Halcyn raised his arms and metal thorns exploded from the walls. The cannons fired.

Blue energy shattered the sixth floor.

The shots blasted through the first layer of thorns. It shredded metal with a deafening shriek. It splintered the second layer, snapped through the third, and the heat that came after melted through the fourth. The remnant energy scorched Halcyn’s skin, his arms blistering, bursting with blood that evaporated in the same instant.

Crack! The ground below him burst from the energy and the building collapsed. Halcyn felt the floor beneath him give way, crumbling, sending him tumbling down with the rest of the sixth floor. Tons of wood and flooring crashed down after him. Halcyn raised his arm and the thorns caught him, then swept over the falling debris, smashing it all to the side.

With a groan of effort, he directed his thorns to shove the rubble away. Rain fell from above and he stood, looking up at the ships, the back of his arms reduced to charred scrap.

Halcyn glared at the Duskwater scion above.

“You figured out the range of my reflection,” he said, and blood dribbled down from his arms as Halcyn spat. “I suppose that’s another one of the secrets you heard from your new friend?”

Trian sneered, “Aside from the fact that you’ve been planning a civil war for over a decade? It’s one of many.”

“I thought you were on my side, Trian.”

“I’m on the side of peace. Even as a friend, I refuse to stand still while you plot to take over Caereith with violence.”

“Violence is a last resort. I would have done it peacefully, if you’d just let me try.”

“You’re a better liar than that, Halcyn. The Houses won’t take your power-grabbing lying down. In the path you’ve chosen, war is inevitable. I won’t let you plunge this world into chaos so soon after we finally found peace.”

Halcyn channeled his patron’s power, and Freyarch’s essence power rushed into him. The burns on his arms flaked off and new skin sprouted in its place. The saer shook his head, “Caereith is the weakest of the Nine Realms. Fractured, sick. Our Ancestor Trees are dead and our military power drops with every petty squabble between the Houses. Once the next Convergence War starts and the rifts start tearing open the skies, we will be wiped out.”

Trian shook his head, “Caereith won’t be saved by some deluded tyrant.”

“No, it won’t. It will be saved by an emperor.I don’t care who it is, only that a capable one appears. Or do you really think I’m in the only one with plans to take over? Caereith would be safer in my hands than anyone else’s.”

“Its corpse would only rot in your arms by the time you’re finished,” Trian said. He raised his hand and closed his fist, “Shoot him.”

At the man’s words, a hundred magitech cannons lit up with blue light. Power gathered, building up, ready to burst—

,̸̥͙̕;̶͓͎̒̄̈́'̵̹͉̑͜;̷̧̗̫̉̈.̷̠͕̃͆̒,̶̗̗͛͜'̵̱̄̑̑'̷̪̊̾;̶̭̼͛̇͠.̷̰̥̱̽̀̒'̸͈͘,̷̱̈́̅'̸̝̫̈́͋.̷̢̍'̷̯̥̋ͅ'̷͇̝̖̓̆̈́;̶̡͖̙͐̆'̶͓̣̑̐;̶̫̋̓'̶͉̲̈̾.̴̫͐,̶̻͐̈'̴̟̰͋̑.̵̯͓̀.̴̩̓̆͝,̶̥̭͇̽̄̈́;̵̯̂̒̃.̵͚̞̾͊;̶̡̙̓̔͝ͅ'̷̹̂,̷̜͒;̵̨͛'̸̡̩̰͛̈͝.̷͙̈̃̆,̵͓̀̑;̷͕̭̤̈́̂̅'̶̹̩̆̀̅.̵͉̝̮̒͋͋;̶̭̼͛̇͠.̷̰̥̱̽̀̒'̸͈͘,̷̱̈́̅'̸̝̫̈́͋.̷̢̍'̷̯̥̋ͅ'̷͇̝̖̓̆̈́;̶̡͖̙͐̆'̶͓̣̑̐;̶̫̋̓'̶͉̲̈̾.̴̫͐,̶̻͐̈'̴̟̰͋̑.̵̯͓̀.̴̩̓̆͝,̶̥̭͇̽̄̈́;̵̯̂̒̃.̵͚̞̾͊;̶̡̙̓̔͝ͅ'̷̹̂,̷̜͒;̵̨͛'̸̡̩̰͛̈͝.̵̩̅̄̆;̵̣͑̂'̶̧́̀ͅ.̶͙̳̙̋,̷̜͒;̵̨͛'̸̡̩̰͛̈͝.̷͙̈̃̆,̵͓̀̑;̷͕̭̤̈́̂̅'̶̹̩̆̀̅.̵͉̝̮̒͋͋.̶͉̫̊̃͌ͅ,̸͓͆̾̆,̶̹̲̓.̸̛̝͔͉͐̐,̸̥͙̕;̶͓͎̒̄̈́'̵̹͉̑͜

