***Chris Campbell***

“Cold as a witches tit,” Chris complained, rubbing his hands together. Far enough south, and the enormous trees gradually shrank as the sunlight simply wasn’t enough to sustain them. His tools for starting the fire were frosted over, waiting for him to finish warming up his fingers.

At least Martha will appreciate that I’ve lost that weight she’s always on me to lose.

He was down maybe fifty pounds. He felt terrible, and thirty years younger. It was a complicated sensation.

“Here,” Hannah said, crouching beside him. A flame sprouted on her finger as she held it into the pile of wood, lighting the pile of tinder in seconds.

“That’s a different power,” Chris said, pointing. “You can make water too. I thought people only have one power.”

“Hmm, they do.” Hannah said, sticking her hand into a pot of water and bringing it up to boiling before throwing bits of dried meat and grains into it to make a simple gruel.

“And?”

“I’m a Kulesh, one of Honnekun’s subordinate families. Minor nobility.” She acted like that explained everything.

“And?”

“We’re more commonly called the Scarred.” She said. “Anything that leaves a mark on our bodies, we can replicate and control to an extent.”

She rolled up her sleeve, and Chris’s jaw dropped at she sheer quantity of scar tissue on display.

“That’s horrible.” He whispered.

Chris could only imagine the amount of suffering the young woman had been subjected to as a child.

“You know the honnuken are healers, right? They can dull sensations and prevent infection. It was really no big deal.”

“Oh.”

“Although, it’s a common belief in my family that if you can feel the pain, it makes the bond stronger.” She whispered conspiratorily. “I got most of these when I was younger with help from a Honnuken, but this one…”

She briefly tugged down her collar, showing him a puckered wound on her breastbone.

“This one I got all by myself, and it’s strong.”

She pointed at a nearby tree.

CRACK!

There was a concussive explosion, and the tree shattered.

“That was a bullet!” where did she get a bullet wound!?

“I was on the expedition that brought you back, silly.” She said. “You probably couldn’t see my face.”

She motioned to her face, pantomiming lowering a helmet’s visor.

“So your people are like – whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?”

“Oh, that’s an eloquent way of putting it. Mind If I steal it?”

“So let me get this straight,” Chris asked, glancing at the gold tattoos Grant had presumably put around Hannah’s ears so she could act as his translator.

“You work for the Honnuken.”

“Uhuh.”

“The Honnuken work for Kinzena.”

“Uhuh.”

“Kinzena and En’hul are major rivals.”

“Yeah?”

“So how did Grant En’hul get you on the expedition? He’s like you’re boss’s boss’s enemy’s nephew.”

Chris motioned to the dozen or so scouts he was on the road with.

“Eh, at the low levels like me, they don’t really care that much what you’re doing in the day-to-day. This is more mercenary work than anything else. If I’m drafted, I’ll go to the side I’m supposed to, but if we’re not directly at war…a job’s a job.”

“A job’s a job, huh,” Chris could understand that. People did what they had to do and moral sophistry was for those who could afford it. “Fair enough.”

Hannah sat down by the fire and the two of them shared gruel in companionable silence. “So where did Grant learn how to do that?” Chris asked, pointing at his ears. After a few decades working as a detective, he found it difficult to shut off the nosy questions.

“He didn’t say. Why?”

“I don’t see anyone else walking around with them.”

Why would Grant give her magical translating tattoos and not Chris? The pessimist in him believed it was because without being able to speak the language, Chris was essentially hobbled, unable to flee very far or receive aid from the local people.

The optimist agreed.

He just found it frustrating as hell because if he was going to investigate this ‘Endless’ person, he would need to be able to have smooth back and forth communication. But no. he was basically hobbled.

He’d made it a point to try and learn the language from the other scouts, but it was slow going. It was mentally easier to let Hannah translate everything for him.

Chris leaned back up against his garruk which was sleeping on the hoary ground behind him as he ate. He nearly sank into the thick wooly hair of the cold-weather ATV.

