LILIA HELSTEA

My legs burned as I crested the long incline of the switchback mountain trail. Hands on my hips, I turned to admire the wagon train stretching down the mountainside behind me.

Jarrod Redner, who had been walking at my side, put his hands on his knees and gasped for air. “I don’t…understand…why we’re…taking this old…mountain path,” he said breathlessly.

Although I knew he was speaking rhetorically, I answered anyway. “There isn’t anywhere for these people to go in northern Sapin. Valden, Marlow, Elkshire—they can’t support them. The farming villages between Xyrus and Blackbend, though, have room. And there aren’t any roads through the dense, marshy forest between Marlow City and Xyrus.”

“I…know…” he puffed, standing up straight and screwing up his face as he tried to control his breathing.

A few of the adventurers acting as guards passed us, and then the first cart. A little girl stared forlornly off the edge of the mountain path as her grandfather controlled the reins of two large skitters that were pulling their small cart. Her parents had died fighting at the Wall.

“Hello, Kacheri,” I said, giving her a small wave.

When she didn’t wave back, I slipped something out of my bag and tossed it at her. She watched it sail through the air and land on the seat next to her with a vacant expression, then jumped with excitement and hurried to remove the wax paper.

Her eyes widened, sparkling with excitement as she shoved the chewy caramel in her mouth.

“Poor kid,” Jarrod said under his breath as the cart rolled past.

There were over two hundred people in our caravan, people like Kacheri who had lost almost everything, and the only hope they had was to escape the smaller villages like Ashber because they could no longer sustain themselves after the war. Families had been ripped apart, people enslaved, their properties taken from them or destroyed, and when the war ended so suddenly, Sapin had lacked the leadership and infrastructure to send help or rebuild.

With countless mothers, daughters, sons, and fathers never returning from the war, too many families just couldn’t survive so far away from the cities.

Ironically, a few of those in the caravan were people we had helped escape the cities to begin with who hadn’t been able to risk making the return journey on their own and had instead waited months for assistance. Some of them would return to Xyrus and Blackbend, but others had no homes, families, or lives to return to. With no hope of their own, they needed someone to step in and help rekindle it for them.

Nudging a small rock with my toe, I watched as it bounced down the steep mountain, the repeated clack, clack of stone against stone quiet under the continuous crunch of wagon wheels and the rumble of so many voices, both human and mana beast.

Jarrod was silent but kept up a brave face for the sake of those who rolled past in the caravans.

Ahead, I heard the guards calling out and turned my ear in their direction.

“Just announcing a rest,” Jarrod said, seeing my worried look. “It’ll take awhile to get everyone up this incline, so we can take a breather ourselves, right?”

I nodded, hiking my pack higher up on my back and continuing up the road, which leveled out as it curved around a broad valley in the mountainside. “At least half an hour to get the last carts up here, but we should all fit comfortably on this flat space.

Jarrod cut through a gap between a cart and the family following it on foot, then beelined for a large boulder that had fallen from the mountain and cracked in half at the road’s edge. By the placement, it looked like someone had moved it with magic a long time ago, and now it made a convenience table for Jarrod to pull out a few containers of food.

I followed, comfortable with the ritual by now. Withdrawing a few things from my own dimension artifact, I laid them out to share, then took up an apple and bit into it with a crunch.

A heavy-set woman in bright-colored clothes whistled as she passed us by in her small chariot, which was being pulled by a large bird almost as bright as its owner. “Oi, when are you going to ask me for a lunch date, Jarrod Redner?”

Jarrod’s cheeks flushed, and his mouth worked silently as he struggled for a reply.

“Maybe the day your very presence doesn’t redden his face and steal his tongue, Rose-Ellen,” I shot back, then laughed behind my hand.

“Alas then,” she shouted, turning around in her chariot and straightening her tight blouse, “I fear I am doomed to hear only the sound of silence from those wind-kissed lips of his.” She gave me a wicked grin. “Unlike you, Lady Helstea.”

I waved my hand to shush her, then hid my smile behind my apple, slowly taking a bite.

Jarrod took his time ripping a strip of dried meat off a slab and nibbling little bites off it, looking everywhere but at me. After a minute, he cleared his throat and said, “Do you ever think about…before? Like, Xyrus Academy, and what life might have been like if the Alacryans hadn’t attacked?”

“Sure,” I answered, absently turning the apple over in my hands. “It’s hard not to, even when I know it doesn’t help anything.” I hesitated, then met Jarrod’s eye. “What’s on your mind?”

