The days walking through the tall grass bled together just like the horizons did, so it was more than a little surprising that two different remarkable things happened on the same day. The first was a messenger from the throne.

She was a cat beastkin that seemed somewhat similar to a cheetah with the speed and grace with which she moved. She ran through the formation with such speed that she raised the alarm, but by the time swords were drawn and men were shouting, she was already gone, and she ran down the column to find Benjamin.

When she did, she leaped and reached the back of the turtle where he, Raja, and Emma were sitting around his focus and talking about what to do about their dwindling food supply. The donation of tubers and baskets of dried seeds from a giant prairie dog mound village had made their needs less crucial, but they were probably going to have to raid another Plantation in the next few days, or else they would have to stop the army and hunt instead of march for a few days.

Benjamin had only barely noted the distant call of alarm at the edge of their formation when all of that changed, and the furry woman with feral eyes leaped on top of the turtle, startling all of them. He and Raja jumped, but Emma barely moved; she regarded the new arrival critically, but in the end, she merely sat there and regarded it cooly.

Instead of ripping out his throat, though, the beast woman landed just in front of where Benjamin was sitting and immediately bowed low until her muzzle touched the wooded platform. “I come from the west on an urgent errand from my mistress, the Throne. Are you the Ben-jamin?”

“Umm, that’s me,” Benjamin said, uncertain when his name had been turned into a title. “What can I do for you… I mean, her…”

The woman produced a scroll wrapped around a carved ivory handle and pressed it immediately into his hands. “My mistress congratulates you on your efforts to purge the pests from our hunting grounds and on your fine work with the children of Lasthome. A grave threat is assembling not far from the coast, though.”

“What is it?” Benjamin asked as he unrolled the scroll and started to parse out the flowing handwriting on the papyrus as best he could.

“Ships come from the world island like a strange tide of their own, and each of them vomits forth whole loads of manthings before they leave to fetch more,” she cautioned. “A true army approaches. One that is larger than all of your men put together.”

“If they have so many men, then why aren’t they stepping through portals and kicking our ass already?” Emma asked.

The messenger, for her part, gazed at the interruption and hissed briefly at Emma before she turned back to Benjamin and continued. She clearly wasn’t interested in talking to humans who were not the Benjamin.

“They will not come for you like this,” the woman said. “Not directly. Instead, they will march from the sea in a line so long that one end is not visible from the other, and they will burn everything in their path, just as they did before.”

“They’ve done this before?” Benjamin asked. “Why didn’t anyone tell us?”

“This was long ago,” she answered with a shake of her head. "In the time of my grand-dam’s grand-dam. For decades, the world had been struggling as one to shake the black-eyed manthings free from the world island without success. Then, one night, they came ashore and began to build and expand. My people fought and sabotaged them for years. Whole expeditions got lost in the grass sea never to return. It wasn’t enough, though. One day, they assembled a grand army and destroyed everything in their path so there could be no more tricks.”

“And after that, they started to colonize the area,” Benjamin said with a sigh as he realized the pattern of history here. “How awful.”

“Indeed,” the beast woman agreed. “They aim to plow the land, and then when there is no one left to oppose them, they will begin again here. They have done it in the firelands before, but there, they have had a harder time gaining a foothold. The fertile east is less primal, and it shames me to say that they had all but tamed it until your arrival.”

Matt climbed up the ladder to where they were all seated high on Benjamin’s battle turtle. He’d obviously thought they were under attack, but when he saw the only thing that was happening up here was tense conversation, he relaxed visibly.

“So she wants to meet with us, or…” Benjamin asked as he reviewed the scroll.

“No,” the beastwoman roared. “She doesn’t need more words. She wants you to strike at the very heart of them and end this before they can do more harm.”

According to whoever had drawn the map, the front stretched for almost 50 miles, and the soldiers numbered in the tens of thousands. It wasn’t just so many that they had no hope against beating a force that size. It was that no one did.

The only way they’d won so far was by staying a step ahead and moving fast. Even if they won a battle or two against such a force, his mind balked at the idea that they might be able to do so and live to fight another day. Two thousand versus forty thousand wasn’t even suicide. It was simply madness.

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“I’m not sure that’s possible,” Benjamin said finally, earning a look of pure fury before the cheetah woman roared with rage. This was enough to make Emma twitch slightly as a pair of knives appeared in her hands, but otherwise, she continued to sit where she had been until now.

“Listen,” Benjamin said, trying to placate the angry woman. “We want to help. We’re on the same team, but being outnumbered like that… twenty to one. We can’t rush these things. We’re going to need a plan. A strategy. If we—”

“The longer we talk, the more people will die!” she growled, rising to her feet. Benjamin was reminded of advice that trickled up from his childhood at that moment. Don’t show fear in front of wild animals. “The wetlands, the nest cities of the winged ones, the packlands… all of those will burn unless we do something!”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She simply leaped off the back of the turtle and sped through the ranks before disappearing into the grasslands.

