked.

“There’s no more Khador,” Siege muttered. “No more Cygnar. No more Llael. There’s the infernals, and then there’s us. You’d better get on board with this if you want to ever see your people again.”

Ashlynn looked at her injured queen, who would not meet her eye.

She moved to the window, her heart heavier than it had been when she expected to die moments ago. The streets below were a mix of old enemies killing new ones — Khadoran soldiers battling infernals. Lightning flashed where Cygnaran troops confronted horrors their own way.

“It’s about survival now,” Siege said. “That’s all it is.”

“Then this isn’t the world I want to live in,” she countered.

Turning from the injured queen, Irusk wiped infernal blood from his unshaven jaw. “I would argue it’s no better or worse than the last one, d’Elyse.”

Ashlynn challenged him with her glare, but Irusk waved her off. “Your sullen look changes nothing. Not the way the world is now or the way we have to see it. We are all dying. We fall like raindrops, by the hundreds of thousands.”

Siege said, “I heard that Caine — ”

“I don’t care.” Ashlynn closed her eyes. “And what does your mutant alliance propose we do now? Die as allies instead of enemies?”

As one, Siege and Irusk said, “Henge Hold.”

In a blood-filled voice, the queen, her back set against her throne, gasped. “Henge…Hold.”

Ashlynn thought of the years she’d given to defend and liberate Llael. She thought of her father, whose life had been sacrificed to protect their land. She thought of those who had already fled, their patriotism beginning and ending with their own lives.

“Henge Hold,” she finally said. “Dammit.”

***

This is how the end begins. From the wide sweep of the world, figures of destiny approach the field of reckoning, the field of oblivion. The fates and fortunes off all lie upon their mortal shoulders.

Uncertain about what tomorrow holds, these rare few feel the weight of fate upon them. They stand at the gulf between hope and despair. The divide that splits the future from the past.

They stand united. For now.

— Hermit of Henge Hold

***

The burly warcaster approached Henge Hold, gnawing on a foul cigar. His posture was casual. The presence of Nemo and Asphyxious in their new bodies seemed to faze him not at all.

“King Julius sends his regards,” Drake McBain said.

“But not his army,” Aurora observed.

McBain spat out the cigar, smoothing his moustache with a mailed hand. “Nah. They’re cleaning up the streets of Caspia and Steelwater. I doubt they get this far west.”

Aurora looked out on the Cygnaran refugees — and the mercenaries escorting them. “What have you brought?”

“About three chapters of Steelheads, a crazy Searforge dwarf, and too damn many civilians,” McBain said. “If Julius didn’t agree to my substantial fee, I wouldn’t be here.”

Aurora looked north, to another throng of refugees. “What about them?”

McBain shrugged. “Damiano, I suspect. You can spot the shine of his armor a league off. Some Crucible boys and girls, too.” He gave Aurora a meaningful look. “They weren’t part of my contract. Neither were you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Good. We understand one another.”

The mercenary’s flippant attitude bothered her.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

He shrugged again. “I’m being paid to be here. Rumor is that you are planning something. Maybe you’ll get some people away from all this.”

He gestured, as if to encompass the entire world.

“And if we can?” Aurora asked.

“Those people down there are betting their lives on it,” he said. “Julius thought so, too. Opened the coffers of Cygnar to see them protected. So, here I am.”

Aurora looked on the throng of desperate Cygnarans and their counterparts from Khador and Ord. Dozens of families looked up at the gate in silent desperation.

“Move the people closer to the henge. Prepare a defensive line to the east. Be ready for anything,” she said.

“I always am,” McBain said with a smile.

***

Vlad awoke to the sound of a raven’s croak.

His sword was in his hand before the rheum cleared his eyes. He pointed its tip at the silhouette perched at the foot of his bed.

“Don’t be afraid, little prince,” its voice creaked.

Moonlight through the window rimmed an ancient face, glinted from iron talons.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

The Old Witch of Khador gestured out the window. “Time. Ve can slow its march, but ve cannot stop it. I have held back the clock’s hands as long as I am able.”

He had never heard her voice like this — she sounded tired.

“You need something,” he said.

“Yes. I go south. Vith me go all the bad dreams. You go to Umbrey. Tonight.”

As she spoke, the Old Witch’s words rang in the cool air. There was an irresistible gravity to them.

Vlad couldn’t refuse her, but he needed to know more.

“Why?”

“Your blood knows vhy,” she said. “It burns vith the blood of kings. It pulses to the drumming of hooves. It quickens at the scent of battle.”

The horses in the stables of Stasikov Palace began to whinny.

“What do I need to do?” Vlad asked.

The Old Witch rose, gently running a talon down his jaw. “Oh, little prince. Vhat you are born to do. Lead the horselords to their deaths.”

***

The Oathkeeper appeared in the heart of the gathering.

This was an auspicious meeting, attended by the omnipotents of the Circle Orboros and representatives from each of the three dominions. They stood, silent sentinels, watching and waiting.

“Wurmwood speaks thus,” Cassius began. “The creatures have offered us a compact to ensure our order’s survival in the days ahead. If we stand aside and allow them to claim their due, they agree to leave untouched all among us who do not oppose them.”

The conclave of the Circle’s greatest powers murmured at his words. Furtive glances across the throng spoke of alliances forged in haste, and just as quickly abandoned. The blind Desertwalker called for silence.

“What promise do we have of this offer?” Mohsar asked.

“The Weaver of Shadows has given us an agreement most binding,” Cassius said, “and sealed it with rituals of indestructible nature.”

The druids began to chatter, debating the proposal. Loud voices argued for the pact. Others proposed how to rebuild following this claiming, their opinions gaining traction among the mob.

A stern voice cut through the chatter. “Idiots.”

A slender figure stepped forward, a hood hiding his face. “When a gorax tastes a bit of meat, do you think you can debate it into stopping its feast? Or make accord with a ravenous troll, perhaps?”

The conclave went quiet as the man moved to the center of the circle.

“What know you of such things?” Mohsar asked.

Krueger the Stormwrath pulled back his hood. “About dealing with hungry beasts? Far more than any of you.”

Cassius felt Wurmwood writhe in Krueger’s presence. A mix of anger and anticipation surged through him.

“The Beast of All Shapes hungers,” Krueger said. “Always seeking to devour. These things would strip Caen of its life and leave nothing behind. With nothing else to consume, how long do you think we would survive? I say act now.”

Mohsar shot back, “What do you propose?”

Krueger gestured beyond the conclave to the east, beyond the trees and hills surrounding them.

“There are more hungry things in the world than the Wurm or infernals. I propose we invite them to the feast.”

***

No dawn rose. A swallowing darkness took its place as the infernal masters devoured the light of the sun.

From that shadow came the wailing of a thousand-thousand souls.

The infernals had arrived.

***

Alain Runewood had once been someone noble. An archduke. A lord among lords. A patriot. A commander leading gallant soldiers into battle.

Now he was a lord of ash leading the most evil fiends ever seen in western Immoren to annihilate his former allies.

He sat atop his mount, his faceguard lowered, staring down a hill at the refugees streaming into a crowd gathered on the coast. They came to Henge Hold to find salvation of some sort. But Runewood knew otherwise — they were gathering to expedite their own slaughter.

Valin Hauke rode next to him, the fallen knight’s horse as twisted and unnatural as its rider. At times, Runewood thought of Hauke as a statue; he watched children butchered with a carven, impassive face. Runewood hated his chaperone, but he also envied Hauke’s emptiness.

“Stop it,” Hauke suddenly said.

Surprised, Runewood looked behind them. The lumbering, slithering, crawling, leaping, limping horrors they led were amassed, but they waited obediently. He looked back at Hauke.

“Who do you — ?”

Hauke said, “You. Stop pitying them. Now.”

An enshrouded figure approached on foot, seeming to limp and float at the same time. These wretched ones were scattered among their forces, and Runewood wondered if this one had known him in another time — it avoided him every time they were near one another. It judged him.

It hissed something secretly to Hauke, who seemed to translate conservatively for Runewood.

“The Weaver of Shadows comes soon. She brings more forces to tear down their gate,” he said. “We are ordered to claim the ones who’ve come to use it.”

Runewood instinctively scanned the expanse below for this so-called gate, but his attention was quickly captured by a military force gathering to approach. Hammers rose into the sky.

“Dwarves,” Runewood said, scanning them. “I believe Durgen Madhammer is at their head.”

“Kill the head,” Hauke said, “to kill the beast.”

“On my command, we — ” Runewood began, but Hauke was already gone, charging down the hill, bellowing. Cultists and monsters streamed around Runewood on both sides as if he were just a rock in a river.

By the time he joined the charge, the first dwarves were already dead.

PART 5

A horde of predatory creatures from beyond the boundaries of existence really does put things in perspective.

“I love you so much,” Madhammer said as the charging mob of infernals drew close.

As the cultists and beasts came within range, the Rhulic warcaster stroked the ring on his finger one last time and hurled the now-primed explosive with all his strength.

It detonated among the mob with a throaty roar, sending flesh and soil flying in wet chunks.

“Come at me, you fatherless sons!” Madhammer roared. He flipped the visor of his armor down and fired his cannon, Buster, sending another explosive into the enemy ranks as he invoked a spell to detonate in their rear guard.

Fathers, but he loved his job.

Masked cultists and blade-armed beasts hit the front line of dwarves. Creatures sprung over the front line to fall on those behind. A discord of carbines and clashing steel filled the air.

“Get low!” Madhammer bellowed. The dwarves who heard him hit the dirt.

The Grundback Blasters he controlled all surged up and fired their Hail Shot cannons. Sprays of cast-iron shot mowed through the front ranks of the infernals — and the Rhulfolk too slow to follow orders.

The Blasters’ barrage opened up enough space for Madhammer to risk another charge.

“I love you so much,” he whispered to the explosive before sending it on its way.

***

Time was not a beast that could be broken to the saddle.

Once it had been a river that buoyed her along from the moment of birth to the moment of death like a rotting leaf in the rapids. It had since lost its stubborn linearity.

But time remained stubborn. It felt like trying to fold a spider’s web. One moment, she was a girl on the beach, playing with her sister. Another moment, a soldier on the front lines. Then, an old woman, frail and feeble in a cold room.

All jumbled up, all happening at once unless she focused her attention. For her sin of breaking its yoke, it punished her with a mix of now, then, and yet-to-be, with a measure of almost-was to keep her on her toes.

Victoria Haley fought to keep her focus on the present moment, the present foe. A throng of hulking shapes, grotesquely human, with arms like scythes. She could see the scraps of time and memory bound into their forms. Fragments of spirits mirroring her fragmented self.

She cut through them, watching an infinite series of possible attacks falter, watching herself die countless times, tracing a thread of actions that led to her victory.

Haley plunged her spear into the last howling infernal’s skull when time stopped.

For a moment, the tapestry of potential futures rippled in her mind’s eye. Dozens of golden threads extended from her, each one splitting and splitting again, representing potential paths forward. Yet all seem drawn toward a single point in time and space alike.

West. Toward the Meredius, far from the current battle. Something there crushed down on all her possible futures. Stubborn old time pulled at her once again, insistent on her course.

She twisted her spear, pulled it free of the infernal corpse. “Thorn, come with me.”

Her warjack tromped near and let out an inquisitive whistle of steam.

“I’m not sure,” she said. It felt surreal to be uncertain about what the future held. “But we need to go there, now.”

Victoria Haley looked at the darkening sky to the west.

“I’m afraid we don’t have much time,” she said.

***

The mercenaries on the west flank struggled against the swarming infernal attackers. Already the field was hazy with the smoke of rifles, warjacks, and artillery.

Aurora activated the enormous gate. Along its surface, geomantic accumulators growled to life in an aura of blue light.

Flashes of arcane energy coursed at the gate’s center, sinking inward like a whirlpool. Air roared into the vortex, whipping dust along its current.

A sound came from the other side of the gate, a gentle voice like silver chimes, beckoning and alluring.

Iron Mother struggled to her feet, her machine eyes looking into the vortex with something like reverence.

“Call her, Daughter,” she whispered.

Before Aurora could respond, the vortex swelled, pulsed. A flash of light erupted from its heart.

Where the light touched, the world writhed and changed. Fine filigree of metal crawled like vines over the surface of the henge. Patches of grass on the hillside took on the gleaming color of steel, bristling like tiny knives.

