Blood and ruin. Steel and death. Father and daughter. It was happening again.
Oaky eyes weeping black oil. Mouth twisted, begging, shameful, praying to be erased, looking in the face of the one whom he had raised in love and honor.
"Danitha. Do your duty."
And what was her duty? To maintain the honor of the people who had already been lain low like beasts? To be a hero—the kind who slay their fathers and can do nothing for the shattered people before them?
The steel in Danitha's boots clicked against the floor of the stone passageway. She stretched her arm, wincing only slightly as she felt the healing magic pulse in her sides. She knew she should keep it still, let the cleric's power do its work, but more powerful in her was the congenital urge to act. Especially in present circumstances.
Behind her: rows and rows of Benalish refugees whose orderly footsteps, trained by years of discipline, couldn't conceal groans, cries of agony, prayers for salvation—or death. And ahead of her, the tunnel plunged into the distance. By her estimation, they had walked miles since exiting the chapel, and the end of the cavern only twinkled with the dimmest light.
Even further behind them: the village of Croden, reduced to ruins, razed by Phyrexian invaders. Countless Benalish, children and adults, consumed by the monsters. Hundreds of her troops, devoured, reduced to grist for the monstrous machines. Among, them, perhaps, was Knight-Commander Aryel, Benalia's most important miliary leader besides Danitha herself. She grimaced: Aryel might already be lost, made a Phyrexian abomination, laying waste to Benalia City, crushing underfoot the knights who had trained all their life to be heroes, people who had believed in Benalia and in the Church of Serra and who now would be drowned in oil and crucified as testaments to Phyrexian glory.
And then there was Teshar, the aven priest who had held Danitha, counseled her, whom the villagers were still asking after, whom she refused to say she had seen pulled into a cloud of Phyrexian monsters. She prayed, with the little light still twinkling in her soul, that he would know peace.
The cave was, her cousin Marten had explained, part of a religious rite, a way of commemorating the honorable and dishonorable dead alike. Each year, the people of Croden would celebrate a Serran service in the chapel and carry relics of all who had died in the year—personal effect, trinkets, tempera-painted icons of Serra or Gerrard, even bones—through the tunnel and to the salt-soaked cliffs, then let the sea take them. Remembrance and release. She felt a pang, a bite of venom, something almost like anger at them for being able to consign those burdens to Serra with such ease.
The onyx walls of the cave closed in. She seemed to float apart from herself, from it all, felt sick. All their lives, and hers, had been built on millennia of Serran faith and Benalish heroism, promises of honor and heroism and conquest and immortality, and that faith was shorn apart, mutilated before their eyes and then reduced to smoking rubble, and she was the last to stand in the ash. She was not resuscitating that history; she was its last gasp.
Danitha straightened her shoulders—an easy, rote maneuver, the kind that could bring her body under control, something easy to keep track of when the mind was too stormy, or so he, the man who had been her father, had told her, back when he was a knight instead of a bloated monstrosity weeping shimmering oil. "You have duties out here,"—he pointed to the ground—her father did always love pointing to make a point—"And duties in here." He pointed to her head. "Both real. But one is a world of shadows. One is a world of life. Know which is which. They change roles. Find yourself in the real one."
She cringed, trying to hear the real fatherly voice that the clang of alien machinery had replaced in the moments before—it all. World of shadows, world of life.
Danitha tapped one of her knights on the shoulder. "Take the lead. I'll be back." He nodded stiffly, and she could see an almost imperceptible expression—suspicion, fear, doubt.
Easing her steady gait—letting herself feel the tight, stinging pain of her wound—Danitha dropped back into the crowd. She allowed the survivors to slip around her, trying to meet as many of their glances as she could manage, half sickened at the cold death in their eyes and half stunned by the awe with which they still, somehow, looked on her. She wanted to receive them with pride and triumph, just as her father would have. Instead, she felt like hiding like a child.
She reached the middle of the caravan, where they had improvised a mobile infirmary. There were two rows of gurneys, their carriers, nothing more than strong-armed townsfolk who had been drafted into the duty, ambling awkwardly down the corridor. They were trying desperately, with little success, not to jostle their charges. In the center-back gurney lay a limp form, shorter than any Benalish knight, just close young enough to be confused for a squire, excepting, of course, how scrawny as he was. Marten Capashen. Cousin. Steward. Friend.
