A battle could shift tides in an instant—that was the incredible, horrific beauty of it in Lady Captain Urla Pelasius’s mind.
Life and death stretched along an invisible thread, weaving across the entire battlefield, through every warrior, every beast, every razor-sharp edge. The difference was a matter of inches and moments.
One moment, Urla’s axe was wedged in the crevasse of a Sigan warrior’s dark-haired skull. One moment, fire rained down from violent skies and consumed entire companies of warriors. Smoke rushed into the heavens, and blood gushed from a writhing furor of blades and shields, and the deathblows found between them.
The next moment, horns blared, and cheers swept across the battlefield.
The next warrior Urla faced dropped his weapon to the ground and lay prostrate on the blood-soaked ground before her. Her two-handed battle axe hovered mid-air, casting a gruesome shadow over the whimpering man.
The entire field became a furor of clattering weapons and ringing shields. The rain of fire ceased, and the mighty Dragonmounts of Attica soared over the plains, gargantuan wings blocking the sun before settling on the hills at the edge of the battlefield.
Three fates stretched the bloody plains—the fallen, the defeated, and the victors—threads woven before the war had begun. It was the Fjuriin Path they all trod, whether they believed it or not.
Lady Captain Pelasius had stayed her course, that was all, the gory evidence spread all around her. To her left, Urla had dealt one fate, the man’s innards coating the ground in goops of flesh and bone. Now, for the fortunate Sigan heathen kneeling before her, she dealt another fate.
Urla lowered her axe, though she did not stow it on her back immediately.
The surrender itself had likely happened several minutes ago. Somewhere behind her, comrades in arms closer to Lord General Raithe had survived, where here they had fallen, crimson cloaks twisted around their mutilated bodies. Somewhere ahead, the battle still raged for a few moments longer.
But Urla bore no regret in her heart for any man or woman she’d slain on this field. It was their path, and it was the heathen price of ancient rebellion finally paid in full.
The prostrate warrior shifted at her feet, and Urla tightened her grip on the leather-wrapped handle of her axe.
“On your face!” she barked.
“P-please, I will not resist. I have family. Please.”
All it took was one word, and even warriors could be reduced to pant-pissing cowards. The Sigan man planted his face deeper in the blood and upturned earth, wedged between the bodies of fallen soldiers.
My son lost his father for this? Urla thought bitterly.
She’d been tempted to let her axe fall. She knew plenty of her comrades had surely done so. But she was Lady Captain now. And besides, the battlefury was already waning, and the ache of buried sorrow seeped back to the surface.
Keivan’s death will be avenged by much better blood than yours, she thought.
The Sigan nobles and high-ranking officers would be tried and executed, replaced with imperial loyalists. The rest of this heathen force would march home in shackles and shame. Nothing to show for their years of independence, but a host of orphans and half-starved lowborns.
After a bloody civil war half a century ago, Siga had managed a tumultuous independence, like many nation-states at the outskirts of the empire during the decline. But under the Emperor Athanasius, the tide had finally turned, and a new path lay before the Attican Empire.
Kalkesh and Ytan had fallen first, and now, Siga would be grafted back into the mighty tree of Attica. A tree that had weathered droughts and storms, and was now poised to spread the blood-soaked world once more, and bend thousands more soldiers to such a groveling state.
The Sigan man still simpered pathetically at Urla’s feet, not daring to look anywhere but the mud.
A series of runners dispersed shackles and chains across the battlefield. Prison carts descended the hills, steel cages rattling, and picked their way amongst the throng. A slow process, due to the sheer mass of corpses littering the ground.
Urla knelt on the Sigan warrior’s back. He groaned at the weight and the sharp edge of a glowing runemarked greave piercing through his cloak.
“Quit crying, swine,” she said, patting his cheek. “You’ll live.”
A scrawny Attican squire handed Urla shackles. She seized the Sigan warrior’s wrists and shackled them, and jerked the man to his feet. He wore only leathern armor, except for a chest plate made of bronze. It was remarkable their little kingdom had lasted as long as it had, in truth.
