A cold morning light bled across Camshire's jigsaw rooftops and chimneys. Trees were planted on the sidewalks, fountains splashed, the speech was refined in this high ward. The district was a place of judges and advocates and senators and generals and confidence men of the highest caliber. Carts and beasts hauled goods from the tanneries and rustworks to be distributed among the bickering merchants who readied their stalls for the coming day. The season was wet and so the Diluvian guards at the gates ordered all creatures put to such burdensome purpose washed of their mud before entering the domain of the societal elite. Newsmen barked from the street corners with printed reams in their arms as they sang headlines of war on the frontier and unrest at home.

Servants and housekeepers worked to clear the alleys and avenues and windows and doorways of the webs that had been woven by spindle-rats over the course of the dripping night. The vermin themselves had by that early hour already claimed and cocooned and ferried their prey deep into the stinking reaches beneath Camshire's cobblestones where they could gorge undisturbed by the stirring metropolis. A Purist street preacher lent his voice to the babble until a throng of Diluvian shieldsmen scooped him up and dragged him to a ward where his proclamations would be better tolerated—after perhaps a bout of rehabilitation at their bronzed knuckles in some tucked-away cell. Traders traded. Children played. Bureaucrats conspired. The city hummed and groaned.

The anarch pushed through all this bustle and walked into the door of a crowded public house. His ears were met with a din of competing chatter and clinking ware. The embroiled aromas of coffee and baked pastries and perfumes tinctured the atmosphere. Downtowners crammed the establishment. The eatery had seen praise from Camshire's prophetic tastemakers and so business was brisk. The bakehouse was near the Julian Wall and thus rife with aristocrats and officers alike in their fulsome silks and feathered hats and gilt scabbards. These men commuted daily from homes in the surrounding neighborhoods to the fortified complex to do their work for the Nation and its people, but above all themselves. The anarch was no such man as those favored sons. A stranger to this ward. His compatriots kept to haunts far from these lanterned throughways, away from the bridges and minarets and canals of Camshire's richer districts. The revolutionaries were forced to lurk beneath the noses of the elite in secret places, dark smoky rooms of forbidden song and unwashed beasts and men. The anarch did not come to this far destination to taste sweet delicacies or to conduct mundane business. He came to spill blood. He came to burn.

Before venturing out prior to dawn, the insurrectionist had removed the metal from his piercings and covered his runic tattoos in a sleeved and hooded robe like those worn by the scholars and dignitaries whom he now moved among. The stolen attire had been peeled from the back of one such statesman as he lay dying in the street, his blood mingling with the mud, struck down by the anarch and his fellow conspirators during the noble's clandestine outing to a ghetto sinhouse. The disguise would not serve the anarch well if he were to fall to any real scrutiny and so he was prepared to act quickly if trouble came. It did not. The crowd was busy with itself and gave no attention to the thin pale man who walked the throng. He came to the center of the room and surveyed those whom he would soon unmake and was pleased at the looking. Soon he would be a martyr. History would know his discontent. His gaunt breast surged with power, a feeling he'd never known until that moment. Today he would steal from his enemies their most precious thing. He would be their god. Reaper of their souls.

He drew a blade from his waist and pulled his robe open to reveal a chest like a bird's, hollow and frail. Etched into his pallid skin was a spiraling and intricate network of tangled scarifications. This action caught the notice of only a few and there was no time for them to do much more than register the oddness of it. One silver-haired officer gasped and rose and stretched out his arm and even gained purchase of the anarch's sleeve but it was by then too late. The rebel mage put his blade to the unfinished rune carved into his own flesh and etched the final vector that would complete its solution. In this fatal act he triggered the awesome kinetic force locked within that intricate geometry and unleashed a spectacular and irreversible doom.

A stone wall buckled and collapsed as sorcerous shockwaves lashed through the place. The anarch himself was instantly torn to ragged pieces, bereft of his consciousness by the time his singed and bloodied skull ricocheted off the flaming rafters and plummeted back to the cratered floor. The terrible blast splintered and flipped tables and flung the patrons outward, slamming them broken against the scorched stone walls. All took to burning. The arcane explosion shattered windows and made eardrums bleed and left the streets outside smacked with gore. Many of those who survived the blast were brutally rid of their limbs and senses. People panicked, animals stampeded. Dozens were crushed under boot and hoof. Survivors wandered in the dusty aftermath, tattered and soiled and confused to be alive.

— • —

"Ticks!" Dimia screamed. She was covered in the bloodsuckers, swarms crawling on her skin. The girl and the golem had been walking through a hillside carpeted with tall yellow grass, unaware of the parasitic hordes biding within. Until the discovery of the insects carpeting her body, it had been a serene moment—precious and ephemeral. A stolen sliver of peace in their otherwise upsetting journey. That fleeting glimpse proven, too, a lie.

"Ticks!" Dimia shrieked again, racing in panic to the bottom of the hill where lurked a stagnant pond. She threw herself past the reeds and into the polluted waters and frantically tried to wash the things from her body. They were legion, the ticks. Some of the terrors fell with a brush of her hand. Others had more firm a grip on her flesh and had to be furiously plucked away one-by-one. A forever of this swatting and brushing. Finally, she had to begin hunting for the last few. She threw her hair under the fetid water, trying to shake and drown them (if they could even die in such fashion, she did not know).