Roll your shoulders. There was Marten, sprawled out on a gurney, murmuring quietly as they jostled him along.
"How is he?" Danitha looked at the ersatz medic in the back of Marten's gurney. Their thick muscles were beaded with sweat—the cool corridor was baking with the heat of human breath and bodies—and they huffed quietly as they trotted along. Their hands, she noted, were dusted with a layer of ash.
"Hanging in, my lady," they said, casting his eyes down. They had likely never met a member of the Great Houses, at least not one higher than the petty noble that the Joryevs had installed in Croden. That man, Iven Joryev, had still been missing when Teshar and Marten had shepherded the villagers to their escape. Perhaps he had died. Perhaps something worse had happened.
"What does the cleric say?" her eyes were fixed on Marten.
"Hrm," they grunted. "I haven't talked to Brother Merah in a while. Seems occupied, my lady."
She glanced up. Merah, the other aven clergyman of Teshar's parish—part of the same pastoral mission—was the only surviving Serran priest in their company, and so he was their healer by default. He walked alongside the front row of gurneys, whispering clipped prayers to Serra as golden light flickered from his fingers. An experienced healer would struggle to keep up with this many injuries, and this young cleric, who had seemed more interested in theology than life magic, was far from experienced.
Then, she remembered herself dimly. "What's your name?" she asked the medic, cursing herself for forgetting her manners.
"Nathyn, if it pleases, my lady," they said quietly.
"Are you here with your family, Nathyn?"
They pressed their lips together. Nodded. "My daughter's here. That's all." They nodded towards a cot nearby, where a little child was nestled into a cot, sleeping, tossing and turning.
"I'm sure Merah will get to her in due time," Danitha said, knowing she should say something else but losing the words in her throat. Teshar's words echoed: What good is explanation in the face of such suffering?
Nathyn nodded stiffly, then turned away.
Danitha placed a hand on Marten's forehead. The sheen of icy sweat was unpleasant, but his fever had broken. He was sleeping unsoundly, periodically murmuring nonsense and thrashing his legs. She wondered if he was still there, still in that chapel with the Phyrexian's razor claws perpetually piercing his sides, she herself perpetually screaming for him and begging for mercy. When he awoke, would he be relieved to escape that nightmare, or horrified by the one they were still in?
She felt that feeling, the one that lives not so much in the brain but in the spine and the nerves and the heart, of a figure, next to her, gazing upon her, and without knowing why she was filled with the dread of being watched by her father, and she flicked her eyes up at that unknown shape just beyond her—but it was only Nathyn. They looked away as soon as she turned to them, but for the half-moment of mutual recognition, when she saw them watching her, she was filled with dread at the dim eyes of dun faith, yes, but there was also something else, something more there.
Something pulsed in her, something like the feeling she'd felt in the church, something moving, a wanting that reached out, and she was looking at their powder-stained fingers. But then they were looking away and it fled, and she was back here, amidst the dark, the dead, and the dying.
The next time she visited, a few hours later, she thought Marten was sleeping. But as she approached, Marten raised a hand.
"So, cousin," Marten said meekly, without opening his eyes. "What's the plan?"
"Hm," she said, smiling ever so slightly. "After what happened at Croden,"—she looked at Nathyn (burning buildings, broken bodies, Benalish weeing oil)—"The Phyrexians clearly haven't brought some paltry strike team." An understatement. The Phyrexians were pouring in from the seeping wounds in the sky, and she doubted that any fortifications could stand up to them for long. "Joryev Manor, perhaps? It's a full day on foot, perhaps half a day to ride."
Marten gave a hoarse grunt, gasped out words. "Ah, of course. The Joryevs. Isn't it convenient, cousin. That they. Called you out here. Middle of nowhere. Right at the moment the invasion started."
"Sleeper agents, you think," she said, her stomach knotting. He shrugged.
"I'm. Not at full capacity. But I'm suspicious. And in any case. Could the Manor really be standing?"
He was right. If the Manor wasn't rubble already, it might be a monument to Phyrexian glory and Benalish suffering. The Joryevs might be nightmares with eyes weeping oil and flesh grafted to steel and claws hands that held their daughters by the throat and squeezed the life out of them and—
"So, hardly desirable," she said.
"Perhaps Lyra Dawnbringer will come save us. Perhaps the D'Avenants."