Urla shoved the man forward, the rest of her company quickly following her lead.
Most of the flames had dwindled to smoldering grass across the trodden plains, except for the splintered remains of an Elyan runeship, a quarter-mile to the west. The flying galleon had nearly swayed the battle in the Sigans’ favor. Broadsides from the skies were a rare and terrifying thing to behold. Hundreds of Attican warriors had been killed, but the Dragonmounts had done their duty in the end.
Dragonflight could not be matched by any human invention, magic or no, that was what Keivan had always told her.
May you enjoy your rest in the halls of Myrath until I join you, husband, she thought coldly.
Keivan was one week from a very different fate. The loss was still fresh, and the full reality of her husband’s death had yet to truly set in. Urla did not think it would until she returned home to her son, alone.
A thick hand clapped her shoulder from behind with a laugh. Urla didn’t flinch. She’d seen her comrade coming in the corner of her vision.
“Final tally, twenty-three, Captain!” Roak said with a chortle.
The young Sergeant looked like a mossy blond boulder. All thick muscles and curly hair, from his beard to his toes, Urla was loathe to know. There was little privacy in a battle company, even for one of the shield maidens of Attica.
“Roak, if you were counting, you weren’t lost in the fury,” said Lieutenant Caliphus, shoving his own prisoner in the mud. “Bloody shame.”
Roak chuckled. “Is it truly the fury if you just stand there hacking away at the same heathen the whole damn time?”
Caliphus glowered. He was ten years younger than Urla, and younger than most of the Bloody Company. But unlike most of them, he was an academy boy from a decent family. The men liked to razz him over being a soft noble’s son, and he fell for it more times than not.
“Too many kills to count,” Caliphus said.
“Hey, I thought you said it didn’t matter!”
“Help me out here, Lady Captain!” Caliphus said.
Urla smirked and shook her head. “Only kill I ever marked was my very first. Twenty years ago.”
“Heh, first kill, that’s all you marked today too Lieutenant,” Roak laughed.
Caliphus shoved him in the shoulder, but he laughed along.
Roak hurried forward, but Caliphus remained close by Urla’s side.
“So… how many was it actually, then?” Urla asked.
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“Twenty-two,” Caliphus said, shoving his prisoner forward. The heathen stumbled over his own feet. “I’d happily make it a tie, however!”
The Sigan warrior shriveled at the words, and hurried forward. He did not trip again.
***
The dusk of battle was Urla’s least favorite hour, when the gruesome throes of fate were exchanged for a strange and raucous amalgamation of screams and frivolity. Of course, she’d had her own part in the looting of defeated kingdoms before—shaming and mutilating and enslaving—but over the years, it had grown less appealing.
For years, Urla tried to suppress her displeasure at the post-battle ritual, for she knew it was the mother in her, and something deep within felt sure this was weakness festering. Eventually, she could not deny it. If becoming a mother had changed her, then, so be it.
Her own child would never be left so vulnerable. Still, Urla could not shake the knowledge that her son’s fate had been mere chance blessing from the All Mother.
How easily little Ruan might have been Sigan, born on the other side of a war he had no say in. And when the Attican Empire quashed that rebellion and subjugated its citizens once more, as was their right, it could just as easily have been her own son orphaned or starved or... worse.
So, once her duties were fulfilled on the battlefield, Urla retreated to the outskirts of the war camp while the warriors of the Bloody Company subjugated the Sigan heathens in the name of the empire, and the Dragon Emperor Athanasius himself.
The Sigan capital of Leone was nothing like the great Attican cities of stone, where the history of the empire was etched in every temple and square. Here, everything was made of bamboo rods and thatched together by little more than twine. If the legions felt so inclined, the entire city could be razed by morning—it surely wouldn’t be the first time Leone had suffered such a fate. A proper civilized city could be built in its place, but that was not the Attican way.
