Swearing and high on a berserker’s natural frenzy, Lucius cut his way out of the blood fest, carrying the female commander’s head by the hair. He had roughly sewn it off with his sword in the midst of fending off a dozen other panicked madmen. The smell of death was in the air and the concept of allies had ceased to hold meaning. After the volley of grapeshot, only chaos existed and every human cleaved to their own survival alone. Those that made the mistake of viewing my pupil as their enemy did not escape the killing field.

“Stand down, out of my way!” Lucius bellowed, smacking spear tips away from himself.

The cannoneers were busy reloading the crude sabot of metal. They focused single mindedly on their duty, heedless of the approaching death and in this particular circumstance were lucky. Lucius had no interest in slaying the men who had rendered him victory among the commanders. This was of course fleeting to an extent. The armies were still nearly evenly matched, and even outmatched when it came to stigmata. Not one of the Giordanans had a stigmata worth noting in this historical record.

The greatest force of destruction was Lucius himself, but he had a responsibility that pulled him from the battlefield. Still carrying the severed head, heedless of etiquette, he plunged into the wastelander army. He shouted for, “Lupa!” and grabbed one man after the next. He screamed in their faces to little effect.

The first of note to find him was the former angel. While he lacked most of his powers, he was still wholly unfazed by death, injury, blood, the wailing of thrashing life expiring about him. He strode over soon-to-be corpses with a spear propped upon his shoulder. None of the wastelanders forced him to put it to use. “And so he returns!”

“I need Lupa, now.”

Golden gestured to the sands far behind their battle line, to a pack of warriors corralling the remaining camels.

“Thanks,” Lucius said, tossing Golden the severed head.

Golden frowned. “Is this a gift?” he asked, but received no answer.

Lucius charged through the army, passed by the cannoneers and beyond the slingers. His presence dragged a wave of confusion through the men, as though the bannermen wanted to follow after him but with no command they soon merged back into violent formation.

Up the dune and over the buttes of stone, Lucius scrambled his way over to her with a stolen sword clutched in his hand. When half a dozen spear tips swayed at him, he snarled like a hound. “Back off!”

“Lucius! What happened?” Lupa demanded, emerging from between the animals. She stayed the warriors with light touches and slipped between them.

“I need your stigmata. There’s a problem in the mine. The bishop–Jean, she… it’s hard to explain. Come, please!”

Lupa blinked and glared and glowered. She instinctively recoiled at being expected to help some other woman, especially without an answer, but it only took a moment of judging his gaze for her to capitulate. “Has the battle been won?”

Lucius twisted round and swept his hand. The grapeshot had punched a hole through the enemy formation. The whole thing was unraveling and panicked wastelanders were fleeing northward, squeezed out by the dual press of his army and the Giordanans. “Soon enough,” he said.

“Any stigmata users?”

“None anymore… wait.” I hadn't completely wasted my efforts trying to teach him languages. The man who had called himself Pontius had done so with purpose. In the common tongue, he called himself Fifth. Only four commanders were accounted for dead.

He spun and glared at the battle, though the men were no larger than vermin at his distance. Still, a stigmata user of note can make themselves known even from a great distance, among a great many men. The right power at the right time can shake the world in fact.

Primarus had been the one to rally the men north. Lucius wouldn’t learn his name for some time, but the leader’s presence was immediately felt. Far more potent than mere blasts of lightning or claps of thunder, he had feasted upon the heart of the godling and took from it the most nuanced control of electromagnetics.

He cast out his will, pushing it through the crowd like hurtling wind. Confused warriors had to grasp their weapons and plant their feets and unseen forces pulled upon every bit of metal and rust. The weapons of the fallen shot across the carnage like leaves in a current, ripping at legs and feet. More blood was shed, but not nearly enough to sate the dead, if that were Primarus’ intent.

The crux of the forces twisted and manifested at the ley cannons, the two constructs of iron-bound wood. They shot into the sky, tumbling and twirling as ley rods tumbled free. The cannoneers gawped until one of the cannons tumbled out of the magical grasp and fell back to the sand. It crushed two of the men, sending up a geyser of bloody sand as it shattered.

The other did not fall. It danced and floated, wobbled and slipped away. It was carried upon a sea of magnetic forces, far above any human’s grasp. Primarus stole it away with the full might of his focus and exertion, surrounded by hundreds of slavishly loyal soldiers.

Lucius roared. He took half a dozen steps to charge north. Brutish instinct told him to abandon all strategy, to forsake allies, and to slaughter the enemy thief. But, if he did that, Jeanne would be lost. No one would be able to bring Lupa through the battle.

He was not without allies however. He was not the only warrior able to retaliate. It was Nikolai who brandished his sword and rallied troops to a fresh formation. Without a word exchanged between the two men, the northerner threw himself into the battle because it was Lucius who could bring safety to the angel of Jeamaeux. The clash between forces drew it tight, pressing bodies against shields until the magnetic warrior had no hope of sorting friend from foe with his stigmata.