She smirked. "Now, cousin, being wounded doesn't mean you can slack off. Lyra and the Order of Dawn have sworn to defend Benalia—not us. Benalia City is their greatest priority. Ditto for the D'Avenants. I trust Cerise, but now that the Invasion has started, her priority will be to stabilize the Council."
"Ah, yes. The practicalities of politics. So very thrilling when you're at court. So very difficult when you're on death's door."
"Perils of leadership. In the meantime—our daring escape. If we can't go south, we'll have to lead the civilians out, then north, along the coast. Eventually, we'll run into Deniz or D'Avenant settlement—hopefully one that's still standing. If it isn't, perhaps our merry band of misfits will grow."
"Hnh." Something resembling a laugh slipped out of Marten. "You know, cousin. Inbetween your audacity All my jabbering has meant something."
"I might be wildly unprepared and walking amidst smoldering wreckage, but I was trained for this."
Marten furrowed his brow. As the muscle flexed, a tiny blot of blood trickled from his forehead—a wound that Brother Merah hadn't seen to, evidently. "It's a risk to bring these civilians along. We'll move slower. Be in more danger."
She was tempted to agree. But. "If we leave them here, they'll be defenseless. The Phyrexians haven't found them yet, but it's just a matter of time."
He groaned and tried to say more, but the words turned to a groan in this throat. She tapped a finger to her lips and wiped beading sweat away from his forehead. "Keep resting, cousin. I'll get a lay of the land. See what we can do."
As she reached the mouth of the cave, Danitha was met not by shimmering beams of the Benalish sunrise but by the steely light of an invasion.
She was crouching near the tunnel's exit, a squat little maw that opened into the foot of a stony bluff. Jaren, the scout who had brought the first report—he was a squire, really, apprentice to the knight back in the chapel, the one whom the Phyrexian had mutilated (a man raised to be a hero, proud of his people, insides ripped out by a hulking monstrosity, just like)—he had given as comprehensive an account as his trembling voice could manage. But she struggled to believe it until she saw it.
Overhead, the sky was pocked with the branches of the Phyrexians' terrible tree. Dozens of them. If the attack in Croden was any indication, each branch carried hundreds of Phyrexians—perhaps thousands. And this was only here, in one of Benalia's most thinly populated regions. She could only imagine the untold thousands swarming in Llanowar, Shiv, Tolaria, Benalia City. The blood and oil and steel and screams. She whispered a prayer, shaky, like ink dribbling on paper, that the Coalition's preparations would help save as many lives as possible. She couldn't bring herself to hope for anything more than that.
"Alright," she said, turning to the squire. "Let's go."
Jaren's eyes flared. "Go? Erm, my lady? Go where?"
"I need to survey the terrain, see the paths. We need to know our options."
The squire shook his head, and then caught himself a moment later and stilled himself. "Well, my lady. I suppose you might. But I—you should go."
She frowned. "No, squire. I can't go alone. I need someone to watch my back. We don't have enough soldiers to spare—someone need to protect the villagers. Your people, yes?"
Jaren nodded stiffly. She recalled that he was squire to the reservist detachment in Croden, that he was as much a member of the townsfolk as of the army.
"Then this is how we help them. Come with me," she said, cutting off any further objects. Regret hung on her shoulders; she knew she should give the boy more space, more choice, but they couldn't afford it. They had to carry on.
"Very well, my lady," Jaren murmured. "But you'd best be ready for the smell. It'll set in soon."
As they exited the cave and stepped out over the limestone rocks, she inhaled the solemn breeze of the ocean, so like the riversoaked air of home. Her cloak streamed around her in the salty wind. Particles of water drenched the air, as if the sea itself wished to crawl up to shore. Next to her, Jaren covered himself with a paltry hood to escape the oceanic gale.
They paced through the rocky terrain abutting the coast, picking across jagged stones that would-be fishermen had used for generations. Each step added more data to her mental calculations—whether the wounded would be able to climb the stones, whether children would hurt themselves while trying to keep their balance, whether the salt spray would put them at risk for hypothermia. Marten could have sized up the situation in a moment, but she had to make do with the fruits of experience.
As they reached the end of the rocky outcropping, Danitha was relieved to find easier, greener terrain. A wall of swaying reeds parted easily before them, and they finished retracing Jaren's path—right up to the treeline of the coastal forest. The ember light of the Phyrexian portals rippled through the pine-lattice canopy, and Danitha swore that she saw shadows slipping through the darkness. Jaren shuddered.
