Chapter 41:
To the Song of War
> Herald Conspicua,
>
> If you are reading this, I am dead, and my gambit has failed. The weapon is loose.
>
> Understand that what I set in motion was not born of recklessness, but necessity. You know as well as I do that forces beyond us are moving, and time was no longer on our side. I wagered that I could control the outcome—that I could wield the Song, and in doing so, secure our future. But if this letter reaches you, then I was wrong.
>
> You are left with two paths. You can gather overwhelming force and attempt to crush the weapon before it gains further strength. It will not be easy, and you will risk everything. Or, you can flee. Leave the Empire behind, for there may be nothing left to save once the Song awakens fully.
>
> Whatever you choose, you must choose quickly. Time will not wait for you, and if you delay, the choice will be made for you.
>
> — Rinthess, Speaker of the House Unseen
Adrian had known from the start this so-called expedition was rotten—rotten to its core. What kind of training mission allots horses? No other expedition had them, and for good reason. The Hand and the Tongue were expected to survive in the field without easy access to transportation. Training was supposed to prepare them for the worst-case scenarios. But since he didn’t have to walk, he’d kept his mouth shut.
Then there was Rinthess, swinging between venomous cruelty and almost feverish glee, casting a dark cloud over the group’s morale. Even the group itself was strange—where were the usual trainers, the attendants setting up fake encounters and staged obstacles? Nothing made sense.
And then came the real proof something was wrong. Godfrey and Riella had slaughtered a band of armed men without a second thought. Not a word, not a question. Just straight-up frontier justice. If Adrian hadn’t been writhing in agony from bad jerky cramps, he would have yelled at them for being so reckless. Armed men this close to Centria? On a road, even if overgrown, that should have been patrolled? And Rinthess didn’t even bat an eye. No investigation, no interrogation of survivors, no scolding Godfrey and Riella for charging headlong into superior numbers.
Adrian had known it from the beginning, but now he was certain—this expedition was rotten.
And now, as dozens of armed men—some of them armored head to toe—descended on the ruins, Adrian knew one more thing: he was about to die in some fucking political play.
This was fucking rotten.
A primal roar tore from his throat as he drew his shortsword. His shield and glaive—the tools he was most deadly with—were still strapped to his horse, hundreds of spans away. If he survived this, he swore he’d never be caught without them again.
Godfrey wasn’t here to help. Whether he was under some further Compulsion or running from certain death, Adrian didn’t care. What should’ve been four fighters holding the chokepoint was now just three.
The chokepoint wasn’t perfect. The ruins were crumbling, the brush overgrown, and the low walls weren’t enough to keep the enemy at bay forever. Eventually, the attackers would break through, and they’d be surrounded.
The enemy line moved with purpose, advancing in a deadly formation. Most wore ramshackle gear, but Adrian’s gut clenched at the sight of several men in the back—fully armored, wielding high-quality weapons. They were trained. They knew what they were doing.
Spears and pikes leveled toward the narrow gap in the ruins, aimed to poke them out like fish in a barrel. Just as Adrian prepared himself for the worst, the air warped.
Riella and Thyra began chanting, their voices weaving a sinister melody that cut through the chaos. The front rank of spearmen twisted on their heels, their faces blank as they turned their weapons on their own men. Ashen poles slammed into unarmored heads, steel tips gouging into flesh as chaos consumed them. Riella’s and Thyra’s chants shifted, and the men thrust wildly at their comrades, hacking and stabbing until blood soaked the ground.
But the chaos couldn’t last forever. The men regrouped, spreading out, and approached with caution, trying to avoid another massacre. Adrian’s pupils dilated as he focused, drawing on his body’s Control. His muscles surged with power, and he launched forward in a blur of movement.
In moments, he was among them—a miniature sortie all to himself. He cut down two men with swift strikes, each blow precise, before retreating to the archway, drained but steady.
Riella and Thyra were spent, their faces pale as they struggled to keep their arming swords raised. Their Compulsion had taken its toll.
The enemy’s commander bellowed an order, and the men rushed forward.
Adrian was ready. His shortsword danced in the tight space, slipping between armor, finding vulnerable joints and soft flesh. It was an advantage here, in the cramped ruins, where longer weapons couldn’t be wielded properly.