The sight of the gate’s energy transfiguring a nearby living priest entranced Aurora. He screamed, the noise shifting into the sound of poorly meshed gears grinding. Without her power field, she may have suffered a similar transformation.

“Nemo,” Aurora shouted over the wind. “We can’t just send innocent people through that!”

He floated down, studying the gate with a mechanikal eye. “I agree. The goddess’ energy is potent. I will reconnoiter.”

“I should go!” she cried. “I’m still human. We’ll know if a field can protect us on the other side.”

Asphyxious cut off further debate. “Our allies fall in great number,” the former lich said. “Thy bickering shall be moot should they draw nearer.”

“Stay out of this,” Aurora shot back.

“Cyriss’ warning may be clearer on the other side,” Nemo said.

A gentle voice spoke from behind Aurora, where a moment ago no one had stood. It was a woman’s voice, tinted with a soft accent.

“Not a warning, old friend,” she said. “An invitation.”

Aurora turned to face Major Victoria Haley. The Cygnaran looked up at Nemo’s new body with soft, sad eyes.

“Where did you — ?”

Haley spoke. “She’s inviting you to join her, Sebastian.”

“I accept,” Nemo said.

He floated through the vortex before Aurora could say another word.

***

Were it not for the likelihood of staggering defeat and a brutal, senseless death, Drake MacBain would have said this was one of the best damned days of his entire life.

Steelheads drove bloody wedges into infernal fodder to his left; his Nomads barreled over cultists to his right. The battlefield was a chaotic playground of thousands of deaths, big and small, and MacBain thought it could only be better if he were being paid more.

His cigar tasted like bitter leaves, and his blade, Undertaker, sang like a dirge. His goggles were so covered in blood he could no longer see out of them — he’d relegated them to headgear. Overall, he felt like a victor even in the midst of their downfall.

He was no longer sure where the gate was they’d come to protect — he could see no better via his warjacks than he could through his goggles — but he sure as hell could feel its presence. It was a cool wind on a hot summer day that became a savage winter deepfreeze.

He slashed, and body parts flew. The cultists were the most fun — he could tell when the traitorous bastards were hurt by their wails and entrails. It was harder to tell when the fanged, rippling horrors that looked like nightmarish insects suffered. He had to guess.

The Steelheads he’d brought were hacking a path to join the Searforge forces dealing a fine blow to the cultists who’d come charging down a nearby hill. Of course, that balance likely to shift soon — MacBain was pretty sure he’d seen their Rhulic warcaster take an ugly hit.

“Be seein’ ya, Madhammer,” he grunted around teeth full of cigar. “Probably sooner than expected.”

He heard the wind howl as if in agreement…and then realized it wasn’t the wind. It was the collective gasp of all the mercs and allies around him.

He turned.

“Uh-uh,” he heard himself mutter; it didn’t even sound like him. “That ain’t so.”

He stared at a towering thing with an ill-proportioned woman’s body and a head like a grotesque horseshoe. Hell, maybe it was a hat; it didn’t matter. The thing terrified him to his bowels.

He had no idea where it had come from or why there were suddenly atrocities with lobster-like claws and slanted fangs like meat-eating fish around it. They were just there — from wherever your nightmares went when you woke up, he supposed.

He cleared his throat.

“But I ain’t sleeping, you bitch,” he called out. His voice was strong with a tone his men would say brooked no dissention.

Just the same, the bone-white woman — Zaateroth, he would learn her name before the end — dissented by turning toward him.

They moved like kites in storms, unpredictable, erratic, yet terrifyingly focused in hunger. There were so many, they blocked the horizon and then the sky above. The shrieks of those dying around him were distant and meaningless — it was their last stand, after all.

His very soul quivered and threatened to flee, as if there were anywhere for it to go.

“Stay here till this is finished, you chickenshit,” he said to it as the horrors closed in, and he raised Undertaker.

***

Nemo emerged into a void both marvelous and terrifying.

He hung in a midnight realm, crushing in its emptiness. Since his early childhood, he had looked up into the night sky and wondered at the distant stars. Now he drifted in their domain.

There were no words he knew to describe the silent expanse. Before him lay not a goddess or a world, but a whorl of shining light. They formed a frozen swirl of sparkling luminescence, a dense cloud of blinding brilliance.

Cyriss was not among the heavens, not a body upon the velvet dome of night.

She was more. So much more.

The aura of Cyriss washed over him, cradling him in her insubstantial arms. At her touch, he understood that the machine blight to emerge from the gate was merely a miscalculation of her power, recalibrated now for the delicate beings she invited.

Nemo’s unliving eye drank in radiant star fields and the delicate filigree of nebulae. Dark places that devoured the light, blacker than the black of the void. He imagined worlds among this milky river of stars, hanging like motes of dust in a sunbeam.

Cyriss spoke to him then, not with words but through a perfect language, mathematical and musical in rapturous counterpoint. Nemo’s soul despaired. His soul sang. If he still had living eyes he would have wept.

Come, the goddess begged. Be with me. Be among me.

Make me your home.

***

Roget d’Vyaros felt young again.

He knew he had Infernal Master Zaateroth, the Weaver of Shadows, to thank for this feeling of exultation.

But she did nothing to earn it, he thought. This is all mine.

As soon as she brought him to the final battlefield, Roget led his cult members away from her, driving them into the refugees and those who thought to protect them. Steelheads fell before him, and Roget drank of their decimation like a vampire.

One of his cultists shouted to him that Orin Midwinter was conquering the field as well. Roget bristled for a moment — there wasn’t enough harvest to feed them all, and he would likely have to consider Midwinter’s fall before this was over.

Steelheads grunted and died. Rhulic soldiers gasped their final prayers. Trollkin and human blood spilled in gallons. He even caught a glimpse of a Crucible Guard theater commander, if the insignia spoke truthfully, as the man was torn to pieces.

It was, Roget decided, a good day to be alive.

He drove his dagger into the face of a mercenary woman, pleased by how she flailed with both hands to pull it out again, but she fell away from him, taking his weapon with her. As he bent to unsheathe it from her skull, he had one more moment of surprise and pleasure.

It stank of death and tasted like a corpse, but as Roget d’Vyaros stood tall again and clenched the blood-soaked cigar he had discovered in the mud between his teeth, he thought again:

This is all mine.

***

They had been given souls and chose to spend them like this? With squandered potential drowned by petty ambitions and a desire to satisfy imperfect masters?

Zaateroth would have pitied them, if it were worth the effort.

Their spirits shed living prisons and danced like embers caught in the updraft of a bonfire.

The Tyrant of the Unhallowed did not let them go to waste as the mortals had done.

She snagged these wayward spirits, dividing and molding them into new shapes. Then she directed them into the fray, one wave after another, wearing down their opponents.

These souls were tarnished and feeble things, but Zaateroth was a master sculptor. She could transform a single one into several lesser beings, and from the joined scraps coax other, more powerful, entities into existence.

To her south, the marked souls ground deeper into the enemy’s defenses. She advanced on the north, drawn to the light of a few remarkable souls scattered among them. She could taste doubt and fear, points where she could apply pressure to bend them to her will.

Part of her infinite intellect drifted through the motions of battle, guiding her horrors and whispering orders in her lieutenants’ minds. The rest was devoted to picking out those who were vulnerable to her manipulations.

Across the battlefield, she bargained terms with dozens at once, making deals and counter-deals faster than human thought. Fewer agreed than she might have hoped, but they would suffice.

***

At least he wouldn’t die old and aching in some bed. The thought gave Captain Amador Damiano small comfort as he cried for order among his crumbling Steelhead lines.

“Ask for glory, and fate shall provide an opportunity to seize it!” he called out, though no one seemed to be listening. Halberdiers and riflemen started to give ground, their once stately regiments turning into disgusting routs.

Damiano thrust his sword at the foul thing that had appeared to the east, graceful, alien, and abhorrent. “By my side, brothers and sisters!”

He pressed on, guiding Glory through muscle and sinew. Though attacks weakened his power field, battered his gleaming armor, he drove forward through the enemy. At his back, Rocinante threshed through the horde.

He grew close to the infernal master. As one, he and Rocinante lifted their arms, Damiano holding a pistol, the warjack aiming its cannon. Their shots were a heartbeat apart.

As the smoke cleared, he saw he had failed. The master stood tall, gestured at him with a dismissive flick of the wrist. Many horrible things converged around him and loyal Rocinante.

“I should have brought a horse,” he said. “The best stories always have a hero meet his ending from the saddle.”

The horrors descended on Damiano.

It was neither glorious nor quick.

***

The gold-clad fool dispatched with, Zaateroth finalized her pact.

Across the battlefield, the few dozen who saw the futility of fighting against her turned on their allies. It was not their strength of arms she desired, though. It was the mark now upon their souls.

Omodamos would arrive soon. He would desire more horrors to command.

***

A murder of crows heralded their appearance in battle.

The warhost of Umbrey appeared on the eastern horizon to the crackling laughter of birds. The Old Witch had shortened their way.

Great Prince Vladimir Tzepesci rode at the head of their battle line, his faithful companion Drago by his side. Before them, the land sloped below into a tangled field of bodies and mires of bloody soil. The infernals swarmed the defenders in clouds like angry hornets.

Vlad wheeled to face his cavalry, good men and women of Umbrey all. Khadoran red and Protectorate white mingled together. Though the heraldry of different nations adorned them, they were as one.

“Once the world trembled at the horselords’ approach,” Vlad called to them. “In steppe and valley, all knew to fear our fury.”

He pointed to the raging battle with his spear.

“This foe is not of our world! It has not known the might of Karpathan steed or Umbrean resolve. Let us teach them what all in the Iron Kingdoms know!” Vsada whinnied and pawed the air. “Let our hoofbeat be the drums of war! Let their dying screams be our battle cry!”

The warriors of old Umbrey raised their weapons, bellowing back in answer.

“Today is a black day,” he shouted, “a day we will make run red! By your blood and mine, we will emerge victorious or die in glory!”

Vlad wheeled back towards the infernal masses. He couched his horselord’s spear and led the charge.

***

“Wait — ”

Orin Midwinter’s staff impacted the man’s skull, cutting the plea short. His hand throbbed, fingers numb, from the sharp jolt.

The fight around him was less of a battle than it was a bloody brawl. Bodies crashed together, went down into the churned soil. It was a gouging, spitting, bleeding, dying mob. His robes were drenched with sweat and blood, hanging heavy and sticking to his flesh.

Orin howled to be heard above the fighting, calling to the many congregations he directed. “Let their wounded fall! Press on!”

The cultists who heard him clambered off of broken bodies and staggered to their feet, rendered like drunks by the slick ground and their own injuries.

They drew steadily closer to Henge Hold. But as the numbers of their foes dwindled, as they tightened the noose around them, those who remained fought back with greater fervor. Irate, Midwinter hurled baleful flames at someone… friend or enemy? It was impossible to tell.

The souls he snatched were invigorating, but not enough to dull his many aches. A Steelhead bullet ground against a rib where it had stuck in his flesh. His fingers throbbed from gripping his staff. Midwinter’s scowl deepened.

The battle was in their favor, but uncertainty gnawed at him.

It was almost a relief when the thunder of hooves sounded from the rear. His dreadful suspicion was confirmed as hundreds of heavy horse bearing armored riders bore down on them.

To the cultists nearest him, Orin gave the order. “Fall back to the masters, regroup. Regroup!”

***

“God’s sake, I think they’re on our side,” Marshal Gearhart mumbled. He flapped his hand in the general direction of where he expected Mr. Clogg to be, letting his aid put a fresh weapon in it.

“Sir?” Clogg sniffed. If he asked anything else, it was drowned by the report of the warcaster’s weapon firing.

“The riders to the east. Did you think I was talking about the bloody infernalists?” Gearhart said, lining up a shot at the tall figure commanding the enemies.

Gearhart fired.

It was a kill shot.

The awful bugger didn’t die.

“Dammit, Clogg. Give me the big gun!”

Clogg responded with another dribbling sniff. “That was the ‘big gun,’ sir.”

Gearhart scowled at the weapon in his hands. So it was.

“Right,” Gearhart said. “Get some bombs to our best rocketman. The one who dropped a Conquest back in Llael. Captain Evie something.”

“It was a Victor, sir.”

Gearhart turned on his porter. “I don’t give a good damn if it was two trolls in an overcoat! Hurry up and do it before things get worse!”

