Manservants took to the streets carrying the belongings of their masters onto the backs of carriages. Families frantically boarded after their most precious belongings were safely stowed. The roads were filled with the sounds of horses and machinery. And when all the carriages had left, a thin scatting of servantry remained behind. The sidewalks became loosely littered with men, women, and lost children. Their souls cast long shadows from the wavering, artificial sunrise, a poor substitute for the real dawn but far brighter. And the fires grew yet. Their faces became darker the hotter the flames became, until their expressions could no longer be seen. Those islands of culture tucked between alleyways splintered. Hordes of people spilled out of them, and for a brief moment the streets were busy again. Then they too emptied out. A small number of workers idled as the owners of their industries went up into the sky. Some lit a pipe and leaned by a wall. Others sat on a curb. They waited for nothing at all. There was nothing to do anymore. Left-behind children cried. The fires grew.

The center of the city could be seen from every point in Ralagast. The buildings were tall, gothic, imposing. They were more imposing now than they ever were as they were transformed into scarecrows for men; a simple enough adaption, for men were afraid of all things tall and all things aflame. This was the second great fire Jorge had witnessed. He had lost a friend to the first. Guiltily, it hadn’t rested very heavily on his mind. He had grown comfortable in a sense, assuming that lightning didn’t strike twice, and that by evacuating that forest he had left that chapter of his life behind, never to see it repeat. But here he was surrounded by fire again.

He left the loitering citizens to head deeper into the palatial district. A cry for help could be heard from the first house on his left. He broke through the door, searching amidst the smoke and crumbling foundations. The cry came again. He followed the muffled sound to the master bedroom. He swung his axe into the door and the wood crashed instantly. One of the occupants screamed.

“Come on!” Jorge shouted.

But it was a young boy and an overweight father who laid sprawled in all directions on the carpet. The smoke had been too much. Jorge knelt down and pressed a finger on the large man’s neck.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The boy resisted, screaming, scrambling to return to his father’s side. Jorge ignored it and brought the boy to safety.

“Let me go!” The boy shouted.

Even as they left the fervid confines of the house, Jorge heard more cries for help. But he couldn’t let go of the child.

“You’re being selfish,” Jorge said. With his other hand he swung the axe through the colonnades supporting the front canopy of the house. The collapsed pile of stone barred the front entrance. Then he let go. The boy ran back, but there was no longer a way back inside. Jorge was already on his way to the next house. He didn’t look back.

The second one had several people. Three men and three women trapped in the dining room by a jet of flame in the main halls. Half-eaten food left to simmer on ruined tablecloth. Their wide, watery eyes looked at him, and then the flame.

Gas. Ralagast had mazes of fuel gas running throughout the city. It warmed their homes and lit their lamps. That must have been how all this had spread so quickly. But Jorge hadn’t the time to theorize more on it. He found the living room, lifted a couch, and slammed it on the exposed piping in the floor. The flames subsided to gorge themselves on the new fuel. Then he turned to citizens in the dining room.

“You’ve about three seconds,” he shouted over the roaring heat.

They scrambled out, coughing all the while. In truth, Jorge had no idea that would’ve worked. It very well could have not. As he left the house, the plume worsened, and the entire structure began to collapse. Wood and stone creaked as the weakening beams neared their limits. The material hung in the balance, lingering at that precipice of collapse, then tipped over. There was no loud final snarl of wood or shattering of brick. The house simply caved in. It was quieter in death than in its last throes. This was happening everywhere. For every two families Jorge tended to, it was too late for many more.

Others were not so unlucky. They managed to stumble out of their homes sustaining only minor burns and shortness of breath. The streets were beginning to fill with people covered in soot, gasping for air. Jorge surveyed his surroundings with grit teeth.

“Where are your firefighters?” He asked those closest to him.

Only one middle aged woman gave any sort of response. She coughed into a handkerchief, unable to answer him, but with a trembling finger she pointed down a road. Jorge broke into a run. Surely a city this developed had disaster prevention. He assumed the worst. There was what he assumed to be a fire station down the road. He was not alone. A group of young men and women were standing guard outside of it. They had surrounded a batch of citizens in high visibility uniforms kneeling on the grass with their hands behind their back. Two of the insurgents were carrying cumbersome devices in their hands.

