Year 221. Veoris

JIRA ne'JIRAL

“Ũ mebubã,” a commanding voice like thunder announced. Murmurs, like the buzzing of bees, followed it. Crackles of flame—torches and campfires, she identified—accompanied them, as did a subtle ringing behind her ears.

Her head hurt with the pain of a stab wound, her eyes producing the sensation of being swollen as if stung. Attempts to move her arms and legs were instantaneous failures, held down by bindings she was unsure were real or imagined. A drumming pulse erupted from her chest, a cold sweat forming on her brow. She could barely breathe, and her tongue went dry when she opened her mouth to try to talk.

“Help me,” she tried to say, but all she managed to eke out was a barely audible groan like the last exhalation of a dying human.

“Ũ fẽgubo vətu,” a darkly rich voice said. “Ɥäɥä.”

Veorisian. She knew the language, so why was she struggling to understand it? No, why could she not understand it at all? Another attempt to move brought no salvation to her predicament, and she found herself screaming inside her body.

“Help me,” she screeched for all not to hear her. “Help me!”

“Ã ɥõ,” the first voice commanded. Soon, all the murmuring vanished, leaving Jira alone with the crackling of the flames and the ringing behind her ears.

“Help...” she meekly pleaded from her heart. “Don’t leave like this.”

Tʼu aw chʼa d’ed du.

Jira’s eyes forced themselves open, threatening to tear apart the swollen flesh until she was staring at an elderly man sitting across from her at a table in a featureless, black-walled room. A dark-scaled figure of reptilian origin dressed in basic light-colored robes designed perfectly for traversing the desert. “Hello, Guile,” he said in a disembodied voice of fire.

“Father?” she breathed with ease. Tears welled her eyes almost immediately. Why him? Why not her mother? Why not her brother?

He smiled in the rare way that he did, making her heart swell with joy. “It has been a while. A long while.”

“Where are we?” she asked, mind racing with a thousand questions. “What is this?”

“Calm yourself, daughter.”

“I have spent too long not receiving answers. I refuse to be told to be calm again, especially by you. Tell me what I want to know, or leave me alone.”

He laughed. “I will answer so long as you drop the act around me, yes?”

“Act?” she cocked a brow and shook her head in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“Drop the act. Let me see your true self again.” He narrowed his eyes. “Let you see your true self again, not molded by false stories and the manipulation of weaker minds.”

Jira swallowed hard. Her fingers curled against the arm of the chair she sat in—it was quite familiar. “Why?”

His eyes remained narrowed. “Because it sickens me to see you remain in this lesser form.”

“It is not lesser.”

“You are not human. Around me, you will not present yourself as such.”

“I have not dropped this form for many, many years, Father. Not even in sleep.”

“Many of our people can say the same.”

She shook her head again. “I worked very hard to build my guise up in Khirn.”

“As did many of your kin before you.”

“If I drop it now, I might be unable to recover it. What then?”

Her Father scoffed and crossed his hands on the tabletop. “The time for it is long past, my daughter. You don’t need it anymore. Not with Them awakened.”

“The others will kill me if they find out. Orlantha. Gíla. Alden. Hell, maybe even Silof—or whatever his name is.”

“Then explain to them. Explain to them who you are. What you are. If they refuse to understand, kill them.”

Jira rose from the table and silently praised her return of motion. “Kill them? Are you mad? They are allies. Friends!”

“You are more.”

“More? What am I exactly, Father?”

Her Father joined her in standing and tucked his hands behind his back. He was more frail than she remembered, yet the fear he put into her with that simple act was enough to make her resolve waver. “Chosen.”

The dark, featureless room shifted into a whipping sandstorm of black sand and towering dunes and crags of red, bleeding glass. Beasts of burden and caravans of her people wandered in the distance, unbothered by the winds and dangers of simply breathing the air. She felt her lungs choke in the now unfamiliar territory. Knees buckled, hand clutching at her throat, Jira fell to the sand and coughed horrendously.

“Yet, by your refusal to get on with your mission, you threaten your ability to complete it,” her Father laughed gravely. “I would not see you so weakened.”

