A frigid morning zipped by as Dimitry shared his plans for eliminating the heathen threat. The members of his impromptu council provided feedback according to their expertise, and after a discussion on time constraints and resource limitations, predictions and possibilities, he amended the draft into its superior version. Those in attendance swiftly learned their roles, and the colony pulsed into action.

Fishermen repositioned torpedo-like naval mines across the shore. Chemists concentrated land-based explosives at the mouth of the cove, soldiers dug pits around the barrier, and carpenters erected an oak platform further along the beach.

Dimitry oversaw the preparations from a coastal cliff while providing last-minute instruction to his combat medics. Hopefully, the need for emergency medicine wouldn’t come again, but if it did, the troops under his direct command would at least know how to treat extremity hemorrhages and alkaline burn injuries. Their purpose was to get patients to Dimitry within the golden hour—the period during which intervention could save their lives. Assuming one had the means.

He was hammering into them the intricacies of applying a tourniquet when his inventory manager rushed closer. Cerulean hair falling over her pointed chin, Claricia breathlessly pointed to a massive crowd approaching from the north. Scouts soon arrived to report that the interlopers were unarmed refugees.

The news troubled Dimitry. He had an inkling of why they were here, but now was a poor time for their arrival. Claricia followed as he went to meet with them.

Emerging from between oaks and willows into a depleted forest was the world’s most pathetic caravan. There were hundreds. Women holding the hands of unwashed children, riders mounting oxen saddled with bags, and a man whose wrists were so thin that they’d fracture with a firm handshake.

“It’s him!" said a hopeful voice of indeterminable origin. “Pale green eyes!”

Wagon wheels creaked to a halt as one geriatric stepped out from the crowd. Dirt flecked his long, white beard and a robe that had doubtlessly spent many nights on the frozen forest floor. “My boy, you have no idea how happy I am to see… well, civilization wouldn’t be the right word.”

It was as Dimitry thought. He had asked Ignacius to join his army as an experienced wizard and a consultant in matters regarding the Church, and in return, he’d have to take in refugees from Volmer. However, a war zone was the worst place to house unvetted personnel. “We agreed that you’d bring them to Malten.”

“I tried,” the old man said, words trembling like his wrinkled lips. “They didn’t let them past the gates—something about some rascals setting fires. I couldn’t exactly leave them alone, so I asked around, and I learned you were already here.”

The queen must have limited immigration to secure her streets. During last month’s Night of Repentance, arsonists incinerated buildings across the city while mercenaries incited riots by the cathedral.

While a prudent decision for maintaining the kingdom’s stability, Dimitry was left to pick up the slack. “Claricia, think we can take them?”

She looked around. “Food and firewood won’t be a problem, but there aren’t any extra tents. We’ll also run low on fresh water. The desalmonation… desalination facility won’t be able to sustain all of your projects and more people.”

“Don’t worry your head about that, little miss. We’ve been drinking from rivers and sleeping on spruce needle beds for weeks. I think we can handle a few more days.”

Normally, Dimitry would oppose housing people in the wilds, but his guests faced horrors beyond dysentery—ones boiled water couldn’t fix. “We’re also summoning a heathen horde.”

“You’re what, my boy?”

“The specifics are a bit complicated, but we’re going to force the heathens out so we can kill them before the Night of Repentance.”

“To make them weaker…” Bushy eyebrows furrowed, Ignacius stroked his beard. “That’s quite alright. I’m sure a smart boy like you’s got something figured out.”

Though Dimitry would have liked to share in the certainty, the watching devil made anything possible. And no less concerning than the heathens were the refugees themselves. Did saboteurs hide amongst them, preparing to cause trouble like they did last month? Precious didn’t have time to gauge their sincerity, and even if she did, innocence didn’t imply stability. People might panic when the settlement came under siege. Especially those with children. Right now, the Hospitallers’ young took shelter inside Malten’s monastery, freeing the adults to focus on the fight. Would the refugees be as calm when their families came under threat?

