The hourglass had been smashed. We weren't counting days anymore. We were counting heartbeats.

  The hidden valley, once a place of desperate refuge, had transformed into an anthill of controlled panic. The wailing of the siren horn had faded, replaced by the shouting of sergeants and the weeping of children being pulled from their fathers' arms.

  I stood at the mouth of the Deep Caves at the rear of the camp. This was the only retreat. It was a dead end, but it was defensible.

  “Move!” I barked, ushering a line of refugees forward. “Keep moving! Don't look back!”

  A woman clutched my arm. She was holding a bundle of blankets that held a sleeping infant.

  “My husband,” she sobbed, looking back toward the barricades. “He’s holding a spear. He’s a baker, sir. He doesn't know how to fight.”

  “He knows how to hold the line,” I said, my voice softer than I intended. “Go. Keep his child safe. That is your fight now.”

  I gently pushed her toward the darkness of the cave.

  Beside me, Willow was working her own kind of magic. The gnome moved through the crowd of terrified children, hardly taller than them herself. She wasn't using spells; she was using presence.

  “Everyone hold hands!” Willow ordered, her voice cutting through the crying. “We are going on an adventure into the mountain. The rocks are friendly, but they are sleeping. We have to be very quiet, or we’ll wake up the echoes.”

  She took the hand of a sobbing boy and led him into the dark. She looked back at me once. Her eyes were hard. She wasn't just a gardener anymore; she was a fierce protector of the seedlings.

  Once the last civilian was inside, Captain Vane ordered two soldiers to collapse the tunnel entrance just enough to make it a choke point.

  “That’s it,” Vane said, wiping soot from her scarred face. “Three hundred souls in a hole in the ground. Now we just have to make sure nothing gets to them.”

  I walked back toward the front lines. The soldiers were terrified. I could smell it—a sour stench of sweat and urine mixing with the ozone of Elmsworth’s alchemical preparations.

  Elmsworth—the spindly old human—was running back and forth along the main barricade, his long white beard tucked into his belt to keep it from dipping into his chemicals. He was handing out flasks of volatile orange liquid to the archers.

  “Do not drink this!” Elmsworth shrieked at a young man. “It is Liquid Fire! It combusts on contact with oxygen! If you burp, you will explode!”

  I found Liam near the edge of the camp. He was stripping off his excess gear—his travel pack, his bedroll, his cloak. He stood in just his fitted leather armor, a quiver of black-fletched arrows on his hip and a composite shortbow in his hand.

  “You’re light,” I noted, stopping beside him.

  “Travelers travel,” Liam said, testing the bowstring. It hummed like a angry hornet. “Scouts run. Snipers wait.”

  He looked at me. The usual arrogant smirk was gone, replaced by a grim, focused intensity.

  “The scout said four hours,” Liam said quietly. “But panic messes with time perception. If they march hard, they’ll be here in two.”

  “We aren't ready for two,” I admitted.

  “I know,” Liam said. “That’s why I’m going to go ask them nicely to slow down.”

  “Liam,” I warned. “Don't be a hero. Just get eyes on them.”

  Liam laughed. It was a sharp, brittle sound.

  “I’m not a hero, Commander. I’m a nuisance. And I’m very expensive.”

  He turned and sprinted toward the canyon wall. He didn't climb; he flowed up the rock face, finding handholds that didn't exist, disappearing into the shadows like smoke in a draft.

  While Liam ran toward death, Willow walked toward the abandoned ground.

  She moved past the new, tightened perimeter lines I had drawn. She walked past the confused sentries, out into the Lower Fields—the farmland we had just sacrificed to shrink our defense.

  It was empty now. A wide, flat expanse of mud and half-harvested crops that sat right in front of the main barricade. This was the killing field. This was where the enemy army would funnel before hitting our walls.

  Willow knelt in the mud.

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  She pulled the green leather pouch from her belt—the one she had salvaged from the Otter’s hoard.

  She opened it. The Iron-Maw Sunflower seeds pulsed with a faint, angry heat. They were heavy, black, and felt like lead bullets in her small hand.

  She didn't dig deep holes. She pressed them into the soft mud, spacing them out in a staggered grid pattern. Five yards apart. Covering the width of the pass.

  She closed her eyes.

  Usually, when Willow sang to plants, it was a lullaby of sunlight and vertical growth.

  This was not that song.

  She hummed a low, vibrating note that resonated deep in her chest. It wasn't a song for the stems; it was a song for the roots. It was the sound of a virus spreading, of a web being spun in the dark.

  Sleep, she commanded with her magic. Spread.

  The ground didn't erupt. Instead, it rippled, like water disturbed by a stone.

  Beneath the surface, the magic took hold. The seeds didn't grow upward; they exploded outward. Roots shot through the soil like aggressive veins, tangling, multiplying, and binding the earth together. One seed split into ten. Ten split into a hundred.

  Willow could feel them through her knees—a massive, writhing network of dormant life seizing control of the field. Where she had planted fifty seeds, the root system was now preparing to birth two thousand.

  The mud settled. On the surface, the field looked empty and barren. But underneath, a legion of iron-hard buds was waiting, coiled like springs.