No time to ponder it. She kept her sword at the ready, letting its mutlicolored stained glass wash her with iridian light. They slipped between the trees, finding the paths that Joryev subjects had worn into the earth over generations. She wondered whether Lady Aveya herself had ever been here; she had never gotten the impression that the quiet, dark-eyed noble took much time to venture out of her estate, but it was Benalish tradition to tour the domains at the conclusion of each seven-year cycle of the Ranking. Danitha wondered what had become of her. She hoped dimly that her end had been swift, painless. But she doubted it.
"My lady," Jaren whispered. His skin was pallid. "I thought I could go, my lady. But when I went out—I can't. I was there next to Duwain, back in the cathedral, when the monster came in."
"What? Who is—" A pause. Of course. Jaren, a squire. Duwain, his knight—
She paused. "I'm," she said softly. Her voice cracked, failed. Words struggled to knit themselves together in her chest. "He was…"
Jaren continued, as though he couldn't hear her, as though he were speaking to some glowering presence just behind her back. "He asked me for his sword, and I gave it, and he asked me for his spear, and I gave it, and he asked me stand beside him, and I—tried. He charged. He thought I was behind him. But that thing. I know the stories—I know I was supposed to charge in with him and fight it. But it looked at me—it didn't have eyes and it looked at me, and it just…"
"Smiled," Danitha breathed. "And you couldn't move."
"And then Duwain was gone. And I'm left."
Danitha placed a hand on his shoulder. "Jaren. Look at me." The squire—he was a boy, no older than her brother, she dimly thought—struggled, thrashed his head around, eyes fogged with tears. "Duwain is gone. But we're here. So now, we have to do this. We must. It's." She tasted metal on her tongue. "It's our duty."
Duty. The word, infused with generations of utterance, millennia of meaning, echoed through the ages to every Benalish warrior—invested with the spiritual exhalation of Serra herself, as though she was calling each and every person to offer all they had—found their mark. Jaren steeled himself, inhaled, nodded.
She allowed him a moment to gather together his surveying equipment, turning away so that he wouldn't see her grimace. She despised the words she had spoken, abhorred that she was doing this to him, begged for it to be someone else, begged for peace. He was little more than a child, and more than that, he was a hurt child, a sick child, who needed healing and care, not the platitudes of Benalia's glory cult. But they had no choice.
The face of Light will shine upon them, and they will know war no more. Song of All. Canto 918. The words flashed in her mind, then faded to smoke, vaporous nothing. If only.
"Duty, squire," Danitha said, willing herself to believe it.
As they plumbed deeper into the woods, the fragmentary trails and isolated groves assembled themselves in her mind. Images rose before her, possible paths: here a route perfect for a retinue of knights, there a path that would accommodate three abreast. But none would be easy for a hundred wounded, grieving, broken refugees; every snaking vine was a broken leg, every outcropping of rocks an impassable obstacle for the disabled, every tangle of bushes a moment when someone might be left behind.
And, true to the squire's assessment, a stench hung in the air. At first, Danitha thought it might be the sulfurous odor that wafted along muddy coasts, but that wasn't it. Nor was it the smell of the animals that made their homes in the wood. Nor was it even the smell of Croden's distant fuming embers. It had, she thought, pacing through the soft squishy soil of the cliff, the textured depth of leather and the sharpness of rot, the scorching scream of tar and the ferrous cloy of blood. She rested her hand against tall, gnarled pine, breathing deep, trying to ignore the stench even as she felt compelled, without knowing why, to inhale it all the more deeply.
She had never remembered the smell before, only the words, but now, there he was again, before her, stinking of synthetic life: stretched skin no longer nourished by the body, organs ripped free from the chest and left to bake in the heat of whirring metal like rotten meat. Her foot, she dimly noted, was pressed into something sticky, some mud. And there was something else: floral, like games in the summer sun and candlelit laughter. But that wasn't mud, was it? Ah. There. Mixed in with the stench of destruction, even as he screamed and black oil poured between his teeth, her father smelled of lavender. His favorite.
It was only when she heard Jaren yelp that Danitha looked up and saw that the tree was scarred with the sigil of the Phyrexians and that its bark was split, oozing ebon ichor.
