* * *

  It was a matter of minutes, Tanhkmet knew. He’d seen and felt the same signs in many battles before. It was close.

  Even without his career’s worth of experience, as much would’ve been obvious. At almost every point along their misshapen, crumpling line, two or three soldiers lay bleeding or dead for every five or six still standing. He’d seen regiments twice as veteran break after losses half as severe.

  The next wave of the enemy was already disembarking in the distance, and regrouping with the last assault his force had only just barely managed to repel. The sky flashed to mark another volley, and he braced himself, but the ground shook elsewhere.

  He thought of dispatching a messenger to the transports. The yachts risked destruction if they waited much longer, even as they were far from finished loading passengers. When the great warship’s slow precession brought the yachts into its firing arc, a single barrage would destroy each vessel. And even before that, once the white-coat foot infantry shattered his position in the coming rout, his aerial defenses would no longer be able to protect the evacuation from the enemy’s faster gunships.

  Their next wave was already advancing, he saw. As they came, more ships landed behind them, deploying the wave that would follow after that.

  But he heard a familiar voice, then.

  Clear and decisive, shouted above the storm of battle. And nervous and frightened as well, if hiding it well, as the best frontline commanders managed.

  Ducking against low cover some yards ahead, Lieutenant Belisarion shouted to her squad. With saber drawn, she urged them back forward to reinforce the line’s most vulnerable gaps. Beside her, the ardent fire of her wolf refused to drown even against that storm's leaden darkness.

  There was a whole world she deserved to inherit, thought Tanhkmet. A whole world she deserved, but would never have.

  He climbed out of his own foxhole, picking his way down to where the young lieutenant retrenched. Sliding into the dugout surprised her, but still she managed a salute.

  She almost returned to her firing position, before doing a double-take, examining him.

  “...Something wrong, sir?”

  He almost found humor in the question, despite himself. Where to start?

  The first presences of hostile vis re-entered his awareness, as the approaching enemy neared range of small arms.

  “...I’m sorry, Theodora,” he managed.

  “For what, sir?”

  With a sad, weak smile, he just shook his head. Then he raised his shield ready toward the front once more.

  And so together they faced that final assault, which they knew they would not survive.

  * * *

  A million pairs of eyes lay upon her, and Kera had nowhere to hide.

  She was almost used to such nightmares.

  Not just in her dreams. She’d lived them, too, if in milder form. When called to recite theory, or demonstrate drill before her fellow cadets, in classes at the academy. And again in those past weeks, after indignant rage had wrested control of her words in front of the gathered officers, righteous as that defiance might’ve been.

  But never before had it come close to what she faced, then.

  Terror worse than even mortal fear radiated waves down the length of every nerve. Agonizing seizures fixed her in place like stakes through her limbs, and her heart burned as if tearing itself apart with every rapid beat.

  In that manner she felt the attention of a million spectral gazes. A million faces, each expectant, waiting for her.

  She knew then that she was dying.

  But someone embraced the searing heat of her body. Saltwater cool immersed her in a different, soothing pain. She looked to see who had come, even as she somehow already knew.

  Her mother smiled.

  She shimmered, barely real. Her expression bore equal parts satisfaction, apology, and resolve.

  Kera’s tears as well were cold and stinging on the burning redness of her cheeks. She clung to her mother tighter, even as resentment festered, as everything began to make sense.

  “Why?” she rasped.

  Her mother stood.

  “Do you know where you are, Kerauna?”

  “No… please… help me. Make it stop,” Kera managed, between sobs.

  But the nightmare remained.

  Her mother seemed to offer some awkward, wordless pity, guilt then as well plaguing her indistinct features.

  “Do you know who they are?” she asked, gesturing toward the expanse.

  “Please…” Kera begged.

  Her mother stared down at her, then knelt back by her side. Kera thought she might at last grant her some lasting relief.

  But her mother’s hand instead cupped her chin, and forced her to look up. Not with a force harsh or cruel, or even stern, but still holding her so she could not shy away. Compelling her to see the ocean of bodies, the swarm of countless eyes watching her in turn.

  “No—“ Kera croaked.

  At last the hand fell away, and so Kera twisted back, burying her face in their embrace.

  “...Why… me?”

  “It… it didn’t have to be you, I suppose. I heard you were assigned out of the city, which was a requirement. But after your father died… I’m not sure who else I could have trusted.”

