Elrik coughed sharp and low beside me, finally dragging a breath that sounded like it meant to stay. He was propped against a splintered cart axle, one arm wrapped tight around his ribs, the other clutching a flask like it was doctrine. Good. If he could drink, he could walk. And if he could walk, I didn’t have to carry him.

  Around us, the world had caught fire.

  Cannon to the north—ours, by the rhythm. Gustavians to the east—volley fire, clipped and proper, like they still thought polished drills meant something when things stopped dying in the usual ways. Hooves cut ruts near the ravine, boots thundered across the inner yard like they knew where they were going. The air stank of powder, piss, and the kind of hot metal breath that meant teeth had been dislodged recently and without ceremony.

  I took a slow look around. North line firing. East holding. Riders mobile. Civilians not accounted for. Officers posturing like they’d read command in a book and thought it’d hold weight when the air turned to knives. And then—Blemmyes. A tide of them. Dozens. Maybe more. Too many. What in the devil’s arse is this? What conflagration of idiocy decided stacking that many things in one place was wise? I didn’t sign up for parades or miracles. I wanted numbers, lines, a thing I could stab and watch bleed. Not this.

  I didn’t trust any of them. The Gustavians shot straight, but they’d stab a man for crossing the wrong patch of mud. Our lot looked underfed and overbrave. The Blemmyes were a sermon wrapped in muscle—beautiful if you were suicidal.

  We’d arrived just in time to catch the fallout. Now I had to figure out who was worth standing behind when the next wave hit. And who I’d rather shoot before it did.

  No one asked who we were. Not yet. That was mercy, or laziness. Hunters like us weren’t made for speeches or flags. We came from the cracks, sold miracles wrapped in blood and bile to men too soft to face their own rot. The Church called us heretics. The army called us thieves. But when the air curdled and a man’s piss turned cold before his breath did, they still came calling.

  Elrik winced, shifting. “They’ll ask,” he muttered.

  I leaned in, voice low. “Let ‘em. We hold the cards, Elrik. We saw them. We fought them. That gives us say. Real say. If anyone’s calling shots today, it’s the bastards who didn’t shit themselves at the first scream.”

  He nodded once. I kept going.

  “We can call the shots—in literal damned terms. Let them bluster and posture. We know where the fire starts.”

  The first officer to try was barely old enough to shave, face still pink with his mother’s worry. Sword polished like he thought reflection stopped bullets. “You—who gave you leave to cross the lines? Who do you report to?”

  I didn’t rise. Sorry youngling thought I hadn’t faced worse than him. Authority ate me and shat me out, and I clawed against the walls all the way down. This pup was nothing.

  “Where are you sorry fucks aiming?” I snapped. “You pointing that steel at noise like it’s gonna negotiate? You think your banner’s gonna scare what doesn’t blink?”

  He stiffened like that made him braver. Poor fool thought tone outranked truth.

  “Aim where it’s dark,” I said. “That’s where they live. Not in your drills. Not in your sermons. The black spots in your teeth, that’s where they’re breeding. You want to keep your limbs, you shoot where it hurts to look.”

  He tried to speak. I stood.

  He didn’t.

  Blemmyes passed by in clusters—too many. More than I’d ever seen outside old bar stories and the kind of prayer that ends with blood on the doorframe. All silent. All watching without watching. They didn’t march. They glided like old guilt, all muscle and rot and memory.

  “What in the fuck,” I muttered. “What goddamn parade is this?”

  Elrik didn’t answer. Just sipped like he meant to swallow the whole scene.

  This had never been a battle. This was the land spitting us all up and daring us to beg for reentry.

  And here we were. Knee-deep in it, smelling like the bottom of the world.

  My body was running on powder and memory. Too far, too hard, too long—but I needed to see. Had to. From the wall if nowhere else. I found the ramparts, feet dragging, ribs barking, every step a piss-poor argument with gravity. But I got there. Had to see where the teeth were coming from.

  Riders. Galloping across the bridge—what was left of it. Horses flying like they didn’t know what water meant. Gustavians firing again—tight volleys, no hesitation. Maybe they’d finally found their nerve. Twisted heathens storming them from the brush, low and fast, like sins given spine.

  This wouldn’t hold.

  "Aim at the dark!" I roared down.

