Lilly, as baffled as ever by Windham’s consistently bizarre behavior, returned to her father with a growing sense of urgency. Yesterday, based only on instincts and feelings that had come from speaking with numerous newcomers to Brightholme, she had been concerned an invasion by some unknown entity were possible. She’d had no hard proof, no evidence. Not one of those she had spoken to had explicitly stated, “Oh, hey, by the way… there’s this group? The Holy Ascension? And they’re, like, conquerors and stuff? And they’re totally coming to take over the world. Like, tomorrow.” But she’d been right all the same.
People continued to hurry past her, the mass flood of… what? Evacuees? Refugees? Exiles? Whatever the term, they were people. Her people, whether she knew every last face or not. She had never felt particularly close to them, as a group, despite her father’s position as a pseudo-leader. Yet, watching them dead and dying around her throughout the day and now fleeing in fear, their clothes tattered, their faces bloodied, their children still in their arms…
It had always been the Godknight’s responsibility to protect them. Today, he had failed to do so. It had never been unfair of the people to expect that protection; the Godknight had promised it. Follow the “live in peace” rule, and in exchange, he was supposed to assure you could, in fact, live in peace.
Lilly felt a barrage of conflicting feelings. Anger. Resentment. Fear. Empathy. Responsibility. The Godknight had failed to protect them, as had, by proxy, her father. Something within her insisted that was something she could not allow herself to do. Fail these people.
There was a new buzz around her father once she reached him. The crowd had expanded and were more animated, a strange sort of excitement rippling through them. Lilly picked up her pace, quickly covering the ground between her and the crowd, and immediately saw the source of the excitement.
Icabod Deepshield, founder and Captain of the Peacekeepers, had arrived in Safehaven.
Tall and lean, Captain Deepshield stood a head above most in the crowd. He wasn’t a lanky thin, though, instead composed of long, sinewy muscles that hinted at his wiry strength. Despite his lean frame, his shoulders were broad and squared and his jaw seemed chiseled from stone. His slender hands were calloused and firm, visibly powerful, and the few battle scars on his face suggested a harder life lived before his arrival in Brightholme.
His salt-and-pepper hair was short, his high forehead revealing a few creases that suggested a lifetime of strategic thinking… or frequent scowling. Unlike her father, Captain Deepshield’s air of authority was not cosmetic, carefully curated to present an aged wisdom. His was earned.
Lilly couldn’t say she liked the man. Nor could she say she disliked him, exactly. But she did respect him: his directness, his commitment to service, his unerring honesty. Seeing him here made her feel a little better. A little more hopeful.
His blue Peacekeeper uniform, usually crisp and clean to a flawless, almost obsessive degree, was crumpled, torn, and dirty, suggesting he’d fought his way from wherever he had been at the start of the invasion into Safehaven. He was joined by what Lilly estimated as twenty more Peacekeepers, each of their uniforms in similar states as their leader’s. Together, despite their ragged appearance, they presented a small glimmer of hope in a day of despair. The Peacekeepers never carried weapons, other than their Tranquility Nets. But today they did. Although they were makeshift weapons—hand axes, shovels, pitchforks—seeing them gathered and armed seemed to be energizing the crowd around them.
Deepshield had just finished whatever one-on-one conversation he had been having with her father—who slunk quietly into the background—and began to address the crowd in a loud, clear voice.
“Listen up, people. I’m sorry we weren’t here when this invasion began, but I assure you we’ve been fighting these bastards all day just the same. It’s taken us this long to get to Safehaven… but we’re here now. We are armed and we are ready. Ready to take the fight to them!”
A raucous cheer erupted from the crowd. Lilly spotted Kal, right up front, raising his own fist high in the air and cheering as loudly as the rest.
“As you know, we have no weapons available to us,” Deepshield continued. “So we will make do. As the Peacekeepers you see before you have done, I urge each and every one of you to grab whatever you can.”
Those in the crowd who had already thought of that waved their wares into the air: farming equipment like sickles and scythes, mining picks, even an oar from a row boat. Kal kept his fist in the air, activating the strange metal sheath that quickly encased it. Deepshield took note of it and pointed to Kal.
“You there! Who are you?” The Peacekeepers suddenly took defensive stances and focused their attention on Kal. He stepped back, his zeal to fight replaced by a look of shock and uncertainty. While he’d discarded some of the armor he had previously stolen, he still wore enough that, along with carrying the weapon of the Order’s soldiers, he appeared more than a little suspicious to Deepshield.
Lilly stepped forward, between the Peacekeepers and Kal. “He’s with us, Captain.”
Deepshield’s eyes remained locked on Kal. “Is he a defector?”
“No!” Kal cried out defensively.
“He’s a farmer, actually,” Lilly said, keeping her voice calm and even. “But before you start threatening him, I’d point out that he was here, in Safehaven, doing a hell of a lot more for these people than you and your Peacekeepers were.”
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She hadn’t meant to be so harsh when she had started to speak—she was sure Deepshield would have been here if he could have been—but Kal had proven himself, without question. Deepshield’s tone somehow offended her, even more than it had Kal.
Deepshield stepped around Lilly and to Kal. “How’d you get that, son?”
“I took it,” Kal said flatly.
