Chapter X: First Watch

  The barracks under the Wall smelled like damp socks, old steel, and the lingering regret of a thousand poor decisions. Torik tugged at the collar of his too-stiff uniform, scowling like it had personally insulted him. The fabric was scratchy, the seams too tight, and he could already feel the skin around his shoulders and armpits getting rubbed raw. As a signup bonus, the Guard had issued them both a brand-new pair of boots—still stiff as boards and about as forgiving. Torik could feel them biting into the backs of his ankles with every step, the leather refusing to bend as if it resented being worn by anyone unworthy.

  "I swear to the gods, Gell, if this thing chafes my nipples raw, I'm filing a complaint with Command," he muttered, twisting awkwardly to adjust the underpadding.

  Gell barked a laugh, pulling on his own tunic with exaggerated flair. "Please do. I wanna see you explain nipple damage to Commander Mardis. He’ll probably offer to lick it better."

  Torik snorted. "Better than his usual way of ‘disciplining’ recruits."

  They’d grown up three blocks apart in the Dustrow slums, shared food, fists, and trouble since they were old enough to throw stones. When one signed up for the Guard, the other followed. Today was their first real post—stationed atop the crumbling north wall, a part of the city most people pretended didn’t exist. The assignment wasn’t glamorous, but it was theirs.

  The Guard itself was a joke to most citizens: underpaid, undermanned, and riddled with corruption. Bribes flowed more freely than orders, and loyalty often meant looking the other way. Commanders sold patrol routes to smugglers, inspectors skimmed off collected fines, and half the barracks doubled as flophouses or illegal gambling dens. Discipline was a formality, respect nonexistent. Most guardsmen spent their careers leaning on spears and waiting for their pensions—or early graves. No one respected the Guard, least of all the Guard themselves. Torik and Gell knew it. They'd joined anyway.

  Then it came—a metallic screech, sudden and sharp, ripping through the morning air and vibrating through their boots. Magic. The wall’s alarm system. Still functional, apparently. Both boys froze.

  "You ever heard it do that?" Gell asked, his grin faltering.

  Torik shook his head. "Nope. Thought it was broken. Like the rest of this pisshole."

  The enchanted resonance echoed again, deeper now, pulsing along the ancient stone like a heartbeat out of rhythm. Gell cracked his neck and tried to play it off.

  "Maybe some old bastard lit his balls on fire trying to light a pipe. You know how they get—one bad spark and suddenly you’ve got a flaming nutsack emergency."

  Torik slapped his shoulder. "Let’s go. Maybe it’s something real this time."

  By the time they reached the top of the wall, the alarm was still going—now a deep, bone-humming thrum that felt like it was coming from inside their skulls. The stone beneath their feet was chipped and cracked in places, whole slabs missing. The walkway was uneven, a patchwork of hasty repairs and rotting wood. Pigeons scattered as they passed, wings flapping madly.

  Gell ducked to one side and leaned over the edge, shouting down at the winding street below.

  "Oi! What’s happening?"

  A voice shouted back, barely audible over the wail of the alarm: "They’re coming! From the north! Abominations!"

  Gell’s grin disappeared. A shadow crossed his face.

  Torik grabbed his elbow, his own stomach beginning to churn. "Come on. Station."

  They ran up the final staircase, boots clanging against rusted metal. At the top, their unit commander awaited—Commander Mardis, a barrel-chested man whose armor barely fit over his gut. He swayed slightly, as if the tower itself had caught a breeze.

  "You two!" he barked, pointing his baton with less menace and more creative wobble. "Form up! You picked a hell of a day to get your first taste of service."

  His breath reeked of wine. It was still morning.

  "Yes, sir!" they said, in practiced unison, though their voices cracked slightly with nerves.

  They took their post, gripping borrowed spears with hands that trembled just enough to betray their inexperience. Then they looked.

  The plains beyond the wall stretched far and flat, a gray-brown sea beneath a low sky. Once, centuries ago, this land had teemed with life—villages, orchards, family farms—but now it was a forgotten place. Only a few scattered homesteads remained, crooked silhouettes leaning in the wind like drunkards on their last legs. Most had been empty for decades. Those that weren’t were occupied by the desperately stubborn or the quietly mad.