Still, Dimitry couldn’t condemn those who’ve done no wrong. These people traversed an entire forest in search of shelter, and who knew what skills they possessed? They’d prove useful next month. Only a sizable labor force could fulfill his ambitions. For now, the best solution was to quarantine them so they couldn’t disrupt his plans.

“Claricia, help get them set up on the eastern clearing. Assign some bladed troops to keep them safe—far, far away from the battlefield.”

“The watchful kind, Your Holiness?”

Dimitry gave her a knowing nod. As she led the refugees away, he turned to face the real prize: a wizard as cunning as he was wise. “Welcome to the team.”

“I’d kneel, my boy, but these knees aren’t what they used to be.”

“Don’t worry about the pleasantries. Rather, I want to know if you’re ready to work. I have an important job for you.”

“Sure, but—” Ignacius lifted a canvas sack with a voltech rifle protruding from between scrupulously folded robes. “Is Angelika around? Raina asked me to bring her some… you know how mothers are. We’re not on the best terms, so can you get this to her?”

Dimitry’s gaze fell to a mound of snow. Not much better off than the old man, he hadn’t spoken to Angelika since the heathen wave. How should he talk to the girl he had encouraged to take on military responsibility only for her first major battle to end in dozens of casualties? And yet, he needed her help. She would play a vital role in the coming operation, and if he was lucky, well into the future.

From what Leandra and Anelace had said during the meeting, Angelika had potential. She lacked only confidence. Dimitry thought he knew how to give her some. While they had their differences, perhaps a pep talk from her grandfather could restore her resolve. And considering they’d be working together from now on, a chat was an excellent opportunity for them to bond. Joint pursuits necessitated good relations.

“I think you should go meet with her yourself,” Dimitry said.

Ignacius heaved a slow and depressing chuckle. “I doubt she’d want to see me, my boy.”

“You won’t know until you try. May I suggest a topic?”

Soldiers shoveled sand on the shore, digging a pit that would soon house an explosive trap. They labored without complaint even after all that had happened. Death was normal for them. As peasants, they saw crawlers reap their neighbors just as they reaped wheat, and to them, eleven corpses to fend off twenty heathens was a bargain.

But it wasn’t for Angelika.

She hunched beside her troop, eyes pressed to hastily scribbled notes, racing past every word of Lady Mira and Lord Richter’s wisdom. Logistics, training, raiding. Nothing about fending off organized heathen hordes. Nothing about what to do when carriers formed a forward barrier with their bodies. None of the advice made her a better officer, and she needed to become one soon.

Warnfrid had told her about Dimitry’s plan. Everything about it made sense. Everything except one detail: Angelika being in command. She couldn’t hold the line against a wave of heathens, and now she was supposed to fend off an entire raid? The timing of the blast. When to advance. Responding to whatever shit the watcher flung at them. That was all her responsibility, and when she inevitably fucked up, people would die.

Slow footsteps crunched across the sand.

Angelika’s head shot up, and her expression soured. “The hell are you doing here? I don’t have time to deal with traitors.”

The traitor, who abandoned his family to elope with the Church, froze. He slowly lifted a bag. “It’s from Raina and your sisters. They wanted you to have this.”

A package? From mom and sis? For a moment, the warmth of the fireplace soothed Angelika’s bones, just like it did whenever she returned home after a winter patrol with the girls from the guild. Worried sick, mom must have sent some triple-laundered clothes. Beneath were probably those honey rolls Leona made that melted in your mouth and freshly carved propelia seals from Emilia.

Reality smacked Angelika in the face, and the cold as balls beach she stood on chilled her face once more. She resumed reading. “I’m busy. Just leave the bag there and go away.”

With his traitorous beard swaying in the salty wind, the traitor took a hesitant step forward. “I was worried about you. I heard about what happened and—“

“You’re the last person I want sympathy from. You and your shitty Church are the reason we’re all eating shit right now.”