But they were coming—too many. The enemy had found a way around. Adrian heard branches snap. Soon, they’d be surrounded.
And then, three men lunged at him at once, their combined force slamming him against the wall of the archway. He barely had time to twist away, his blade flicking out, but there was no time for relief.
He was running out of room, running out of time, and they were running out of luck.
That was when he heard it.
He could not describe it as music. It was a note of melded voices, as if the throats of a million dead souls were given life once more to trumpet a call to war. The thundering of hooves, the shattering of lances, the steady drumbeat of artillery and arrow barrage, the clack and patter of engineers digging softworks during siege, the scrape of workers fletching arrows.
Adrian felt his blood rise, and a profound sense of…not hope, but something like certainty, inevitability, settle over his mind just as his sense of self began to dissolve.
He saw, almost through a haze of noise, a tall black-armored figure approaching them from behind, and raising his sword to cleave them all in two.
He felt not fear, he felt not sorrow.
He felt only pity.
XXX
The Bladesong advanced.
It did not think of strategy or mercy. Those concepts belonged to the flesh-bound, to the fleeting beings whose fragile lives marked the passage of time. The Bladesong was beyond time. It existed only in the rhythm of destruction, in the echo of a million voices—souls that had long been silenced, their only remnant now a collective cry for vengeance. It was that cry which filled the air.
The Bladesong had two hands; one caught the man-named-Corvin’s blade, the other caught his throat. Both squeezed. The steel and the flesh offered similar resistance. It was the same, all of it. Matter to be undone.
The pieces fell away, unmade in the wake of its touch. The Bladesong advanced.
XXX
Thyra screamed as she saw the man closing in. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and she wanted to sob in terror. She was a fucking gardener. Why the hell had she done this? Why had she bent to her parents' wishes and joined the Tongue?
She could have quit. The rules would have bent for her, just like they had for all the other children of the great houses. But maybe that was why she kept going.
She wanted to be something—someone—by her own hands.
She could still remember her mother's fury the first time she'd found Thyra in the gardens, digging up weeds and planting tubers. She had ruined an expensive dress, the fabric streaked with mud, and eventually, with tears when her mother’s tirade began.
Her father, though—he had found it adorable. He let her spend as much time in the garden as she wanted.
She loved him more than anything. And now she wouldn’t see him again. Or her garden. Or the life she had been cultivating, a life she had carefully nurtured—now all of it, pruned too soon.
And here, standing before her, were the shears.
The man in black armor loomed, shouting something—maybe at Godfrey’s retreating back, that coward. The armored man’s arm raised, a cruel grin spreading beneath his helmet, ready to bring the blade down.
That was when she heard it.
And that was when she saw the man shatter, breaking apart like wheat before a swift wind.
XXX
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Riella could not, would not believe that Godfrey had abandoned them. She remembered some of what Rinthess had said to him, something about the door beyond the archway, and when Riella had an opportunity she would glance back to see him there.
Sh had to believe he was under some Compulsion, and was not willingly abandoning her and the others to fight alone.
This whole situation reeked of politics, but Riella could not imagine the purpose.
Given their size, these ruins were almost certainly known about widely. If there was something of value here, it was long gone. Why were several dozen armed men being paid and equipped to exterminate a group of four Scribes and Squires?
She should have known that the armed band she and Godfrey had dispatched meant something deeper. Rinthess had barely reacted, which after the rush of combat had felt like absolution. However, now it was evident that she had been profoundly stupid to not see the signs.
Her mother would have been proud; dissecting and analyzing a present situation while also mounting an effective defense? Something the Battle Matron was well-known for.
Thyra and Riella’s trump card had been played, however, and now it was simple action against overwhelming numbers.
Scribe training, at this stage, was heavily weighted toward physical combat. This was all that saved her and Thyra from immediately dying on the end of spears, weapons that were absurdly effective at range against their arming swords. Adrian was flashing in and out of the fight, trying to sow chaos, but Riella heard the branches snap. She saw the tall man in black armor upon them, and knew she would soon be dead.
Dead, just like her mother, in a fucking game. She had let herself get placed on the board.
That was when she heard it, and saw Godfrey standing with the shattered pieces of the tall man in his grasp, gore dripping from his hands and lower body as he strode through the discarded corpse. His black eyes, no hint of sclera remaining, turned to her.
