The holding room was a civilian bunker built of brick and iron, its floor covered in pale panels of wood. Blair almost thought it could have been a school if not for the lack of windows and low ceilings.

Their guards had left them alone several minutes ago when the Kyeilans commenced their assault on Corvid. With their war oath bindings, they wouldn’t pose a risk even with the guards gone; the only real effect was that none of them would be able to leave the room to use the bathroom.

Suddenly, the door to the bunker blasted inward.

“We’ve come to rescue you,” a man declared, his form draped in black cloth. He pulled down the mask covering his mouth to reveal the face of Mikael Juruba...otherwise known by the name Fatebreaker. The Remorse and End practitioner had a noble bearing, his posture immaculate, his brow furrowed in righteous anger.

How does his hair stay so perfect? Blair wondered absently. Hairspray?

Juruba turned his face to Blair, his eyes narrowing. “What did they do to her?”

“She’s been a bit...off since the city fell,” Coronus Kiehl muttered irritably, slouching against the wall, his Death-ravaged arm cradled against his chest.

“I can hear you, you know,” Blair murmured.

Coronus Byrrh sighed and rubbed at an eye. “This isn’t the time. Fatebreaker, what brings you here?”

“I’m here to break your war oaths,” he stated, narrowing his eyes further, as though trying to decide if they were all crazy. “I’m breaking yours first, Splinterflame, unless you have any objections. We’re going to get you out of here and back to Kyeila.”

Coronus Byrrh shook his head. “You can try, but they’re powerful oaths: The Crowned Prime prepared them himself. Will you be able to break them all now?”

As a peak End practitioner, Juruba would probably be able to break at least one war oath, but shattering powerful oaths was exhausting.

“I’d be able to tell you if I could still look into the future,” Blair sighed. “But...I can’t.” The war oath prevented any use of her practice.

“You should break Corona Blair’s oath first,” Byrrh stated. “One elementalist is of little help in the grand scheme of things, but a Regret practitioner is always valuable.”

Juruba nodded his head and gave Blair a once-over. “I’m not convinced she’s in her right mind, Splinterflame. I don’t need to look at anything more than the emotions bubbling up on the surface of her mind to see that she’s...well.”

Blair snorted. “I’m fine, Fatebreaker. I simply think what you’re doing here is futile: Corvid’s a lost cause.”

“Because of Dunai?” Juruba sneered. “We have a slew of countermeasures.”

“With all due respect, you’re underestimating the Skai’aren,” Byrrh interjected, his face stoic, his body interposing protectively in front of his subordinate. “Did you know that he circumvented Kiehl’s mental assault, then survived a blast of my empowered flames?”

“Well–”

“I destroyed his heart,” Byrrh continued, his eyes wide with indignation. “A hole the size of my fist drilled all the way through his chest. He didn’t even...” The coronus trailed off, shaking his head. “I know you think little of us, letting our city fall to the SPU. You think that we’re the weak link. But Mikael...We coronuses have been fighting the SPU for most of our lives. Believe me when I tell you that the Skai’aren is the most formidable practitioner I’ve ever met.”

Juruba’s expression softened somewhat. “Apologies if I came off as flippant. I’ve relayed what you just told me to General Zimmerman–we’ll tread carefully.” He walked over to Blair. “We’ve already wasted too much time: The soldiers I incapacitated will be noticed soon. Corona, are you prepared for me to break your oath?”

Blair held up her wrists. The white shackles glimmered with circling inscriptions, a solid manifestation of the oath. If she didn’t actively think about the shackles, they’d fade away, allowing her to have full range of movement; but if she tried to use her practice or leave the holding room unescorted, they’d return and engulf her entire body in terrible pain.

“Yes; thank you, Fatebreaker,” Blair said, her voice meek.

Suddenly she was beyond herself, Juruba seizing her consciousness. She didn’t know much about the practitioner, only that he used an unconventional combination of Remorse and End to break oaths.

She found herself once more in the command room, though she was alone, her face pressed up against Coronus Byrrh’s scope. She watched her own movements from above as a phantom spectator.

The scene zoomed out past the walls of the observation tower, revealing the surrounding city...and a black comet. Oily, flame-like tendrils grasped hungrily at the air as the darkness careened toward Corvid’s center. The comet exploded into the ground on impact, shattering the rustic cobblestones and sending people flying. They only moved a few feet before they stopped, suspended in air. Everyone else was similarly frozen, their eyes swiveling frantically in their sockets.

No! Blair thought, struggling against whatever Juruba was doing. She didn’t want to see, but she couldn’t look away, her vision untethered from any physical body.

The people unfroze, their bodies collapsing bonelessly to the ground. A toddler’s head cracked open on a shattered brick, a small trickle of blood pooling out; her eyes were red and frenzied, though her lips were still curled into a carefree smile.

These were the people she had sworn to protect...and Dunai killed them so easily, so ruthlessly, sparing no one. Sure, Dunai never killed anyone in reality, but he didn’t so much as hesitate when he culled the city’s regulars. There was no remorse, no pity, only unflinching indifference.

But that wasn’t the end. The bodies began to rise and shudder, their flesh convulsing. Dunai grunted and the corpses shambled forward, alarmingly agile as they tore down the city streets. Periodically some of them would fall to the ground writhing, only to have their bodies come together to form a new monstrosity.

Dunai walked forward in their wake, his steps unhurried. Coronus Byrrh and Dalar were back in view; Byrrh readied another ball of fire, while Dalar’s black and white shield dropped like a guillotine over the city, cutting Dunai off.