“No sympathy, child. I just want to tell you a story.”

“Do I look like I’m in the mood for a fucking—“

“It’s about a commoner who became a war hero.”

A glimmer of hope rising in her belly, Angelika’s eyes widened. “A commoner? Impossible.”

“Well, she was born a commoner. An orphan, rather.” The traitor strolled closer, ocean waves crashing against his boots. “Like you, even as a little girl, she had a penchant for magic. Her talents were recognized and she was given an education. After many long years of training, she organized a force to stop the advance of the monsters that destroyed her village: the ancient evil invading from the Unblessed Lands.”

The Unblessed Lands. When Angelika belonged to Malten’s choir, she sang hymns about them. They lay on the eastern edge of the world, once home to prosperous cities that things even shittier than heathens had since reduced to rubble. Or so the Church claimed. “Let me guess. She kicked their asses?”

“No. She routed, losing most of the men in her militia.”

Angelika’s heart dropped. She looked down at the notes dangling from her hands. “Doesn’t sound like much of a hero to me.”

“She thought the same. While she mulled it over, the evil advanced, and there came a day when she could sit idle no longer. She tried again. Now, if you travel east past Crucium, to the forward barrier defending the Bulwark passage, you can see her statue in the plaza of the city she helped found. Last year, Cesarea became their archbishop.”

“C-Cesarea? You’re talking about—“

“Your grandmother.” The traitor gazed into a distant, regrettable past. “My wife.”

Though Angelika despised her grandmother, even more than the traitor, she respected her. That firm glare. The unbridled strength that carried through her voice. A decade had passed since Angelika had spoken to grandma, and yet she still cowered at the thought of pissing her off. She was a bishop then. For her to have become the archbishop of an imperial border city since… the story would have been laughable if it had been about anyone else. But not her.

“Child, I always worried that me teaching you magic would lead you down the same path as Cesarea and your father… and me. You were too kind. And war is such a terrible thing.” He turned to face her, the wrinkles on his forehead crunching into serious bunches. “But remember, neither soldiers nor chosen face doom because of you. They risk their lives so that their families and countrymen don’t have to. That is the death of a warrior. Not a victim.”

Angelika glanced back at her troops, who were burying barrels of black powder within a wood-shielded ditch. She had heard them speak about their children and sick relatives taking refuge in Malten. They were just like her. The only reason she was out here securing the coast was so that her mom and sisters could be safe back home. Everyone shared the same goal: completing the mission by any means necessary.

The tension squeezing Angelika’s lungs loosened, and she inhaled a deep breath of cold and salty air. She could still make this right. The dead had died, but their ambitions lived on through the living. Only victory could redeem their sacrifice.

She pocketed the book and closed her eyes, willing her frenzied mind into submission. Clarity parted her tangled thoughts. Angelika saw it all: how to secure the back lines during the advance, deal with the carrier barricades, ignite the blast at the right time. There was no time to waste.

Angelika pivoted on her heel and yelled at her sergeant across the cove. “When Clewin gets here, tell him to set up the landmines in a circle around the blast zone!”

“Yes, mad’m!”

She ran off.

“Child,” Ignacius said, “where are you going?”

“I gotta go talk to a Precious, person, thing! See ya… gramps.”

“Madam Angelika!” a voice from outside pierced the workshop’s loose log walls. “Where are you? Madam Angelikaaa?!”

Besides Leandra, whose expression morphed into a disappointed scowl, not one paid heed to the calls for the missing sorceress. Charcoal forges blared and hammers clanged as smiths forged components for gun firing mechanisms and naval mine self-detonation spears. They labored around the edges, and at the center of all the anvils and filing vises, the most important work commenced.