—until a black flash smashed through one of Trian’s ships. Wood splintered and sprayed and the ship’s barrier’s shattered like glass. The shape was a blur, shooting through the sky, tearing through ships one after the other. It struck an engine and mage’s fire swallowed the ship. It crashed with an earth-splitting boom as dark shapes descended from the clouds, tearing through the battalion of Duskwater ships.

Halcyn didn’t waste the chance it gave him. The thorns beneath him surged up, closing the gap between him and the fleet.

“Sylstrix!”

Trian growled out his patron’s name. The Fae on his shoulder grinned and vanished. He swept his arms to the side, and gray mist billowed out from under his cloak. Ash coalesced into giant spikes and shields, simultaneously blocking the attacks against his ships and barring Halcyn’s advance with a barrage of spears.

Halcyn wove between them. Blocking, dodging—he rushed up to one of the ships and his thorns pierced it, impaling it from the bottom and out from the deck. The thorns dragged the ship down and to the side, smashing it into the rest of Trian’s fleet.

He felt the magic compress on his left. Halcyn turned. Blocked with his thorns. A blast of fire ripped his defenses open, blasting him away, tumbling and spinning through the air. Halcyn caught himself with a redsteel thorn as the black flashes retreated from the ships. They gathered into a circling mass of darkness in the sky, and Halcyn finally recognized what they were:

Ravens. Crows.

They flew down, down to where the rubble was, and they transformed into feathers that merged into a masked woman’s cloak.

Nashandra, the Lady of Crows, stood atop the rubble with an unconscious Elanah in her arms. She looked up at Halcyn and Trian, and the voice that leaked out from under her mask was as frigid as ice.

“Children, battling with wooden sticks,” she snarled. “I have waited decades to find a master of alchemy that I can work with, and you have the gall to shoot your cannons into a room where she and I rest?”

Nashandra’s mana surged as arcane power filled the air alongside her immortal essences. The temperature dropped. The rain that fell over her swirled into a compressed mass above her head. Frost crackled in its center, forming a mass of coldness within that covered the ground around her in hissing ice.

“I tolerate one Fae, and I’m attacked by another for it. I seek tutelage, and I find the mentor I sought suffering under the games of children calling themselves princes and kings. No more. I have had enough.”

The Lady of Crows looked up at Trian and Halcyn, and her magic flared.

“Chreza’s Cutter.”

It moved too fast for either of them to dodge. A whip of water, thin as a hair, sharp as the edge of a butcher’s knife. It sliced through metal thorns and airships like a guillotine through skin. Blood sprayed. Halcyn retreated, his wrist a bleeding stump, and Trian staggered back as crimson sputtered from a cut across his stomach. His airship groaned and strained and the front half of it slid down, sliced cleanly in two. A panicked scream filled the air—

And an explosion from its ruptured engine devoured what remained of the ship. Splintered planks and metal chunks sprayed across the air like fireworks, splashing into the swamp with fiery hisses and cracks.

“Retreat!” Trian roared, and the remaining ships turned to flee. Nashandra clenched her fist.

“Shatter Rain.”