“I just…” He paused and took a bite, chewing slowly. “Everything that’s happened since the attack on the academy has been…awful, you know? But…” He shifted in his seat, his eyes darting around as he searched for the words, and I realized he looked…guilty. “I don’t want to sound like I’m discounting the horror that these people have faced—that everyone in Dicathen has faced, like the elves, like that girl, but…”

He let out a dramatic sigh and finally looked at me. “I just wanted to say, I like this. I…like what we’re doing. Helping these people? Spending time…uh, making a real difference, I guess. If it weren’t for the war—if you hadn’t saved my life when I literally tried to kill you, I just don’t know who I’d have become. Is it…bad, I guess, that I prefer who I am now?”

I felt tears building behind my eyes and quickly blinked them away. “No, I don’t think that’s bad.” I cleared my throat but wasn’t sure what else to say.

Sensing the awkwardness, Jarrod chuckled wryly. “Speaking of saving my life, I think that’s Tanner cresting the ridge over there, see? Who’d have guessed I’d end up working alongside that blade wing rider again, huh? I swear I still have nightmares about Velkor…”

I snickered into my hand. “You should show some more appreciation for the mana beast that helped you escape Xyrus.”

“Easy for you to say,” Jarrod exclaimed, brandishing his jerky at me. “You didn’t have to ride the beast. I swear, I’m still not sure Tanner even knew how to control it, really.”

“Well, he seems to have a good enough handle on it now—” A gasp burst out of me unbidden, and I jumped to my feet as my entire body went cold with horror.

The blade wing was twisting wildly, its flight quick and erratic just moments before a green jet of light lanced across the sky and struck it from behind. Velkor and Tanner spun out of control, and the blade wing’s distant silhouette vanished from sight as it plummeted out of the sky.

Four dark figures, at first only specks, grew quickly larger as they approached, their killing intent expanding before them like a wave of black, crushing mana.

“Guards!” I screamed, breaking into a sprint toward the front of the caravan. Jarrod didn’t hesitate but followed right behind me, wind wrapping around his arms and legs.

The adventurers had already begun to form ranks, some conjuring shields around the refugees, others chanting and preparing offensive spells to launch a counter attack at whatever approached.

But we could all sense the strength of their unconcealed mana signatures, and already I saw the hopeless looks being exchanged between our guards and heard the quavering of their voices.

Shouts went down the wagon train, bringing the carts to a halt one after another. Most of the people we were escorting weren’t mages, and they couldn’t sense what was approaching, nor had they seen Tanner shot from the air, but they saw the defensive spells being cast, and that was enough to send them into a panic.

There wasn’t time to organize, though. We couldn’t turn around, run, or hide. The distance from the road to the ridge where the blade wing had appeared melted away as the figures bore down on us in what felt like seconds.

Diane Whitehall, one of the adventurers who was leading the protection of our caravan, chopped downward with her arm and shouted, “Attack!”

I held my breath as a volley of spells launched into the air.

Not a single one found its target.

Black ice crystalized around the feet of our frontline defenders. The ice condensed into spikes and thrust upward, piercing mana, armor, and then flesh and bone with casual effortlessness.

I heard chainmail rip and bones break. Men and women screamed, then went silent as their familiar physical forms became a shredded red mess staining the black ice.

Behind them, the second line stumbled back, defensive spells flickering out, no barrage of return fire evident as the horror of the display stole the strength from even these hardened warriors.

“Fall back!” Diane ordered, her commanding tone replaced by a manic shriek, but there was nowhere for any of us to go.

Green mist billowed up from what remained of the corpses, engulfing the survivors. I couldn’t turn away as their flesh began to run like candle wax down their bodies, their dying screams bubbling with bile and blood. Diane’s freckled face and curly hair sloughed off to reveal the skull beneath, then she collapsed.

The skitters pulling the lead cart scrambled over each other to get back, get away, ripping out of their harnesses and clawing over the driver’s seat, ripping Kacheri’s grandfather to pieces. Then the mist hit the cart, and I finally turned away, unable to watch what followed, unable to even feel my core past the sickening numbness that was gripping my mind and body.

Suddenly Jarrod had a hold of me, dragging me back and away from the mist as it devoured the second and third carts in line as well. Everything was screaming…the mountain was tipping on itself, turning upside down as if trying to throw us off into the sky…

I fell to my knees and was sick in the dirt.

I’d been in the war, in my own way. I’d fought, I’d killed…but I’d never seen such casual and horrific death. Even in the worst days of the Alacryan occupation of Xyrus, I hadn’t experienced anything like this.

“Cast another spell and die,” one of the figures said, a woman by her voice.