  “Trust me…?” Kera stammered. “You don’t… even… know me!”

  She tried to push away. But fell over her own weakened, seizing limbs.

  Cool hands caught her before she collapsed.

  “I’m sorry… that you feel that way,” said her mother. “But… it did have to be someone, meli…”

  “It doesn’t matter…” Kera rasped. “I failed… so you failed. We all did. I don’t know… what you know. But… I’m dying, I think. I’ll be dead soon. The war is over… we’ve lost, already. It didn’t have to be anyone… because… it was all for nothing.”

  “No… No. Not yet. That’s why I’m here, now, meli… you can still live. And none of us can say, about the war… but the day, at least, is not yet over.”

  An ominous, deeper sorrow entwined her words.

  “Look at them, Kerauna. They’re still here, all of them. Like me. Still alive, really. That was the point: to save them. Before I knew a whole protracted war would follow the initial attack, that all made sense. To have them reside in a vessel, for later… retrieval.”

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  Kera understood little beneath the weight of her suffering.

  “...But the craft to actually do that, to rematerialize pure vis… it's all theoretical. Maybe even impossible. Which was better than nothing, back when we knew the alternative. But the problem is that you’re right — you are dying, now. Our people, flesh and blood, are dying, right now. Which means, everything that’s still only theoretical… needs to become a secondary priority.”

  Her mother took her by the shoulder.

  “Listen, meli. Their power… It can be yours,” she whispered. “You need only convince them, to lend— to give it to you. To give… themselves… to you. Their whole selves.”

  “What—“ Kera shuddered, terrified.

  “Vis can only be either theirs… or yours. They have to truly pass on… to sublimate themselves, fully, into you.”

  “But— the whole point— to save them—“

  “And maybe some of them will remain. But only in this way can we hope to save any of those still alive in flesh and blood on the ground below.”

  “How can you… just… decide, like that?” Kera sobbed. “Two dozen here, a million there…” But even as she protested, she couldn’t help but understand, deep down. To that same most essential part of her, to that intuitive, natural knowledge at her very core — it was obvious.

  “Well, you’re my daughter, Kerauna. Ten million, even—“

  With a broken groan, Kera pushed her away.

  Her mother’s regard grew detached, colder.

  “...In truth, Kerauna,” she said after a moment, “all decisions in war are the calculus of lives. Trust my estimates today, and live.”

  Kera looked up through the blur of her tears.

  “But I can’t–”

  “You need only speak to them. Tell them what is right, lead them, and they will follow you unto death. And you, Kera, will be able to survive.”

  “I can't…” she rasped. “Please… I can’t… ask that of anyone… I can’t even speak to just one stranger… and that… I could never… I could never…“

  But rather than disappointment, or the anger she’d expected, Kera met eyes of sorrow, pity, and acceptance. Her mother nodded, and drew her back into an embrace.

  “I know, méli, I know,” she whispered. “You’ll have time to learn how, méli. In your own time.”

  “But—“

  “Shh… I know. It's okay,” cooed Astrapes. “You don’t have to convince anyone else, today, Kerauna. You’ve already convinced me. That’s enough, just this once.”

  “What… what are you saying–”

  “I can be the one to… catalyze the reaction. Just this once, meli. You need only stop the chain reaction, out on the other end. But I’m afraid… you’ll be on your own for that. Just know that I’m so, so proud of you. I’ve seen all you’ve done. Your bravery, already, should be enough. You don’t know how sorry I am that it isn’t.”

  “Wait— I don’t—“

  “I know, méli, I know… but you are dying. We don’t have the time,” she whispered, giving Kera one final squeeze.

  “Wait— mother—“

  “I love you.”

  And then she was gone — truly gone — and everywhere she’d touched was fresh with unbearable, incandescent, electric pain.

  * * *

  Kera’s heart beat once more, and her eyes thrust open.

  The world fell all around her.

  Each pulse still burned, but no longer from the organ’s self-destruction. But rather, like the protestations of rusted gears forced back into motion. Blood surged in its circuit throughout her arteries, and she could feel in visceral detail the functions of her body reviving.

  But something new was with her. Particle-pinpoint, infinitesimal, but there, within and before her.

  Power.

  Energy, spirit, electromagnetic charge.

  Vis.