She stumbled back, drawing her sword, but the symbol stared down at her like the cycloptic eye of an undead god. And it wasn't just there. A crack, a squelch, and the pines began weeping glistening oil that intermingled with sap and dripped to the ground, smelling sweet like rancid sugar. Another sound, pine needles crunching underfoot and branches splitting and steel clanking against wood. By the time she realized what was happening, it was already too late.
The Phyrexians materialized on all sides, rising from the underbrush and stepping from behind tree trunks and skittering along the dirt path. They came in different forms, bedecked in different metallic shapes—A ranking system? Different contingents?—soldiers in beaming porcelain and bloody fleshy leather whose blades were lined with enormous cuspid teeth, goblins with sickly puce skin and armor glowing like firelight, enormous skeletal cats made of chrome, coppery simians that hung from the trees and barked raspy screams.
Jaren whimpered. Danitha gulped. The Phyrexians watched.
She held her sword at the ready, its stained-glass light casting them in a dim multifarious aura, and, she noticed, the Phyrexians cringed when its reflected light fell on them. She allowed herself a moment of relief: Benalish glazeplate was infused with layers of enchantments—wards of protection, auras of power, incantations to ward off dark magic. She was glad that she could depend on those, at least.
The Phyrexians didn't move; they stared at Danitha and Jaren, eyes of all kinds—glowing and bulging and bloodshot and empty—boring into them. There was a rustle, and from the crowd there emerged two figures, side-by-side, moving in lock-step.
On the right: an ebon-plated thing that might have once been human, its body scoured of flesh and its fingers grasping an axe whose blade was the size of her arm; but most arresting was its face, whose bones seemed to have been flattened, smoothed over, and rescuplted into a blank mask, bisected by a black line. The mask symbol, Danitha remembered, of the old Phyrexian god Yawgmoth.
All this she only had a moment to size up, because as the figure on the right entered the clearing, her blood ran cold. Even despite the leathery flesh that stretched over the body, even despite the porcelain armor plated over the arms and throat and face, even despite the wings that belonged more to a demon than to a priest, Danitha recognized him: speaking to her in quiet whispers, holding her with love and care, speaking the words that seemed from the depths of his soul to hers. Teshar. The Ancestor's Apostle.
"Hello. Lady Danitha," Teshar boomed, his voice—beautiful, tenor, a gift to choirs and hymnals—mingling messily with raspy whispering echoes, as though a dozen more voices were packed into his throat. "Long time. No see."
The last she had seen of Teshar, he had been screaming, begging for help, as oily Phyrexian claws closed around him. Danitha had prayed to Serra, offered up whatever faith she could muster, to let the aven, the loyal priest, the parish vicar, the comforter, the friend, find peace. Serra, it seemed, had not answered.
It was happening again.
Danitha knew she should think that Teshar was gone. There was no use trying to negotiate. Whatever soul might have been there, once shining incandescently, was now only the lifeless engine fire of the Phyrexian war machine. She knew this; but she didn't believe it.
"Teshar," Danitha said, barely audible, surely not loud enough for the Phyrexian that had been her friend to hear it—except, Teshar smiled. He gestured to the dark, masked Phyrexian beside him, and a horrible voice, a voice once human and now mingled with crackling static and the hiss of metal, boomed from its face.
"We're here to protect you," it said, in Danitha's voice. Words she'd spoken to Teshar in the chapel. "Do your duty, soldier—find somewhere safe." Her voice again, this time the words she'd spoken to Payle, her bodyguard, during the attack on Croden, as black ichor had seeped from a wound in Payle's side—these words, echoing out of the Phyrexian's mouth. "Do your duty. Do your duty. Do your duty."
"Danitha, do your duty." Her father's voice. Head separating from body; father dead and daughter destroyed.
"Lady Danitha," Jaren whispered. She was going to be sick. Jaren nudged her. But then, the masked Phyrexian turned to him.
Something that had once been a man's booming voice: "Squire! To me!"
Jaren stiffened his grip on his sword. He whimpered. "Duwain?"
It repeated itself. Squire! To me! Over and over. And then, the voice died in the Phyrexian's throat, and the defiant cry turned into a yell, and a gulp, and the sound of squelching flesh, and a scream, a scream that repeated itself over and over. Jaren dropped his sword, tried to cover his ears, but the scream grew louder, louder, kept repeating Duwain's death over and over and over.