Trembling, I watched as she landed amid the carnage of their attack, the mist dissolving around her. She had jet black hair and red eyes…and horns.

A Vritra, I thought, a word that only partially had meaning until that moment.

“Bare a weapon and die,” she continued, stepping toward the handful of adventurers still drawing breath. “Run and die. Irritate me…and die.” She paused, standing over me, her crimson-colored gaze sweeping across the front of the caravan. I could hear her voice carrying down the mountainside, echoing so she could be heard even from the far end a half mile distant. “Who speaks for you?”

“I—I do,” I said weakly, although it wasn’t true, strictly speaking. “S-sort of, I guess.” Struggling, I wiped my sick-splashed hands in the dirt and stood. “This isn’t a…we’re just helping people move to surviving towns, that’s all. We aren’t transporting anything of value…except human lives.”

The woman smiled, a cruel expression on her blunt face. “Convenient, because that is exactly what we need right now.” Over her shoulder, she said, “Raest, head to the rear of the caravan. Ensure no one gets brave.”

Raest was badly burned and missing most of one arm, but he gave no outward sign of pain as he nodded in understanding and flew off down the road.

“Varg, give the venerable Sovereign over to Renczi and assist me in the preparations,” she continued, her piercing red eyes flicking toward the sky.

A second man landed beside her. He had a narrow, sharp face with a long curved chin, and short horns stabbed up from each temple above his small eyes. Over his shoulder, he was carrying a prone form. He stepped up close to the woman and spoke in a low tone that I could only barely make out. “You sure this is the best idea, Perhata? We could—”

She bared her teeth at him, shutting him up. “For the moment, we have the Sovereign but no tempus warp, since ours went up with Cethin. We need to send out a signal, and these Dicathian unads give us cover in case we have…company.”

Her focus turned to me, sharpening. “Your pulse quickens at my words, as if they mean hope for you.” She bared elongated canines and leaned in close. “Know that if you survive this, it will be because you did exactly as I said. It will be because I spared you. Seek no hope from outside yourself, understand?”

Swallowing past a lump in my throat, I nodded. When she extended a hand toward my face, I flinched away, but she was faster, her fingers clamping around my cheeks. “Go, child. Calm your people. Explain what is needed of them. Ensure that they understand their continued existence is firmly in their own hands.”

She gave me a soft shove as she released me, and I nearly tumbled over backwards.

Jarrod took hold of my arm to steady me. “Lilia, are you…” He trailed off, then used his sleeve to wipe away a spot of vomit clinging to my lips, whispering, “What are we going to do?”

“What she says,” I confirmed. “Come one, let’s keep these poor people from stampeding off the mountainside.”

Despite my confident words to Jarrod, as we began making our way down the length of our caravan, speaking to family after family, I couldn’t help but feel fraudulent in my attempts to spread calm. After all, hadn’t I just stood frozen as a mere child was casually executed by their cruelty, and now here I was jumping to do the woman, Perhata’s, bidding…

It was perhaps a benefit that the four powerful mages were flying around and casting spells, their punishing auras like the weight of an oncoming thunderstorm, because most of the people in our care were too frightened to do anything except exactly what they were told. Just like me.

***

“Just stay with your family, and keep calm,” I told a middle-aged man whose six children were whimpering from inside their wagon. The four aurochs pulling the large vehicle shifted nervously, but he kept them firmly in hand. “I’m confident that when they get what they want, they’ll leave us be.”

I smiled and hated myself for it. Was I lying to the man? I had no way of knowing, and that broke my heart.

As I stepped away from his wagon, which was perhaps halfway along the line of carts, wagons, and people on foot as they snaked up the mountainside, the ground rumbled and quaked beneath my feet.

Stone exploded somewhere deep beneath us.

I gasped as my ankle turned on a rock, and the four aurochs surged forward toward the back of the small cart ahead of them. The father shouted in panic, jerking futilely at the reins as his children screamed from behind the thick cloth covering their wagon. The lead aurochs dipped their heads and slammed into the back of the cart, splintering wood and sending it careening toward the road’s edge.

The lone woman on the cart screeched in surprise and terror, and her skitters hissed and tried to surge up the mountainside, dragging the broken cart behind them.

The hissing lizards spooked the aurochs even more, and the beasts swerved right to get around the smaller cart, taking them—and the family they were pulling—toward the edge of the road and the sharp incline down the face of the mountain.

Reaching outward, I took hold of the limited water-attribute mana in the atmosphere and condensed it into a wall just before the aurochs plunged over the side. The beasts smashed into the wall and were forced straight, keeping them on the road as they raced along its very edge, the wagon rebounding off the wall of water behind them.