Clogg moved to fulfill his request as the northern sky grew dim. A creeping blackness rolled in, a dark fog of ink. Another immense master advanced on Henge Hold, accompanied by a small mob of cultists.

“Things have gotten worse,” Clogg mumbled, then hastily added, “sir.”

***

Sheer momentum carried the Umbreans forward over the bodies of the wounded. Hooves slipped on gore and churned earth. Riders fell beneath the weight of dying horrors or were stalled by the shoals of dead enemies that massed before them.

The Great Prince and Vsada were swift and skilled, weaving through the press of bodies and across the broken ground. The two moved as one, the horse stamping down creatures that the prince skewered with his spear.

Drago struggled to keep up, charging forward with the surges of a derailed train. The venerable warjack scattered bodies like chaff in its frenzy to stay by Vlad’s side, hacking a corridor through the enemies with its axes.

He flowed through the bodies, riding the river of carnage to his destination. Past feeble traitors to humanity and nightmarish figures of waxy flesh, a spire of muscle and bone stood tall. She orchestrated the infernals and wove death with foul magic.

Vlad spurred Vsada, his spear guided at her heart.

Hurdling over the first line of her cultists and thundering through the second, the Great Prince of Umbrey plunged his spear through the infernal’s spine. Ichor sprayed from the rupture on the other side, sizzling where it touched the ground.

She shrieked in wretched pain as smoke boiled out of her wound. The infernal twisted to face Vlad, snapping the haft of his spear, turned her featureless face upon him, backhanded him with trailing fingers.

His flesh withered under the age of countless years at her touch.

The infernal spoke, her buzzing voice blending into the speech of Umbrey. “You missed your mark, mortal.” Her wound was already sealing. “It will cost you your soul.”

Vlad slid from his saddle, sending Vsada away as he drew his sword.

“My soul is spoken for,” he said.

As the dark champion of Umbrey slashed at the infernal master, an old and furious warjack screamed with the noise of steam and grinding gears.

Drago joined the fight.

***

Aurora could wait for Nemo’s return no longer; as far as she was concerned, passing through the gate was as foolish as stepping off a dark ledge with the promise it was a short drop. A promise from someone you barely trusted. Or, as it turned out, even knew.

“He’s gone,” she said to no one in particular, though she knew Major Haley was listening. A crush of refugees — some arriving on tiny hovering ships as if they sailed a raft in a maelstrom — had closed in around them. “He’s not coming back.”

“There remains a future on the other side,” Haley breathed, close to her now. “The time is now.”

“You’re worse than that hermit,” Aurora said.

Haley was not deterred. “Trust. Have faith.”

“In what? In him? You? Them?”

The pleading around them had reached a crescendo. Hands that had never touched a sword begged her.

“I suppose,” she whispered, “it’s better to die with slim hope than with none.”

Haley nodded as if to scripture.

“Don’t agree,” Aurora said. “It makes me feel worse.”

She directed the nearest vessel, manned by wide-eyed young man with desperately old eyes, toward the gate, assuring him over and over as he reached behind him for his even younger wife’s hand. Their craft vanished, and when neither screamed, others surged to join them.

The vessels steered near and glided gracelessly toward the gate, the protective fields around them shimmering as if hesitant. Aurora had to say little else — they fled the killing fields for the unknown like souls beckoned to a light. No one even asked if they would live.

It was just as well they didn’t. Aurora didn’t like to lie, and Haley probably wouldn’t.

***

They flee. They escape. They live.

No words, but this message spread among the infernals and their masters, inducing a frenzied fit in a wave. Horrors shrieked as souls slipped through the gate beyond reach, and those souls still near paid dearly for those departed.

They crushed, shattered, and shredded those they could, but still others crawled through the gate. The infernals howled and roared, gnashing teeth and snapping claws. Sheer terror held some back. But too few. Even those with nothing left to live for were trying to do so.

Then the air rippled with heat, and fires incinerated the tall grasses that had been crushed by the first refugees and then bloodstained by the next ones. Bodies too close when he passed were shredded as a dark shape descended from the north.

He had come for the end.

Those who knelt before his towering form cowered and died. Those who stood their ground died. Omodamos, called by some the Black Gate, by others the Bringer of Sorrow, only brought death at the gate this day.

With a baleful eye, he took in the entirety of the battlefield, yet another eye met his across the dead and the dying. It did not bloody itself blind to avoid his stare. It held fast, and Omodamos heard its master whisper even from afar.

“Come for me,” Asphyxious hissed.

***

The pulse of their engines clawed the sky as they crossed the mountains east of Ramarck. She could feel the hum of arcane energy screaming through the deckplates.

“Message from the Cloudpiercer, ma’am,” the signal officer said.

“What does the old cyclops want now?” Kommandant Kratikoff asked. She almost regretted the system of signal flags Irusk had devised.

“Short message, ma’am. ‘Didn’t you used to be fast? Stop.’”

Sorscha’s dour expression hardened. “Stoke the fires. Tell him Vygor’s Hammer will meet him at Henge Hold.”

***

Vlad rolled away from a bilious stream one of the infernal beasts spewed at him. He pressed his attack, opening wounds on the master’s flesh like black-lipped mouths. Drago’s axes flashed and hewed one of her arms free.

The master’s expression had turned from arrogance, to anger, to desperation as they battled. She clearly expected his strength to fail.

So did he.

The eastern flank faltered under the weight of his cavalry charge and was congregating at the foot of the henge. The gate within flashed as refugees escaped the infernals’ grasp.

The master bellowed. Vlad’s skull split from the noise. Like an avalanche it rolled over him, driving him to his knees.

But it drove her down as well.

Not the master.

The roar came from two vessels, large as watchtowers. Lightning wreathed one; the other was built like a gun-studded anvil.

***

“Drop off our passenger,” Sorscha ordered. Below her, the mechanism of the bomb bay ground open.

Karchev the Terrible fell to the earth, a blacksmith’s hammer landing upon a stubborn bit of iron.

Old familiar smells of blood, coal, and blasting powder filled his nostrils. Karchev rose from the crater of his impact to look down on the field of struggling soldiers. Their eyes rose to meet his, trailing up the armor of his colossal frame.

“It is good to be killing again,” Kharchev said and laid into the foe with his oversized axe.

***

“Get us closer to the gate,” Magnus said. The airframe’s pilots obeyed, causing the vessel to drift over the battle below. “If you have a clear vector, tell the stormsmiths to hit them with everything they have.”

The bridge crew called affirmative.

Looking out the front window, Magnus saw throngs of refugees around the gate in Henge Hold. There were dozens of vessels crowded around it. Far too few for those gathered.

“Bring us in, fast and low, to the gate,” he ordered.

“Sir, that brings us directly over the enemy,” a young pilot said.

“Good. Get the storm chambers hot and fry anything down there uglier than me.”

***

It was an unexpected relief but a welcome one. On a tide of lightning, the Cygnaran sky ship flew at the gate, disgorging trollkin and trenchers to aid the defense. A hobbling, scarred Magnus emerged and shouted to the refugees, ordering them aboard.

It could not contain them all, but Tristan Durant saw Nadira and dozens of Menite faithful board the ship.

He smiled, knowing they would be safe.

***

The arrival of the ships only served to agitate the infernals swarming the henge like a disease. They climbed atop one another, straining to reach the Cygnaran ship’s hull as it descended toward the gate.

Once the first horror found its grip, the rest easily followed.

They breached the hull and climbed the gunwales, rending steel and penetrating the ship’s inner workings. Lamenters scattered among the decks, piercing victims with their savage forelegs and flinging them out into the air.

Acid from below and spells singing through shriekers from above devastated the craft and its people. The ship tipped as horros clawed their way into the engines, the consumption of souls replaced by wholesale slaughter.

Beneath the decimation, one soldier ran as if to join the carnage, his armor bloodied by those he’d once called fellow countrymen. Their bodies fell all around him in pieces from the ship above as he positioned himself below it, welcoming its descent.

When the ship came down in a fiery explosion, Omodamos returned the sliver of his attention he’d focused on it to the gate itself and the foe who waited there. Souls could be lost from the ship but not from the gate.

Zaateroth battled a mortal opponent but spared part of her mind to communicate.

Runewood is escaping us, she conveyed to him.

A second explosion from the destroyed Cygnaran ship punctuated her declaration, as if Runewood mocked her from beneath its crushing finality.

The gate, Omodamos conveyed and moved toward Asphyxious again.

***

It would cost her personally, perhaps more than she had ever imagined paying, but to Haley, it would have cost more not to try.

She watched the Cygnaran ship Cloudpiercer plummeting from the sky, its surface moving with infernals like maggots on a corpse.

Yet the threads were there — as they always were. She had learned to eschew certain phrases that had been part of her vernacular once, but one came to her now just the same: There is still time.

There is ALWAYS time, she amended.

Pulling the thread tightly might snap it, but she could twist it enough to go back and right the Cloudpiercer and slow its descent, adjusting it to prevent it from toppling sideways down the henge’s hill if it shouldn’t stop in time.

It remained under assault, but it could still move — and it did, skimming the earth’s surface as it redirected itself toward the gate once more.

She closed her eyes, which only strengthened the lights she could see, and reached out for the echoes she knew were there.

She knew their names if not their faces. It was easy to welcome Amador Damiano — he was so recently struck down, he even recognized this field of battle. More difficult was Hierarch Severius and his predecessor, Voyle, whose faces were hidden behind masks. Still, they came.

Most difficult was among the last of hundreds whose echoes she found. This was a face she knew intimately — the black facial hair.

The eyepatch.

The sneer.

An echo out of time, Vinter Raelthorne joined the others that had made the Iron Kingdoms what they were as if he’d expected to assume this role all along. Under less dire circumstances, Haley would have allowed her resentment to boil over.

Instead, she welcomed him to the battlefield.

He seemed to scan the combatants, as if perhaps looking for Asheth Magnus to deliver payback for Vinter’s death, but then he joined the myriad other echoes she had sought and found for the final battle.

As she turned to lead this newfound force against the infernals all around the gate, she secretly hoped that the former king’s soul would be one of the noble sacrifices about to come.

From the south came a new force, one she was mildly surprised to see. The enormous gatorman at its head, flanked by two pale-skinned Nyss witches well known to her, was a strange sight, as were the green-and-gold-armored troops and surreal stone constructs with them.

All forces become equal in fear and death, she thought, and then, If we all live, this will be a historic day, indeed.

Maybe even the end of wars instead of days.

More death followed this final thought.

***

Beneath the Cygnaran ship, one soldier ran toward it, his armor bloodied by those he’d once called fellow countrymen. He could sense his escape from torment at hand as he positioned himself below it, welcoming its descent.

He closed his eyes to welcome the end, his lip curled in defiance and his mind filled with hatred for his infernal masters. The mistakes he’d made were about to be rectified, he knew.

I win, Runewood thought, hoping they were listening.

The air turbulence shook him and threatened to knock him from his feet. He opened his eyes and stared up into the underside of the ship as it passed overhead. It steadied itself, its bow aimed at the glowing gate.

He watched his salvation sailing away.

“Son of a — ” he wept aloud.

And then he felt Zaateroth calling to him.

Head held high, his emotions contained, he had no choice but to obey.

***

“Is that the royal consort?” Kommander Harkevich asked.

The entire bridge crew of Vygor’s Hammer went quiet. Sorscha snatched a spyglass and looked where he was pointing.

“He’s beaten one of the masters,” she said.

“Gunnery crew, put a full spread down around him. Make sure nothing reaches him,” Harkevich barked. They relayed his orders through brass speaking horns into the depths of the vessel.

***

The humbled master crawled away, holding its lacerated hand up in defense.

Vlad stalked forward as the ripple of Khadoran guns turned the world into fire around them.

“Stay your hand,” she hissed, “and I can offer you anything you desire. Power, fortune…”

He could feel her gaze on him like a film of gritty oil. She probed his heart, his spirit.

“… love.”

Vlad raised his sword. “You offer water to a drowning man.”

Zaateroth smiled, an ugly gash revealing loathsome teeth and gesturing skyward. “She’s here, you know. Watching us. Watching the father of her child.”

The great prince’s step faltered. “You need better lies,” he said.

The master chuckled. “So, the old one never told you. Took and hid the child away, plundered the vault of your memories. I can help you reclaim it.”

Uncertainty. He could feel it gnaw at him, opening a chink that the master’s black tendrils explored to widen the fracture. She summoned images of him, of the child and its mother. The battle faded in his eyes, replaced utterly by the vision.