Yes, they conquered, but vassal states still maintained remnants of their culture. Sure, the Attican conquerors erected temples to the true All Mother and All Father, and over time, monks would bring many more converts to the Fjuriin Path. But theirs was an empire built on land, not superstitious rites or culture. So long as the Sigans paid proper tribute to the emperor, they could carry on their lives much as they had before. It made the matter of rebellion all the more baffling to Urla. Surely, life in Siga had been worse during their liberation.
But then, she had been raised in the Path, and for that, she thanked the true gods.
Urla walked the edge of the battlefield, where the sounds of spoils were diminished. Clouds hovered overhead, forming a sort of glowing dome over the valley. Most of the pyres had dwindled. Heathen soldiers were all huddled in prison carts, kept warm by the fires that had incinerated their fallen comrades.
Along the hillsides, the silhouettes of dragons loomed against the cloudy backdrop, wings drawn back like dark sails.
A faint golden luminescence caught Urla’s eye near the center of the field, and she ventured over. As she neared, Urla noticed several brown-cloaked alchemists shuffling around, picking through splinters of wood, the source of the strange glow.
The remains of the runeship, Urla realized, her curiosity piqued. It was little more than a heap of splinters. Urla could make out what she thought might be a section of mast jutting out of the wreckage, and a section of taffrail, perhaps, but little else.
She drew closer. The browncloaks hefted a few select pieces of wood into a wagon, for study Urla presumed, the rest they cast aside into a large pile of charred lumber to be destroyed. The runeship was a terrifying marvel. Urla’s own armor, like most highborn officers, was reinforced with runes—they made it possible to survive a single axe blow to the chest, though, rarely two—but to fly an entire ship with magic? That was a sorcery beyond anything in Attica.
Though Urla knew little of magic.
It was a force of the Other, according to the Fjuriin Path, and bore risks far greater than dragons, if practiced by the wrong hands. Worlds had fallen before from such power.
This runeship was a bad omen. The power of a nation that did not believe in the same restraint towards sorcery.
The Elyans were meddling in Attican affairs, and that was cause for worry. But if the secrets of their magic ships could be unraveled…
The browncloaks shot Urla an aggravated look, but carried on about their work. Runes on the salvaged boards continued to glow, despite the decimation of the ship itself. Urla peered into the cart for a closer look. It was as though the boards had been etched with liquid magic, like metal in a forge poured into intricate shapes. The runes themselves came from no language Urla had encountered in all her campaigns, their shape somehow both sharp and fluid.
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to find you out here lingering on the battlefield,” said a familiar voice. “Kraal ni Mira.”
Consul General Campos strode toward her from the darkness, his crimson cloak billowing out behind him in the soft evening breeze. She saluted him with a raised right fist before answering.
“Soldiers live for spoils,” Urla said. “Warriors fight for glory. You taught me that.”
Campos had been Lord Captain of her first company, many years ago, and taught her much of what it meant to be a warrior.
“I did,” Campos said with a grin. “But who said there’s no glory to be found in spoils?”
Urla shook her head. “Well, I don’t see you partaking either.”
“I’m a consul.”
Urla rolled her eyes. “Well, there you have it.”
“But I am sure the men of your Bloody Company are relieved you let them choose their own glory.”
Urla smiled. “That would make me a poor bloody mother.”
Kraal ni mira.
The name had come from the moment she proved her mettle in the training camps.
Back as a young officer recruit—far more green than Caliphus. There were few women in the legions, and hardly any female officers, and more than one cocky grunt had tested her. But when one bastard tried to have his way with her after a drunken fest, Urla nearly severed his hand clean off.
The bastard was a fellow noble’s heir, and took the incident up the chain of command.
Urla denied it. Naturally, it was a much worse offense to maim one of her fellow soldiers than what the man had attempted.
“What would you have me do?” Lord Captain Campos had demanded of her before the tribunal. “How else do you explain the blood on your uniform?”
Urla had shrugged sheepishly. “It’s my… time of the month.”
And the name was born. The Bloody Mother.
The maimed man was discharged. The legions had no use for a one-handed man, noble or not. Urla, meanwhile, earned her respect and her place among the legions.