Thrusting both hands forward, I sent the wall as a wave across the ground beneath the wagon, pushing it into the dirt and gravel, softening it into a thick muck to catch the wheels.

The wagon slid side to side as the aurochs tried to force their way around the next cart in line. I conjured another wall at their side, preventing them from veering too far right and plunging down the fatal incline, but it was clear what was going to happen if the runaway beasts turned our caravan into a full-blown stampede.

Gathering as much force as I could behind the wall of water, I condensed it into a scythe, dropping the liquid blade across the harness connecting the beasts to the wagon. Wood and leather splintered, and the aurochs bellowed in terror, leaping from the road. For a moment, they held their formation, sprinting in unison down the steep mountainside, then one lost its footing.

I looked away, unable to stomach the sight that followed.

The wagon rested half off the road, the screaming of breathless, terrified children still issuing from its interior. With its wheels stuck in thick mud, it was stable for the moment, but I wasted no time rushing to the wagon’s rear and ripping open the cloth covering. Six pale faces stared out at me even as their father struggled to get to them from the other side.

“Come on, out, out!” I urged, waving them toward me.

Two older girls grabbed their two youngest siblings in their arms and hurried toward me. The other two scrambled to escape out the front, their father dragging them through the opening. As the weight shifted, the wagon slid sideways in the muck.

I grabbed the first two children and pulled them to safety. As I reached for the second pair, the wagon slid again, and the older child yelled and slipped as the wooden floor lurched beneath her.

A gust of wind slammed into the wagon’s broad side, pushing it back toward me. The girl lunged, and I grabbed her and heaved, yanking her off the deck and onto solid ground.

Jarrod ran up, channeling the gust of wind and slowly pushing the wagon back onto the road.

Above us, the two skitters clung to the mountainside, a half-destroyed cart dangling beneath them. The driver was lying in the dirt a dozen feet away, nursing a badly bruised elbow and cursing her mana beasts.

A deadly aura approached, and I looked up to see the one-armed Vritra, Raest, land in our midst. He slowly gazed around, his eyes narrow and hostile. “Keep your folk in line, girl.”

My anger and anxiety overcame me, and I stepped in front of the cowering family and leveled a fierce glare at him. “Whatever you’re doing feels like it’s going to bring down the mountain with us on it! Your spells scared some of the mana beasts, and these people almost—”

I choked on my words as his killing intent wrapped around my throat like a clawed fist. Eyes bulging, I scratched at my neck but couldn’t force in a breath.

The Alacryan stepped closer. “Do not think that our need for you is so great that it makes us willing to be disrespected, girl. Perhaps the rest of this pathetic lot will be more pliant if I spread your guts from one end of the caravan to the other?”

“Please, that’s enough!” Jarrod yelled, running to my side. “We understand, all right?”

Raest eyed Jarrod with disdain, then flew up into the air and away, his aura receding with him.

I sank to my knees, tears streaming down my cheeks, and dragged in a rasping breath. “Stupid…” I gasped, shaking my head and angrily wiping my tears away.

“So I’ve been told,” Jarrod said, kneeling beside me.

I wheezed uncomfortably, half laughing, half crying. “Not you. I shouldn’t have—”

“Nevermind that,” he asserted, offering me his hand. When I took it, he helped me stand. “Come on. There are a lot of people here looking to us for some kind of leadership.”

Knowing he was right, I stood straight and did my best to collect myself. We helped the woman release her skitters. Several other families came forward to find places for the large family to take shelter and redistribute the goods contained in their now-useless wagon.

Assuming we ever leave this mountainside, I caught myself thinking. But then, perhaps it means they still have some hope. Otherwise, why bother?

Feeling a little better, Jarrod and I continued along the wagon train, doing our best to explain what was happening and offer consolation and guidance where it was needed.

It took nearly two hours to reach the end of the caravan, where the one-armed mage was watching over the road to ensure no one tried turning around and fleeing. Meanwhile, the mountain continued to tremble like a volcano about to erupt, and our captors offered us no further explanation.

A bitter wind had started to blow down the mountainside, turning the air cold, and most of the people had retreated to covered wagons to huddle around warming artifacts or built fires and set up tents against the base of the cliff that bordered the road. With my cloak pulled tight around my shoulders, I turned away from the last cart in our caravan and began making my way back up the mountain with Jarrod.

“Do you feel that?” he asked, stopping and looking westward, using his hand to shield his eyes from the sun.

“Impossible…” I breathed, the word little more than a groan.