Vlad barely noticed as Zaateroth wrapped a withering hand around his throat.

***

Sorscha’s heart turned to ice as the great prince fell.

She could summon no words. Cold radiated from her until the crew’s breath smoked, until frost hung from the tips of their hair.

When she spoke at last, her voice was that of an ice goddess. It carried the unstoppable weight of a glacier.

“Destroy that thing.”

***

A murder of crows whirled above Zaateroth. Their thousand voices called to her with mocking croaks. More came, impossibly more, to blacken the sky.

As one they dove at her, a tornado of black wings. They hit and spread across the battlefield, battering horrors and cultists in their passage.

In their place, a motley army of nightmares stood, a cackling old woman atop a rattling machine at their heart.

Zaateroth prepared to meet this new foe, siphoning souls to close her wounds, when a new dawn broke to the north. A legion of fiery-winged warriors descended on the Black Gate’s army, led by a radiant woman with a blinding soul, a silent shadow of a man by her side.

Accompanying them were chanting hordes of faithful mortals, singing praises to their creator god.

Zaateroth felt something unfamiliar.

She felt afraid.

***

“Poor child,” Zevanna said, looking down to where her flock gathered over Vlad’s body. “You knew this day vould come. Be happy. Your bloodline still flows.”

With that she cast her eyes to the gate, and a refugee vessel slipping through it. Somewhere amid its passengers, a young stowaway, unknown to all, traveled beyond the infernals’ reach.

***

Omodamos felt reality ripple, shift. These were expected tactics. His greater interest was the one who now fled across the battlefield. The one who would die a second time.

“You cannot escape,” he breathed to the former lich lord. The distance between them closed swiftly.

Asphyxious turned suddenly and set his stance. He shot a glance at the gate and then back at the infernal master called the Black Gate. “Thou misunderstand. ’Tis not I who would escape.”

“Yet you flee,” Omodamos said, swatting troublesome mortals out of his way.

The Black Gate allowed their dying spirits to fuel him. He spun his flails at speeds that cracked the air.

Shouting to be heard, Asphyxious called, “I merely await my reinforcement!”

Omodamos made to attack the lich when the shadows turned against him, holding him fast.

The Witch Deneghra revealed herself and joined Asphyxious. Together, they charged.

***

Aurora caught herself laughing as a ridiculous thought crossed her mind.

I am now the child of two machines.

Beneath the shifting glow of the gate, she lashed out at a trio of hideous floating horrors with tentacles that died easily.

Were their choices my future?

She felt her gaze pulled to the gate, the escape, the promise. The future.

It was far, far too late to consider it any other action.

***

Axis, the Harmonic Enforcer, shifted his blows from one hammer to the next, from Action to Reaction, but the substantial amount of gore that covered both of them could not distract him from his belief that an enormous moment of portent was upon them.

Action. Reaction. Cause and effect. The goddess brought him here, in this moment, to see her will evoked on Caen. He would not falter, could not fall, unless she deemed it necessary.

Axis spotted the gore-covered leader of the cultists, Midwinter. He began carving a bloody path to the man through the bodies.

***

Sunder felt lighter than Karchev could ever recall it feeling before. The massive axe felt more like a kitchen cleaver in his grip, as it inevitably did when his addiction to battle took him over. He spun, infernal pulp spraying from him, as a human rider approached.

He wore befouled emblems marking him an Illuminated One. Karchev didn’t know him personally, but he could still kill him impersonally.

Karchev stoked his boiler and trampled forth, pulverizing combatants in his path. Bullets rang off his hull as he waded through the storm.

“You stand in the way of destiny,” the rider cried.

Karchev raised his axe high. “You stand on broken ground.”

He brought the weapon down with all his strength, striking the earth hard enough to split it like a rotten log. Horse and rider tumbled into the breach.

***

She moved between the spatters of blood from both infernals and those resisting them, and none stained her white attire. The blood soaked the ground but left the Harbinger immaculate.

She felt the blessing of Menoth all around her. And she brought her faith to this place where gods were changing the world.

The warm radiance of her archon companions felt like the sun on her cheeks. Like morning’s dawn banishing the cold and dark, they blazed their way through the tangle of bodies.

She proceeded to the gate with mixed intentions but the conviction of a god defying irrelevance.

***

Marshal General Baldwin Gearhart would have preferred attacking the Khadorans around him than the rabid monstrosities tearing apart the world.

But today, they had torn apart more than that.

He knelt in the blood of his manservant Clogg and stifled the gasp in his chest.

“See here, Clogg,” he said hoarsely, “if you defy me on this dying business, I fear I’ll have to fire you.”

The older man, eyes flickering, reached up for Gearhart’s hand. “Perhaps I must tender my resignation, sir.”

“Foolish Cedric,” Gearhart whispered.

***

Barnabas ripped a scythe-like appendage from the nearest horror, used it to pierce its lopsided owner, and then flicked his tongue across the limb’s edge.

“Tastes like pygs!” he bellowed, the gate forgotten. Everything he could want was right here.

Saeryn turned back at the gator’s shout. The Lord of Blood and his most devout congregants needed little encouragement to rip apart their enemies. The few spawn she and Rhyas controlled required additional goading.

Yet the infernal enemy seemed to favor the gatormen, as if detesting something about the spawn.

How interesting.

She could not justify why she liked this insight.

But she did.

***

Ashlynn could not help scanning the refugees for Marie Aguillon and Vayne di Brascio as they made their way toward the gate. She didn’t really expect to see them. She was charged with protecting the queen; they were charged with protecting the people. The odds favored her.

“We are almost there, my Queen,” she whispered to Kaetlyn. The pulsing lights ahead beckoned them to a new world beyond this life.

“I am only Kaetlyn now,” the queen wept.

“You will still be a queen on the other side,” Ashlynn promised. She told herself she believed this.

***

The corpses of horrors were stacked and slung like fish dumped from a giant net. The soil was slick with their blue blood; some of the bodies pulsed with fading life still. Their stench carried to the furthest combatants, and all avoided it if they could.

One stack moved.

His body was ruined, his skin flayed everywhere it was exposed. He raised his hands with twisted and broken fingers to explore his face. One cheek was peeled to raw muscle, but he passed his fingertips over the hole indifferently. He pressed them against his tattered lips.

“Dammit,” Drake MacBain growled. “Where the hell is my cigar?”

***

Omodamos’ grip on his flails tightened. The abhorrent silver-clad thing assailing him and its witch companion were pesky flies that bit and left lingering stings.

He prepared to summon up a fresh horror from one of the souls Zaateroth had marked. Let it put this battle to an end.

Yet the Black Gate discovered he could not.

Something was girding the scattered souls on the battlefield from him. He could not wring their essence from them. With one flail, he forced his opponents back and looked for the source.

A young woman, her soul as delectable as a fine meal, accompanied by a winged host. This was the source of his frustration.

Ah, to craft from that soul would be a pleasure.

Omodamos turned away from the irritating foe to pursue his new quarry. Mortal servants and horrors flooded to fill the gap of his passage.

The Black Gate had not traveled far when a loud voice called out.

“We aren’t done with you,” Karchev the Terrible heaved. Blood coated every inch of him, dripped from his axe in sheets.

The infernal master moved to intercept the man, drawing upon his own essence for strength.

He would enjoy this appetizer before his feast.

***

The first ships appeared to Nemo as shooting stars.

Emerging from the gate, their protective fields glowed brilliant blue against the void. Each appeared with a corona of chromatic mist that trailed them like tails.

More came, each flitting past him. He was in the eye of a storm, lines of color and light describing infinite arcs to Cyriss.

Wishing the distant travelers safe passage, Nemo flexed his mechanical strength to return to Caen.

There was still much to be done.

He returned to a scene of chaos. The ring of Henge Hold pressed tight with refugees. Mere yards beyond the huddled mob, infernals and the people of Immoren struggled in desperate battle.

It was close enough for the blood to spatter up on his hull.

“I hope you’re on our side,” a familiar voice grumbled.

Nemo turned to face a grim soldier. Magnus. He wore a Cygnaran uniform, its clean lines a strange pair for his weathered face.

“You look different, Asheth,” he said.

Magnus fired his scattergun into the wall of horrors. “Morrow’s dangling… Nemo? So the hell do you.”

“There is time for you to escape,” Nemo said, “if you go now.”

The warcaster gave him a sardonic grin.

“I’ve spent my whole life fighting for Cygnar,” Magnus said. “I’m not about to leave before the curtain call.”

***

Haley was fading.

Her reinforcements had spread the infernals’ attention, but they were still closing.

Already weak from calling forth so many echoes, she drew on what little strength remained. Her body stuttered, barely able to remain.

Time was stubborn, true, but so was she. Haley wrapped her fists in the weave of it, wrenching pieces apart. Around her, refugee vessels stuttered, doubled. Like pieces of a broken mirror, they reflected across each other.

As she flickered between the present moment and other infinite possibilities, she saw her actions had consequences. Reflections of Caen, manifold reflections, showed her many futures.

She was not in them.

“Keep them back,” she said to the other warcasters, her voice carrying over the battlefield. Axis, Aurora, Asphyxious, each fought on.

Three A names, she thought, as she felt herself sinking into very the flow of time. How odd.

Refugees stampeded onto the colorless ships she summoned. Keeping these reflections in the present moment was like holding up a warjack. Her body and spirit flagged with the effort.

She’d earned the wrath of time. She’d drawn the attention of the masters.

Though it must have cost them dearly, the two masters allowed themselves to be struck down. Hosts of horrors collapsed. Cultist souls burned up.

They manifested again, closer this time.

At the cost of so many souls, they died and appeared again.

Closer still. The infernal masters were coming for her.

Haley put her faith in her companions.

She faded deeper into the pull of time.

***

The skies rumbled as if a storm threatened. Even the infernalists taking the battlefield paused from their killing to look up in surprise.

A lance of light shot from the gathering clouds like a bolt of lightning, like a falling sword. Soldiers, cultists, and horrors shielded their eyes against its glare.

Among them, only a few knew what the archons were before they arrived.

They came like giants on wings of silver and royal purple, in armor glowing with their creed. The Thamarites in the battle below were not surprised to see their angelic saviors alongside those of their goddess’ brother, but the Morrowans caught their breath in disbelief.

Some cheered, some prayed. Some expected instant salvation while others recognized the renewed strength they could feel in their limbs because hope had finally arrived.

Some, however, could not believe their eyes.

Irusk had felt like he’d arrived late to a buffet — it seemed many of the best kills had already been taken, and those that remained were too far afield or otherwise engaged for him to chase down.

Then, once Ashlynn and her queen bolted for the gate and Brisbane had pursued his own targets, Irusk had needed to decide how to proceed.

Ultimately, he’d settled for quantity over quality.

Now he pulled one leg free, then the next, from the pile of dead cultists that rose as high as his hips. He watched the archons fall from the sky, his lip curled back when he recognized the one in the front.

“Why,” he sneered in disgust, “are we never really rid of you?”

Asheth Magnus was so close to the gate that he wasn’t sure at first what he was seeing. Then he broke out in a grin as he opened fire at the nearest clawed horrors.

“Welcome home, old boy,” he grunted as the archons joined the battle.

Infernals quickly fell upon the archon that wore the face of Coleman Stryker.

They died just as quickly.

***

“Kommander Harkevich,” she said in a measured voice, “you have control of Vygor’s Hammer. Inform the mechaniks to stoke Beast’s boiler. Bring me down to the fighting before you all freeze to death.”

Kommandant Sorscha left the command bridge. Her tread left a trail of cold so deep that the thick hull plating crackled.

The kommander watched her go, dread growing, feeling that a great doom had been unleashed on the world.

***

It had been a hard row to hoe, the road from Caspia to Henge Hold. Her sword gave her more than enough power to deal with the horrors she encountered along the way, given that she had felled a gate with it, but she still found it difficult.

Perhaps she no longer wanted to go. Perhaps the futility of it all was finally settling on her. Perhaps her mother’s incessant questioning of her motives was exhausting.

Or perhaps she was just weary of the Witchfire.

She was also surprised to find she missed Harlan Versh and even more surprised to find she regretted that she’d left him to his fate in Caspia. She wished she hadn’t, but it couldn’t be undone now.

And besides…this would make it worth her while.

Lexaria, the voice of her mother, whispered from the sword. Do you intend to destroy the infernal masters and their brethren…or the gate everyone is using to escape?