From that day forward, there was neither male nor female amongst her comrades, only soldiers. Twenty years later, Urla was one of the few lady captains, and her company of a hundred would follow her into the pits of Skrala itself.
“The Bloody Mother.” Campos laughed, clapped her on the shoulder. “That bastard had it coming, I’ll tell you.”
She smiled. “You have many times.”
“We all liked your boldness, just—”
“Just needed an excuse not to send me packing,” Urla said.
They laughed. Campos followed her gaze as the alchemists continued their work on the remains of the runeship.
“A marvel, isn’t it?” the general said, surveying the diminishing heap that had once been a ship of terrifying magnificence. “I’m glad there was only one.”
“The Flying Armada is a legend, isn’t it?” asked Urla.
“If the Elyans can build one ship? Why not a fleet?”
“They might ask the same of our dragons.”
“Aye, and we all make damn sure we keep that shrouded in mystery, don’t we?”
Urla knew he was fishing for information, as usual. Being wed to a Dragonmount, many assumed she knew all the secrets of the order, but her husband had taken oaths long before they’d met, and Urla knew little more than most other members of the legions why there were so few dragons in the world.
Urla shrugged. “Mysteries are mysteries for a reason, sir.”
Campos turned to one of the alchemists.
“Will you be able to unravel this monstrosity’s mysteries, Lord Sorcerer?”
The bald man scowled and set a glowing scrap of wood in the wagon. “I’m not at liberty to say, sir.”
Campos chortled. “Good man, good man. Carry on, then!”
He waved the alchemist away and grabbed Urla by the elbow. “Walk with me, will you? I think you’re putting them on edge.”
“Me?” Urla laughed. “You’re the one asking questions.”
“Then, permit me the joy of your company, Kraal ni Mira.”
Urla nodded. “Of course, sir.”
They strode in silence, weaving amongst the pyres dotting the battle-churned landscape.
“Your company fought with honor,” General Campos said. “Throughout this campaign. You lead them well.”
“I learned to follow orders well, that’s all.”
“There were some who feared you’d let grief rule you today.”
Urla huffed. If hers and her husband’s fates had been reversed, she knew he would have received no such doubts.
“I was not one of them, Lady Captain. I knew you’d fulfill your duty, beyond the highest expectations. As you have since the day that bastard lost his bloody hand.”
She smiled. “Thank you, sir.”
“After this, though…”
“I have no intention of retiring, sir. My duty is written in blood, just like my father’s and his before him.”
“I hear your son shows much promise at the academy. How old is he now?”
“Eighteen. He’s already passed the Mountain and the Desert trials. Though he longs for the Sky like his father.”
“It’s a damned shame Keivan’s mount was lost with him,” Campos said softly. “Voltari should have been your son’s mount, and his heir’s after him. So rare a tragedy.”
Urla bit her lip. It felt like a betrayal, but that was the news she dreaded sharing with her son the most, even more than the death of his father. Ruan had trained all his youth believing he would be Dragonmount. He’d ridden Voltari on half a hundred occasions, and he possessed rare skill in flight.
Urla had insisted no word be sent about the tragedy. She could not bear the thought of anyone else breaking such unspeakable news to him.
General Campos brushed her shoulder in a patronly fashion, and Urla turned to him. He’d been a friend of her father’s, and after his death, Campos was as close a thing to a father as she had left.
“There may be another way for your son to attempt a Sky trial.”
“Only a couple of dragons are hatched each year. I don’t know as much as you think about their origins, but I know the chances that my son would be granted one is unfathomable. I have a better chance at becoming Lady General.”
Campos smiled down at her. “Some might have said the same about your chances at being captain too. Or even making it out of the training camps. But in my experience, it’s always a combination of who you are and who you know. Your son is one of the most promising young novices in the capital, and you are more well-connected than you may realize.”
“What are you saying, sir?”
“There’s someone I’d like you and Ruan to meet when we return to Attica. Assuming, of course, that you’re interested.”
“You think you can get my family another dragon?”
Campos walked off, calling over his shoulder. “I’ll send word after the Victor’s March.”