ostranenie (n.) encouraging people to see common things as strange, wild, or unfamiliar; defamiliarizing what is known in order to know it differently or more deeply.

Rakel Sjöberg woke to the sun streaming, softly, through the window of her dorm-room. There was a bird singing somewhere, very sweetly, beyond the building wall; she could hear the rattle of carts over cobbles as the city beyond her walls began to to slowly rustle into day. Kass District was a much more gentile place than the Obušek of her youth, or her adopted home in Mønt – it was a town of merchants and small businesses, the kind of place where middle-aged fellows stood on street-corners reading newspapers together and loudly discussing the latest news from the palace on the hill. She could hear them now, like amateur town-criers: a Selection, you say, they've declared a Selection? It was nice here, relaxed; the Tagma here were few and wasted. What was the use of druj-killers here, so far from the druj?

She rose promptly enough, rubbing the sleep from her eyes as the girl on the bunk above her stretched and yawned. They were assigned two to a room, and room inspections were few; Rakel and her roommate had strewn clothes and gear about the space as though they were trying to decorate the dorm with fabric and leather. The only legacy of their military training lingered in the shine of their boots. Today, Rakel disdained the red-and-grey uniform of her hosts in favour of her familiar forest-green coat. Her stint as a watcher had been a short one; this was not the path she had chosen.

She and her roommate exchanged quiet goodbyes outside their dorm-room door. The other girl was reporting to an early inspection on the southern side of the wall; Rakel was expected for convocation in the main body of the headquarters. The buildings here were so much nicer than those she called home in Mønt: the staircases were broad and panelled in a gorgeous teak-coloured wood, while the windows were huge and crisply blown, allowing the light to streak in totally unimpeded. It felt as though the entire place was utterly bathed in golden light; Rakel felt well-rested and cheerful as she moved down the steps towards the hallway on the second floor where her cohort were waiting.

The third- and fourth-class excubitors were lined up against their wall, their hands lying relaxed by their side. Rakel slid into the end of the line, rolling her eyes at the reproachful look shot at her by the dark-haired soldier nearest to her. "Late again, Sjöberg?"

"Blame the beds, Hanover." They were so comfortable – small perks, she supposed, operating further within the walls. Excubitors didn't have a purpose this far inside Illéa; they were frontier people. But it was nice, Rakel supposed, for short stints. She was nonetheless eager to get going; her comrade shot her another quelling look as she bounced gently on her toes, scanning their ranks. They were all here. Returning to the front? She carefully relaxed herself into stillness once again as their temporary commanding officer moved out of her office and offered them a respectful salute.

They returned it promptly – hand over heart, the first thing anyone learnt in the corps.

"We've appreciated having you guys on loan." Euphrasie Bardin was a short, stout woman; she still insisted on wearing a more old-fashioned uniform, the one their fathers might have worn, with leather straps crossing over her shoulders and emphasising the sheer coiled strength of her frame. She had a square face, with large, deep-set eyes and curly hair kept cropped in a short, natural style; she had a large keloid scar below her eye, swelling her cheekbone larger than it was. Rakel had always heard that Bardin had earned it in the Battle at Obušek District; in Xye's training corps, the story went that she had received it in a fight with her predecessor as head of the northern watch. "I hope we haven't bored you to death."

Quite the contrary. All of the older excubitors had been more than happy to while away a few weeks sleeping in soft beds and walking gentle patrols from the relative safety of Wall Schreave; Rakel rather suspected that she alone, as the lone fourth-class recruit from the furloughed western garrison, had spent their sojourn with the watch positively abuzz with nervous energy, keen to return to the work for which she had joined the Tagma in the first place. She had copped a fair amount of flack for the same; the consensus around the mess hall had been that she was jinx them badly if she kept wishing for disaster to strike. She couldn't bring herself to regret it – life on the walls was fascinating for the first five days or so, but five weeks later?

"Hijikata better take good care of you all." She smiled fondly. "You're expected at the Nav Gate before noon. If you need a horse, take it."