The frail man brought his hands to the front and waved them over his daughter. Jira coughed one last time before she was able to breathe normally again. She shot to her feet and glared at the man she called Father. “You say I am chosen?” she snarled.

“Yes.”

Her arms extended out in display. “Am I? I have done all that I can in this war of the humans, trying to uncover what I can for the mission you gave me. All I have accomplished is become part of events I cannot control, even when I did the very thing meant to fix that. That Tower changed me. Killed me. I heard things speak to me. And not one thing I could use to help my people came of it. What am I now?”

“Drop the act, daughter. And I will help you.”

Jira clenched her eyes shut. “Why must I always change for others before they help me? Why can I not just be?”

“That is what I am trying to tell you to be, daughter. Be yourself.”

“I am myself!” she roared, lunging at the man only to land at the feet of a Veorisian who scrambled back with a shout.

“The woman wakes!” he yelled. Jira rolled to her back on the hard, cold floor and stared up at the man, who looked down at her in shock. He held a bowl and a cloth and placed both down, turning to an open door. “The woman wakes! Get the healer!”

A laugh broke from her fragility. She could understand them now. She could hear them again.

Tʼu aw chʼa d’ed du.

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“Veoris is besieged,” the healer had told her in the days following her awakening. The two sat in the small yurt given to her as temporary lodgings until her eventual and inevitable departure. A small, comforting fire was nestled between them, providing just enough illumination in the cold and the dark. Two men armed with axes stood behind the healer to watch over him. “A terrific glint in the sky had filled our eyes and homes, and the dead rose with it.” Jira eyed him at this reveal, sipping on the bone broth he had made to ease her comfort in the cold north.

“The dead?” she asked, reflecting on that figure standing next to Crius. Their eyes boring into hers, telling her of her deceit and her failure.

“Our kindred. Our families and friends, buried with honors and disgrace—now risen once more to fight against their own people for some purpose I can only say is vengeance or punishment. Our cities are falling, our people scattering.”

Jira shook her head, neck stiffening at the immediate sense of fear that an entire land in Khirn had fallen within a matter of moments. “That cannot be. How long has this been going on?”

The healer clasped his hands in front of his face, shrouded in the shadows not lit by the fire. There was a defeat emanating from him. “They have only needed a few days, Belanorian, to push us to the brink. Such has been their number from the tombs and the mountains and further isolated from an alliance with the south that we have been able to broker no defense against them. They came down in swarms like the waves of the Jade, their horde the creatures that swim in those murky depths. Our armies have been destroyed without much of a fight, for there is not much we could do against that which is already dead. We watched for years as you Southerners fought and fought and fought, unbreaking and unbending to the other, even as countless of your kind died beneath the blade and the boot. We fell to ourselves in days.”

“And what does this horde do now? If you have lost so much already, have they started to move south?”

“They either remain in the places they took, standing motionless in moaning agony or move on to one they have not taken.”

Jira remained silent as the healer contemplated in his darkness. She sipped her broth and thought of her allies and friends back in Tahrir. Were they still trapped down there? Trapped in that prison? Many times had she tried to leave this village to return there to find out. But her body had not been as willing as her mind, trapping her in her cot as strangers attended to her to keep her well and ensure she did not die under their watch.

Or work to ensure that another undead did not threaten their home.

“Was there a source?” she asked him after minutes passed of her consuming the broth and him sitting in silence. “Where did they first rise?”

“Stä̏,” the man answered. “The Mountain of Spears to the east that overlooks the Jade and its violent waves. It was our necropolis where the most honored of our dead were laid to rest. And it was there that the most honored of our dead were pulled from their slumber. The same day you arrived in my home.”

“I had nothing to do with that,” Jira quickly said. “I-”

“I know you did not. You are a victim of something beyond us, and I shall not place fruitless blame upon a woman I just healed.”

Silence was shared again as she nervously sipped her broth.

“How many?” she finally asked. “How many rose?”

“Millions, if our seers driven to insanity were correct in their scrying. More possibly.”