  “Good boys,” Willow whispered to the dirt, patting the mud affectionately. “Stay down. Sleep tight.”

  She stood up, brushing the dirt from her dress.

  “When you feel their boots,” she whispered, her eyes flashing with a dangerous green light. “Eat them all.”

  She ran back to the barricade, leaving the invisible minefield to wait for the dawn.

  Liam was five miles out when he saw the end of the world.

  He lay flat on his stomach atop a jagged ridge of red stone, looking down into the Great Pass. The wind whipped his hair, carrying the smell of thousands of unwashed bodies and rotting meat.

  The canyon floor was moving.

  It wasn't an army. It was a landslide of black steel and violet flesh.

  Torches stretched back as far as the eye could see, a river of fire flowing through the dark rock. The sound was a physical weight—the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of twenty thousand feet marching in unison, overlaid by the deep, guttural chanting of the Cultists.

  Liam pulled an arrow from his quiver. He didn't nock it yet. He scanned the column.

  He saw the Void-Thralls—mindless husks. He saw the Siege Breakers—Ogres the size of houses, dragging battering rams. And he saw the leaders. Cult Commanders in ornate, bone-white armor, shouting orders and whipping the thralls to move faster.

  “Too fast,” Liam whispered. “Let’s fix the pacing.”

  He stood up, crouching in the shadow of a rock spire. He drew the bow.

  He aimed at a Commander five hundred feet down the line.

  Thwip.

  The arrow flew silently. It struck the Commander in the throat. He crumpled off his mount without a sound.

  Liam didn't watch him fall. He was already moving.

  He sprinted fifty yards down the ridge, slid into a new cover, and drew again.

  Thwip.

  Another Commander, this one shouting at an Ogre, took an arrow to the eye.

  Liam moved again.

  Thwip. Move. Thwip. Move.

  For ten minutes, he was a ghost. Down in the canyon, chaos erupted. The column halted. Soldiers were shouting, pointing at the cliffs, firing blind volleys into the dark. They couldn't find him. He was picking off the officers, severing the head of the snake one vertebra at a time.

  “They’re stalled,” Liam grunted, ducking behind a boulder as a stray fireball scorched the rock above him. “Now for the road block.”

  He reached the overhang—a crumbling section of cliff face directly above the vanguard.

  He pulled one of Elmsworth’s "mining charges" from his belt.

  “Chew on this.”

  He tossed the vial.

  BOOM.

  The explosion shattered the keystone. Tons of red rock sheared off the cliff face, burying the front line of the army in a cloud of dust and rubble. The pass was blocked.

  But Liam wasn't done.

  Three Void-Runners—spindly, multi-limbed scouts—were already scaling the cliff face, hissing as they scrambled toward him.

  Liam switched to his bow. At this range, he didn't need to aim.

  Thwip. First Runner took an arrow to the chest. It fell. Thwip. Second Runner took one in the knee, slipped, and fell to its death. Thwip. Third Runner lunged. Liam drew a dagger with his off-hand, stabbed it in the neck, and kicked it off the ledge.

  Below, the army was recovering. Archers were focusing on his position. A rain of black arrows began to shatter the rocks around him.

  Liam stood his ground. He returned fire.

  He was a machine. Every time an officer tried to organize a clearing crew, Liam put an arrow in them. Every time a sorcerer tried to cast a spell, Liam interrupted it with a shaft of steel.

  He fired until his fingers bled. He fired until the wood of his bow was hot.

  He reached for an arrow. His hand grasped empty air.

  “Empty,” Liam whispered.

  Below, a massive Siege Ogre roared. It had pushed through the rubble, ignoring the arrows stuck in its hide. It was clearing the path, lifting boulders the size of wagons and tossing them aside. If it cleared the way, the army would march again.

  Liam looked at his belt. He had one mining charge left.

  He looked at the Ogre. It was directly below him, roaring up at the annoyance on the cliff. Its mouth was a gaping maw of rotten teeth and purple energy.

  “Catch,” Liam said.

  He primed the vial and dropped it.

  It fell straight down. The Ogre looked up, just in time to see the glimmering glass bottle fall into its open mouth.

  Gulp.

  The Ogre looked confused. It burped.

  THOOM.

  The explosion was muffled, but the effect was catastrophic. The Ogre’s head didn't explode; its entire upper body convulsed. It collapsed backward, dead before it hit the ground.

  Its massive, multi-ton corpse fell directly onto the narrowest part of the cleared path, wedging itself between the canyon walls.

  A perfect, fleshy barricade.

  The army behind it stopped. They couldn't move the body. They couldn't climb over it without breaking formation. They were stuck.

  Liam slumped against the rock, breathing hard. Blood dripped from a cut on his forehead.

  He checked the time.

  He hadn't bought them twenty minutes. The confusion, the dead officers, the rockslide, and the dead Ogre blocking the pass... it would take them hours to clear this mess.

  “You’re welcome, Kaelen,” Liam wheezed.

  He pushed himself off the rock. He was out of arrows, out of bombs, and bleeding.

  But he smiled.

  He turned and melted into the shadows, leaving twenty thousand demons shouting in frustration behind him.