Be silent, Alexia answered. She took in the sprawling bloodbath of chaos spread before her.

She was still thinking of the proper answer as she moved to join the battle.

Either way, she said to her mother, you’re about to receive guests.

She ignored her mother’s response as she reached the first combatants.

***

This was not what she was promised.

Zaateroth struggled to keep her feet and looked on the sea of violence. Walls of corpses were impromptu cover for pockets of mortal gunners. Blood and sweat sprayed into the air.

The defenders appeared at every edge of the field surrounding the henge, a motley band of different culture and ancestry blended in battle. Demigods, a few, attempted to stall her and Omodamos’ approach to the time-witch.

The old one to whom she offered clemency commanded her machine-steed to kick one of Zaateroth’s own horrors at her like a cannonball. The old witch She was laughing.

Laughing at her.

Enough, Zaateroth conveyed to the other master.

Omodamos was locked in battle with a trio of winged avatars but spared part of his mind to respond.

Are you certain?

She let the memory of a high priest drive its punching dagger through her body. She shed the form like a snake shedding its skin, appearing behind the apparition, a few lengths closer to her target.

I tire of their heroics, she communicated.

Zaateroth allowed the greater portion of her mind to sink away from the mortal realm, feeling Omodamos do the same. Both continued the battle on pure instinct, letting their intellects touch a far darker place.

Why are you here?

The Magnate Tritorium was not used to being bothered.

Their gaze was like myriad blades peeling back every layer of her being. They did not wait for her to answer the query, preferring to extract the information in their own way. A painful way.

You are weakened. You come seeking our aid.

Zaateroth did not answer. The leaders of her infernal order would draw their own conclusions.

She is failing, the primus thought.

She has failed, thought the secundus.

She desires our intervention, tertius thought, sickly amused by the prospect.

The Magnate convened for a moment. In the space of that moment, Zaateroth knew they considered and discarded infinite punishments and debts for her, each one tailored to humiliate and debilitate her utterly.

She and Omodamos awaited their fate.

We have decided, they declared as one.

We will assist you but require a benefaction in return. This gate. It intrigues us. It could make our traversal between worlds…simple.

See that we acquire it, they thought, burning the deed into her mind with an unbreakable contract. In return, they invested in her a measure of the reserve of souls kept ready for just such a need.

With it, they gave her the reins of their chosen protector. The great leveler. The consumer of all things.

The guardian of the Well of Souls.

I won’t disappoint you, she vowed.

But you already have, they responded before banishing her from their presence.

Her focus returned to the battle. She was reinvigorated and more furious than ever.

***

He heaved off the weight of his crippled horse. In the fall, both its forelegs had snapped like old broomsticks.

Valin Hauke looked up from the fissure. Corpses hanging over the rim dripped blood onto his face. He grunted, picking his way up the ragged earthen walls.

As he did, a low sound emanated from the shadows beneath him, drowning the shrill cries of his mount.

Hauke looked back and saw a liquid blackness slowly filling the pit.

It moved like a living thing, extending thin tendrils that sought out the horse, entangled it, and dragged it into the waiting dark.

The creature stopped shrieking, at least.

His body was close to giving out by the time he reached the top of the crevasse he’d been spilled into by the Khadoran warcaster. He marveled that the man was now nowhere near.

Next time, make sure you finish what you start, he thought, scanning the battlefield.

The machine-man was roaring, threshing his way to where Omodamos stood. Hauke could hardly make out his bellowed cry.

“You do not escape so easily.”

In the distance, he recognized Orin Midwinter, braced for battle. And while he did not recognize the metallic thing that stomped its way past him toward Midwinter, he did recognize it as a follower of Cyriss.

Its hammers did it no good when it did not know Valin Hauke was directly behind it.

As he stabbed it in the back, his sword burst out the other side, and he imagined the metallic thing’s soul hanging off its tip.

Midwinter raised his staff in a salute.

Idiot, Hauke thought.

He advanced on the Khadoran warcaster.

***

While halfway across the continent infernals and refugees congregated on Henge Hold, Lord Arbiter Hexeris took a moment to appreciate his surroundings.

Most skorne kept their emotions on a short leash, but Hexeris found his current companions had mastered the skill far better.

For all the passion they displayed, the soulless Iosans may as well have been ancestral guardians.

The lord, Ghyrrshyld, was another matter entirely.

“They are birthing beds.”

The flat voice startled him. Hexeris had been studying high furniture built in rows along the wall.

“You were a…midwife?” he asked, struggling to find the word.

“Something like that. Your Shyr is improving.”

The lord arbiter changed the subject. The thought of this elf overseeing births unsettled even him. “How fares the void master?”

“Patiently. Follow me.”

They traveled through the bowels of the building. It felt funereal, like the tunnels of a vast mausoleum. Along the way, Hexeris noted what could only be holding pens, like those for captured slaves. He noticed fingernail scratches outside the doors with keen interest.

Their journey ended at the largest underground vault, which Ghyrrshyld described as his “former workshop.”

It made him think of a paingiver and extoller sharing a space. He could all but taste the pain and fear soaked into the stones.

A circle of soulless Iosans stood guard in this chamber, surrounding an elaborate cage with twelve interlocking faces. Too short for the master to stand, too narrow for it to sprawl, the thing had chosen to wait for them with legs folded beneath it.

“Update us,” Ghyrrshyld instructed. The one called Nayl spoke up.

“It has been asking to speak with you,” Nayl said.

***

Agathon passed the time by reviewing their contracts. They had drawn upon a number of them to summon a force to these lands, but many still remained. They prioritized individuals to seek out once they were free.

They’d made no gains with the current watchdogs. These creatures were empty vessels, of no worth to them. It was difficult to even see them without intense focus. The lack of a soul made them fade into the background, duller than an insect crawling across the wall.

But these two, they were something else. Agathon studied the form and history of their unusual souls. Writ across them were many deeds, far darker than those to which the master had become accustomed.

One pulsed from within, an essence that strained the limits of its container. The other… the other had calcified spirits clinging to it. Flies stuck in honey, worn like jewelry on a queen’s throat.

Agathon spared a portion of themselves to communicate, devoting the rest of their mind to probing the arcane prison.

“Pain does not work on us,” they said, looking for a reaction.

“We do not intend to use it,” Ghyrrshyld replied.

“I can offer you — ”

“You will offer me silence,” the elf cut off Agathon’s statement.

The master watched intently as this elf collected an object and gave it to one of the soulless.

“Begin at the lowest setting,” Ghyrrshyld instructed, “and gradually increase until I say otherwise.”

The one called Nayl approached the cage.

“What is this supposed to do?” asked the bejeweled one.

“Test for vulnerability to arcantrik force,” Ghyrrshyld said.

“And if it doesn’t work?”

“Then, Lord Arbiter, we shall try things your way.” Ghyrrshyld moved to a bench and prepared a writing instrument. “You may begin.”

***

Empress Ayn Vanar sat alone in her court, unescorted, unattended.

Vulnerable.

With her hands in her lap, her head bowed, she seemed lost in thought.

Or so thought the only blood-covered assassin who had made it this far.

***

When Stasikov Palace was quiet, as it often was in the middle of the night, Ayn Vanar imagined she could hear the battles against the invading infernals in the distant south where so many had fled.

Now that the Khadoran borders were closed, she imagined this less often.

The latest Greylord report from Henge Hold was incomplete and distracting — she could no longer tell where her people were, though she knew Vlad would keep them in line. Desertion would remain unheard of in the Khadoran Army; execution would be the ongoing response.

She was weary, yet her mind would not let her rest. One thought, both gleeful and so far-fetched as to seem ridiculous, nagged at her like hunger.

When this invasion is quelled, western Immoren will be just one kingdom: Khador.

With I, its empress, at its head.

Yet before that could be accomplished, there were still challenges within her borders that needed to be dealt with. She just needed a name, and then the purge could begin.

She looked up as a shape erupted from the whispering shadows.

She thought, Now I will —

***

They came as a small force, just twelve of the Pale Guard, with former kovnik Kess in command. He was older than the others, hair grayed by experience, so when they finally breached the palace under cover of the night, he let them have the fun of killing the guards.

They took no casualties. Great Princess Regna Gravnoy would be pleased.

Kess, however, felt no pleasure. Killing their own countrymen was unavoidable in ensuring the White Queen’s rulership once the infernals had taken their bounty of souls and left the land to recover.

But he vowed it would not result in civil war. He could control that outcome by being the one who personally assassinated the empress while her champion Tzepesci was too far from home to save her and divide the nation.

She was alone.

But Kess was wrong.

They had been given details about what to expect once within the palace’s walls — guard rotations, heavily traveled corridors, routinely locked doors — but no one warned them about what they ultimately encountered en route to the empress.

He shouldn’t even have been alive.

The terrifying, nightmarish rumors were a far cry from the flesh-and-bone reality that fell upon them in a dimly lit hallway — the rumors were tame by comparison.

The Butcher had been unleashed upon them.

Kess had admired the legend from afar, but in person, he felt little more than sheer terror. Two of his men were dead before Kess even knew they were under attack.

The Butcher’s face was a mangled mess, a red, rabid froth on his lips.

And he snarled like a wild animal.

As the Butcher raised his axe, Kess caught sight of half a head — severed at the mouth — hurl away. Next to him, a decapitated assassin took two steps, hands raised to where his tongue now wriggled as the top of his head.

Someone screamed. Kess thought it might be himself.

The Butcher whipped his axe around in a smooth semi-circle, and Kess could see an arc of blood in the air as if it were a solid surface. Two more troops fell, their corpses flopping over one another as if being stacked.

The others were responding, but none as fast as Kess. The kovnik knew they all would die in this battle, one at a time, and the only way to reach the empress was to let the living fodder give the Butcher pause.

This was what Kess told himself as he escaped the slaughter.

He was covered in the blood of his countrymen. As the sounds of the battle faded, he reoriented himself, recognizing how close he was, and let the death ahead of him overshadow the deaths behind him. When he slipped into the room’s shadows, the empress was alone.

One stroke of his blade, and it would be over.

“Treason becomes patriotism,” he hissed to himself.

He made no other sound as he leapt from the shadows and fell upon the empress, his sword raised, a murder weapon to an historical treasure.

***

She thought, Now I will know.

When the shadows whispered “treason,” she knew what was about to happen.

Raising the pistol concealed in her lap, she shot the assassin in the face at point-blank range.

She enjoyed his look of surprise as his features exploded in death.

By the time Orsus arrived, fresh from killing the assassin’s compatriots, she had already resumed her composure.

“It’s that upstart who calls herself a queen,” she said to the Butcher, indicating the white ribbon on the dead assassin’s belt. “Her little cultist here.”

When the Butcher stared at her as if he were still in the battle elsewhere, she said softly, “Great Princess Regna Gravnoy. I want you to find all her people who might be lurking in the palace.”

She looked down at the dead assassin. “I want to send a clear message to her.”

***

He had a dying thought: kovnik to infernal.

And his soul fled the palace.

He had a debt to repay.

PART 6

***

She scrubbed her hands with the stiff brush, working the boar bristles into her skin until it was raw. Then again into a scalding basin of water.

Feora lifted her dripping fingers to her eyes.

A thin crust of blood remained beneath her nails.

More scrubbing, more rinsing. The hot water stung her hands, made them flushed.

“Traitors,” she said to the empty room. “Every one of them. What was I supposed to do? Allow him to lead them to die in the wilderness? Idiot. Traitor!”

Feora slapped the basin, spraying water across her chamber. Kreoss, too. The man had agreed to aid her but failed to prevent the refugee’s escape. Held back against the traitorous Order of the Wall, forcing her hand.

Her hand. Feora resumed her task with renewed anger. Scrubbing with the brush. Baptizing her hands in what water remained.

The warcaster studied her hands again.

It would not be the last time.

***

Intercessor Kreoss surveyed the collateral damage. No one had bothered to move the bodies of the paladins out of the street, and carrion birds wheeled overhead.

Teams of citizens struggled to put out the smoldering remains of nearby buildings. Devout warjacks, weapons and shields unbolted from their fists, slowly dragged wreckage from the street.

“Any sign of Durst?” Kreoss asked a senior exemplar. The officer froze. His enclosed helmet could not conceal his fear.

“No, Intercessor. We are still searching.”

“It should not be a challenge. The man would be difficult to miss. And Vilmon?”

The exemplar did not meet his eyes.