A garruk was your ride, your space heater, your partner in the frozen southern lands. Chris and his steed had reached an understanding after the first week. Chris would reach out and snag the tips of branches, where the buds would form next summer, then add them to the creature’s feed.

In return, it would stay on task longer and provide extra shelter during the day. It was an arrangement that benefitted both of them.

“So how much further to Hortz?” Chris winced as he sounded like one of those ‘are we there yet’ children to his own ears.

“Not far.” Hannah said, pointing at a faint glow just above the horizon. “We’ll most likely get there tomorrow.” Hortz was, according to Chris’s briefing, where the rebellion the future-readers couldn’t seem to snuff out was brewing.

Even if I figure out the problem immediately, I still got the ride home to think look forward to. Chris thought with a frown. He wasn’t looking forward to it, but going back north would mean it would gradually grow warmer.

***The Next Day***

“Doesn’t look like rebel country.” Hannah muttered, glancing around at the frightened villagers who watched the dozen scouts ride their furry mounts into the center of town.

“To be fair, they wouldn’t want to look like rebels.” Chris said, glancing around, taking in the details. A couple thing stood out. Everyone seemed to be well-fed. They were swaddled up in thick clothes, of course, but they had a vivacity to their frightened steps that hadn’t really been common back in the previous villages they’d passed through. And their cheeks were just a bit more full, more flushed.

Hmm… how did a village this far south have more food than the farming communities with better weather far north of them? Was it supplies from the government? Chris once again lamented the lack of the internet as he squirreled away his list of nosey questions, dismounting his garruk.

The villager’s clothes looked fresh and he couldn’t see any damage on any of them, save a bit of dirt and snow acquired in the last hour or so on the children. It was as if they took them straight off of store shelves that very morning.

Or the loom, in this case, I suppose?

Their chimneys belched smoke. Nearly every single one of them, rather than bank the fire until nighttime when everyone got home from their chores.

“Something’s odd, but I can’t put my finger on it,” Hannah said.

“These people are too well-supplied.” He said, eyes narrowed. It was like finding a trailer park full of people wearing brand-name clothes fresh off the rack. It just didn’t happen. “There’s definitely something weird going on.”

The mayor of Holtz arrived to speak with them.

He? – Was maybe six two, slender, and effeminate as hell. If it weren’t for the height, Chris would have put him in the ‘shorty’ category and assumed a vagina. As it was…Chris was still a little uncertain.

There was no beard to speak of, but ‘he’ did have a bit of an adam’s apple, which was a large portion of what Chris was basing his penis presence assumption on.

“Oh, man, he’s pretty,” Hannah whispered to Chris as the leader of their scouting party spoke to the mayor. “I’d like for him to leave some scar tissue on me if you know what I’m saying.”

Chris glanced at Debbie Mk. II, then shook his head, wondering why he always got paired with the crazy ones. Did he just look too tolerant?

Chris saw movement out of the corner of his eye and focused on it. A child walked up to a nearby soldier and offered him a snowball.

He glanced up and saw that the adults had all faded away.

A flash of memory from Iraq lit up Chris’s brain like a roman candle. A child offering a friend a carved wooden soldier.

On instinct, Chris turned and grabbed Hannah, dragging the Alia to the ground.

“Chris what – “

BOOM!

Hot wet chunks of their former team blew past them, spattering Chris’s face with liquid.

Chris opened a single eye and peered out into the frozen village.

The mayor was standing in the center of the clearing, unharmed. With a gesture, the child-bomber blinked into existence, stared at the carnage for a moment, then turned and ran away.

What the-

I don’t think that’s the mayor of Holtz, Chris thought as Hannah pushed him off of her.

“You son of a whore!” she said, pointing at the mayor.

BLAM!

A red spot bloomed on the ‘mayor’s’ clothes as the .223 round went through the man’s chest. He glanced down at the wound, seemingly bemused.