"Jaren!" Danitha screamed. "We have to go!" But he didn't move.
Danitha could barely think, barely keep herself on her feet. Teshar, on the ground in Croden, crying, screaming, oil seeping into her, losing everything, emotions disintegrating and consciousness not just slipping away but turning hard, metallic, slick, parts disassembled. Teshar, standing here, laughing, the other Phyrexians joining, cackling together in a horrible chorus.
The ache in her seethed. It poured in rushing torrents, in images of bloodied friends sprawled on the ground and holy men screaming as they were torn away and nightmare fathers weeping and stained-glass faith exploding into a million shivered fragments. It beat red like the blood in her temples, like the heart of a flame, and she felt herself moving by the grace of instinct, as though elevated above her own body, and she surged forward.
For that battle Brindri was an angel of light and fury, Song of All, Canto 524
The two copper apes and chrome cat came at her first, pouncing at her legs and bounding from the branches with echoing guttural laughs. She spun sideways, crouched—had to time it perfectly—swept up with her sword, flung the cat into the air—right into the chest of the leaping gorilla. They fell together in a heap, and Danitha swung down, digging her blade in the ape's back as it struggled to get up. A foot on its back, a push as hard as she could manage, but it was like keeping a horse still. Its groaning mechanical parts were too powerful. The cat thrashed beneath the ape, clawing at Danitha's leg, and the parts fell into place in her refined tactical mind: she drove her sword through the ape's chest and into the cat, cringing as feline squeals merged with simian grunts and dissolved into a gush of blood and oil.
Good. Two down. Now—
She felt a crunch as the other copper ape slammed its fists into her back. Foolish, foolish forgetting about it. The monster was on top of her in a moment and she found herself barely able to stand, her armor absorbing the brunt of its blows but still reverberating bruising impacts along her spine. In the corner of her eye, she saw the porcelain soldiers and the pallid goblin surging towards her, brandishing their sick toothy blades, and over there, Jaren had finally picked up his sword and was pacing towards Teshar, all as the ape kept pounding, all as the Phyrexians kept laughing their horrid laugh.
But fury was Danitha's, too.
She swept out her back leg, dipping her knees as the ape lost its balance. It teetered back and forth for half a moment, and that was where she found her chance. She pushed back up, slamming her back against the Phyrexian and sending it sprawling back, then spun, sweeping the blade out—and separating the ape's head from its hulking body.
Over her shoulder, Jaren had engaged with Teshar and the executioner, the ebon figure playing the same laughter over and over again. Jaren swung clumsily and Teshar easily deflected with his white bleached staff, forcing Jaren back.
No time to think. In a flurry, the porcelain soldiers were on her, swinging in a whirlwind of blades. She deflected with her bracer, hearing a crunch as the Phyrexian metal broke against her wrist. The Benalish glazeplate absorbed the force of the blow, but her wrists still shuddered from the force of the attack, and she dropped back, watching, studying. They walked forward together, in perfect harmony, and engaged, jab, swing, jab; swing, jab, swing; and then it struck her. The Phyrexians were coordinated, but it was their only strength. Their bodies were new, fresh, made of parts not used to collaborating. Take care of one…
She twisted her sword so that its flat end faced them—and beams of sunlight bounded off the enchanted glass set into the blade, directly into the face of one Phyrexian. It hissed as the prismatic light, infused with spells of warding and weakening, sizzled against his face. Its companion wavered, and Danitha took her chance. Dart in, slice, detach the sword arm—then, blade to the face. As the other regained its bearings, it showed its face—porcelain scorched crisp by enchanted light—just in time for Danitha to drive her blade through its chest and force it to the ground.
Her cloak twirled in a sweep of white as she spun to meet Teshar and the executioner. Hopefully Jaren had held up well enough to—
No. Teshar stood over Jaren, porcelain metallic foot pressed into his neck, the boy choking, thrashing, screaming out, as the executioner loomed over him, continuing to squawk his knight's words. Squire! To me! Squire! To me!
Danitha became water rolling over the stones, legs roaring, burning and begging for relief as she charged forward, sword raised, and slammed sidelong against the executioner—and felt his body slam back against hers, as though she had pushed a boulder and the boulder had pushed back. The executioner stared at her with that horrible blank face, then marched stiffly,
"Ah," Teshar said, looking at Danitha with a smile. "Finally. No need to waste any more time."