Before they could do that, they needed to get their gear. Everything had been retained for them in the weapons room on the ground floor: Rakel was delighted to find her beloved swords winking at her from a rack nearest the windows. She had sharpened them before putting them away, specifically so she would be ready when the hour came to take them up again. She strapped them into place at her waist, and slung a chamber of fresh blades on either side of her hip, enjoying the familiar sensation of being thrown off-balance by the new asymmetrical weight.

Her comrades were suiting up similarly; the whole space was quiet, the silence punctuated only by the sound of leather being belted and swords being sheathed. Beside Rakel, Xynone Hanover was critically inspecting one of his grappling hooks; catching her watching him, he smiled slightly. "Dented."

"I think I have a spare." A soldier couldn't survive without equipment in perfect order; a hook that faltered at a critical moment was a hook that could get you killed. It had been foolish of Xye to put away his gear in such a condition – what if they had been called for service in the event of an attack? They had to always be ready. "Here. Should be the right size…."

"It's perfect. Thanks, Sjöberg."

"Don't mention it." She yanked tight the strap around her thigh, and sat back into her harness, testing it where it pinched tight around her biceps and waist. That was perfect – that would do. Rakel hadn't even been in the top ten of her graduating class, but she held the western record for gearing up in the shortest time. It was a petty plaudit, but she wasn't going to deny a tint of pride at the idea. Worse to earn no such distinction. Once she was satisfied with her set-up, she followed Xye and his fellow third-class excubitor, Kostas Savva, out towards the stables. Horses were not treated as anything but tools here; it was a far cry from the partnership she had enjoyed with the ploughing horses at her home farm in Obušek. It was no matter to select another steed from the ranks; Rakel favoured a slighter horse than Xye, capable of turning upon a dime. Agility was everything out beyond the walls.

Its name was marked on its headcollar, the letters etched into the tiny brass tag by a heated screwdriver: Vitesse. That boded well. She was a quiet horse, nothing like the one upon which Rakel had completed her equestrian test some long months prior – what a brute beast that had been, always sighing and kicking when she was trying to buckle the girth!

She mounted, and waited for the others, the horse beneath her dancing impatiently across the courtyard in eagerness to be off. Rakel did little to quiet her, only continued to run her familiar checks. It was a kind of ritual by now: blade, strap, hook, blade, strap, hook. The idea of your equipment failing you at a crucial moment… it was a special kind of hellish dread.

Blade, strap, hook.

As the highest ranked soldier in their ranks, Oktawia Chlebek led the way onto the streets, and across Kass; they rode in loose formation towards the gates that linked the district. Illéa was a city composed out of division and separation with the districts strung together like beads on a chain. All the better to slow the advance of any invading druj, of course, but it made travel a little slower than it might have otherwise been; they had to cross through Txori District on their way to Nav, taking a circuitous route through the narrow alleys of the city's most downtrodden neighbourhoods. Even once they arrived at Nav Gate, three walls would still separate them from the outside world. It was claustrophobic, Rakel thought narrowly, living life as though in an aviary; you were always at least one locked gate away from the rest of what remained of humanity.

They were expected by Captain Hijikata at noon; that meant, Rakel had learned early on, that they should arrive no earlier than half-past eleven. There was no need to move quickly; this early in the day, the streets were quiet and the horses were fresh, so their progress was swift. Nonetheless, Rakel could detect in her comrades a certain austere nervousness – no one wanted to be seen as having become soft in their time with the watchers, and everyone was keenly aware that nothing would escape Captain Hijikata's notice. Even Rakel herself was bouncing in her saddle slightly, feeling abruptly small under the smiling visage of Princess Asenath from the enormous poster that hung above the Txori Gate. The lettering below her beautiful face was elegant: a single string makes no music.

Rakel could remember a slightly more coarse version decorating the gable opposite her grandmother's house in Obušek: without lips, the teeth feel cold. She doubted Princess Asenath had ever said these things, but these sayings nonetheless reflected the spirit the young royal brought to all of her charitable works in Txori and Tiamat. In the crowded buzz of this walled city, one could not – and should never – stand alone. They were stronger together.