Prince Ko’la and General Var’dun’a appeared out of thin air, shedding their invisibility to pincer Byrrh. Dunai stepped forward and placed a tentative hand over Dalar’s shield, but the shield began to contract inward, forcing him to skip back.

Dunai’s companion-mode glosSword flew forth, its beak filling with intermixing cyan and black light. When the glosSword companion released its charge, Dunai punched outward, sending a pitch black morass of energy to follow up the blast. Like earlier, the sword’s payload shattered the barrier, carving a small hole the size of a human skull.

Dunai’s inky fist expanded out in plumes of howling faces, as though the decemancer had weaponized the ghosts of the fallen. While Blair knew that even Dunai wouldn’t risk using necromancy in the open, the display filled her with revulsion. The phantoms clawed out and began to tear ferociously at the small hole, chipping away at shard after shard of black-white light. Dalar grunted and twisted the shield, its surface melting and re-solidifying to form an unbroken whole, the phantoms dispersing.

With a flash of light, the scene vanished, leaving Blair with the image of Dunai’s lips curving into a small, bitter smile. She found herself back in the holding room, the ceiling lights causing spots to appear in her vision.

“You’re free,” Juruba stated, his mouth curved into a frown. Blair thought he looked weary, though didn’t yet seem tired.

“Did you see?” Blair asked.

The man blinked. “I...saw.”

Byrrh turned toward Blair, then back to Juruba. “Care to explain yourselves?”

“When I shattered the corona’s oath, I saw the memory of her defeat, when her heart truly admitted surrender.” He sighed. “I saw the Skai’aren kill everyone in the central district.”

Byrrh took in a deep breath. “Given what you saw...do you think General Zimmerman intends to alter her plans?”

Juruba snorted, his lips thinning into a line. “No: We’ve invested too much in this offensive.” He walked over to Byrrh, motioning for the coronus to hold up his hands. “Regardless of the outcome of the battle, freeing half of Godora’s coronuses is no small victory.”

Blair shook her head, but didn’t offer any response. That’s assuming we escape.

—

Ian raced above the city to the second front, the Illyrian ocean glimmering behind the Corvid’s skyline. As the wyrm began its descent, Por’sha’s voice called out.

“Dunai! Drop the Deathseed off here, but then you need to go.”

Ian scowled. “Go where?”

“Wolfien says that we’ve detected another group of hostiles coming in on the water. They’re going to arrive in just a few minutes.”

“Who else will be coming to the oceanside front?” Ian asked.

“We’re stretched as it is...the Kyeilans have brought some of their best, not to mention we’ve been dealing with more bears and wasps.”

“...” Ian wasn’t sure if he was understanding Por’sha correctly.

He heard her sigh in his ear. “We need you to hold that front alone. We know you can handle it.”

Ian blinked. The high war council had already discussed the need for him to serve as a game-changer on certain theaters of war, but holding an entire front literally on his own...he hadn’t considered that an option. The council always considered synergy in their plans; Ian taking Corvid, for instance, was a strike buoyed by excellent coordination between the entire blitz team.

Honestly...it might be easier this way.

“Understood.”

“Good luck Dunai. You won’t need it.”

As the wyrm approached the northern front, he began to hear the cacophony of conflict, a mish-mash of weaponized elemental attacks and bear bellows. As the battlefield came into view, he could hear the humming drone of wasps and smell a billow of acrid smoke.

As they descended onto the ground, the wyrm coiled around itself, mimicking its defensive form during the duel with the Breaker. Energy churned over its length, blazing oily black and electric violet.

Ian’s grip extended out over everyone nearby; he swept friend and foe alike away, carving out a space to deposit the army of constructs trailing behind the wyrm. The scene was like something out of a nightmare, hundreds of bone and flesh abominations in all shapes and sizes falling from the sky and landing softly on the grass. Meanwhile, the Deathseed quietly affixed itself onto a pile of two bodies, its girth pulsing like a stomach undergoing peristalsis.

The people in Ian’s hold squirmed as the constructs bounded forth to gather the fallen and attack the living beyond his grasp. The constructs would attack friend and foe alike, but the SPU practitioners had orders to retreat and assemble when the constructs came into the fray, leaving the most powerful practitioners to deal with Kyeila’s elite. If Por’sha told him to deliver the constructs, he figured she’d already begun orchestrating the movements of their troops to take a defensive position within Corvid’s walls.

Ian considered the people that he’d incapacitated. Unlike before where the captives were half-dressed SPU soldiers, the men on the field wore the uniforms of their respective nations. The color difference wasn’t too helpful in the dark, but the SPU uniforms each bore a small soul gem stud within the left chest pocket, allowing Ian to differentiate between friend and foe.

I suppose...this is it, Ian thought, his gaze grim. Wincing, he tore apart the brain of every enemy Kyeilan in his grasp, then released his hold. The SPU soldiers dropped to their feet while the Kyeilans tumbled to the dewy ground.

Sighing, he turned around, the wyrm uncoiling and lifting off the ground again, leaving almost as soon as it arrived. As the construct hurtled into the air, a bolt of searing flames toasted it, fire licking over its torso. A moment later, a bolt of energy pierced through the smog, nailing the fire elementalist assailant.

Bluebird returned to Ian’s shoulder, its wings flexing in pride. Got the baddie!

Ian snorted and gave the bird a rub on its chest. You did; nice work.

Ian didn’t receive any more attacks as he navigated toward the eastern side of the city, only knowing to go in the vague direction of the ocean. I figure I’ll see intruders soon enough. The time for subtlety was over.