Mana signatures, just as powerful as those of the Alacryan mages who had taken us prisoner, were approaching rapidly. Within moments, I could make out a cluster of five shapes speeding through the air toward us.

Perhata and Varg rose to meet them. The five new arrivals were all horned and red-eyed, just like Perhata and her companions, and each one felt at least as strong as a white core mage…

Nine such powers, I thought in dismay. How is such a thing even possible?

“Maybe they’ll let us go now,” Jarrod said hopefully. “If they get what they want, there is no reason for them to harm us, right?”

I couldn’t bring myself to agree with him, my mind lingering on the quakes that had been shaking the mountain for the last couple of hours.

“Maybe I can make out what they’re saying…” Jarrod murmured, casting a spell.

A light breeze seemed to turn against the cold wind coming down from the east, blowing only around Jarrod.

“They…Wraiths, I think that’s what they’re called. What are Wraiths? That man they captured, he’s a Sovereign, whatever that means. They’re waiting for one of their teleportation devices, but these new arrivals—they’re responding to some kind of signal Perhata sent—they don’t have one. They’re arguing now, and—oh, oh no. Shit…”

There was a wet whisper, and bright blood bloomed like an opening flower across Jarrod’s chest. He looked at me in surprise and confusion, his mouth opening and closing, then he sank to the ground. Somewhere, a scream sounded like a distant alarm, made muddy by the pounding of my own pulse in my ears.

“J-Jarrod…?”

I fell to his side, pressing my hands to his chest. There was a small tear in his shirt, and beneath it a clean hole in his flesh. Blood was pooling underneath him.

His hand reached for my cheek, smearing blood across my face, then slowly fell back to his side. A pained moan escaped his lips, and then he was still, the light fading from his eyes.

All I could do was stare in horror at my friend’s body.

With painstaking slowness, my head turned to where the Wraiths flew above us. They weren’t even looking…

People were moving around me, coming to see only to halt and step back as they realized Jarrod was already dead, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the Wraiths as they flew away, landing near the head of our wagon train.

Only then did my tear-filled eyes turn back to Jarrod.

He stared blindly up at me. Shaking, I pushed his lids closed. I suddenly realized that, although I was surrounded by people, I was completely alone. I’d known some of the adventurers who were guarding us, but they weren’t my friends, and most of them had died in the initial attack. The people we were helping relocate were nearly all strangers to me, at best people I had found and helped escape from Xyrus. Father and Mother were a long way away. Vanesy had helped organize this journey, but there had been no need for her to attend personally…

I was all on my own, and I had no idea what to do next.

My stomach twisted as a Wraith mana signature approached, their intent lashing at me like a whip. The one-armed Wraith was drifting in our direction yet again. There was an awful smirk carved across his burned face. “Perhata said it, didn’t she? Cast a spell, die. Fools. All you need to do is sit still, shut up, and stay out of our way.”

I had no strength to exchange words with this fiend out of my worst nightmares, but he wasn’t listening anyway. His head jerked up, his grotesque, blistered nose sniffing at the air like a beast. A low growl emanated from his throat, and he glared balefully down at me. “Silence. Say nothing, on pain of death.”

Then, one by one, I felt the Wraiths’ presence vanishing. Even as I stared at Raest, I lost all perception of his stifling mana signature. In the space of a few breaths, it was like the Wraiths had disappeared.

Blindly, my hand groped until it closed around Jarrod’s already cooling arm. What the hell is going on?

A distant but swiftly approaching emanation answered my question even as I thought it.

Spinning where I knelt by Jarrod’s body, I stared without comprehension into the sky, where three massive winged shapes had appeared over the mountains and were flying directly toward us.

Dragons! Three dragons!

Breathless, I hungrily absorbed the sight of them: two beautiful crystaline-white beings with ice-blue webbing in their wings and gleaming spikes along their backs, led by a third, black as midnight and seething with a killing intent unlike any I’d felt before.

I considered Raest from the corner of my eye as the dragons slowed, wheeling around to the west and investigating our caravan. He wasn’t watching me, but had hunkered down beside a cart, his bloodshot eyes locked on the dragons.

No, I thought, suddenly desperate, my fingers going white around Jarrod’s dead flesh. They’ll think we’re just…us, they won’t know the Wraiths are here, they’ll leave!

I swallowed heavily, steeling myself for what I needed to do. The Wraith would kill me, I saw that as clearly as I did the dragons in the sky, but I’d been dead since the moment the Wraiths shot down Tanner and his blade wing…

Taking a deep breath, I prepared to cast a spell.