They exchanged no further words. The man reminded Kreoss of a frightened deer, frozen in place and not knowing if the lion before it was about to strike. When he dismissed the man with a gesture, he all but sprinted away.

Kreoss turned his attention to the spires of the Temple of the Flame.

“What are you doing in there, Feora?” he mused. He envisioned the priestess gathering her loyal lieutenants. Why else would she have left Temple Flameguard to their own devices following the battle?

Yes. That must be her ploy. She was no doubt preparing to dig her talons deeper into the halls of power.

Kreoss tapped a mailed knuckle on his faceplate. Perhaps, he thought, he should begin his own plan to prevent her.

***

This wasn’t the first time the kriels had come to the aid of Cygnar, but Gunnbjorn thought it might be the last.

The United Kriels were just that: united. But he wasn’t sure the Cygnaran commandos under his command appreciated this unity in cleansing Caspia of infernals.

He led both trollkin and Cygnaran forces street-to-street, chasing or being chased by disgusting things brought to life from nightmares. The destruction was widespread; the number of presumably soulless corpses was shocking.

That number consisted of no trollkin, he noted.

He’d made a single offer: all trollkin who would join the airship to the rumored safety of Henge Hold were free to go. He even checked his tone so it contained no judgment. Who could say? Survival of their kind might depend on that flight. Yet none fled.

He would never have said aloud there were those he might have preferred go.

An explosion shook the ground, and a large bluestone wall collapsed, taking a sizable factory’s chimney down with it. His forces ducked for cover, even as Gunnbjorn bellowed the all clear.

“Enough!” he shouted. “You wait for my command before launching even one more attack!”

From atop the snarling dire troll Dozer, the pyg Smigg pretended to grovel. “Yeh, yer commandin’, yerp.”

Gunnbjorn knew Smigg had to be here under his command — in Henge Hold, the pyg would have likely blown up refugees alongside infernals. But the idea of making him and Dozer someone else’s problem held appeal.

Trollkin standards were hosted skyward once again his group resumed formation. The Cygnaran flag flew among them, though there was one in particular that caught him off guard.

“By Dhunia,” he breathed to himself. “The Hellslingers are here.”

***

He had kept the two of them well in the wake of the United Kriels cleansing Caspia, watching their banners to know when they were engaged. Behind the trollkin, among the dead bodies of infernals, the occasional gremlin crawled forth to frolick.

He paused, glanced at his partner Kushin, and attacked. The gremlin didn’t see him coming, and in moments, he had the hairless thing secured in a thick bag, its claws tied, its face muzzled.

He held up the bag for Kushin to admire, his third today, but she only sighed.

“You are so weird, Wendell,” she said.

***

‘Latest developments compelling but not fruitful.’

Lord Gyrrshyld finished writing the words and looked back over his pages of copious notes.

“You seem disturbed,” Hexeris said, breaking the long silence.

“Not at all,” Gyrrshyld said. “We can conclude that the most advanced weaponry of House Vyre’s arsenal can inflict incredible damage to it.”

“But not destroy it.”

Gyrrshyld sighed. “No.”

Iosan and skorne looked to the master. Gyrrshyld swore he saw a whisper of a smile at its lipless mouth.

“Lord Arbiter, I spent many years as a creature like that. Sustaining itself on the vital essence of others. It is not an overstatement to say I despise that thing.”

The skorne leaned in, smile revealing teeth filed to elegant sharpness. “Allow me to suggest another approach.”

***

Gathering his tools took some time. Hexeris was selective.

Soulless carried in an array of well-used implements, polished until their barbed edges gleamed in the faint light.

“Is this the limit of your imagination?” the void creature wheezed.

Hexeris raised a finger to his lips.

“Bring them in,” he ordered. As they came, he turned his full attention to the prisoner. In his tongue, he said, “These casteless things have volunteered for our experiment. Their families will not suffer the burden of their existence.”

The master squirmed.

“Yes, you must be starving,” Hexeris continued. “But their spirits are too thin to be much of a meal, I’m afraid. Too much time spent under the lash, I fear. But you can still taste them, can’t you?”

The master’s eyes narrow in suspicion. “You seek to poison me with weak essence?”

“Nothing of the sort. These spirits are worthless to you. I, on the other hand, find them quite…nourishing.” Hexeris rested a blade on the flesh of a waiting skorne. “You’ve tasted Iosan science. Let us see how you enjoy my art.”

***

Mortitheurgy was, in Gyrrshyld’s eyes, something to behold.

Hexeris wrung every drop of power out of the harm he inflicted on the volunteers. Gyrrshyld was relieved to have only soulless present to witness it. He doubted any other would have endured the sight.

Slivers of souls became fuel for dark magic. Their prisoner’s twitches increased in frequency and intensity. Gyrrshyld recalled unpleasant memories of his eldritch days and even worse ones from the days before.

Hexeris worked without rest, stopping only for the guards to collect an empty vessel and bring him a fresh one. The number of volunteers the lord arbiter went through grew. All met their fate with stoicism, with something like pride.

The master fared far worse.

Two days later, while Hexeris honed a blade outside the cage, the master finally relented.

“Please,” it said.

Hexeris’ eyes met Gyrrshyld’s. “Ah, at last. Now we can truly begin.”

“Shall I prepare my notes?” Gyrrshyld asked.

***

As if the woes of the world weren’t sufficient, Khador was now dangerously close to civil war, Empress Ayn Vanar knew.

Under other circumstances, she would assume victory and let the war erupt. But things were radically different now. She had to be wise.

The infernal invasion had necessitated closing the borders and cleansing the kingdom of the infestation. Cygnar faced a similar problem. Rhul and Ios had fallen silent such that even rumors had dried up. The tales coming out of Cryx were simply unbelievable.

She imagined the rulers in the lands of the Protectorate saw this as end of days, and for all she knew, they could be right.

And finally, there was the matter of the gathering at Henge Hold and what it might mean for the future of western Immoren.

But now… Now there was Great Princess Regna Gravnoy, who served the infernals and their invasion.

Assassination was preferable to war, but the empress was beginning to think manipulation was more preferable still.

If she could control Regna, she could access her infernal masters. And if she could undermine their plans or even guide their actions, she could change the seemingly inevitable outcome of this invasion.

She stared out over the dozen agents of Regna whom Orsus had uncovered.

For days, he’d been hunting, absent as her protector. And when he returned with the agents as prisoners, she thought Orsus had at last devolved too far to save. She wondered if he would need to be chained to control the wild-eyed fury he seemed to be losing the battle to.

He’d been rough with them, as evidenced by their wounds, but they were alive. She was pleased — Khadorans had an undeserved reputation outside the kingdom of being indiscriminate when it came to killing their own. Not so. And not here.

“You live,” she said to them, watching the guards around them step back so it was clear to whom she spoke, “because my gentle giant was merciful.”

Behind them, Orsus snarled something that sounded distinctly violent.

The agents, one of them a teenage girl, huddled together.

“I know you serve the White ‘Queen’, and she serves dark masters from beyond Caen,” she said. “But here is the secret none of you know: those dark masters serve me.”

The bluff had the effect she wanted — they looked stricken, surprised, confused. The girl wept.

“And that is why I will send you all home alive,” she said.

More surprise. The teenage girl, whom Orsus had brought from beyond the city walls and who was unknown to the empress, wiped her eyes. She kept her head down and looked the part of captured spy.

She would serve them well, Orsus had said. She would do everything they asked, even if it ended with assassination after all.

The empress believed him because the Butcher vouched for no one.

***

Pyrrhus approached the Priestess of the Flame alone. The rare breach of protocol was not done to protect himself — rather, to protect his fellows. They had not seen her like…this.

Feora’s mask face snapped up as he came near. It was expressionless, but the eyes behind the mask were not.

“Spit it out,” she hissed.

“Exemplar gather in great numbers. The Intercessor has recalled High Exemplar Cyrenia from the field. The Wrath of Ages joins them.”

The priestess let out a long hiss, the sound of a laborjack bleeding excess steam.

“The ‘Intercessor’ should tread carefully. Bring me the Flame of Sorrow.”

That she called for an assassin was troubling. That she called for Thyra was more so.

“Mistress.” Pyrrhus cleared his throat. “She pursues the traitor Durant and his followers. On your orders.”

Feora clenched a gloved fist, letting slip a pained moan. “Nicia. Bring me Nicia, then.”

Pyrrhus did not respond at first. Rumors of the Tear of Vengeance’s new loyalties had reached even him.

“As you command,” he said. Feora dismissed him with a jerking gesture, rubbing the hand that troubled her. Strands of her hair had come free and dangled before her mask.

As the hero of the Flameguard gently closed the door behind him, he looked over the attendant protectors of the temple waiting outside. None dared to speak.

“Let none but myself or The Burning Truth enter,” he ordered.

A woman among them raised her voice. “What shall you do?”

Pyrrhus stared at the door behind him. Imagining the woman behind it, he said, “My duty.”

***

Gunnbjorn thought it was extreme arrogance to fly a banner — the Hellslingers were a strike force at best and were supposed to be secret operatives at least. They were not an army.

In fact, there were only two of them.

Ryan did all the talking. Watts just sat on a nearby rock, fiddling with his magelock rifle and looking uncomfortable. They both looked like death warmed over.

“So,” Gunnbjorn said, “where is he?”

When they hesitated, he weighed the idea of putting his bazooka in their faces. They’d flown a banner to get his attention, and now that they had it, they didn’t want to talk. He could only think of one reason why.

“Is he dead?”

Ryan shook her head. Watts looked up with a glare that implied Gunnbjorn had said something sacrilegious. And when Ryan finally spoke, Gunnbjorn began to put the pieces together.

“Last we saw him was in Blackwater. He’s raised an army to save his daughter,” she said in a rush. “She was stolen from him and taken to the Scharde Islands.”

“He’s there. You’re here,” Gunnbjorn said.

“Deneghra is the only person who knows where she is,” Watts grumbled. “She’s arsed off to Henge Hold to fight. He sent us to pick up something he stowed in Caspia.”

“We’re supposed to meet him at the henge,” Ryan added.

“We got nothing that belongs to him,” Gunnbjorn said.

“We’re here for his old warjack,” Ryan said. She paused and studied him. “That, and you.”

Gunnbjorn gave her a suspicious glower.

“Well, people like you,” she clarified. “He said we should grab anyone capable in a fight who might want to see the world survive another day. People who will put a boot in the infernals’ asses, so he can save his daughter. He wants people like you to help. Will you?”

She stopped to catch her breath, and Watts waited expectantly, as if the answer were a foregone conclusion. So, Gunnbjorn asked the most obvious question.

“Who on Caen would be desperate enough to have a child with Allister Caine?”

***

“Is it always so empty?” Hexeris asked.

They traveled the wide highway leading to the heart of Ios, the Fane of Scyrah. Other than watchful soulless sentinels like mile markers along the way, it was devoid of life.

“No, but nearly so,” Ghyrrshyld said.

He looked back at their captive. A pair of myrmidons acted like pack beasts, hauling the wagon that carried its arcane prison. After Hexeris’ ministrations, the creature had told them much — enough to warrant the risk they now chanced.

Uncertainty gnawed at Ghyrrshyld. A scratching sensation settled at the back of his mind, growing as they drew closer to the fane. He realized his skorne companion was looking at him expectantly.

“I apologize. My mind was elsewhere,” Ghyrrshyld said. “Did you ask something?”

“Do you believe its words?” Hexeris repeated. “I could slice away parts of its spirit, drain away what it had stored, but skorne who endure similar often lie to make it stop.”

“Of course I don’t,” Ghyrrshyld replied. “But I lack other options.”

***

Agathon’s prisoners led them to an ostentatious building flanked by silvery-green forests. They were weak, not as weak as they led their captors to believe, but weak nonetheless.

They had discerned the purpose of their treatment by inquiries in the final hours of their abuse.

One sought how the infernal’s essence could be repurposed to revitalize the lingering gods of the Veld. The other desired knowledge of a soul’s dissolution — and Agathon’s method of its use.

The first had won, for now. Agathon was to stoke the weakened spirit of the god waiting within.

They could feel its spirit, tinted with the flavors of new life and rebirth. But muted, weakened. Frail.

Agathon could sense something else within the building. Something that kindled their spirit. Something that made them smile.

***

“Our instructions were clear,” Ghyrrshyld growled.