Jira laughed grimly and placed the nearly empty bowl on the ground near the fire. Dread and doubt filled her body like water in the ocean. If she managed to escape to the south again, find her allies and friends, and make something of this mess, how long would it be before this apparent horde of undead moved with her? How long before they washed over everything and undid all the efforts made? She sighed and lay on her back on the bedroll, no longer caring about the healer’s presence in the yurt, her mind racing with too many catastrophes to count. The end of Khirn. The end of Aqella. The end of whatever lay beyond both if they existed. This must have been part of that thing’s arrival, Crius’ magic, tied into the plot to resurrect the Gods. Something.

In either case, it was overwhelming, and Jira felt her breath hitch in her chest and her throat go dry. “Are you the last of the Veorisians?” she asked him.

“I do not think so, but we may as well be.”

What was there that she could do to stop something on this scale, especially now that she was all alo—

“Kä! O kä!” a voice pleaded outside the yurt. “O-o kä!” Help me. Help me.

Jira’s body was unwilling to move as the healer sprinted out of the lodgings, her legs stiff and sore. Fear gripped her. Had the horde come upon them? Was this it already? Was she about to die in a foreign land after failing the one mission her Father entrusted her with? “Come on. Move... don’t die here. Don’t die on a bed.” Her arms shuddered as she forced herself to stand from the bedroll, sweat beading on her brow. Heart racing, blood thrumming in her veins, Jira took heavy steps towards the open door of the yurt. Screams of protest resonated through the cold air that wafted into her lodgings. She was dressed in basic Veorisian clothes, spared to her by the village after she proved life remained within her, and had additionally gifted a coat to wear whenever she was able to walk. They provided some warmth against the wind as she stepped out into the world for the first time in days.

It reminded her of the Star Bastion and the Spine of God.

The sun was hidden behind frozen clouds, the wind whipping at horrendous speeds, the visibility of the world reduced to a mere few feet in front of her face, snow covering the mountainscape where this village had been built. She was chilled and quiet, breaths turning to frozen droplets as she scanned the village for any signs of the commotion. It didn’t take much to hear it, even with the wind raging in her ears. “Let go of him!” several voices demanded.

She had no weapon. They had taken it from her. She had no armor. They had removed it and tossed it aside. She was defenseless, weakened.

Jira trudged through the snow, passing several homes that had been emptied, their occupants standing on the front steps staring towards the apparent direction of the emergency. Each movement through the snow became harder and harder, her lungs stinging as they filled with the icy air.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Tʼu aw chʼa d’ed du.

She broke the visibility barrier, a sudden inferno of heat and foliage racing around her as she stepped into a garden that should have been there. Grass, plants, flowers, and the stubs of trees growing into a land that they could never have known surrounded her as she bore witness to Silof holding a Veorisian aloft by his throat, ten others surrounding him with spears and mauls. His face, framed by wild golden hair, was contorted with an expression of rage that should have broken his bones and torn his muscles. His arms flexed with a fury that tore the seams of his long coat that was shredded all over. He appeared taller somehow. More monstrous.

“Silof?” she called out to no avail of drawing his attention.

“Let him go!” the villagers shouted, trying to find the strength to approach this inhuman thing.

“Silof!” Jira strained to yell over the tumult. His eyes, radiant like suns, glared at her without him turning to face her. “Let the man go!”

“You,” he seethed through gritted teeth.

“Let him go, Silof.”

He blinked, lips twitching in a silent wolf’s snarl. “This-where-where am I?”

Jira held out her hand in a calming attempt. “Veoris. You are in Veoris, Silof. Put the man down.”

The wild man clenched his eyes shut and shuddered a breath. “Veoris. No, I am not supposed to be here.”

“Silof-”

“That is not my name.”

“Your name is Silof-”

“That is not my name!” he declared, hoisting the man in his grasp up higher. The villagers surrounding him shrieked and readied their weapons, taking steps forward to attack him.

“Don’t!” Jira warned. She felt a pit in her stomach. If they attacked the wild man, they would all die. Everyone would die. “What is your name then? Kar'ult?”

“I don’t know, but it is not that.”

Jira took a step forward, her lungs now warmed from the intense heat of this impossible bubble of greenery. “Your name, if not Silof, is Kar'ult.”

“Kar'ult. That is not my name either. No. No, that is a lie.”

Jira set her jaw tightly. Another step, her hand held up still. “Then let me refer to you as Silof. That is what you introduced yourself to me as.”

