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Something he’d been able to shed with Orpheus at his side.

Orpheus.

Where was Orpheus?

“Everyone, get to the lake!” he hollered over the cacophony.

What the crowd could not hear, the guards as his back could. Soldiers charged into the crowd, an echo of Fenrir’s words shouted into the mist.

“You too, sir!”

From the tatters of his once-blue herald, Farris took the stage. His hands shook, his grip closing over Fenrir’s bicep, the tug on his blood-soaked shirt weak with a fear neither of them had faced since those long years spent on Lore’s front lines.

“Where’s Red?” Fenrir snapped instead of screaming: Where’s Orpheus?

“Safe, last I saw her. Sent some men for some tools to dismantle the fence and cut through the tents.”

“Good,” Fenrir breathed. “We need to get everyone into the lake. It’s the dust. It’s explosive. The water will protect them.”

Farris nodded, eyes firm on his. “I’ll help get everyone there.”

“I—” Fenrir swallowed, words catching in his throat, eyes slipping out over the crowd and towards the swell of hills and the clouded danger they hid. “Orpheus is out there. I have to find him.”

“I understand—”

“Fenrir!”

From the screaming rose a familiar shout.

Red.

“What the fuck is going on?” Fear broke her voice, cracking with the weight of a reality they’d both thought they’d finally left behind. Fenrir hauled her close as the shriek of metal on metal drowned out the screaming crowd, and if Fenrir turned he knew he’d see the fence coming undone beneath the power of Red’s electricity-powered tools.

Instead, he dragged Red into a hug.

“Good thinking,” he said into her cropped hair. “You’re okay,” came out so much softer.

“Fenrir, what is this?”

“We’re under attack. It’s the dust.”

“But how?” Red shoved away looking first at the crowd, then Fenrir, horror flooding her eyes. “Is it magic?”

I don’t know. But the one person who could say for sure was Orpheus.

“Orpheus will know. I need to find him. Get everyone—”

“Fenrir Rawkner!” Red snarled, tears smearing soot across her cheeks, eyes aflame with so much more than fear. “There’s a whole Empire of people you just promised to protect and you’re going to run off after one man?”

If the world hadn’t already erupted into chaos, that would have done it.

“But it’s—”

“Sparks, I know, and he’s probably holed up somewhere a hell of a lot safer than we are on this stage—”

“Sirs,” Farris cut in, voice shaking, “Is that—”

Fenrir spun towards the crowd and his blood went cold.