Chapter 343: Reestablishing Order
“Master, the city walls have been breached! The allied armies cannot hold much longer. We must leave — now!”
The sounds of combat reached her before the words had settled. When she stepped from the tower, she saw the sky above the city burning dull red — the clouds heavy and viscous as clotted blood, light that belonged to no ordinary hour.
“But my sister hasn’t come back yet.”
“She holds a garrison post. She cannot leave her perimeter without authorization.” Kraft’s voice was tight with the effort of staying level. “If you die here, you waste everything she sacrificed to get you out.”
She waited another moment. Then she nodded.
“I understand.”
The streets were rivers of people. The city guards worked the edges of the flood — shouting, gesturing, pressing the crowd south — but even their authority was fraying. She let herself be carried with the current, Kraft a steady mass at her shoulder, using his body as a buffer between her and the worst of the crush whenever the stream surged and compressed.
So this is where we fall.
She looked back once, toward the Tower of Babel rising above the rooftops at the city’s center — the highest point in the Holy City, the visible proof of everything the Federation had built and sustained across centuries. Flying Devils were carrying Mad Demons to the tower’s upper levels. Lightning cracked, struck one devil down, struck another. It was not enough. There were simply too many.
Several hundred years of growth and construction, and it would be over tonight. The most fertile, most inhabited land in the world. The Holy City. It would fall to ruin as completely as a child’s sandcastle — one afternoon to build, one wave to erase.
When they passed through the south gate, the Devils were already cutting across the road ahead.
Those who could fight stepped up alongside the guards without being asked. But the enemy had brought Mad Demons, Dreadheart Demons, and Infernal Lords. The disparity was not close.
The first wave of spears took dozens of people down. Some lay pinned through the abdomen, their insides spilling onto the frozen ground; some clutched stumps and screamed. She stood and watched it, her heart tightening with each breath, counting the steps between herself and the enemy line.
“Master, what are you—” Kraft grabbed her arm.
“I can fight too.” She pulled in a breath. “Let me go.”
“Your importance outweighs theirs. You cannot—”
“Let go.”
Her magic answered before she had finished speaking, cold air billowing from her skin as she shook free of his grip. She did not look back.
A hundred paces between her and the enemy. The battle masks. The blood-wet weapons. Her heart was contracting with each step, pain-tight and fast — but she was not willing to keep hiding behind the bodies of people who were dying because of the city she represented. She was a witch of the Holy City. If she was going to die, she would die on this ground.
“Everyone — step aside!”
The command came from the flank, and then a figure fell from the sky like something the clouds had thrown down.
She landed with her back to the crowd and raised her longsword above her head. Her hair was the color of embers, long and loose, and when the light struck it she looked less like a person than like a thing that had decided to take a person’s shape for the occasion.
“A Holy Warrior of the Federation!”
“She’s — an Extraordinary—”
The edge of the sword began to glow. A warmth built in the blade from hilt to tip, deepening, brightening — gold, the precise gold of the sun cresting the horizon, every ray of it finding its own angle in the air beneath the red-stained clouds. For a moment the darkness above reflected light instead of absorbing it, and countless golden threads hung in the smoke-thickened air like something that refused to leave.
The witch leaped.
The sword came down.
Silence.
Where the battlefield had been, there was scorched earth. The enemy that had been advancing — the Mad Demons, the Dreadheart Demons, the Infernal Lords — was simply no longer there, as though the blow had erased not just bodies but the space they had occupied. The surviving Devils at the edge of the field broke and ran. More Holy Warriors arrived from the city’s flanks and drove into the retreat, cracking the encirclement apart.
“Go quickly.” The sword-wielding witch was on one knee in the burned earth, breathing in harsh pulls, her strength spent. “While you have the chance — go.”
“But — where can we go?” someone in the crowd asked.
Right. Where.
Even the last stronghold had fallen. Tens of thousands of lives lost. No strength remaining. No tricks left.
“Don’t give up.” The red-haired witch raised her head. The exhaustion in her face was real, but something behind it was not ready to stop. “We’ll cross the mountains, cross the rivers — the desolate lands. We reestablish order there.”
“But there are only peasants there. Backward-village farmers with nothing.”
“We can always reestablish order.” The witch met the crowd’s eyes, one face at a time. “As long as we survive, the day of triumph will come. Now go.”