Many men, smelling of soot and sweat, bored a hole into a barrel that weighed more than two armored knights and their mounts. Typically, such a process would have taken weeks. Cast steel had disfigured most tools Saphiria employed to shape it. However, with the meltia enchanted copper-headed drills her smiths wielded, the alloy molded at her command, swiftly taking the shape of the weapon Dimitry had requested… for the most part.

Last week, Dimitry had given Saphiria sketches for what he termed the 10-pounder rifle. She had spent days trying to solve the divine cannon’s construction, but the branded breech and the compact barrel proved too complicated for her casting methods to reproduce. However, at this morning’s meeting, he said he needed anything—even if it could shoot only once—before the Night of Repentance.

Hence Saphiria simplified the design into a gargantuan model of the guns she had been manufacturing for his soldiers. The project consumed so much wrought iron that she began liquefying old files and flattened saws and the halberds Dimitry had borrowed from Mother’s royal armory.

Although the sight of her ancestors’ craftsmanship melting away in an enchanted cauldron elicited pity, only one matter truly concerned Saphiria. This weapon would play a decisive role in Dimitry’s plan. Without a chance to shoot the cannon and iterate on its faults, she couldn’t guarantee its functionality.

Leandra’s amethyst eyes traveled along the girthy barrel. “Your Highness, I believe Elias can handle the rest. We best return to Malten before the fighting starts.”

Saphiria bit her lip. “We will go once I see the cannon fulfill its duty.”

“At the cost of neglecting your own?”

The court sorceress referred to a letter that had come from the castle. Mother demanded Saphiria’s immediate presence. She was to mediate a court dispute between nobles who disagreed on how to handle Dimitry’s property on their land. Northerners asked that the apostle staff and supply the abandoned Church outposts while southerners wished to keep them vacant to avoid paying tithes and to maintain territorial control.

Though Mother never said as much, she must have realized that neither party was being reasonable. Dimitry hadn’t the resources to fulfill requests nor had he the time to argue over holy structures that were already his. Lacking the military strength to deny them, her solution was obvious: Saphiria would pretend to lend a compassionate ear to both sides so that Mother could defer a decision for as long as possible—a stalling tactic that would serve only to delay the inevitable outrage.

“I have no intention of wasting my time on diplomatic posturing,” Saphiria said.

“Then you lied when you told me you would take your responsibilities seriously?”

“Tell me, Leandra. Who would win an argument? A serf on the side of righteousness or a rogue knight whose warband marched behind him?”

“That depends on the battlefield. On the plains, the knight, but in a court of law, the serf reigns victorious.”

“That is true in theory, but what if the court lacks the power to oppose the knight?”

Frowning, Leandra folded her arms across her chest. “Your Highness, I’m afraid your analogy is wasted on me.”

Saphiria approached a workbench. She retrieved a black slate board from atop the uneven lumber and smudged the revised cannon schematics detailed on its surface. With a jagged piece of chalk, she drew three circles. “There are three factions in Malten. The north, the south, and the capital. The north and the capital rely on the south for vital resources and trade, while the south relies on them to halt the heathen advance. All three exist in equilibrium.”

“That is why we must return to Malten,” Leandra said. “The kingdom relies on diplomacy.”

“Perhaps that was true years ago, when the north and the capital had enough strength to fight the heathens and the south if they rebelled, but a decade of war has disrupted the peace.” Saphiria redrew two of the circles as smaller.

“The south is now as big as the others combined.”

She nodded. “Tylo’s relative strength is now as great as the rest of Malten, meaning he can act with impunity. No judicial decisions can be forced on him. However, if we succeed here today, a new faction loyal to the crown will be born.” Saphiria looped a fourth circle on the blackboard’s western edge.

“The apostle’s outpost…”

“With guns and artillery, Dimitry’s power will grow swiftly, and as he takes on the burden of the coastal heathens, the capital will be free to expand. Then, when all the pieces are in place…” Saphiria tightened her grip around the chalk, crushing the stone into jagged limestone shards. “I will put the south back into its place.”