  One officer—old, limp-legged goat with a face like boiled beef—barked back, voice cracking with authority he hadn’t earned: "What stinking wretch thinks he can command here?!"

  "One that’s killed more of them than you!” I shouted. “The shadows, across the tents! Fire or die!"

  They listened. Maybe not to me, but to the math of the moment. Cannons creaked as crews heaved the barrels around—booted feet bracing against the mud, hands gripping scorched wood, sweat and powder flaking off their skin. The gunners moved like men who didn’t care what they hit as long as it screamed. Linstocks readied. Chocks kicked loose. The iron gods were awake.

  Muskets swung wide. The line shifted like a drunken centipede, each man glancing sideways to see if the next would fire first. Officers barked—less sure now, more noise than spine. But the rifles rose. The line breathed in.

  Across the tents, the shadows twitched. They moved with too many elbows, too little noise, dragging themselves between flame and fabric like they belonged under your bed, not out here.

  Then the volley landed.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  One of them shrieked. It was like a declaration of pain, a rip in the world. A few crumpled. One flailed backward through the canvas like something too brittle to belong to muscle. Fire caught cloth. The dark bled.

  There, they had their proof.

  More shouting followed, but not the kind that aimed. Demands. Questions. One of the older bastards in borrowed brass tried to throw weight: “Who the hell are you, commanding my men, spitting in our face? What story have you got to think you earn this?”

  I didn’t give him what he wanted. Not everything. Just enough to stitch a wound shut.

  “We fought them,” I said, voice flat. “In the Emberwood. Just north. Fire and screaming, and things that wore the faces of children. We didn’t blink. We didn’t run.”

  Elrik stepped up beside me, pale but steady. “They came through the trees. Giggling. Crawling over each other. We set fire to half the wood just to buy ten minutes of breathing.”

  I nodded. “So if you’re asking who gave me leave—call it experience. Call it luck. Or call it the only bastard here who already knows what those things bleed.”

  The officer squinted, still puffed up, still full of uniform and theater. “Have you no steady facts to give? Numbers! Strength! Do they die or not?”

  “No ledger’s gonna save your throat,” I said. “But if you need something to scrawl in your little book—yes, they die. Not easy. Not quick. Not all the way. You break ‘em with fire, gut ‘em with steel, and pray they don’t come back smelling like your mother.”

  He stepped back. If his meagre mind needed calculation, I would let him hold. And then, like it had always been his plan, he bellowed over the chaos: “Cannons! Grapeshot! Rolling barrage, three-line sweep! Keep your eyes on the tents—aim at the dark!”

  The crew snapped to motion. Orders rolled down the lines like fire catching dry brush. No hesitation now. Not clean, but committed. I watched the crews move—hurried, dirtied hands, uniforms torn, faces black with smoke and ash—but they moved like they'd done this before. Drilled. Tired, maybe, but drilled. Maybe they’d hold after all.

  "FIRE!" The cry cracked across the battlements, followed by a rolling, screaming fog that spilled over the northern wall like it had a will of its own. The cannons spoke—low at first, then rising to a tearing crescendo. The whine of a hundred iron mouths slicing the air, each ball flung wide and deep, ripping through canvas and timber, searching for soft things to punish.

  The dark answered with screams—wet, high, unholy. Like children dropped in boiling pitch. Like sins yanked into light too fast. That sound proved what I’d said all along.

  They linger in the dark.

  No time to cheer, no back-patting either. Just that kind of shared silence that says: we saw the same thing, we’ll pretend it wasn’t enough.

  They’d follow the voice that landed steel. For now.

  I scanned the field again from my perch. Collapsing tents, some torn by cannon, some trampled under panic. Gustavians pulling back in crooked lines, they weren’t running, but every step cost them order. Riders—ours—dragging guns back from the edge, horses frothing, men yelling like they meant it.

  "What the hell is the plan?" I growled, not to anyone in particular, just to the smoke and the noise.

  "To survive," the officer sneered, stepping close again. “I thought you had instinct for such.”

  We watched the riders work the guns down into the riverbed, close to the bridge corpse. The wheels sank like they’d found something to mourn. The horses screamed—froth at the mouth, legs kicking mud like they thought it was fire. Men heaved like idiots with something to prove. One cannon stuck hard. Dead weight. No leverage. No help. A steel corpse planted mid-stream. It would take divine force or a dozen more fools to pull it free.

