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He cleaves through the guards with little effort, Anya scrambling to keep up and then remaining behind, head whipping around as if seeing the battlefield for the first time. Fenrir thinks it’s horror he catches on her face, but war is bloody, and he knows now the rumors are true. Empress Lore has come for them.

“My Lady,” he breathes when the last guard has fallen, the mud beneath Fenrir’s knee red with blood.

“Soldier,” Lore says, voice even. “I need your help.”

He follows her at a loping run towards the opposite hill despite Anya’s shouts to wait for her.

“I’ll be back!” Fenrir cries, charging up the incline on Lore’s heels.

Before them, a much larger battle rages. From the edge of the forest through the muddy remains of the mine’s shanty barracks, pockets of soldiers engage the company’s guards. Fenrir can already see which way the tide is flowing, Empress Lore’s soldiers a brutal force to contend with, particularly the group positioned east where a small wedge of white-cloaked fighters hold ground against the largest wave of guards. They fight better than the rest. Coordinated. Calculating. They slice through the guards with a skill that makes the rest of the battleground look like a mess, and Fenrir takes an involuntary step towards them, intending to run to their aid so he can learn from the best.

“Soldier,” Empress Lore says again. “What is your name?”

Fenrir freezes, boot slipping in the mud before he fights every instinct inside him and turns towards Lore.

“It’s Fenrir,” he breathes. “Fenrir Rawkner of the Rim.”

“Fenrir, I need your help.” Lore raises her sword and points at the white cloaks. “That woman has betrayed me and I want her dead.”

Dead?

Something strange tickles at Fenrir’s subconscious. A question he can’t put words to but won’t leave him alone all the same.

“She’s not on your side?”

Lore does not answer, and Fenrir realizes, suddenly, that this is a test.

The mine had taught him to question his superiors, but an army like this? There is a chain of command, or death.

Fenrir swings back around and charges down the hill.

Guards fall to his sword before he reaches the white cloaks, their stern faces going strange when Fenrir leaps into their ranks and cleaves through their shields. The woman is stronger, his sword shattering on hers when she brings the silvery blade up to parry him, but his brute strength cannot be matched, and if she looks a bit like his mother with her blonde hair and Rim-pale eyes, well, it just makes it a little easier to punch the cracked blade into her chest.

When it’s over, bodies litter the churned-up mud around him, the woman at its center staring up at the clouds with eyes the color of the sky, her arm outstretched, silvery blade abandoned in the muck.

Fenrir swallows down a strange inexplicable sickness and trades his broken blade for hers.

Behind him, a man screams.

“Go, tell them. Pass along the warning.”

A young man with a bloody gash across his face stumbles past Fenrir, white cloak stained red where he bleeds from wounds unseen. He meets Fenrir’s eyes briefly, the terror he expects absent, replaced instead with a furious hate, and Fenrir resists the instinct to chase when the white cloak takes off over the hillside, held in place by a singular command.

“Kneel, Fenrir Rawkner, and welcome to the Empire.”

Epilogue

Moonlight painted Sanctuary in pale sweeps, her scars limned silver, her violet wounds left unstitched.

The night was cool despite the late summer sun that set on the Deadland’s horizon, the city still awake, the hammer of tools and whine of saws replaced by a quiet nightsong meant for another world. A different place. Orpheus ignored it, taking the stairs one by one, an incendiary beetle trundling along in his wake.

Pincers snagged his robe and held on, and he paused to nudge it loose with the tip of his cane. Gossamer wings fluttered, its flame sparking and catching and then simmering down to a tiny flicker, pincers clicking like it had a question to ask, rather than a hunger to feed.

I’ve got nothing for you, friend, he thought, hooking a finger into his collar and turning away. Down into Sanctuary’s bowels he descended, moonlight traded for Netherflame lanterns with the turn of the next corner, nightsong for the rustle of mechanical wings fluttering overhead. The missives had grown more numerous in the last few days, communication with the Gilded Palace now a steady back and forth via the relay station Red had set up midway through the Rim. The tower would take another week to complete, but the sigils were set. The magic cast. The conduit run. Soon, the two-day delay would turn into two seconds, but he would be far away by then. Somewhere no tower could be built, no antenna could reach, no satellite could find.

But magic could.

“There you are,” breathed out from the shadows.