  Most people had moved inside the city long ago, not out of fear, but for convenience. The markets were closer. The spells ran stronger. The water was piped. Why haul a harvest when you could conjure dinner in a rented flat near the commerce ring?

  What remained beyond the wall were fragments: patches of wild grain gone to seed, rusted fences crawling with vines, half-buried wagons, and stone wells choked with weeds. The ghosts of the city's past. And now, something far worse.

  What approached wasn’t an army in any recognizable sense. Shapes lumbered and crawled and skittered forward, a tide of nightmares pouring from the distant hills. Too many limbs. Not enough faces. Some moved in jerks, like puppets yanked by drunken gods. Others flowed, gelatinous and wet, dragging themselves forward with a sick enthusiasm.

  Some floated. Some dragged themselves on chains of flesh and bone. One creature was little more than a writhing cloud of eyes and mouths. Another towered over the rest, walking on four legs that bent the wrong way, its head a twisting tangle of antlers and smoke.

  All of them were wrong. Wrong in color. Wrong in shape. Wrong in feeling. They radiated a sense of brokenness, as if reality itself had cracked to let them through.

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  Torik whispered, "What… what the fuck is that?"

  Gell’s voice was dry. "I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does."

  The closest creature surged forward, half-spider, half-rotting ox, its hide sloughing off in ribbons. Its mouth screamed like rusted hinges scraped against bone. It slammed into the base of the wall with a force that made the stone scream.

  The entire structure shuddered. Cracks spread like lightning. Dust fell like snow.

  Torik and Gell looked at each other. Neither spoke.

  There was nothing to say.

  Then, almost by instinct, they moved to the barrels set haphazardly along the parapets—old storage caches filled with warped bows and bundles of dusty arrows. Neither of them had ever been issued a bow. The Guard didn’t bother with proper training for recruits on the Wall. But the weapons were there, left for whoever might need them when things got ugly.

  They grabbed what they could. Gell’s bow creaked like a floorboard when he strung it. Torik's hand fumbled through the arrows, finding one that looked only half-rotted. They nocked and loosed. Then again. Arrow after arrow whistled through the air, some vanishing into the field, others thudding into the approaching beast. The ox-thing didn’t flinch. Not once.

  More abominations surged into archer range—hundreds, maybe more. Shapes blotting out the horizon.

  Other guards along the wall had begun to fire too, most missing entirely. The wall echoed with curses, bowstrings, and the rising clamor of panic.

  Then Torik, by chance or dumb luck, loosed one more arrow. It soared and sank straight into the ox creature’s eye with a wet pop.

  The beast reared back, finally reacting—not with pain, but with rage. A spider-like appendage shot upward from its side, long and segmented, ending in a grotesque claw. It reached the top of the wall with impossible speed, latched around Torik’s chest and yanked him skyward.

  He screamed.

  "Gell! Gell, help me!" he howled, his voice cracking as he was dragged down the wall toward the waiting jaws below.

  Gell froze. His hands clenched uselessly around the bow. If he jumped, he was dead. But if he didn’t—Torik was already dying. The world seemed to slow, his heartbeat pounding louder than the alarms. Seconds stretched like years.

  He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t even shout.

  Then, behind him, a voice: a low grunt soaked in wine and fatalism.

  "We’re all dead anyways, boy," said Commander Mardis. "Go ahead."

  Gell turned, startled. He hadn’t heard the commander approach.

  Maybe it was adrenaline, maybe it was seeing a spider's arm with phalanges take his best friend, who knows. Gall walked over to the commander, grabbed his "water" skin, knowing exactly what was inside. He took a long swig, smiling at the commander.

  Then he jumped over the wall to save Torik, his uncalloused hands gripping the spear with everything they had.

  It didn’t matter. Not in the end.

  Time passed—but only a few minutes. Maybe less. The two of them died without ceremony. Gell vanished into the mass of teeth and claws and shrieking limbs, never even reaching Torik.

  The wall held, for now, but just barely.

  Commander Mardis remained where he stood, leaning slightly on his baton. The wine sloshed quietly in the skin now hanging from his belt. He stared out over the edge, eyes glassy, brain ticking slow.

  He hadn’t even known their names until this morning.

  The screaming hadn’t stopped, but it had faded. Or maybe he’d just gotten used to it.

  He scratched his beard with one hand and muttered to himself.

  "Might be time to pull the plug. Full retreat. Fuck it all. There’s no plan here—never was."