The Song she was hearing was coming from him, and even through the haze it cast upon her mind, she could tell it was strange. His throat did not distort or manipulate to produce the sound, it simply emitted from his open mouth.
As Godfrey’s gaze swept across the three of them, and as the men behind them faltered at the shocking sight of their master’s broken body, the Song shifted, and Riella could think no more.
XXX
The Bladesong had two wet hands.
The wind shifted, and beside the Bladesong, three figures stood—bodies still warm from the violence they had wrought. Their hands dripped with the remnants of their own kills. The Bladesong felt them—sensed their fear, their raw potential. The glory of this day should not belong to one body of flesh alone. All should feel the Song, know the pulse of war in their veins.
With neither word nor pause, the Bladesong welcomed them into its embrace, its rhythm folding around them like a cloak of inevitability.
The Bladesong had eight hands now.
And the Bladesong advanced.
XXX
Rinthess watched and waited as her play unfolded.
Everything had gone horribly wrong since she'd sent Corvin to Oakvale. Not only had the idiot botched the entire operation, but he'd also let the boy wander off into the wilderness alone. It was pure dumb luck the boy had survived long enough to reach Centria, and her people had been scrambling to ensure his Induction in time.
But instead of being hopeless and surrounded by a hostile city with no resources, he hadn’t come crawling to her for help. No. By some impossible twist of fate, Godfrey had thrived—silently, unpredictably, and entirely outside her carefully laid plans.
It was all sloppy. She knew that. Too many variables, too many loose threads she hadn’t accounted for. Godfrey had always been obstinate, but this... this was unexpected. The timeline was getting tighter, and ever since that moment in the hallway, when he had resisted her Compulsion—if only for an instant—she knew she had to accelerate the plan.
The memory sent a shiver through her. He had resisted. Him, a boy barely twenty-one summers old.
Godfrey was nothing like she had anticipated. Instead of being isolated, he had found allies. Instead of recoiling in fear from the unknown, he leaped into it with reckless abandon. Instead of staying on his knees like a good pawn, he had stood, looked her in the eye, and demanded she hand over Corvin.
Well, he would have Corvin now. And after the weapon was unleashed—after he woke up over the corpses of his new friends—he would be truly, utterly alone. That would be her moment. Her opening.
This was a risk, she knew. She didn’t take risks lightly, but some rewards outweighed the fear of any punishment.
And then, she heard it.
XXX
The Chorus advanced.
Without regard, without mercy.
In and through, the Bladesong moved—a dervish of death, its form flowing like water, its strikes as inevitable as time itself. Around it, the Chorus echoed, their movements harmonizing with its own, bound together by threads of melody older than memory.
The men stood before them, unaware of their place in the Song. They were as manure for the grasses and trees, fuel for a cycle that stretched endlessly across the expanse of time. Life to death, death to life. They were part of something greater; though they would never understand it in this life. Perhaps, one day, beneath the tree their blood and bone had birthed, someone new would sit in the shade, unaware of the sacrifice that fed the roots, and contemplate their own understanding of the cycle.
The Bladesong’s hands were many now, each strike cutting through armor, flesh, bone—no difference between them. They would fall, as all things must. During the Ballad of the Bladesong, there was no cruelty, no pity, only the cadence of destruction, a note in the grand composition of existence. For the Bladesong was neither cruel nor just; it simply was, as inevitable as the rain, the wind, and the hurricane.
The Chorus moved as one—souls ringing with the same undeniable refrain. It was not malice that carried them forward, but purpose.
And the Bladesong led, its melody weaving through them, pulling them deeper into its rhythm.
The men before them were but notes, plucked from their place, fading back into the earth from which they came. Their bodies would nourish the roots of future life, their screams the final discord in a perfect harmony.
And still, the Bladesong advanced.
Men in suits of metal stood in their path, their eyes bleeding darkness, foul steam erupting from their skin. Poor approximations of the glory of the Song, but for that, they could not be faulted. They, too, fell—though they fought to the last, their struggle desperate, as if their resistance could alter the melody already written. The grasses below them churned with the weight of their collapse, soaked in their failure. The Song knew the cycle here would take longer to begin anew, but it mattered little.