After that, the four of them talked about what had happened and the scant information they had, but none of them had a good idea of what came next. “Unless you’ve got a new miracle up your sleeve, Benji, I’m just not sure it’s possible.”

“Well, we have to figure out something,” Benjamin said in frustration. “This is our fault. We’ve been successful enough that they are finally unleashing the big guns.”

“We’ve done what we can,” Emma shrugged. “That doesn’t mean we have to die for lost causes.”

“But—” Benjamin started to protest.

“Ask any of them?” she said, gesturing widely at the small army that surrounded them. “Ask them if they want to die because it’s the right thing to do.”

“What do you think we’re doing right now?” Raja asked. For once, there wasn’t a trace of amusement in his voice. “What the fuck do you think Nicole died for? What everyone so far has died for.”

“She died for a fight that had a chance,” Emma clarified. “We won, didn’t we? We fight this, though, and all of us…”

Her words trailed off as Raja climbed down the ladder and disappeared into the crowd. The death of the fifth member of their little group wasn’t something they talked about much, but it was still definitely a sore spot for Raja, and Benjamin completely understood. Honestly, he thought that Emma was being more than a little awful.

“Sensitive, much?” she said with a smile that died as soon as she saw that neither Benjamin nor her man agreed with her in even the slightest.

Selfish, he thought. That’s the right word.

“Fine then,” she said, sheathing her knives and propping herself up into a handstand in a single motion. “You two discuss lost causes. I’m going to go see what I can do about our ongoing battle with hunger. That’s a fight we can actually win.”

Then, before Benjamin could answer, she flipped off the edge and landed in a solid dismount half a dozen feet from the tortoise. Part of him worried she was going to go murder Raja, but he doubted she’d be able to find him. When the man wanted to be alone, he had a way of just disappearing into the wilds. He would be back when he was ready and not before.

Which just left Benjamin and Matt with no clear idea of what to do now. “I’ll talk to my inner circle,” Matt said, referring to the loose collection of captains and lieutenants he’d been building up as people distinguished themselves for obedience or valor in battle. “But I can’t imagine they’d have any more insight into the situation than me, and the best I can come up with would be some sort of crossing the t situation, like at Trafalgar.”

“Tea?” Benjamin asked, completely lost. “Trafalgar?”

“Well, it’s sort of a refused flank where we could…” he started to say, but as he saw Benjamin’s eyes glaze over, he switched topics. “You know what. Don’t worry about it. We’ll talk it through and try to come back to you with some plans.”

Benjamin nodded, handing his friend the scroll before Matt retreated, leaving him alone with his thoughts. He really was alone, too.

At the beginning of all this, when they’d only freed a couple Plantations, the men that he freed were friendly with him, and women had occasionally even flirted with him. Now, though, he was in a world apart. He’d won too many times and come up with too many miracles. People would still talk to him, of course, but there was this look in their eyes like he was a celebrity or something.

Raja told him that some called him the messiah and that rumors said he’d already died and come back to life to save humanity. He prayed those weren’t true, but there was so much truth in it that it would have been impossible to argue with. He’d died for the cause more than once already, and he’d happily do it again if it meant taking these assholes down.

Benjamin was left alone to ponder these and other thoughts when the second remarkable thing happened. This one was also a messenger, and the only real difference between the two was that this one had been expected. This one didn’t cause a stir or raise an alarm. It was the leader of the scouting party that they’d sent to investigate Lord Jarris’s strange parlay offer, after all, and not some stranger.

Benjamin wasn’t terribly sure what they’d find there, and he was just glad that they’d made it back safe and sound without issue. But when the man sent him the helioglyphs and explained what he’d found, Benjamin knew that trap or not, he was going to have to go.

The faintly glowing images that were little more than fuzzy magical photography he’d been able to give to all of their scouts were hard to make out sometimes, but this time, Benjamin knew exactly what he was looking at. He was looking at his house.

Well, his parents’ house. It was the house he’d grown up in, and it was sitting there in a shallow valley with a few other buildings that were too blurry to make out. The longer he stared at the images, the more his stomach sank.

“Could they really do that?” he asked himself. “Could they really summon specific people from other worlds?”

“S-sir?” the scout captain stammered, uncertain how he was supposed to answer the question he thought he was being asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Benjamin said finally as he struggled with that terrible thought as he signaled all of his friends with their party. “You’re dismissed. Please give my compliments to your team.”

The man gave a salute before he left, but Benjamin barely noticed. His head was spinning. Suddenly, despite everything they’d done, he felt like a fool.