And, as it turned out, they needn't have worried; Captain Hijikata clearly had no intention of a prolonged inspection. From the irritable expression settled between his eyebrows, Rakel suspected they had caught him returning from a meeting at the palace; he wore the face he always did after a run-in with the royal guard. Nonetheless, he offered them a quick greeting – "I think I was starting to miss your ugly faces" – and briefed them in that short, dry way of his: "Oroitz wants us to clear the southern plain; says there's been a lot of activity. After that, we have clearance for a poaching session near Mainyu. That's about six hours to stretch our legs – should ease you all back into real work."

Then they were off.

They chose a direct route back towards what amounted to their home territory of Mønt; the excubitors were not the sort of people to delay unnecessarily. As they passed through the enormous shadow of the wrought-iron gate at Mønt, Rakel caught sight of the watchers moving along the wall, calling back and forth to relay the presence of the excubitors. Anyone who tried to venture this way without a seal of approval from the palace or from the Tagma council was liable to find themselves lying in shreds on the grass; Rakel eyed warily the cannons that lined the wall, and was glad to have the reassuring presence of her captain as he wearily shouted up to the nearest watcher and the gate rattled up out of the earth to permit them passage.

And just like that – for the first time in months – they were outside the walls. Captain Hijikata indicated that they could spread out into a looser formation, and Rakel was quick to take him up on that offer, guiding her horse out of the line to canter gently up the hill towards the south. Ordinarily they would have taken the gate out of Kelch District for this task, but she wasn't going to complain: there was something magical about the way that the world unfurled before them, unstymied by wall or gate, unspoilt by their urban cage. Just this: just grass and sky and trees, as far as you could care to see.

The first time she had left the walls had been as a panicked child, druj at her heels. She was in control now, though. That time had been left – abandoned – in her wake.

A few yards away, Xynone Hanover was sitting low in his saddle; the horse he had taken from Kass was proving to be more skittish than the steeds they used specially for hunt-and-destroy missions. It seemed to be taking offence at every strange shadow that they encountered along their way.

They were a tight band of about fifteen; the excubitors were not a large group at any given time, and recruitment had been slim of late. However, that made Rakel feel more comfortable rather than less – there was something much more comforting about being surrounded by a narrow group of masters than she had ever experienced in a great sea of those less competent. She was the youngest in the group, the lowest ranked and the least experienced, and there had always been something comforting about that as well. In a situation of life or death, it was always nice to be the greatest liability in your vicinity. You could have no one to blame but yourself.

It wasn't long before they spotted their first druj – a mile ahead, to the south-east. It seemed to have taken a circuitous arc around Illéa; that was unusual, because usually when druj came to close to the city, they did not deviate from their path. Blood was all; they were not, typically, a tactical kind of creature.

This specimen seemed no different: it barrelled towards them almost blindly, its limbs spinning in great pin-wheels like some kind of grotesque caricature of a quadruped; its head was enormous and anvil-shaped, with a line of spear-sharp teeth lining the top and bottom of its skull. It was black, like so many other druj; against the glossy emerald green of the grass, it stood out like an awful stain upon the fabric of this reality. Standing out so starkly, no one could have mistaken this thing for prey.

Behind it, a half dozen or so of its brethren, similarly shaped and chasing in an enormous pack, limbs spinning in that same sick parody of ordinary movement. An unusually large group, so close to the walls – it was good that Oroitz had asked them to clear this. They were enormous; Rakel suspected that her horse's head would not quite come to the height of their back. And yet, towards them the tagma charged.

Ahead of her, Oktawia Chlebek raised her hand in silent signal; Xye Hanover and Kostas Savva peeled off from the group, riding in a great hooked path around the monstrous pack. Their arc was not too wide; it was apparent they had been spotted, and a few of the druj similarly veered from their path to give chase. The two third-class excubitors took off, their horses kicking up enormous sods of soil, as they raced ahead of their comrades, towards Mainyu, drawing about half of the druj away from the walls; just ahead of Rakel, Captain Hijikata unsheathed his sword to dispatch the rest.