The executioner slipped into a fluid stance, as though he had done it a thousand times, cleaving hopeless lives from desperate bodies, and swung his axe high into the air and swept it down on her. She raised her sword to deflect the blow, but the axe collided with the weight of a landslide; it was all Danitha could do to remain standing, sword locked against the axe's blade, wrists screaming out as the executioner's primeval hate bore into her.
"We have been ordained anew," Teshar said, his beautiful voice dripping poison, his foot grinding into Jaren's throat as the executioner forced down on Danitha. "Into the glory of Phyrexia. As the Etched Host spills your blood, I shall anoint it with new blessings."
Ignore. Ignore. Ignore. Dodge, turn, roll, avoid the blade, get the leg—deflection—avoid the arm—axeblade in your shoulder—bruise on your neck—too much. The executioner pressed forward, his axe sweeping in a maelstrom. Its voice still boomed. Squire! Danitha. To me! Your duty.
It was not an act of strategy but one of rage that drove her next. She charged, knowing the executioner would not feel surprise, that indeed it felt nothing at all, and even as its axe sheared a hole in the side of her armor and crunched against her ribs and dug into her flesh, she knew it felt nothing—just as she knew it felt nothing as she pulled herself along the axe and drove her sword up through its chin.
Glistening ichor spewed out of its throat and head, and the voices in its throat garbled together into a horrid screech, and the executioner fell.
Teshar's face was still visible, ever so slightly, behind the porcelain mask. She saw eyes open wide, filled with blackness and blood, as though they had been stretched open by force, as though he were in there, made to watch the holocaust in which his body participated. In those eyes she saw horror. But in his crooked face she saw a horrible knowing smile.
"Well done," he said. He lifted a foot off Jaren's neck. "You would, I'm sure, be the perfect addition to our Alabaster Lady's legions."
"Teshar," she breathed, begged, without knowing why, grasping that he was gone but not believing it. "Please. Remember yourself. Serra—"
Metal and flesh and rage clanged together in Teshar's throat. "Serra. Nothing. Just as your people. Just as your world. Just as you. Are nothing." He looked at her, his mutilated skin cracking and clanking as his eyeless mask met her gaze. "You will gain strength only when you renounce these nothings. If you believe I am wrong. Then try to kill me. I am fresh from incubation. Simply watching. Studying. I am vulnerable."
It should be easy. It should be simple. But as Danitha looked at Jaren and him and heard the voices screeching in his throat, voices that belonged to Payle and Aryel and her father and herself, as she looked at the abomination that had given shape to faith and inverted it, annihilation made flesh, her arm felt heavy. He was there, all of it, a world and a history and its hopes and its faith all folded into one thing, mutilated, strung up like a martyr cursing his own cause, defiling it, and—she hesitated.
Something like Teshar's grandfatherly laugh, but horrible, worse, broken apart, echoed in his throat. "I thought not."
Jaren looked at her, tears streaming down his face. He opened his mouth to speak and she could see the words, the terror, the agony, and his lips, she saw caught somewhere between her name and "sorry."
A twist. A crack. A scream. Jaren's form went limp and Danitha was screaming and Teshar had taken to the skies. She was alone.
She returned to the cave limping and bleeding and with a tear-stained face.
She had commended Jaren's body to the sea, just as the people of Croden had always done with their dishonored and honored dead. When she entered the cavern, there were only the briefest questions, only a flash of quizzical faces and worried looks, as to why she was alone. But they died away quickly. There was, after the events in Croden, little need to ask.
She commanded Croden's sparse retinue of reservists to assemble the townspeople near the mouth of the cave. There, in a meek voice that nonetheless echoed down the cavern, she spoke.
"Your home," Danitha said, in a voice that to her sounded almost a whimper, "Is gone. This was not an isolated attack. We are besieged. The Phyrexians have launched a new invasion on our home. In Benalia City and Shiv, in Llanowar and Keld, in Argive and Tolaria—and in Croden—we are under attack."
Stony faces, cold pale. If you had told these people a year ago that they would fight the Phyrexians as Gerrard had, as Serra had, they would cheer. Now: silence.
"I would like to tell you that the battle will be easy. That Serra's light will burn through the invaders. That we will go into myth like Gerrard and Serra. But I will not do that. I do not know what will happen, and I won't lie to you. I can only tell you our next course. We will go north, following the coast, until we reach a Coalition outpost."