With a dismissive wave, Hannah vanished, along with the wound in the man’s chest.

Chris laid very, very still. That’s what the rest of the scouts were doing, and none of them had been straight up vanished. To be fair, they were corpses, but their strategy seemed to be paying off.

A man ran out of a building, shouting at the top of his lungs, while holding the child bomber above his head. The wide-eyed fervor in his face made Chris think of a zealot who’d witnessed divine inspiration.

Goddamnit why couldn’t I have gotten the tattoo!?

But, Chris knew the words, ‘the’, ‘time’, ‘is’, and ‘now’, and when they were strung together in that particular order by someone carrying a child bomber above their heads, the message is pretty clear: Shit’s about to go down.

The mayor got on top of a literal wooden box and began an imprompteu speech, rhythmic and repetitious, making the surrounding civilians cluster close together like the heat of a bonfire had bloomed in the center of the snow-dusted village.

The slender man on the makeshift stage glanced over at Chris’s ‘Corpse’.

He winked.

Chris felt the hot blood freezing against his cheek.

***Vendrith Kinzena***

“You weren’t there during the retaking of the Dinamor Stretch,” Vendrith said as his massive ring of soldiers linked hands. “You didn’t witness what the Ku’leth were capable of.”

Raze stood with his hands clasped loose behind his back, not deigning to interrupt his father’s speech. He actually found that silence more irritating.

Vendrith reached inside that ancient well of power in his chest, his heart beating heavily as he took the weight of a thousand men in full armor on his shoulders.

Now.

He plucked a note on the weave of reality, shifted their chords until they matched the position he wanted them to be. Teleportation was a demanding art, and only the best Kinzena could do it. Suffice to say Vendrith was the best.

He was the Omnipresent. Everywhere and nowhere.

The sun flickered to the south as they traveled hundreds of miles in the blink of an eye, a thunderbolt from a clear sky. A tactic only the Kinzena could perform.

A village full of savages appeared in front of them in the blink of an eye.

“Close in!” Vendrith shouted. “Kill the warriors, but leave the old, women and children, we need hostages and we need information!”

Scarred casters closed in, protected by vith-blooded knights in a living wall that gradually pressed inward on the hapless stone-hurlers.

A spear of solid iron hissed through the air beside Vendrith and caught a vith-blooded knight, picking him up and pinning him to the Scarred behind him.

Vendrith’s eyes narrowed. This is why Ku’leth need to be stamped out.

“That building there!” He shouted, pointing at the wooden colossus belching smoke into the atmosphere. “Burn it down!”

Undead came pouring out of the ironworks, rotting bodies wielding hammers and in one case a length of red-hot steel, defending their work with their lives.

They were disposed of in short order. A Bloodmage captain sliced the undead apart with contemptuous ease.

Vendrith counted six, but undead were like vermin. There were always more. Always more. The campaign against the Ku’lth had proved that. That single family had very nearly pushed back the combined might of all the Alia of Deraan.

“Burn it down!” he repeated as the common flame Alia stepped forward and subjected the building to a wave of fire.

The encirclement had become tight enough that small groups of vith-blooded knights were able to break away from the line and push inwards, pulling women out of their huts before putting them to the torch.

Wherever the one with the Ku’leth knowledge was, they would find them. We are going to wipe this entire village off the map, but not before we find out who else knows about the Ku’leth. If the knowledge spread, it must be contained.

Vendrith was watching with satisfaction as hut after hut was emptied of its inhabitants.

Thank the gods, we caught it in time.

Kuleth knowledge was an unnatural cancer that if unchecked could rapidly spiral out of control.

In the distance a soldier whipped open the leather door of one of the larger huts and disappeared into the darkness.

A moment later a mangled corpse was jettisoned outward, riding on a wave of grey insects the size of a man’s fist that poured out of the hut like water from a dam, far more than such a building could ever hope to house.