  I tracked the Gustavians next. Still firing, sure, but you could see the slope. Their line didn’t fold—it sagged. Fired in rhythm, but the edge frayed. One hole, then another. Civilians poured through—old men, brittle women, things clutched to their chest that might’ve been children, or bread, or god knows what. And in that clutter, the dark things found room. One at a time. Clean. Like picking teeth with a dagger.

  "Reload, you sorry whores!" someone barked behind me—maybe the officer, maybe another with breath enough to command. "Fire at the fringes, at the dark! Keep them at bay!"

  And then, the hymn came.

  Low, rolling, utterly wrong in its timing. The Blemmyes had arrived. Singing hymns I’d never learned, shielding the civilians behind them with bodies built like siege towers. One of them swatted a flesh-infant with the back of his arm like it was a fly. The thing popped.

  Utterly bizarre. Had I not been a shell from blood and fatigue, I might’ve laughed.

  The cannons did the laughing for me. Another roar. Another steel hail. The sound rolled across the stream like a rockslide chewing its way down bone.

  “What in God's name are they doing?” I asked, flat.

  The officer didn’t answer. Just looked. Cold. Eyes dead, mouth shut, jaw set like it had already buried the question with the last man who asked it.

  "They are helping, you stubborn fool," Elrik muttered. There was something in his eyes—like he’d seen the sun rise and remembered what warmth felt like.

  The riders reformed, pulling into a loose column trailing across the border road, their formation ragged but intact. They looked like ghosts stitched together by the rhythm of hooves and the sheer refusal to fall. The Gustavian line had made it across—barely. And staggered behind them, clutching scraps, kin, the half-dead and the too-young, came the villagers. Not all. Never all. But enough. Enough to count. Enough to make you wonder what worse thing would’ve crawled up behind them if they hadn’t.

  I watched them, jaw tight, vision pulsing at the corners. This was what survival looked like—not glory, not banners, just a dragging mass of limbs and breath and stubborn, blind motion. And still they came.

  Sunrise...

  It wasn’t there yet. But the idea of it was. The pull of something behind the hills. A promise painted in blood and soot.

  "We must keep them at bay, until the sun returns!" I barked, louder now, stepping toward the nearest cluster of half-willing officers. "They bite like the meanest shield-lion you’ve ever heard of, but they’re as cowardly as a tax collector when the numbers don’t favor them. Stand firm! Yell if you’ve got no shot! Fire blanks if it keeps the bastards guessing! Hold them off!"

  I was laying out our survival. They could take it or die choking on their dignity.

  "What good will the sun do?" a cannoneer barked, sweat streaking through powder-blackened skin.

  "You think boiled souls like that belong in the sun?" I spat. "The light will be our saviour," I answered, not because I believed it, but because they needed someone to.

  I pointed to the horizon, still black but thinning.

  "They're beasts of shadow. They move with malice, not reason. Give them nowhere to hide, and even hellspawn blink. Keep firing. Keep shouting. Hold the line until the sun makes cowards of them all!"

  The old officer turned his head slowly, giving me a long, unreadable stare. The kind of look that stripped a man down to weight and purpose. I saw the gears turning behind his eyes. Then they clicked.

  “Drummers! Roll for battle, and don’t stop!” he barked. The call rang out, taken up by a pair of boys with sticks and raw palms. The rhythm began—low, steady, unbroken.

  He looked back at me once, almost something like respect flashing in the filth of his face.

  “Song rings louder than shouts,” he muttered, and walked off into the smoke.

  The drums did what mouths couldn't. The line held—Driven by the percussion of old. I stepped back. The fire dimmed. Like the world had paused to inhale.

  Elrik found me. We didn’t speak. Just locked eyes long enough to say what words would ruin.

  Somewhere down the line, a Gustavian officer raised his hand, voice carried through hoarse restraint. “Ridge line fallback. We regroup there. Civilian escort first. Keep the wounded covered.”

  No one argued. No one cheered. The ridge wasn’t salvation. Just ground. Higher ground. Slightly harder to die on.

  I kept my gaze on the tree line.

  A trace of purple. Of a new dawn. How many would die screaming before it rose?