They were utterly silent; only the pounding of hooves and the snarl of the three druj ahead. Reaching down to touch the cannon strapped to her saddle, Rakel flicked off the safety and prepared to fire – but then the druj were upon them, entirely too close to take any proper long-range manoeuvres. Well, then – she would have to improvise. Undeterred, she yanked the switch, and fired into the druj nearest to her.

The hook embedded deeply into its abdomen; the wire attached whirred as it was reeled outwards, pulled by the weight of the druj as it shrieked its rage. Its abdomen? No good! Rakel wheeled her horse around, and kicked the switch on her cannon again; there was an unpleasant ripping sound as her hook was forcefully rescinded back to its firing position, ripping chunks of flesh from the body of the druj.

Vitesse did not protest as Rakel turned her again, responding to the merest touch of the excubitor's heels. Rakel prepared to fire, and then had to abruptly veer violently, right as one of her targets' brethren leapt at her from Oktawia's position. Oktawia had been contending with two of them at the same time; Rakel couldn't blame her for letting one get away from her.

She knocked her sword from her sheath, and, at the next leap of the druj, swiped with the least wild motion that she could muster. Her blade came away stained with black flesh and ichor, but not enough to suggest she had done any significant damage. As Vitesse shuddered beneath her in a desperate intent to retreat, Rakel fired her cannons one more time, and – yes – succeeded in hammering her hook right into the shoulder of her target.

Good enough! She dug in her heels, and her horse did not protest, taking off as quickly as it could – oh, but not quickly at all, for Rakel had just tied them, quite forcibly, to a monster.

The druj was snarling in confusion at its inability to retreat or to attack, for Oktawia had come up on its other side and fired her hook into its other shoulder, so that the monstrous thing was held between two horses, unable to move too far in one direction or the other. It was snarling, thrashing, snapping, and then, very abruptly, it could not snarl, thrash, or snap, for Captain Hijikata had separated its tongue from its head, its head from its body, its body from its limbs. His sword was naught but a flashing arc of silver; it seemed like an extension of his limbs.

Rakel and Oktawia kicked their cannons, and rescinded their grappling hooks. Their comrades had handled the other pair; Rakel was gratified as she rode past the carcass of one and saw that its eye had been gouged out by her blade in her last uncontrolled slash.

The captain did not seem displeased; he had dismounted by the carcasses to inspect them, kicking aside heads and directing Carlu Panettiere in cutting out chunks of flesh for packaging away; Lorencio would appreciate their thoroughness, Rakel thought, and the care with which Carlu was setting aside each dissected piece.

When she looked down at her hands, she was gratified to see that they were not shaking. So long away from work – she had thought she would be a little more rusty than this. Sometimes it was nice to be wrong.

She glanced up to the horizon: no sign of Xye or Kostas. They would be okay, she thought, but it was likely they had ridden some distance before pausing to engage the druj. As long as they didn't venture too close to Mainyu, they should be fine…

"Nice aim, Sjöberg." Oktawia's horse, like Vitesse, was clearly ill at ease so close to as unnatural a creature as a druj, even a dead one; this was why the excubitors usually trained their horses specifically. It was a lot to ask a human being to spend too long around these things without their skin crawling; for an animal who could not reason their unreasonableness, Rakel imagined it was a kind of torture. On that awful day, so many years ago in Obušek, they had known that the druj had made it past the walls when their livestock had fled their pens, tearing through barbed wire in an awful, desperate attempt to escape what was coming… "We didn't do too bad for a first day out..."

Three destroyed. Rakel couldn't complain. "I appreciated your help."

"Don't mention it."