“Master. Why didn’t you go with them?”
She had separated from the main column before the south gate crowd dispersed, taking a smaller group west. Kraft stayed close, and her bodyguards had formed a loose escort around her. The others — her retainers, her servants, none of them fighters — moved in a pale cluster behind.
“I left important documents in the experimental lab at the Concealing Forest. And magic stones. If we’re going to reestablish order, those materials are essential — the witches will need them. I have to bring them over the mountains.”
“The Devils are gaining on us!”
“Hammer, Stone — hold them back.” Kraft’s voice carried the flat, clean authority of a man who had given orders men were going to die following.
“Yes, sir!”
She kept moving. She did not look back.
These mortals would slow the Devils; they would not stop them. Once they stepped out to face that pursuit, they would not come back. She knew this, and she kept walking, because she needed to reach the laboratory and she did not have the luxury of standing still for grief.
For some reason, overlapping patches of black and white had begun appearing at the edges of her vision.
Then the world blurred.
Kraft was still breathing beside her, three days later — still upright, which was more than she could say for most of the escort. Someone as robust as him could tire. Even he was slowing.
She looked back. Thirty people had dwindled to six. Some had fled somewhere along the route. Some of the badly injured had stepped out of the column on their own, without explanation, before she could argue with them. She had let them go. She was already asking too much of the ones who remained.
If the Devils catch us again…
“You still have me.” Kraft said it quietly, not loudly — not for the group, just for her. “I’ll stall them as long as I can.”
She looked at him. “Why?”
He blinked.
“Why are you still here? If you ran now, you might actually survive.” She was genuinely asking. She had turned this question over for three days and could not find the logic that held it together. “We are witches. We have always kept our distance from ordinary people. You are an ordinary person. Under normal circumstances, you would not be walking to your death beside me.”
“But you never mistreated us.” His voice was simple — not humble, not eager to please, just plain. “I don’t have magic. But I have principles. Protecting you is my duty.”
She opened her mouth, and did not find anything to say.
A sound rose behind them. Everyone understood immediately.
“Master. Go quickly.” He stepped back. “Don’t look back.”
The black and white patches were spreading.
She stumbled into the basement.
The lab was intact. Documents on the table, magic stones in their cases, everything exactly where she had left it. She began organizing with hands that would not quite stop trembling.
Kraft’s words were still moving in her.
For as long as she could remember, one belief had been foundational in the Holy City: witches were chosen by the gods, and ordinary people — those who could not condense magic — were their charges. Uneducated. Powerless. Cultivating soil. But the man who had just gone back to face an enemy he could not defeat in order to buy her sixty more seconds — she could not locate powerlessness in him. What she had seen was valor and tenacity, in forms that she was not sure she could match. Qualities that were entirely independent of magic.
Cooperation was better than unilateral command. She had believed that in theory, in her laboratory. She was starting to understand it as something more than a theory.
But that understanding also sharpened the question that had been pressing at her all three days: if cooperation was better, if the mortals in the city had qualities the witches lacked, then how had they lost? How had the people of four hundred years ago suffered a defeat this complete?
The bellowing started outside the door.
Faster than expected. Dammit.
Her vision was nearly filled with the flickering patches. She could barely see the worktable. But she could not die here — she had to get these research results past the mountains, across the rivers, to the desolate lands where the survivors were trying to rebuild.
She found a magic stone of reverberation by feel and pushed her magic into it, setting it to cry for help on an endless loop. A sound someone would eventually hear, when the fields were restored and the witches came back.
The wooden door split apart.
She turned. A Mad Demon filled the frame — massive, its arms already beginning to swell with the power that preceded a throw. The spearhead came up, the shaft leveled, the point aligned. Ice formed in the air around her, the last of what she had, thrown into a barrier she already knew would not be enough.
She closed her eyes.
The black-and-white patches covered everything.
Sound stopped.
Cold stopped.
She was not lying in a basement. She was lying in a meadow in warm light, something soft wrapped around her, and the spear had not come, and she was so tired, and the light kept growing.
Did I die?
After a time — she could not have said how long — a sliver of light appeared in the dark and widened, little by little, until she was looking up at a grey ceiling.
Someone said: “Your Highness, she has awoken.”