  No one was around to argue with him.

  So he reached for the bugle strapped to the wall’s inner post, the brass dulled by age and neglect. He wiped the mouthpiece on his sleeve, took a breath, and blew. The long, low note echoed down the battlements—a sound not heard in generations.

  The signal for full retreat.

  There weren’t many left to hear it. Most of the guards had either been dragged down screaming by the monsters or had thrown down their weapons and run the moment someone else got taken. The wall was quiet in that eerie, end-of-things kind of way. Just the wind, the echoes of dying screams, and the growing thunder of claws against stone.

  Mardis stood in the stillness, letting the silence crawl into his ears. He thought about the state of the city’s defenses, and how laughably unprepared they were for anything like this. They hadn’t been openly attacked in centuries—not like this. Not by an army. And so the city had grown soft. The Guard, weakest of the lot, was only the most visible symptom. There were no real armies left, not anymore. Just peacekeepers and taxmen in armor.

  There were private armies, of course—mercenary groups and hired battalions loyal to guilds and noble houses. Mardis figured they’d come soon enough, drawn by duty or coin or the opportunity to look good in a fight. But they’d leave just as quick when they saw what was really crawling up from the plains. No contract was worth getting torn in half by something that shouldn’t exist.

  He grunted, mostly to himself. "We got too used to being safe. Too used to things dying when we stabbed 'em."

  Another claw slammed against the wall in the distance. Dust floated in the air like ash.

  Mardis took another pull from his wineskin—his last, it turned out—and let it drop empty to the stone. He thought about magic next. About what magical help they could even muster. There were mages in the city, sure. A few small battalions kept in reserve. The odd wizard-for-hire. But most were showboaters, academy-trained dweebs who spent more time arguing over spell theory than hurling fireballs. He snorted.

  The Number, now—those weirdos still had a reputation, even if most folks weren’t sure they were real anymore. Mardis had read about them in the Gazetteer. The stories were wild. World-ending spells. Floating cities. One of them supposedly lived in a house made of storms. And then there was Krungus—the mad wizard from the east, if he remembered right. Brilliant, if you believed the reports. Insane, if you believed the others.

  Mardis dismissed them all with a shake of his head. “Buncha loons,” he muttered.

  Below, the Guard broke into retreat—what was left of it. The survivors were already flooding down the stairs and into the alleys, yelling for everyone to run, to get to the safe zones, if such a thing even existed anymore.

  Mardis turned his back on the wall and started walking. Deeper into the city. No orders. No plan.

  Just the hope that he might not die today.

  He ducked into a narrow alleyway, one of the shortcuts he knew from years of patrols and drunken wanderings. The shouts and clash of retreating guards echoed faintly behind him, growing distant.

  Then he saw them.

  Shadows shifted wrong at the alley's mouth. Wet slaps echoed from the stone. Three of them—abominations, already inside the walls. One looked like a sea slug with too many mouths, its body pulsing and trailing a smear of mucus across the cobbles. Another slithered along the wall, eyeless and skeletal, dragging a chain of twitching limbs.

  The city was doomed.

  Mardis reached for his sword. It stuck in the sheath. Of course it did—he hadn’t drawn it in months. When it finally came loose, it did so with a squeal of neglected steel.

  He looked at the sea slug thing barreling toward him.

  He screamed. Not a call for help. Not a cry of defiance.

  It was the scream of a man who had come to terms with the fact that this was how it ended.

  And then he charged.

  But before he could close the distance, a shadow passed overhead—huge and sudden. The abominations paused, every grotesque head swiveling upward in unison, as if drawn by the same invisible thread.

  An airship. Not just any airship, but a massive, ornate vessel of impossible craftsmanship. Gleaming sigils lined its hull, glowing faintly in the ash-thick air. Gold filigree curled along the edges of reinforced plating. Turrets rotated with slow menace. Instead of a balloon, it flew with grand sails—billowing, arcane-infused cloth that shimmered with invisible winds, catching currents no one else could see. The sails stretched like the wings of some god-bird, bringing peace and salvation from on high.

  It soared overhead with silent grace, angling toward the main battleground near the Wall.

  Mardis blinked, jaw slack.

  "Krungus," he whispered. Not in awe. Not in relief.

  But in disbelief.

  Then he was promptly eaten by the sea slug with too many mouths.