"No slacking off." Captain Hijikata had mounted his horse again; Carlu and Jooa were setting the carcasses on fire. The other druj would steer clear; they were creatures of the darkness, these things, and though they could tolerate fire and sunlight, they were rarely attracted by the same. "We're still on the job, comrades. Keep your guard up; I don't want any of you ending up like old Melnik."

Rakel managed to avoid shuddering; she remembered running into Vladimir Melnik on one of her first day out of the training corps. He had seemed like some kind of agonised phantom – the man had lost his arm and leg to a druj attack, and lived in constant pain from whatever strange after-effects had been wrought on his body by the venom coating its fangs. Captain Hijikata had basically hauled him out of a monster's maw, risking his own life and limb in the process. Rakel had heard this story, and her eyes had henceforth been rather filled with admiration whenever she looked upon her leader. He had deserved it – she had learned that later.

Their horses were relieved to get going again; they rode away from the walls, again stretching out into a languid canter as they moved away from the southern plains and towards Mainyu. Captain Hijikata maintained a rigid grip upon the hilt of his sword, for they were heading in the same direction as Xye and Kostas had raised with three blood-thirsty druj upon their tail. However, but for the deep hoof imprints which indicated that they had come in this direction, there was no sign of the two third-class excubitors. That was not as worrying as it might have been; there was also no sign of the druj.

Almost as soon as the forest was in sight, they paused for a regrouping. Beautiful Oktawia passed Rakel a flask; the younger soldier blushed and thanked her. They were only two or three hours into the day; maybe she was slightly rusty these days. They cleared their hooks and checked their cannons as Captain Hijikata cleaned his sword carefully and addressed them quietly about the poaching session upon which they were about to embark. There was an unmistakeable note of tension reverberating through his voice as he spoke; Rakel could not shake the impression that this expedition had been thrust upon the excubitors quite unwillingly.

They waited there, changing their gear and scanning their surroundings. They were some twenty miles from Mainyu, and they stayed there for some twenty minutes, until they were joined by a cart despatched by Oroitz Txori for carriage of whatever they poached. Then it was back into the saddle, and back towards the forest, those twenty miles disappearing beneath them like so much mist.

Abruptly, Mainyu loomed before them. Of all the things in this world, the immense and ancient forest scared Rakel the most; it was enormous, larger than any forest had a right to be; it was eternally wreathed in mist, no matter the weather without its threshold; no one had ever ventured into those woods without being driven irreparably mad, being devoured alive, or both. It was partially this forest that kept them so hemmed in – it seemed to occupy the whole of their eastern horizon, as far as they had ever managed to explore without attracting an unpleasant amount of druj attention.

So, she mused, even once you left the walls, you were still caged in somehow.

It loomed before them, suddenly; how did a forest sneak up on you? Rakel carefully freed her boots from her stirrups, and leapt up, so that she was balanced upon her saddle; flicking her switch, her hook shot into the trunk of the nearest tree. Wood exploded everywhere, tiny splinters raining down onto the ground. Very gently, as though aware of how little practice she had of late, Rakel jumped from her horse and, in the same motion, racked the reel on her hook; she was reeled, quickly and smoothly, into the air, landing slightly clumsily upon the nearest bough.

She spun, at the same moment that Jooa landed on the tree next to her; from this elevated ground, the captain and the other excubitors abruptly looked enormously small. Captain Hijikata raised a hand, and she and Jooa responded in kind, to show that they were ready.

Ready, Rakel thought. Of course. They always were. She sat back in her harness, kicking her foot lazily across the bough of the tree, and glanced over her shoulder into the gloom and shadow of Mainyu. So eerie – so still.

She glanced at Jooa, as her comrade said, "we should probably settle in – Kane reckons it'll be a quiet session..."

He had jinxed them. There was, quite abruptly, the rumbling sound of a monster prowling. Jooa and Rakel snapped to attention and swivelled from their vantage point, searching for its source, but the forest floor was quiet and empty. And yet still, the sound was all around…

Rakel realised it first. Her head snapped up, and – yes! "It's above us!"

A druj with wings?