Lucius saw no more of the fight than that. Taking Lupa’s hand in his own bloody grip, he took off running with her. Down sand dunes and over exposed rock, the two of them ran wide around the combat. They kept friendly forces to their side, jumping over the corpses of the fallen.

He put the war out of his mind the moment they were passed the battle. He trudged one foot in front of the other as his lungs burned. The exhaustion of battle dragged down his pace so much he wasn’t even dragging Lupa behind him. While there may have been some disgruntlement, some accusations of desertion, he did not allow such ideas to pass through his mind.

As the two of them bounded down ramps and ladders, he bellowed, “Bring her out, bring her out!”

Not one of the guards obeyed, but none stopped him. His unexpected arrival had only been planned among the commanders. The guards simply didn’t impede his progress back to the secure room of the mine.

The Giordanan guarded the door paled when Lucius appeared. He gripped his spear and almost leveled it at him. “The battle is still going! I can hear it. Do not fool me!” he shrieked.

“I came early,” Lucius snapped back. “Open the door.”

Gulping down his fear, the guard pounded his fist open the door and bolts were pulled free. “Who’s this?”

Lucius glanced back at Lupa and shook his head. “She’s the doctor,” he said, pushing past the guard as soon as the door had been pulled open.

Oil lamps had burned low. The two men still in the room with her had jumped to their feet, holded the curved blades common to eastern Giordana, a diffusion of Aillesterran culture. They were something akin to lesser nobility. It meant nothing at all of their material wealth, but implied they were polyglots at the least.

Lucius snarled when he didn’t immediately see the bishop. “Where is she?”

“Resting,” one of the swordsman said. “Who is she?” he asked, lifting the tip of his blade toward Lupa.

Lucius stepped forward and grabbed the steel. He squeezed and twisted, driving the man back as blood trickled down his forearm. Nearly wrenching the weapon from the guard’s hand, he said, “Bring me to her.”

Lupa snarled. “Just what is going on? Would it kill you to explain?”

Lucius released the sword and picked up one of the oil lamps as the inner door was opened up. “See for yourself,” he said, casting light upon her fevered body. The markings of the cursed stigmata had returned in full, etched upon her body as though by living paint.

He clicked his tongue. “I couldn’t disrupt the spell. I don't know how it’s working. Ma– Amurabi might be able to do it, or Anubi, but we don’t have either of them at the moment. I was able to slow it down but it looks like it’s attacking her body to restore itself. The spell has some kind of stabilization effect. If it didn’t, just the casual brush of clothes might have destroyed it. Lupa, I need you to destroy the spell on her like it’s a stigmata before it kills her.”

The wastelander woman hesitated and knelt beside the angel of Jeamaeux. She put her hands to Jean’s arm and lifted it up. “How do you even recognize this?”

“There are libraries in the north where they’ve cataloged stigmata for centuries. The scholars barely understand them, but, for something this crude?”

“This isn’t crude at all. I don’t even know where to begin.”

“Does it matter?”

“Lu, this isn’t one stigmata! I can’t just bite it off like I bit off yours. The effects aren’t in one spot. Look, here–” she pulled the bishop’s thin shirt up, exposing the marks spiraling out from her navel. “This is the core, though I’ve never seen a sigil this far from the heart. I have to work my way to it, undoing the… it’s like it’s growing across her. Lu, I don’t think I can break this.”

Lucuis got on his knees beside her. “You have to try, or the war in the middle kingdoms will be hell.”

“That’s what you need her for? War?”

“I’m a war leader, aren’t I?”

Lupa huffed and lifted Jean’s arm up further, running her tongue across the woman’s wrist and lapping off the furthest reaches of the curse's spread. The mark writhed and dissipated wherever her saliva reached, dissolving like ink in water. “This will take a while.”

Lucius rose and gave her space. Before she had accomplished much of anything however, a cry came from outside. “The battle is over, they are routed!”

Lucius spun, then hissed orders at the guards, “Give her the space she needs. Your angel needs to be fully seen to.” The men understood his implication and shut the door between them and the so-called doctor. Neither strayed from it, each practically pressing their ear to the wood.

The herald of victory was a young boy, anxiously shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He shrank back when Lucius spotted him. “They said to get you and the bishop.”

“You have me, what happened?”

“They’re retreating!” the messenger said as Lucius scrambled back up ladders to the rim of the mine. From his vantage, the entire battlefield looked like nothing more than a massacre.

“Who is routing them?”

“Nobody, sir… Master Nikolai, he’s fallen.”

Lucius almost fell off the ladder as the news took the strength out of him. “He what?”

“He’s been killed.”