  Amid the deafening crackle of the new bright fire on all sides round, by reflex alone she thrust out her arm, and seized it.

  Molten heat seared her palm. But she forced her grip to remain tight against it, for she knew she was fighting for her life.

  Sparks flew.

  She felt herself falling faster than before.

  Like primordial liquid-stone, the pain she held cooled and vanished, as something firmed, coalescing in her hand.

  A form like a knife, aflame blue-tinted white, and bright beyond bright.

  Blade.

  To cut, itself, given form.

  Its edge of resplendent fire shining so fierce she could look upon it for no more than an instant. Pointed downwards, the speartip of her being.

  She tore through the atmosphere. Somehow, the air was no longer freezing. In place of water vapor, a metallic pungence instead coated her nostrils and throat.

  The power she held was massive, and then no longer static. Growing. From one needlepoint origin within her, launching itself into others, that each in turn collided with more…

  It was escaping her.

  What had been once a singular, familiar presence, given to her, within her grasp — then was beyond measure, and still rising exponentially.

  A chain-reaction spread far beyond her grip on the blade, accelerating quicker than any mortal mind’s perception. She grappled for any brake, but found none. In the crucial space of microseconds, pure energy overtook her form, and she was of it entire.

  The roar of her approach drowned out all else, from the gale, to the guns, to the distant thunder. As she shot toward the earth, faster than the most terrible of shells.

  Her wake left of sky-rending light, where the very air itself burned, on fire.

  * * *

  The wet and the cold had defeated Tanhkmet, at last.

  Though it had taken the whole of that overlong day — through all his stumbling persistence, and his many falls and recoveries, in what had become that vicious melee of that battle — the slurry of freezing rainwater and upturned earth had finally crept through the thin gaps between the plates of his armor.

  Keeping alight the flame of his overburdened vis had already been like marching under leaden weights. But as Tanhkmet felt then that touch of cold, as if icing over his last reserves of strength, at last he could persevere no longer.

  Doom flew in the sky above him.

  Doom for all his people. Perhaps not right away, if the transports could depart. But there above flew a promise that doom would come for any who escaped that day, if only in time.

  Ruin had come to Setet.

  The emperor. Octavia, and the younger Alexander.

  Their children. Little Aurelia.

  Aurelia, whom he’d just begun tutoring in the battlefield arts — but whose innate talent and knowledge of theory had astonished him, even when he’d already known of her precocious intelligence. Aurelia, whose questions so often forced him to think, those questions he couldn’t always answer. Whom he knew in time would’ve been the leader Setet needed to right the wrongs of her grandfather, to banish the corruption he’d allowed to fester, should she have grown old enough to take the throne.

  She’d died under his watch. All of them had.

  Everywhere around him, the once-defiant and resilient auras of his comrades were vanishing, lost in the tide of enemy vis that flooded the plane of sense with menace and hate. All the soldiers who’d followed and stood by him, and refused to rout in the face of such horrors, were meeting that same fate. Their flame smothered, as they were overrun.

  A final hail of rifle fire deflected against his failing aura. Forced back, he fell to one knee before the wound's pain registered. Warmth trickled down his thigh.

  He grunted, trying to stand once more.

  But his leg did not right itself. His boot just scraped across the bloody dirt. The red-clay fire above him flickered, uncertain.

  A single familiar presence emerged from beyond the wall of vicious enmity. Through the haze of gunsmoke, Belisarion found him again.

  Her wolf leapt into the melee yards ahead as she slid into his muddy defilade. Seeing his wound, she called out behind them for assistance, but Tanhkmet could discern no response.

  She offered an arm, flexing, as she readied to help him back to his feet.

  But Tanhkmet could only stare at the gesture.

  The cacophony of battle felt distant then, all while still so terrible. He looked up, seeing the young lieutenant’s distress.

  Tears mixed with the rain streaking down his face. As his vis flickered one final time, then finally burnt out.

  Her expression broke, as his fire died. He felt her vis wane, then, too.

  The sky brightened. Tanhkmet tensed for the impact of that next coming shell. Perhaps the one destined for him. He imagined it taking him, finally ending his strife.

  But the light lingered, longer than that of the previous volleys. And the cannon’s thunder didn’t yet follow the flash.

  Belisarion gasped.

  Tanhkmet felt it then, too.

  A lull fell over the battlefield.

  They all felt it.