It dive-bombed them, this enormous skull-faced black thing with enormous black wings, and on the ground Oktawia and Captain Hijikata dived out of its way. The captain was on his feet almost immediately; from his expression, Rakel could tell, infuriatingly, that they had found their target. After all, a druj with wings? Lorencio wouldn't forgive them if they did otherwise…

The thing had landed on hooked claws, claws which were unmistakeably hand-like; it turned in search of its prey, the starch-white of its skull-like face gleaming dimly in the wan afternoon light. Its jaws opened wide, wide, like a snake threatening to swallow the sky whole, and the fangs within were as long as Rakel's arm.

At almost precisely the same moment, she and Jooa and Oktawia fired their hooks. They embedded immediately – in the monster's throat, its wing joint, the soft spot between its limb and its abdomen. Jooa and Rakel drew their swords; he leapt first, and she watched him carefully as he reeled himself in, very rapidly, towards the enormous beast's wing.

It spun its head, and snarled, and lashed out – and was stymied, almost immediately, by Captain Hijikata's hook, which had exploded through its skull and jaw and, in so doing, bound them shut and still, no matter how it writhed; the same blade pierced jaw and headplate alike, pinning them shut.

In a single instant, Jooa's sword had carved through the thinnest skin at the joint of the wing; watching his technique closely, Rakel tightened her hand over her sword and followed suit. The air whipped through her hair; the ground rushed up towards her, alarmingly quickly; the straps of her harness constricted tightly, so tightly, around her waist and thighs. Abruptly, she was aware that there was an overwhelmingly strong scent of burning hair, but she had no time to question it; she had only the mental energy to keep her wrist locked and bring her feet underneath her as she skidded across the ground and swiped her blade, as best she could, through the flesh of the enormous beast.

For a single instant, she imagined it was the druj that had killed her mother; she felt that she slashed with a particular kind of savagery once that thought had crossed her mind.

It was small enough, for a druj – smaller than those they had confronted earlier – and most of that mass, she saw now, were those broad black wings, hooked at their tips like those of a bat. It was small enough for a druj but it still rather towered over the excubitors, and Rakel had that same awful feeling of being extraordinarily small indeed as she ripped her sword through its skin like she was butchering meat.

Her strike had not scored so deeply as Jooa's but, Rakel thought, they had both done their job – it was highly unlikely that this thing would be able to take flight with the job that they had done on it. Oktawia had done her part, slicing open what would have otherwise been Achille's tendons on an ordinary creature of flesh and blood and bone; ichor stained her arms, up to her elbow, as she darted back out of reach of the beast's thrashing tail, and watched it struggle, deprived of the use of every limb.

Captain Hijikata had aimed his blade, very precisely, at the eye of the druj; he was standing close to it, far closer than anyone else would dare to stand. Rakel could tell, in the lines of his body, that he was not without fear; in fact, it seemed like he was terrified. And yet, nonetheless, he stayed there, quite unmoving.

"Kane," Jooa said, his voice sharp. "What are you waiting for?"

"They look human," Captain Hijikata replied, his voice short, melancholy. "Don't they? In the eyes… I'd never noticed before."

He paused, he shrugged, and he drove the sword into the eye of the winged druj, burying it up to its hilt and his elbow.

The great black thing shrieked, shuddered, and fell still.

Captain Hijikata turned to Oktawia. "Get it in the cart. Where are Hanover and Savva?"

Rakel glanced down at the earth under her feet, churned by the writhing of the beast and the movement of boots around it as the excubitors had wielded their swords with deadly precision. Discernible in all the milieu, of course, were the unmistakeable indications of horse shoes, riding hard and fast past this precise spot. These hoof-prints… they led directly into the depths of Mainyu.

But that would mean….

Captain Hijikata was clearly thinking the same thing. "Get this secured," he said, kicking the fallen druj's detached wing with the dismissiveness of a man long-calloused to these things. "I'll run the perimeter. If they're not back within the hour..."

He didn't need to finish his sentence. Everyone understood.

The tagma waited for no one.