The raindrops falling from the sky turned into bullets. They smashed into the ships like a million rocks, splintering wood and bursting holes through reinforced metal. A horde of ships burst into scraps. Halcyn sped away, but the bullets raced after him. They smashed into his back. They threw him to the ground, covered in holes, bleeding out from several dozen wounds.

Nashandra turned to the second saer in the sky. Trian. The spell array flashed through her mind, altered in an instant as arcane energy shot towards the fleeing prince.

“Armor of Frost.”

The water soaking into his clothes froze in an instant. The prince stiffened as the ice turned thick, absorbing the rain, soaking in Nashandra’s mana and hardening into a coating of frost that could rival adamant. Setting Elanah down to float on a panel of magical force beside her, Nashandra waved her hand.

Watery tendrils snaked out and grabbed both of the saers, dragging them back to her. They scraped across the debris of the broken outpost, leaving trails of blood across the rubble.

“Children, fighting with sticks. Imitating an immortal’s power,” she said, bringing them up to float in front of her, paralyzed. Nashandra sized them up, “Will your masters move to stop me, or do I need to sever more limbs before your Fae act?”

She received her answer. Nashandra blinked, and suddenly, she was under the shadow of two titans. One was a lion of wood and stone and thorn, with a great mane of leaves and fur of a hundred thousand splinters. The other was a black snake, with obsidian scales that flaked with ash, and wings of smoke, charcoal, and flickering embers. The Ashen Serpent and the Sunchaser Lion loomed over her.

Nashandra stared straight back from behind her ivory raven’s mask, and the weight of three immortal presences pressed against the earth.

“My chosen struck you first,” Sylstrix hissed. “That accident has spawned a debt of blood, and you’ve claimed it. That was your right. Now, look at me and threaten me again. Add a debt of insult, so I have an excuse to scorch the flesh from your bones and swallow the ash that remains.”

To her left, the Sunchaser Lion lowered his head and bared his fangs. He snarled at her, the sound a deep rumble, like earthquakes and boulders tumbling from a cliff face. Piercing green eyes burned like emerald fire, “Lower my champion or face me in battle. I will not ask twice.”

Nashandra tilted her head at them, “You act as if I have not spent centuries slaughtering your kind.”

Sylstrix seethed, and Freyarch growled at her provocations.

Beneath the three of them, the stones cracked and the wood fractured, crushed under the weight of the essences in the air. All three of them channeled their immortal sorcery in tense silence. All they needed was a second. One more word. One more twitch of a finger, or one more shift of the leg.

Just one more movement, and the violence would erupt.

And then a cheery voice cut through the tension with all the elegance of a rock through barbed wire, “Now hold on just a second!” a voice said, and the pressure in the air vanished. Nashandra widened her eyes and took a step back as the Fae tensed. Their essences hadn’t vanished. They’d been suppressed.

Suppressed by someone else.

Nashandra turned her head to a presence that hardly registered in her senses. She looked up and saw a novi standing around the rubble—a man of pure, white energy, sculpted into the shape of a slim man with kind eyes and a jagged chin. He wore a broad-brimmed hat and simple coat over his gilded riftwalker’s uniform, sporting the blue, white, and golden colors of the RWA. He looked around the destroyed outpost and whistled.

“You three sure did a real number against the fort me and the boys worked so hard to defend,” he said, shaking his head. “And here I was lookin’ forward to settin’ down and havin’ a drink after all that fightin’.”

Nashandra stared at him and felt every hair on her weave stand up. Danger,her instincts told her. Danger unlike anything she’d ever faced.

The man turned to look at her with an easygoing smile.

“Why don’t we settle down and relax, huh?”

Sylstrix opened his mouth, “You—”

The man’s hand moved. Nashandra saw it happen in an instant—the moment the serpent opened his mouth, the man grabbed Sylstrix by the fangs and dragged him down. Down to where he could look the Ashen Serpent in the eye. He squeezed, and the fang cracked. Freyarch growled and tensed.

