“It was after everything happened, after the whole world went to hell, that I realised it.”

“Realised what?”

“Realised we know nothing.”

Tala crouched down on the balls of her feet, taking shelter from the cold night’s wind behind the wall’s stone crenellations. It made hardly any difference; the gusts found her anyway, whipping her long silver-blonde hair across her face and pouring down the gaps in her ill-fitting armour, bringing goosebumps to her skin.

She struggled to keep tobacco leaves from flying from the rough paper held between her shaking fingers as she rolled, numb hands fighting against every movement she made. Finally, a crude and battered cigarette lit between her lips, she stood and looked out over the battlements, listening with half an ear to the conversation going on besides her.

“Nothing? How’d you figure that?” came the gruff voice of Hurstrom, a thick-bearded, heavy-set man whose face carried numerous scars and whose neck showed the deep puncture marks of khiladri teeth. Very few men survived an attack from the beasts, and he wore the scars with something like pride.

The wasteland beyond the walls was illuminated only by moonlight, a grey, barren expanse of bare earth, scarred by fire. They had first flamed the land years ago, before Tala was anything but a child, and did so every year in the springs, ensuring nothing could grow, nothing could live out there.

“We lived on the knowledge of our forefathers, our foremothers. We built and bought and sold and slaved, never realising that we made nothing for ourselves, only copied what our parents had been given from their parents, and their parents before them.”

The man Hurstrom was speaking to had only come to the city a few short months ago, arriving with the most recent batch of bruised and weary outsiders who made it to the gates. Such groups were rare these days, and their faces told the story of life beyond the walls far better than any words could.

Ruen’s face was haunted. He stared out over the waste, and though his voice responded to Hurstrom his eyes were focused on something else entirely, something only he could see.

Tala turned away from the both of them, cupping her hands around the burning embers of her tobacco as an especially strong gust made both men draw their jackets tighter over their breastplates. She walked further down the rampart as she felt the anger flare; Ruen was one of those.

There seemed to be more and more of them recently. They took many names; the fallen children, the forerunner’s folly, the lost. It didn’t matter what they called themselves, to Tala they had only one name.

She called them worthless.

Tala tried to focus on the wastes outside, squinting her eyes into the dark and searching for that one flash of violet that was their entire reason for standing this watch, but Ruen’s voice still found its way to her.

“Our time ended long ago,” he droned on in deadened tones, “we’re just hanging on until the planet manages to get rid of us altogether. Even our dead want us gone.”

The dead. One of the possible sources of the violet glimpses they watched for. The sight of the eyes of such a creature catching the moonlight was enough to send children into wails of tears, to send grown men who had never left the city walls into paroxysms of fear.

Tala felt nothing for them.

Oh, she would move quickly to inform the council if she caught sight of one of them, though they were rare and she thought it unlikely, but only so that any scouting parties due to leave the next day were aware and able to take account of the presence of the shambling monstrosities. They did not worry her. The dead were easy to handle.

They had no brains, no thought processes. They stumbled erratically through the land, almost always individually, clothes rotting as they moved. Even when they did spot a human they would not react until they were far closer than any sensible person would allow them to get. The early stories of people torn limb from limb by unblinking corpses, of skulls crushed in by cold, lifeless hands, were a thing of the past. No-one who went outside anymore was caught by the things.

It wasn’t the dead she was worried about.

“Have you ever been hunted?”

The wind carried Ruen’s question to her. It was the first time tonight she had heard any feeling in his voice. What was that? Sadness? Fear? She couldn’t tell.

She leaned over a parapet and drew the last of her cigarette into her lungs, watching from the corner of her eye as Hurstrom harrumphed and gathered himself up. He was clearly done with this discussion.

“That’s enough of that, then,” he said, coughing nervously but trying to hide his fear. “It’s time I was getting back. My watch ended some time ago.”

He stomped away without looking back, swinging his large frame over the bound wooden poles that formed a ladder down from this part of the wall. The nearest set of steps was far further up the ramparts, and guards had long since begun using these ladders as a faster way of moving up and down the walls.

Tala thought that was that, but Ruen turned towards her and stepped closer. His eyes glittered in the night.

“Have you ever been hunted?” he asked. He seemed to be searching her face for… something.

She wouldn’t let him see the chill the question sent down her spine.

“Yes,” she said, and turned away.

As she walked away she tossed the butt of her roll-up over the ramparts, where the wind grabbed it and threw it against the wall, tumbling over and over again down into the night.

They were the other reason you might see violet in the night, and they were appearing more and more. A scout could outrace the dead and forget about them the next hour, but they invaded your dreams. They were the reason you lay awake at night despite your fellows on watch, tensing at every sound that echoed out of the darkness.

The dead were dumb, and could be beaten.

The khiladri were smart.