“Instructions I don’t recall agreeing with,” said Lyesse Uithuyr. The priest regarded their procession with disdain. “You shall not stain the goddess’ presence with…this thing.”

If Hexeris was offended, he did not show it.

“You know who I am,” Ghyrrshyld said, “and what I am. You are endangering monumental work.”

“Yes, I am aware who you are and what you’ve done. I do not question the wisdom of the gods. Nor do I take their safety lightly.”

The priest brushed the air near his head as if swatting at a troublesome fly.

“Not all are ready to throw ourselves down to praise you,” the priest continued. “Some of us haven’t forgotten the war you started.”

***

Yes, thought Agathon. Not an offer, not a command, but a whisper to the mind of this one.

Yes, they thought again. This is your house. You have warriors. Defend it.

***

“If you refuse to stand aside, we will take action,” Ghyrrshyld warned. His hand went to the hilt of Voass and fingers of ice crept up his gauntlet.

Uithuyr stood his ground. “You entered here unwelcome once, Goreshade. You will not do so again.”

Behind the priest, the entrance to the fane filled with guardians.

***

Agathon worked with a speed fueled by desperation.

You are a great protector, they whispered. I can make you greater.

You are a wise priest, they whispered. None shall ever question you again.

They resisted. Of course they did. But the more these mortals pushed against them, the greater an offering Agathon suggested.

Bit by bit, the Whisperer in Darkness discerned the cracks in their spirits and levered them open.

***

“Lord Arbiter, prepare yourself,” Ghyrrshyld said. He drew Voass, plunging the area into an icy cold.

Hexeris gripped his gulgata. “I have no beasts.”

“Then we shall make do.”

***

Agathon watched with growing glee as the fane’s guardians surged forth. They stood little chance against the master’s captors, but it wasn’t their prowess Agathon required.

An errant spear, touched with the goddess’ blessing, impacted the cage.

It was not much, a mere nick in the arcane metal, but it would do. The goddess could not shield the souls Agathon had marked. As the Iosan and skorne warriors cut them down, Agathon fed.

The Whisperer in Darkness burst from the weakened prison glutted with souls. They wove together essence to forge lesser infernals, shadow warriors that distracted Ghyrrshyld and Hexeris.

Agathon did not wait to see the outcome.

They fled west. To Zaateroth.

To Henge Hold.

***

Ghyrrshyld was furious. It was a rare breach of his calm.

“Wait,” Hexeris said, in an effort to restore the Iosan’s peace. “Not all is lost.”

“If you know something — ”

Hexeris offered a faint smile. “It has fled, but it cannot escape.”

The skorne produced a sliver of glowing stone, offering it to Ghyrrshyld. “A wounded basilisk returns to its nest. I have a piece of its…blood.”

“You kept a piece of it,” the Iosan whispered. “When you were working, you cut off a piece of its essence?”

Hexeris nodded.

“And we can find where it’s going. We can follow it.”

“Back to its nest,” Ghyrrshyld said.

“Back to the others.”

“Get your beasts,” Ghyrshylld said, “and assemble your warriors. We don’t have time to waste.”

***

She could not speak Khadoran, though she could understand it. In fact, she could not speak at all. She had been mute since her mother had died years ago. In the “care” of the estate owner where she was then enslaved, she’d had even fewer reasons to speak.

And when the Butcher slaughtered them, she’d been alone in the world with no one to talk to anyway.

Yet he had continued to appear in her life — at first, with food and coin, then with a woman who treated her kindly. A woman who gave her shelter. A woman who was with the kayazy.

She saw less of him over the years, but each time she did, she thought he’d become more feral. The last time, he’d struggled to explain what he wanted her to do. For him. For Khador. It was as if he’d forgotten she was Ordic.

She would do it anyway. Because she loved him.

Now she was being escorted, alongside a dozen others, into the presence of Great Princess Regna Gravnoy. The others were spies, sent by Regna to lay a foundation for conquest in Empress Vanar’s court. This was not her role, however. She was here to sway Regna. Or kill her.

Regna walked the line, conferring in low tones with each of them, until she reached the girl.

“You are not one of mine,” Regna said. She did not sound surprised. “Who are you?”

The girl handed the great princess the first note she had prepared.

I AM BRATYA.

Regna smiled. “I assume there is more?”

The second note: I AM ORSUS ZOKTAVIR’S DAUGHTER.

And the third: HE IS NOW ONE WITH THE INFERNAL MASTERS.

And the last: SAVE US.

***

Ayn Vanar felt control slipping away from her.

Her plans to lure Regna south, drawn by a belief that her infernal masters were active in Stasikov Palace, no longer mattered. The tales of refugees and gates and unfathomable alliances no longer mattered either.

By the time Orsus responded to her command to join her at court, she had dried her eyes and allowed the burning rage to enflame her chest. She would cry again at a later time; for now, her tears evaporated in the heat of her fury.

“Word has come,” she said. “Vlad is dead.”

She had no expectation of a reaction from Orsus — his emotions were those of a rabid dog on a weakened chain. Still, she was taken aback when he spoke.

“Too bad. What now?”

“Now — ” she said but stopped. What was “now” at all? “Now” was an empty space that she could no longer fill. Vlad had been the only one who could help her do that.

“Now,” she finally continued, “I want the ones who killed him to suffer. I want to go to Henge Hold.”

She expected him to resist — she was not meant for the battlefield — so he surprised her yet again.

“Good,” he said. “Regna?”

A slow feeling of purpose rose in her. She stood, dizzy but in control again.

“When she gets here,” she said, “we’ll have her imprisoned.”

The Butcher scowled. “Killed.”

Empress Ayn Vanar faked a smile. “One step at a time, Orsus. Given her choice of allies, she may well be dead before she even gets here.”

***

“Intercessor, is this the best course?” High Exemplar Cyrenia asked.

Kreoss kept his eyes on the Temple of the Flame. “You weren’t there. She was merciless with the paladins and the lives of her Flameguard.”

“I heard a bit. Others say the Synod is discussing her fate.”

Kreoss was not impressed. “Yet again. The priestess seems immune to the consequences of her actions.”

Their Exemplar and warjacks advanced. The rattling of their armored tread reflected from the walls of Sul. A vanguard of errants cleared the streets of civilian refugees.

He would not let Feora repeat that mistake.

“And if the Synod rules in her favor, what will we do?” Cyrenia asked.

“If that happens, I will abide by their decision and face the consequences. As any true Menite would do,” Kreoss replied.

They converged with Reznik and his soldiers before the Temple of the Flame. Flameguard stood before the brazen gates as a hedge of spear and shield.

Kreoss spurred his mount to meet with the one at their lead, Malekus.

“By order of the Hierarch, I am Intercessor. It is my duty and right to prosecute the military strength of Sul. I come for the Priestess of the Flame.”

The Burning Truth’s breath wheezed out of his mask. “She is busy.”

“Your loyalty to her is noted, Malekus. But I will not hesitate to cut you down if you are in my way.”

The Burning Truth chuckled, a harsh, ugly sound. “Go on. Speed my way to the City of Man.”

The warcaster’s favored ′jack, the Eye of Truth, moved to protect its ward.

“Unlike her, I will not enjoy this,” Kreoss said.

He readied his spear Conviction and summoned Fire of Salvation to his side.

Before Kreoss could strike, the doors of the temple flew open.

Feora rode out wreathed in flames. Leaving a trail of living fire in her wake, she parted the temple guardians and charged the Intercessor. Hand of Judgement was with her, spraying Menoth’s Fury at Kreoss.

The Exemplar and Flameguard did not await an order. They crashed together in the shadow of the temple.

Once more, there was blood in the streets of Sul.

***

Pyrrhus watched his priestess and master hurl herself at fellow Sul-Menites. Her voice was a hoarse scream.

It had all happened too fast. Too fast for him to prevent it. But he might still be able to stop it.

Feora had lost her way. The escaped refugees eroded her control, forced her into the brutal murder of many. He hoped that she would go peacefully with the Exemplar.

She’d had other ideas.

Pyrrhus knew his duty.

Two lives for the soul of the people seemed like a fair trade.

Pyrrhus hefted his spear and waded through the storm of swords and flames. The Exemplars’ weapons found him time and again, tearing through his armor and flesh.

Blood-slick, he turned away enemy strikes with his heavy shield. When someone blocked his path, he wove around them or battered them aside with the head of his flame spear.

By the time he reached Feora, she was hacking at Kreoss, engulfing them both in fire.

The hero of the Flameguard cocked back his arm, set his eyes on his target, and let fly.

Two lives. Hers and mine.

His strength left him before he could see if the spear struck its mark.

***

They were marching, marching to Henge Hold, marching to the battle there. They were a sizable army, more than capable of having their way with war.

But Gunnbjorn was still undecided what he would do when they arrived.

The gate was not Gunnbjorn’s idea of a final resolution — it struck him as escape, not victory. But many others were convinced of its necessity.

This is how we dissolve as a nation, he thought bitterly.

A long rider, serving as a scout, approached him and dismounted.

“Blackclads,” the rider said. “Just ahead. Their leader would speak with you.”

Gunnbjorn resisted snarling. “No more allies. We aren’t here to protect everyone else.”

Still, he went out to meet them.

He could see from a distance there were actually quite a few of them, spread out in a manner meant to intimidate. But Gunnbjorn hardly felt threatened by leaf eaters.

A woman broke from the line to meet him astride a wolf bigger than any he could recall seeing before.

“I am Kaya,” she said.

“I am not interested,” Gunnbjorn said. “You’re in my way.”

She shrugged, dismissing this. “You go to the place of the gate. We are here to accompany you.”

“With your dog and your pointed stick? Go back to your gardens and leave the fighting to soldiers.”

Kaya smiled and gestured at the tree line. A savage warpwolf stepped into view, flesh shifting to produce long spines. “I have other weapons, no?”

Before he could reply, she waved him off. “The Iron Kingdoms are no more. The invaders have seen to that. Whether we wish it, we are all one people now. And as much as you, we have every reason to live, if it’s here or elsewhere.”

Her wolf growled as if it understood.

“We do not ask for your protection, nor do we offer ours,” she said. “But if the time comes when it’s needed, I do not doubt it will be given. So, if you do not wish to coordinate with us, we will have to discuss our battle plans while under attack on the field.”

Gunnbjorn grunted, muttered to her under his breath, and turned away. He refused to look back, though he could feel the eyes of her and her people boring into his shoulderblades.

Leaf eaters, he thought again.

A short while later, he rejoined his army, where Ryan of the Hellslingers greeted him. Soldiers gathered ’round them to hear their captain’s orders.

“Well?” she asked. “Who are they?”

Gunnbjorn shrugged. “New allies. Who talk too much.”

***

Midwinter could feel his very presence expand with each soul he claimed, a sensation like a glass of wine that finally tipped one over into drunkenness. So, he could not fathom Hauke’s personal fury with the Khadoran warcaster who had tried to kill him in a crevasse.

Yet his empathy returned in a furious rush when Midwinter saw Asheth Magnus alongside what appeared to be an aberrant glory hound Coleman Stryker.

“So be it,” Midwinter muttered and began to carve his way toward them.

***

“I taught him that!” Magnus shouted to anyone in earshot. He grinned as the Stryker archon decimated multiple horned infernals in two swift blows. “That’s my boy!”

Above him, the Cloudpiercer cast a long shadow as it reached the gate and began to disappear through it.

“Be safe,” he said, turning away from its departure, his grin fading. It felt like an ending to a tale, the refugees saved, the story wrapping up.

Then he saw Midwinter murdering his way across the battlefield toward him.

“Come get me,” he muttered, “my epilogue.”

***

I will not weep I will not weep I will not weep.

Every time Marshal General Baldwin Gearhart gunned down another cultist or howler, clearing a path ahead of him, he repeated this mental admonishment.

I will not weep I will not —

Mr. Clogg was heavy on his back. He knew the smart thing to do was to leave his body behind, but it was not the right thing.

— weep I will not weep I —

As he neared the gate, he could not hear the gatorman coming up behind him nor could he feel the tears on his own face.

***

There was something coming. Something big, nasty, powerful. Barnabas could almost smell it. Something rising among the invaders.

Something he could kill.

More important, something he could call apotheosis.

A path among victims cleared before him, and he charged down it.

Everywhere he could reach along the way, he found another victim. They crunched, splintered, snapped. He could feel his strength rising.

He was just thinking the gate ahead was still somehow important when a girl in white floated into reach. So, he reached for her.