“Now you shut your damn mouth when I ain’t speakin’ to you, yeah?” the man asked, and the two Fae’s eyes flared with rage. Still, the serpent stayed quiet as the man spoke. “Now I’m usually much nicer to people I just met, but you… you and your little princes are really pushin’ my buttons t’day.”

He turned his eyes to Nashandra and jerked a thumb towards the frozen prince behind the snake.

“Melt the ice. I want to talk to these idiots.”

Wordlessly, Nashandra obeyed. She wasn’t the target of the man’s anger, and she had no intention of redirecting that fury to herself. With a gesture, the Armor of Frost around Trian melted, sending the prince crashing to the ground and gasping for breath. He looked up just in time to see the Novi’s boot crash into his face.

Bang!

Trian’s head snapped back and his nose flattened with a wet crunch. He fell to the ground, groaning, blood rushing down from his split lip. The man dragged Sylstrix forward and stepped over the fallen prince, looking him in the eye. He squatted down.

“I jus’ wanna ask, in case you were confused,” he said, gesturing around them. “But where the hell do you think we are?”

Trian coughed, wincing. “The western front… sir.”

“Mm. That’s right. And what’s your lot s’posed to be doin’ in the western front? I don’t recall the distress call from Caereith mentionin’ that I’d be comin’ here to close the biggest rift I’ve seen in decades while dealin’ with a civil war.”

“I—”

“—am a fuckin’ moron,” the man finished, before Trian could. “Are you understandin’ even a fraction of what you just did? Now, if you’re plannin’ on speakin’, I want you to really think with that head of yours, because I might just smash it if you show me you aren’t usin’ it.”

Trian stayed quiet, and the man nodded, “Good. Now, let me break this down for you, yeah? In the middle of a crisis, you attacked allies. Outside of this conflict, I don’t give a flyin’ fuck about how you handle your politics. That ain’t my business. But this—”

He gestured around them and sighed.

“This is idiocy. Not only did you start an unnecessary conflict, but you also pulled an assassination attempt in a medical ward. One that happens to be holdin’ one of this war’s most important players.”

With a gesture, the Novi motioned to the unconscious Elanah, safely floating behind Nashandra.

“You shot a fuckin’ cannon at her room. At the biggest contributor to this clean-up operation against the Crimson Tide. D’you have any idea how much longer this war would take—how many more lives it would claim—without her silverplague?”

By the point, Trian was pale. “I didn’t know,” he whispered. “I was told the alchemist that invented the weapon had returned to Felzan.”

“Well, I guess you’re wrong ‘cause she’s right there, no?”

The ruins turned quiet. In the distance, the sound of riftwalker ship cannons echoed across the swamp. Faraway, they fought the blight. Alone, without the support of either of the noble houses that were supposed to aid them. Nashandra eyed the ships, then the novi standing in front of her.

“You’re the White Sun,” she said. “Vin Alraas.”

“That’s right,” Vin nodded. “And you’re the one who saved our dear Elanah Kindlebright. What’s your name, stranger?”

“Nashandra. The Lady of Crows.”

Vin nodded again, before glancing up at the sky. He frowned for a brief moment as he stared at the churning clouds above, before turning back her way, “Well, you have my gratitude, Nashandra. My organization's very interested in acquirin’ her recipe for the silverplague, seein’ how effective it is against the Crimson Tide. You’ve done the Nine Realms a favor by savin’ her life.”

“I did it for selfish reasons. I need her.”

“This place needs her, too. But judgin’ by the look of her, she won’t be useful in the condition she’s in. Didn’t expect her to be so old, either. What this place doin’, sendin’ elderly to the front lines? She ought to be home, sippin’ on tea, or eatin’ cake, or—”

He paused and looked up at the sky again. In the distance, the black clouds rumbled, churning, flashing with lightning. There was almost a rhythm to it—a beat. Rainfall like drums and thunderous claps, accompanied by the echo of something… sharp. Vin Alraas looked as confused as he was impressed.

“Huh.”

Nashandra frowned, “What?”

“There’s a storm comin’ this way, and he looks pissed."