She heard murmurs. "—be safe there?" "What about the angels?" "—knights are supposed to save us—"—still sleepers among us—" "—Going to leave us behind once we get too slow—"
She answered none of them. "We'll ride at dawn. Be ready."
Danitha limped toward her bunk at the heart of the caravan, feeling sick as she saw the innumerable despairing lives that looked on her. She could only look away.
She was seated, later, next to Marten, as he thrashed in his sleep. When she had approached, his response had been pithy. "Best you can do, I suppose." Then, he had drifted into unconsciousness.
She sat there, cross-legged, like when they were children, next to him, gazing on his features, his sweat-stained brow and premature aged face. She mustered the feeblest of prayers that he might find some peace before the nightmare continued.
Nathyn, Marten's ersatz medic, the person with the dusty hands, was there, too, large burly form next to her, and for the second time that day Danitha had the feeling in the back of her chest and the root of her skull of being watched, thought about, without being looked at. This time, when she looked at Nathyn and they flicked their gaze away, she was not silent.
"How are you?"
They looked at her suddenly, eyes wide like an owl's. They frowned. Pondered a moment. "Fine enough. Erm. My lady."
"Danitha. And please—I don't think you're fine enough. Be honest. I'm not doing well myself."
Nathyn grunted, as if they needed a moment to believe what they were hearing. "Nor I, my lady. Danitha. I'm, erm, scared."
A silence. She nodded, prepared to speak, but they kept going, as if they didn't notice her silence.
"I—I had just finished my rolls. Because—I'm a baker, you know, so I have to—I have to make the rolls. Every night. Give them time, let them breathe in the air. Sorry. Erm. That's not what you meant. When it comes to strategy, I suppose—"
The bakery. She remembered the image: the bakery back in Croden, shattered, burning, crumbling, with Benalish soldiers fending off Phyrexians in its blazing doorway. A cleric without a church; a baker without a bakery; a ruler without her steward. Nathyn's hands: covered not with ash, but flour. "No. It is. Please, tell me."
A lump in their throat. Nathyn opened their mouth, then croaked, then closed it, then opened it. "The rolls. My lady, the rolls. They were still there, in the bakery, when I left. They were rising, they've got to rise every night, hours and hours. You have to let them sit out to breathe in the air—I tell my daughter, it's because—Lady Serra's got to breathe into them, make them light." They stopped, inhaled, quavered. "She calls them Angel Wings. She's seen them, the angels—I don't know, not Lady Dawnbringer, nobody like her, but someone else, they've flown over, and my daughter, she likes to make the rolls, just in case the angels ever drop in again. My wife loves them. Loved them."
Danitha's impulse was to think strategically: Croden was close enough to Joryev Manor that it should be under the aegis of some Serran angels, but if they had retreated inward, they might have requested the angels do the same—or they might be occupied by the Phyrexians, or might already be torn to shreds. But then Danitha looked at Nathyn. She saw them, all of them. There they were, their life, just across the fissure between them, a breath's distance, a thousand miles. "Where is she?"
They gestured ahead with their chin. She saw tiny sleeping child curled up on a cot, drifting back and forth. But next to her, in the dim golden light of Merah's healing magic, she noticed what she hadn't seen before: bundles of fabric, clothes, stained with soot—women's clothes, with no woman around to wear them. She turned back and found a flushed face streaked with dry tears and for a moment, this father here and this daughter there, she lost herself, was somewhere else, another daughter with another father.
"The angels weren't there. You were there, my lady, in the chapel. It was blessing. But I don't think Serra wasn't there. I know that's horrible to say. I know the angels, they need to be everywhere, of course, but I just—it's. My bakery. My daughter's rolls. I put extra frosting on hers, make it look like feathers. She asked me, you know, if the angels would help. If they'd help get her mother out of the blaze. I didn't know what to say, you know, so I just said, I don't know." He looked up suddenly. "People say that you're going to leave us. Trot off with the soldiers and fight some battle. But my daughter, me, we, it won't. I can't. Can't be alone."
Eyes filled with tears, trying to shake them off as she walked forward. She could do nothing. Except—she reached down and hoisted the other side of the gurney with them, pressing next to them.
"I'm here with you," she whispered. "I won't leave you alone."