Dripping and stinking Dimia went to her road-battered bag and fished through the accumulation of junk and food she'd managed to scrounge from detritus and the wild and deserted homes and shops along her way. She took from it a small comb she had taken from the abandoned farmhouse outside Marrow and ran it through her damp and dirty locks. She encountered a few straggling ticks and dealt with them until there were no more. It seemed she was finally free of the evil little biters. Yet Dimia knew it would be a long while before she'd stopped feeling their hundreds of legs crawling on her skin and the relentless biting. She now hoped they carried no diseases. Or that nothing from the foul water had entered the tiny wounds. She supposed she would soon find out—if they survived their hunters.

Dimia put her hands on her knees and caught her breath. Put up a solid stone wall in her mind to blockade the thoughts of her old comfortable life that had once seemed so hard and cruel. To think of her old home, the curtains in the breeze, the smell of roasting pork and baking pies, the laughter of children—entertaining such remembrances would bring her to unstoppable tears. Dimia drew deep breaths, stilled her shuddering. Do as a Reaper would, she told herself. She looked over at Bramble who only watched on in dumb silence. He didn't understand. The parasites did not bother him. He only saw Dimia scream and race to the bottom of the hill and roll in mud and frantically slap at her legs and feet and run fingers and comb through her hair like she had gone lunar. Dimia oddly laughed at the thought. Bramble still only stared with concern. "Isth Dimia sick?"

"I'm fine." Dimia shivered at another phantasmal revisitation of the insects that still crawled and bit in spirit. She shook off the unwelcome sensation and got to her feet. "Let's keep moving."

They walked. The girl and the golem seemed to have lost their pursuers, that mob that had likely been sparked by Bramble's special brand of highway banditry. During their flight from the lynchers Dimia always tried to think like her own heroes, Halo and his Reapers. They crossed streams to hide their tracks and their scents from the hounds. They found higher ground and monitored the far shouting of the searchers and the barking of their dogs and the lights from their torches. Bramble's senses were beyond the girl's and had been vital to their escape. To be safe they continued to move through the next day. Although Bramble carried Dimia for much of the time, she was past exhausted. They needed to find a place to settle before the sun fell and that would be soon. The wild was even deadlier by night than by day, and the woods were already thick with gloom. These croaking and lethal reaches were full of things that had stalked them. Muscled canines and great hissing birds and twin-tailed cats, hungry for Dimia's delicious meat and bones. She would have been dead a dozen times had she walked alone—but the hulk at her side frightened away those predators that were less bold. And those that were hungry or confident enough to attempt an attack were fought off or slain by Bramble. He had been damaged on occasion. Feeling no pain, he often did not notice he'd been harmed until Dimia pointed it out. She used some thread and needles taken from that same outskirt farmhouse to treat him. Some of his runes appeared to have been damaged and it was difficult to discern whether that had any effect on him, for good or ill.

As they moved on Dimia noticed hints of an old vine-choked structure in the recesses of the gnarled trees and woodshadows. Perhaps they could stay there for the night. They quietly drew closer to the ruins. She had a small knife in her hand, taken from that house's kitchen. The slanted and overgrown plaza they came upon was dominated by a squat stone tower with a crumbling balcony. It was unoccupied, lost to the wild. Bramble helped Dimia clear the upper floor and make a bed of hay and skins. They lay there together for some time. She drifted in and out of sleep, feeling somewhat safe with her strange protector. She traced the runes in Bramble's flesh with her finger. How comfortable she had become around a thing that would terrify any person unfamiliar with the golem's true inner nature. She had taken to studying the glyphs and had begun to see patterns emerging. Patterns not unlike those in music itself. She'd made a game of playing the runes as if they were sheet music until the golem asked that she stop. Something about the music spun from his runery bothered and upset him, striking a deep and troubling chord. And in respect, she stopped doing so—when he was near.

But Dimia found herself becoming obsessed with the puzzle of runery and song. She had heard tales of bards who spun cantrips from their music, charming audiences and even brightening or darkening a room or producing fire or smoke and other illusions simply by strumming their strings and chiming their cymbals and blowing into their runed pipes. It was said that the best harmonists could charm a listener into walking off a cliff—or even strike a man dead with sound alone. Dimia always took those to be untrue tales for the ears of gullible minnows but now she wondered if there was indeed a hidden power in the intricacy of sound itself. Perhaps music and magery were entwined. She was compelled by her curiosity and wanted to seek deeper meaning in songcraft. Such knowledge could be a powerful weapon against Skelen and the hobgoblins. Whether it bothered Bramble or was outlawed by the Nation, she did not care. She would study it in secret, as all mages did. Dimia was already a slave to its hypnotic seduction. Such hubris was the lot of all who heard the call.

Spent, Dimia fell asleep in her makeshift loft with runery dancing in her brain to strange and discordant arias. Bramble went back down to patrol below, all those unsleeping eyes vigilant for any threats that might emerge from the chirping darkness.

— • —