Amethyst eyes wide open, Leandra pulled back. “You’re planning to subdue Tylo?”

“Not with force, if possible. This country has already suffered enough war, and yet, without the strength to enforce one’s will, peace cannot exist.” Her gaze scrolled up the cannon. “That is why I must remain. The weapon must fire. If it does not, everything is lost.”

Elias jogged closer, his brawny physique casting a forge-lit shadow over Saphiria. “It’s basically finished, Your Highness. All that’s left is to smoothen the interior and cast a fitting cannonball.”

“Good. When you are done, affix it to a wagon and bring it to the beach. Dimitry is waiting.”

At last, everything was ready.

The barrels of naval mines floated on the ocean, funneling into a patch of shore where concentrated explosives skulked beneath the sand. Past there and an unassuming mine field stood the heathen barrier. Over a hundred troops and two court sorceresses crouched behind its walls. Angelika, too. The girl had recently returned from a lengthy disappearance, orange eyes beaming with resolve. Whatever she discussed with her grandfather had worked.

Saphiria waited further down the beach, upright and gleaming with gold-plated steel. Joining her was Elias, the royal knights, Katerina, and a giant cannon that looked nothing like the Parrott rifle the shrine relic had depicted. Hopefully, the metallurgist could get the weapon to fire the cast steel orbs at her feet.

Way in the back, where the sand met the grass, a rough timber platform hovered atop stilts. A pole jutted from the center with a demonic prisoner of war squirming around the base like a live rotisserie pig. Rope affixed all but two limbs, leaving the rest to peddle in vain atop a mound of firewood.

Dimitry accompanied the crawler. This was it. Heart thumping in his ears, he took a deep breath and began the summoning. “Impedeall.”

The captive heathen ceased its struggle. Both free legs folded against the core, oil lubricating their joints such that the beast’s rubbing motions produced faint squeaks. The sounds grew louder and louder. Soon, wails echoed across the beach.

Angelika’s troops loaded, Saphiria’s knights poured a sack of black powder into the cannon before rolling down a cannonball, and Ignacius, who oversaw the settlement’s emergency defenses in the back, gave a prepared nod.

Everyone understood their role. The goal was simple: to provoke and eliminate the heathen horde before tonight’s full moon infused them with speed and strength. That was the only way the colony could survive the Night of Repentance.

An hour must have passed before the watcher flew in from the horizon. With pensive strokes of its broad wings, the beast suspended itself at a safe distance, the many blue jewels on its chest eyeing the battlefield. They swerved independently to scan the captive, Dimitry, and Angelika’s forces before converging on Saphiria’s cannon.

Like in previous encounters, the watcher moved with caution, and no different from two days ago, it approached from a course perpendicular to the captured crawler. Just as Dimitry had predicted. However, his opponent had proven its intelligence, and he couldn’t give it time to think over his plan. The strategy would only work once.

He pulled a reflex hammer from his medical bag and slammed the steel head into the crawler’s knee.

A sharp squeal sounded.

The watcher edged closer.

It cared.

Dimitry didn’t stop. He pummeled the captive, one limb at a time, working from the extremities to the thighs.

Droplets glistening down their spherical cores, crawlers scurried in from the ocean depths, fliers swarmed, and carriers surfaced. One nearly bumped into a naval mine before tilting its whale-sized torso of rectangular stone away—proof that the watcher had learned to avoid exposed explosives since the last invasion.

Perfect.

This was Dimitry’s chance. He needed the enemy to engage now. “Nartuya!”

The mercenary vaulted onto the platform, her many earrings jangling with haste. She held her palm to the wood piled beneath the crawler. “Ignia.”

Like the victim of a witch burning, the captive shrieked as fire consumed its hind legs and flared up the pillar towards the core.

Forty heathens charged through the opening between naval mines.

Straight into the trap.