***

She could feel the whispers of the Guardian birthing into the world, crawling up out of every shadow, seeping forth from the cracks of the world.

Already its power grew. It swelled to encompass her own, its essence like a dead star to eclipse the world.

Yoked to her spirit, every blade and spell, every bullet that found her form, could be shunted into the Guardian’s infinite expanse.

Zaateroth allowed herself to become insubstantial, to pass through the last line of defenders surrounding the gate.

Her prize was in reach.

***

A massive warjack with the Black Anchor logo on it began to hum with renewed power, catching Roget d’Vyaros by surprise. He had to concede he didn’t know much about warjacks, but he knew a warcaster was nearby.

He turned to scan just as the Blockader swatted him like a bug.

He could not remember such pain before. He landed in agony, curling up to contain a scream, as the Blockader rose to its full height and stepped toward him. A shadow joined the warjack, chuckling.

“Now where did you find this?” a voice asked.

Roget looked up into a battle-scarred face with a thick brown mustache. The man grinned almost maniacally as he picked up the cigar knocked from Roget’s lips.

“Well, damned good of you,” Drake MacBain said, “it’s still lit. But I like to light it myself, you know.”

He ground it out in on Roget’s exposed forehead.

***

Her presence muffled the sound of battle the way snowfall deadens sound.

Sorscha walked through a gallery of frozen statues. An aura of killing cold stretched out from her, rendering everything to brittle ice.

She cut down those who tried to flee with the wrath of winter, letting their shattered corpses fall in glittering fragments of ice.

Beast trailed behind her, pulverizing frozen bodies beneath its tread. Together, the pair advanced on Sorscha’s target. The only thing on the battlefield she cared about. The willowy infernal creature that had earned her wrath.

***

Our enemies are twofold, the Harbinger prayed as she neared the gate. Menoth, grant me power to do what must be done to the first and your soldiers strength to defeat the second.

Menoth was with her, she knew. The gate would fall, and souls about to be lost would be saved.

But she did not react quickly enough to the will and warning of the Creator. Her very being trembled to receive the glory of Menoth, but she could not heed the admonition in time.

A claw slashed across her face, and her blindfold fell away.

***

The gate is ours, Omodamos conveyed to the other masters. The Guardian rises. The end is upon us.

And yet souls still defied him. A man encased in armor, a small soul in an enormous machine. A warwitch more dead than alive. And the one who had died twice already.

And somewhere still was that time witch. But first, these three.

He tore free from the shadows they had set against him, pleased by their surprise, and struck at the warwitch and the lich to take their souls at last.

He was not prepared to be surprised himself.

***

He stoked his armor’s boiler until his skin blistered. Treading through a mire of mud, blood, and corpses, Karchev slammed his full weight into the Black Gate.

The impact sent them both flying into lesser infernals and soldiers, their combined mass flattening bodies.

Grappling the infernal with his steam-powered fist, Karchev hacked at its masked head. Sunder rose and fell, dripping with its corrupted blood.

Karchev kept chopping.

He poured every ounce of his rage into the attacks until his axe buried itself deep into the soil.

Gasping, Karchev struggled to his feet and stumbled back.

The infernal’s broken, bleeding head began to coalesce.

Power built within the warcaster, swelling with his rage. An eruption of arcane power exploded with his frustrated scream.

“Why won’t you stay dead?”

***

Karchev is done, Asphyxious scoffed. Count not on Khador to do what Cryx does better.

But as the infernal master before him turned the land black and the air dark, Asphyxious thought, I did not gain this new form to surrender it to the likes of thee.

Beyond the gate, he knew, waited mortals in need of his rule. Let the others remain on this side, fighting an never-ending chain of infernalists and infernal masters. In fact, if the gate could be destroyed from beyond…

He turned, and there stood Deneghra.

“If you want to be a god to rule men,” she hissed, “do it here. Flee, and you leave it to Menoth, Morrow, Cyriss, or that.”

She indicated the infernal master.

“All will obey you, and all will loathe you. Except me. Would you betray my loyalty by leaving Caen behind?”

What do thee know of gods? Asphyxious thought bitterly, but he turned back to the battle against the infernal master.

***

Aurora stood between the rippling tides of the gate and the imperious infernal. Her spear felt feeble and ineffective against this… this thing. But she would die to keep it back even a moment longer.

The Weaver of Shadows reached out to her, foul runes forming as she evoked a spell of darkness.

A trio of lightning strikes flashed, rocking the infernal back as they struck.

Exponent servitors swarmed it, scorching its flesh with their aperture beams.

On either side of Aurora, her mother and father joined her. Both their bodies were battered, but they attacked without hesitation.

***

Krueger directed the fury of Orboros against the infernals, calling down a field of lightning that banished their unnatural shadows in flashes of blue-white brilliance. His woldwardens smote the infernal beasts with their massive rune-covered fists.

Piece by piece, the Stormlord began to disassemble the formations of the infernal army’s back ranks, destroying their commanders and casting the rest into disorder.

He could feel the world stir. He had caught the attention of natural chaos.

From the bones of the earth, two figures rose. Twin archons of primal power.

***

The Voice in the Darkness fled. From shadow to shadow, they crossed the world. They could feel the mortals sniffing on their trail.

I must find help, Agathon thought.

On the western coast, Agathon could sense the eminence of Zaateroth and the Black Gate and a profundity of souls. If they could reach them, there would be enough to regain strength, to summon an army. Enough to destroy those who came so close to destroying them.

They had to be swift. Agathon’s pursuers drew ever closer.

***

On Baldwin Gearhart’s back, Mr. Clogg moved.

Gearhart initially refused to believe it was so — it must have been a death rattle from his manservant’s lifeless lungs. Or perhaps it was just the body shifting in the harness he had fashioned.

But then Clogg moved again.

As quickly as possible, Gearhart lowered him, swallowing the glee that rose in his chest. Best not to give the old boy too much ego boosting for surviving.

“I say, Clogg old boy,” he said gruffly, “would it be asking too much for you to stand on your own two — ?”

Clogg was enveloped in a sickly yellow glow that spit tendrils of green. All around the two of them, others pulsed with the same light, struggling to their feet despite horrific injuries or obvious death blows.

“Here now, Clogg,” he whispered. “What’s all this, then?”

Even if Clogg had been alive to answer, Gearhart would not have known what the word meant.

Witchfire.

***

From the dying horse, the Guardian took strength, stamina, and the shriek of its voice.

Clawing its way up from the pit, it spread tendrils across the battlefield. Flowing over and into nearby corpses, it absorbed the spirits of dying warriors: their memories, their fears.

The Guardian’s shape began to form.

There was so much glowing essence here — more than it could have wished.

From the floundering spark of the wounded down to the pinprick lights of single cells, this realm contained multitudes. The Guardian welcomed every mote of life into its darkened form.

But what form? It flowed over a scuttling insect and toyed with many legs, with an armored shell. It threaded a piece of itself through the collapsing lungs of a man’s crushed torso, enjoying the arc of ribs and flesh of his organs.

The Guardian felt the tug of its reins toward the Weaver, the one called Zaateroth. She would guide its actions.

But she would not dictate its form.

Spreading like a slow tide, the Guardian picked over the terrors of dying men and women. Across its inky surface, it played with the faces of their loved ones and orphaned children.

No, these would not do.

The Guardian flowed from one shape to the next, but none of them suited its purpose. No horror these mortals could fathom could contain its power for long.

The Guardian paused, flowing from every crack and crevice of shadow, out of every split skull and dead man’s mouth. Cyclonic in form, it coalesced in the heart of the fighting, drinking in the whispering spirits of the dead and the fragile touch of the light.

If I cannot be one thing, then I shall be them all, it thought. The thought pleased the Guardian.

It informed Zaateroth it was ready.

***

There is a world beyond Everblight, Saeryn had said, where he is not welcome.

Rhyas was conflicted. Her sister knew they were in disfavor with the dragon for past indiscretions, so a world without him may be one to conquer. Or one to flee to.

Rhyas would not flee.

They stood hip-deep in bodies both dead and dying, allies and enemies, infernals and not. The gate was so close, Saeryn could hurl her spear through it, were she so foolish.

And Rhyas thought she could be. Her sister, the Omen of Everblight, was shaded by doubt now.

They were long separated from the gatormen they had arrived with. Saeryn had guided them on a bloody path to within striking distance of the gate, and Rhyas did not challenge her. Still, she wondered if that part of her sister she could not read was now leading them.

“The Messiah will come,” Saeryn said to her.

Rhyas said, “He is no longer one with us.”

Saeryn pointed with the tip of her spear at the gate. “Still, he cannot resist this for the same reasons I cannot.”

Rhyas was about to ask why when Saeryn raced for the gate.

She was briefly lost in the waves of refugees fleeing, her spear high enough that Rhyas could still track her. But she was blighted and she was Nyss — the refugees scattered from her proximity, and Rhyas watched her sister cast aside the spear as the reached the gate.

It was a betrayal of Everblight, and not one that would be misconstrued, as had been their acts at the end of the Great Hunt.

This was abandonment.

As Saeryn passed through the gate, a great light enveloped her. Running, Rhyas reached down for her sister’s spear.

There was a sound like the gate taking a great breath, and then a flash. Refugees cried out, scattering, momentarily deafened and blinded. Rhyas could still see where Saeryn had vanished, but worse, she could see the bloodied shard left behind in her sister’s wake.

Saeryn’s athanc. Her piece of the dragon.

The blood and flesh on it spoke to how violently it had been ripped from her body.

Rhyas picked it up, her hand trembling. Refugees gave her a wide berth as they continued to flee through that gate that had consumed her sister.

Rhyas, Sigil of Everlight, one of the Talons of the dragon, clutched her sister’s athanc to her chest.

She wailed.

***

There is not much of the scroll left to decipher. Beyond this, my ability to tell what it truly is from what might be wanes. Still, as they come to this place where I, too, will make a last stand, fine lines etch themselves anew into the scroll.

There will be more to tell.

I do not need to see the twisted runes to know death is coming for many. Yet those twisted runes come just the same. And soon enough, despite my reservations, I will read and transcribe those runes. While I live.

But will there be anyone alive to hear me?

The battlefield that was once my home is now littered with the soulless, both moving and still. Great enemies ally to face even greater enemies. I see them all, even from where I approach the henge. And they see me. Some of them, far more powerful than I, are coming for me.

I have done all I can for the world. It has not done all it can for me, but these are the prices one pays to know what I know.

I should be afraid right now. They approach with fury in their eyes.

But I am tired. And I am uncertain if I —

—

TO BE CONTINUED

***

He perched on the deck of the Coiled Serpent. She was an elegant ship, fine as a rare wine. Around him, the crew pulled on ropes and trimmed sheets. Doing sailor stuff, he presumed.

He never pretended to be a sailor. His skills were in a far different field.

He busied himself by cleaning his guns. That was something he understood. A good, oiled gun was reliable, the way he was confident the captain of the ship thought her vessel was. Take care of your tools, and they’ll take care of you.

One of the officers threaded her way through the crew. She stood, no, she hovered near him, looking for an excuse to strike up a conversation.

“I heard that you — ”

“You heard wrong,” Caine muttered.

The Satyxis tripped over her tongue. He didn’t intend to be brusque, but he tired of rumors and speculation. Stories about him seemed to gather like flies on dung.

Caine changed tack. “I’ve heard,” he stressed, “that there were three of those things. One’s gone missing.”

The Satyxis nodded, her horns threatening to knock in his skull. “Aye. The worst two are at the hold, so the scrying says.”

Caine grunted. “Put some cat blood in a bowl and call it a day, did yeh? Damn scrying. Takes all the fun out of a fight.”

She puzzled at him as he lifted one pistol and then the next, squinting down the barrel to check the polish of his front sights.

“The two there match any warrior in skill. So says the hag.”

“I bet,” Cain replied. He fished for a file to hone a dull spot out of his sight.

“Our admiral has agreed to help you,” she pressed, “but you haven’t shared your planning with her.”

Caine fought a smile. “Ravenmane knows better. My plan is pretty cut and dry.”

The Satyxis stood there, chewing her lip. Caine watched her curiosity override her discretion.

“So what do you plan to do?” she asked.

Caine shrugged. “Two infernals. Two guns. I figure I’ll start shooting, and I won’t stop until one of us is dead.” He looked east, to the growing line of Immoren’s shore. “After all, it’s worked so far.”

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