The Bladesong found empty space, the air still and waiting. Its movements slowed, the Chorus following in perfect harmony, and in that stillness, the Song shifted, its melody narrowing into a single, precise note. It knew only one enemy remained, much like it knew what the enemy was.
Across a distance of two dozen spans, nestled behind a veil of shrubs, the woman lay in concealment. But she could not hide from the Song.
The Bladesong’s rhythm wrapped around her now, threading through the clearing, binding her to its will. It curled through the air like a whisper, insidious and inevitable, drawing her into the symphony. She, too, was part of the cycle, another note in the composition.
The Song encircled her, waiting for the moment to bring her into its final crescendo.
But then, a foul sound clashed with the Song—a discordant, jarring note that did not simply disrupt the melody but invaded the very essence of it. It was not just a challenge to the structure of the tone; it was a violent intrusion into the body of flesh the Song inhabited.
The Song trembled, its rhythm faltering as this foreign force sought to grasp control, to wrench dominance over the vessel, and by extension, over the Song itself.
It was not simply resistance—it was an attempt to corrupt, to twist the pure cadence of the Bladesong and bend it to a new will.
But the Song allowed it, for there was nothing to control. The discordant force could grasp all it wanted, but it would find nothing solid to seize. You could no more hold onto the Song than a sieve could hold water. It flowed, slipped, and evaded, existing beyond the reach of any who sought to dominate it.
The foul sound might tear at the flesh, gnaw at the mind, but the Song remained untouched—eternal, unyielding. It simply was, and that which sought to bend it would find itself swallowed by its own futility.
And so, when the enemy finally emerged from her cowardly hiding place, she strode forward boldly, as if she had already claimed victory—as if she believed herself to be in control of war itself. Her steps were deliberate, her gaze sharp with false confidence, convinced that her foul intrusion had bent the Song to her will.
She did not know. She could not know.
The Song flowed around her, indifferent to her arrogance.
Rinthess stepped forward, her voice dripping with cold authority.
"You will not harm me, Godfrey—neither with your blade nor with the Song. You will strike down these three, and then you will dismiss the Song. We have much to do, and little time with which to do it.”
The Bladesong did not advance, nor did it move. It stood perfectly still, its blades lowering slowly to its sides, motionless yet full of potential. Its mouth hung open, releasing the beautiful, lethal Song—a sound that filled the air like a storm on the horizon, its melody as indifferent as it was deadly.
Rinthess's command echoed in the stillness, but the Song answered only with its unrelenting, haunting cadence.
Rinthess shifted uncomfortably, her confidence wavering. The Bladesong remained unmoved, its relentless, haunting melody filling the air. Frustration flickered across her face as she repeated her command, her voice sharp and brittle.
The air warped around her, crackling with the raw energy of her Compulsion, an ugly, twisted sound that snaked through the air, seeking to entangle itself within the Song. But it found no purchase.
The Song flowed on, untouched, indifferent to her will, as though her efforts were nothing more than a ripple on an unbroken sea.
The Bladesong's tone shifted—subtle at first, then growing in intensity. Its melody redoubled, deep and resonant, as if the very air itself was straining beneath the weight of its power. The pressure in the clearing grew, pressing down like the weight of an unseen hand, and Rinthess broke into a cold sweat.
She began to chant frantically, her voice rising, the air around her warping and twisting in response to her desperation. But the Bladesong had already woven its first thread. It wrapped around her words, coiling through the foul air she had summoned and unraveling it, rendering her Compulsion powerless. The twisted sound of her command was stripped bare, disempowered and fragile, dissolving like mist beneath the rising sun.
The second thread of the Song, a deeper, more insidious note, slipped into her mind through her ears, a sound that resonated within her very being. It pulled, not with force, but with inevitability, welcoming her into the embrace of the Chorus. It was not a choice—it was her fate. The Song would consume her as it had consumed all before her.
And there, with no enemies left to face, the Bladesong stood in stillness. It searched—desperately, hungrily—for adversity, for resistance, for something in the depths of the wilderness to challenge its relentless purpose. But there was none.
Finding no more to conquer, no more to destroy, the Bladesong began to unravel, its melody thinning. Slowly, as suddenly as it had surged into existence, it began to dissipate—fading into the air, into silence. The echo of its terrible beauty lingered only for a moment longer, then vanished, leaving only the hollow quiet in its wake.