“Tell him to put Sprȍ down, or we will kill him!” one of the Veorisians shouted, prompting the others to voice their hurried agreement. Silof looked between them and grunted like an animal caught against a wall.

“No! No!” Jira screamed, holding both arms out to the collected villagers. “Don’t! You’ll only hurt yourselves. Silof! Do you remember who I am? Do you remember my name?”

Silof finally turned to face her. “You. I know you.”

“Who am I?”

“You are the woman from the Tower. And the Athenaeum.”

“What is my name? Remember a name.”

“...Jira.”

Relief flooded her and washed away a piece of the dread. One more step, hand returned in front of her to keep him calm. “That’s right. Jira. I am Jira. And I will call you Silof for now. Is that acceptable?”

Sun-radiant eyes stared at her, considering the options of trust and killing. Jira was prepared to die that day.

“It is.”

“Good. That’s good. Now, please, set the man down and talk to me. There is too much at stake for this.”

“Why should I?” the wild man grunted. “Why should I not just kill you all? You’re already dead.”

More protests radiated from the villagers, of whom more had begun to cluster around the impossible bubble of foliage and warmth. “Silof, we can figure something out. If you are here, we can figure out a solution.”

“A solution to what? Sparing the lives of a few against all that we intended to save from-” he fell silent, the knowledge that he was about to speak faltering on his tongue.

“If you kill us, you will never know what we could have done to succeed,” Jira explained. “What we could have done to pull victory out of the shit we’ve been piled under. Put the man—Sprȍ? Sprȍ.—put Sprȍ down and talk to me. Please, Silof. Don’t let everything we have worked for go to waste.”

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Four guards stood outside, ready to kill the man if he posed any further threat. It had taken far too many concessions to get the Veorisians to lower their guard enough to allow the man to stay within their village’s borders, if only for the day. She would have to join him. Her knowledge of the man, his unnatural nature, and the clear shroud of mystery behind them both was too much for the good people of the mountain settlement to let them stay a day more.

“You do not remember what happened?” she asked him as they sat together in her yurt, packing the rest of the meager supplies the elders had elected to give her.

“Vaguely remember it,” he said, chewing his lip in thought. “Images of a thing I thought impossible. Your company dying all around us, guts and bones reminding me of horrible things. But beyond that, I remember nothing else as clearly—only awakening in this place. I don’t know who I am, yet I know who I am not. I remember what happened, yet not all of it. It is strange.”

Jira tied her pack shut. “I know you as Silof, and that is what we will use for now.”

“I am fine with this.”

“Good. I hope you are fine with us leaving soon as well. We must head south. Back to the Athenaeum if possible. At least back to Aslofidor.”

“Hmm. To stop them. How well can you move?”

“Not well at all, but I don’t have a choice. If not for being forced out by the villagers, I have already stayed here far too long and given them too much of a headstart. I would see the gap closed, and our chances of success and survival increased.”

Silof nodded, and the pair spent the rest of the day in silence and minor chatting about their plans to get south. By day’s end, and with discomfort on Jira’s part, they departed the village and vanished into the mountainscape, descending the barely visible path—surviving the cold only by virtue of Silof’s strange alterations of the environment around him. A bubble of foliage that did not belong to any land that Jira had visited in her life or studied in her free time. Of course, this was not surprising to her. She had met the man in the Tower, in a realm of impossibility.

The pair rested for a night, the third or fourth—Jira had lost count after her body began to waver once again from the drudgery of the walk, still yet fully healed. Silof had hunted what meat was nearby and cooked it over an open flame. “Where to now, Jira? Tahrir or Aslofidor?"

Jira considered the options. “The one place I know is still safe, where we can likely consolidate a plan and get some numbers to our name.” She looked up at a nearby mountain, its peak crested with perma-ice and snow. “The Star Bastion.”