Deepshield studied him for a moment, before extending his hand. Kal unfurled his metal fist and shook it.
Deepshield immediately spun back to the crowd, putting one hand on Kal’s shoulder. “This is what we need, people. We use what weapons we can cobble together… but we use them to take theirs! I want to see more of these… every one of you, by the time this day is through, should be wearing one of these and brandishing it right back in these bastards’ faces!” He held Kal’s arm aloft as if he had just won some kind of championship.
More cheers from the crowd. “Move quickly now, people. Those who are able to fight, gather what weapons you can and meet back here in five minutes. We move then. For the Godknight!”
Another cheer, and the crowd immediately began to disperse to look for weapons.
“Hold on!” Lilly shouted. The people paused, turning back towards Deepshield and Lilly.
Initially, she wasn’t sure what she had meant to say when she spoke up. Her damn instincts again. But now all eyes—and there were a lot of eyes—were on her, something she had… mixed feelings about. On the one hand, she was the High Elder’s daughter, and was used to attention. Her younger self even embraced it, maybe even sought it out. But now, at the ripe old age of twenty, she took the world, and herself, a little more seriously. And aspired for others to as well.
Right now, in this moment, she had both: attention, and people looking at her with an expectation that she actually had something worthwhile to say.
“Captain Deepshield,” she began, raising her voice to make sure she could be heard by the people gathered. “With all due respect, none of these people have the first clue how to fight. The Godknight—”
“And your damn father!” an angry voice shouted from somewhere, followed quickly by an about even mixture of cheers and jeers. She glanced at her father, still standing just away from the center. His hands were clasped behind his back and his posture was perfect. Keeping up appearances, as always. But she could see it in his eyes, something she didn’t think she had ever seen before today: the doubt, the fear, and, perhaps, the feeling that everything he had done and tried to do for these people had resulted in catastrophic failure.
Or perhaps she was projecting. Either way, ignoring the sentiment from the taunter would only hurt her credibility.
She turned her head to the crowd, just slightly. “Maybe. Maybe him too. Regardless, it’s been seen to that the people of Brightholme have never been trained how to fight. Easier to enforce the ‘Live in Peace’ rule that way.”
“Hey, now—” Deepshield said angrily. He took a step towards Lilly in what she felt was an unintentionally threatening way. She was just a little surprised—and moved—when Kal stepped in his path.
She held up her hand. “I apologize for the disrespect. Now is not the time to debate the merits of our society’s inner workings. But I stand by my point. None of us know how to fight.”
“I do,” Deepshield said. “I fought for my life more times than you’ve taken breaths, girly. And while I thought those days were long gone, I’m more than ready to fight today.”
A few cheers.
“Great,” Lilly countered. “That’s one who can fight. Anyone else?” She turned to the crowd, recognizing her gamble. Asking a large group of people a question you don’t know the answer to was the quickest way possible to lose an argument.
All of the Peacekeepers assembled behind Captain Deepshield raised their hands, though some with a little less enthusiasm than the others. A few hands went up in the crowd as well, angrily and aggressively. But, for the most part, the crowd dulled into a soft murmur of uncertainty.
“It doesn’t matter,” Deepshield said. He raised his voice to again be heard deep into the crowd. “You’ll step up. Rise to the occasion. You will be brave and your legacies will be glorious!”
Cheers again.
“You’ll also be dead!” Lilly shouted. “That will be your legacies! That, yes, you were brave and you were bold. But that you were dead all the same.”
“Cowards, then?” Deepshield said. “Is that what you would have them be?”
“Cowards?” Lilly felt rage boiling up and suddenly the politics of addressing a crowd disappeared. She stepped to Deepshield, locking eyes with him. “Our people are being slaughtered in the streets. I don’t know what you’ve seen out there, but in here all I’ve seen is blood and death. Good people, going about their lives, happy and content because they were supposed to be safe. But they weren’t safe. Or prepared. And they still aren’t. And rushing headlong into an army of thousands, not to mention the magic users and the damn monsters? That’s not bravery. That’s suicide.”
The crowd grew quiet. Deepshield put his hands on his hips and scowled at her, but initially had no reply.
“We can’t just let them win,” Deepshield said, and for the first time Lilly could hear some of his buried emotions leaking through. “We can’t let them just take our home.”
“But they have,” Lilly said. “They’ve already taken it. This isn’t a war, Captain, one where we can fight back on equal terms. It’s an invasion. And a massacre.”
“I have a responsibility, Lilliana,” Deepshield said, and in invoking her proper name somehow regarded her as a serious person. “To Brightholme. I can’t just abandon her.”
“Your responsibility, Captain,” she said, allowing a hint of kindness into her tone. “Is not to Brightholme. It is to the people of Brightholme.”
The crowd remained eerily silent, so silent that sounds from deeper into the city were starting to become audible. Lilly reminded herself that time was short and just camping out here was nearly as suicidal as charging forward.
“What would you have us do, then, Miss Centes?” Captain Deepshield asked, his voice soft and sad.
Lilly considered. She knew the answer, perhaps had known it the moment she had spoken up. It hurt, recognizing it as the only true option. It would hurt more saying it out loud. But she did it anyway.
“We run.”