Jorge couldn’t withhold a gasp. The instant his eyes fell upon the machines and saw the way they were being held, he knew what they were. It was a primal response. They noticed him as well and immediately began barking commands.

“Stop! Put that weapon down!”

“Take it easy,” Jorge said. He set his axe on the ground.

“Who are you?”

“People are dying. I presume those people are firefighters of some sort? Just let them—”

“Are you thick? Get this great ape on his knees over with the rest of them.”

The two with the guns kept their distance while several other insurgents grabbed Jorge. In one quick motion Jorge tossed one of them towards the gun-wielder on the left. The one on the right hesitated, blinking in surprise. Jorge made it within a foot of the weapon before he felt a searing hot bolt impact his chest. The world blurred. He felt the wind rush past. Then he felt windows shatter on his back as he fell through the wall of someone’s establishment.

If he had air in his lungs to scream, he would. He looked down at his chest as he tried to get back up. The way his blackened skin moved told him how many things were broken just underneath. For seconds he struggled to breathe. His ears rang. Through the ringing he heard glass crunch outside. They were coming. He couldn’t play dead. Jorge had heard enough stories from his army father to know how soldiers “checked” their enemies’ bodies.

Wood and metal tore apart: the sound of a door being kicked off its hinges. They were inside his building. Jorge looked to the doorway of the room he was in and saw their shadows waver from down the hall, growing bigger step by step. He breathed in and tried to think.

--

It was safe to say Lisŗa had not been trained for this. Exhaust fumes were heavy, and there was no breeze, for better or for worse. The fire needed no help spreading. Passenger paper had marked where they were to meet up. She was the first to arrive. Shingles cracked beneath the soles of her climbing boots. From there she could see all around the palatial district. The fires had spared the churches, as if that was the line the insurgents had drawn. Men, women, and children were fine, but religious iconography was one step too close to the moral abyss.

A peer clambered onto the same roof, breathing heavily. A young man she had a vague recognition of from training named Yeoman. He had fiery hair and tanned skin, typical of that province in the Southeast.

“How are you here already?” He asked between breaths.

Lisŗa checked her passenger paper. No new scrawls of ink had appeared. She wondered how June was doing. They hadn’t talked very much since arriving at this city. The noise was too much for the sensitive girl. Considerations had been made, and she was sent to the palace to be surrounded by walls so she could be more comfortable. Now that same palace was surrounded by a ring of flame.

The roof suddenly became crowded as the rest of the runners arrived, out of breath and caked in sweat from the rising temperature.

“Section VI, subsection twenty-one of the military cee-oh-cee,” Yavi began, “In the absence of local authoritative functionality, submilitary regiments of any training is authorized to enforce with extreme prejudice towards the goal of reinstating local authoritative functionality.”

“Are there any lawmen left?” Lisŗa asked.

“No. This attack was planned. They struck the enforcement stations in the palatial district first. Ralagast’s fuel line control has informed me that someone had sabotaged their distributors with Valve-freeze devices. They’ve cut off the gas at the source, but whatever remains in the lines will continue burning.”

“Like a forest fire,” a runner named Lismé whispered.

“Except there are innocents here,” Yavi said.

“What about the Knight’s Guard?” Yeoman asked. “Surely they serve as local authority.”

Yavi shook his head. “There has been no communication from the palace. We’re on our own.”

Lisŗa twitched at the news. Yavi continued, “Here are your orders. We need to get the flames under control. Fire control hasn’t responded, possibly from interference from the insurgents. If this is true, they would need to be spread thin. They can’t do all this and suppress every fire control station in the palatial district at the same time. Split into five squads of eight and relinquish the firemen.”

“And the insurgents?” Someone asked.

Yavi gave them a strange look. “They forsook Falerian privilege when they decided on this path. Destroy them.”

“Y-yes sir.”

Yavi drew a rough map on his passenger paper. Lisŗa watched on her own paper as the diagram manifested line by line. X’s marked the objective locations. She committed them to memory.

“I’m with her,” Yeoman said. “You, you, you, Pylen, Lismé, and you, with us.”

Lisŗa frowned for a moment at the sudden familiarity, but there was no time to question it. They returned to the ground and set off.