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Year 221. Heracla, Capital of Vasileús Hippon Aslofidor - Khirn

RUNEMASTER

In his right hand was the Spear of Blackstone, the Sky Spear reforged by the Av’an’s glorious hand in that dark place it called home. Its stem was ivory black, leather gripped, capped with a shield-breaker pommel of pitch-red stone that hummed with mystharin and was bladed with glistening sharpened onyx trailing with roaming and ever-changing green runes. Currently, that blade was stuck in the face of Faen, tumathios of the royal guard of Vasileús Hippon Aslofidor, skewered to the marble ground of the throne room. Blood that turned black spewed from severed veins and pooled under instantly decaying and bloating flesh.

He wore thick layered-plate black armor with rainbow enameling on the pauldron insets and actively crackling glyphs of mystharinic defense on his gauntlets. His helmet was crafted to resemble an avian creature of ancient design, the visor being two circular lenses capable of magnification up to three miles. Covering the breadth of the armor from helmet to toe were various sequences of runes in the language of his people, of whom six hundred stood beside him in this room, heralded by his dearest friend Akma Yal, who had instantly sworn allegiance to the man upon his rescuing of them from the dungeons below the Vasileús’s castle. They had been tortured almost beyond recognition for their failure to save Erik Apa’s life, their bodies broken and torn and shredded to the bone and tendons and marrow.

“You...came for us, Tohyi,” Akma Yal had wheezed through a broken jaw.

Erik Apa had grimaced at the pain of his friend and placed his hand on his shoulder. “I did, my brother.”

“Am I off...to Rimkatski to join you?”

Erik Apa placed his forehead to Akma Yal’s and laughed, a tear falling from his eye. “Not quite yet, brother. You are to join me in exacting vengeance and doing what we should have done in the first years of this fucking war.”

With a wave of their hand and final favor from the Av’an, now standing beyond the veil of perception, these men and women were armed and armored in their equipment of old as if each piece was freshly crafted. Now, they stood beside him in the throne room, bloodied and roaring with the promise of retribution. Against them stood the two hundred of the garrison and the fifty of the remaining royal guard, each backed to the throne where the Vasileús sat in trembling fear, unable to be ushered from his seat by Ezel Apa, who glared at her son in shock and fury. The Vasiles was absent.

“You died,” the Vasileús bellowed. “You died. You all died.”

“And now we live,” the Runemaster said. He pulled the spear from Faen’s now desiccated corpse. “Interesting how things like that happen.”

“How?” Ezel Apa asked shakily. “How are you alive, my son? We saw your body.”

Erik Apa chuckled and twirled the spear in his hand. The energy of its blade shocked through the air. He took four steps forward toward the throne. “Mother, you should know better than the rest how I am still here.” Under the helmet, his eyes shone with the darkness that he had glimpsed. “I am the Runemaster, and only I decide when death takes me. And you hold no such sway.”

The Runearch attempted to hurry the Vasileús from his throne. The Vasileús refused to move. “I saw you die,” he said, hands gripping the arms of his throne to the point of turning white-knuckled. “I saw you fall to the rebels. I saw it with my own eyes. You died, you monster! You mutant! You filthy animal!”

“The Vasileús calls Tohyi animal, yet he barks like a scared pup!” Akma Yal chortled along with Goka Tur. The collected Druyans roared with laughter, and even the imperceptible Blackstone giggled with a hand held up to their lips in a demure facade.

The doors to the throne room opened with haste, a roar of collective battle cries erupting as Vasileú Hippon entered with his forces from the royal quarter of the city, fully armored and blazing with rage. The Druyans of Erik Apa split into two sides, one facing the Vasileús and one facing the Vasileú. Erik faced the Vasileú.

“You dare!” Vasileú Hippon challenged, marching toward the Runemaster with his hammer held in both hands. "You Druyan savage. You attack my Father so brazenly?”

Erik Apa extended his hand, a wave of shimmers in the colors of every gradient surrounding the Vasileú to halt his momentum. The Vasileú grunted and vomited in stillness, unable to move beyond the ejection of his stomach’s contents. His knights skidded to a complete stop, unable to process what they were witnessing.

Tʼu aw chʼa d’ed du.

“Let go of my son!” the Vasileús commanded.

Another extension of the hand ensured silence from everyone else.

Erik Apa stepped close to the Vasileú. He dropped his voice low like rolling thunder, reaching up to harshly grip and squeeze the Vasileú’s face with his hand. “Listen to me, Hippon. I know of your rage against your Father. Your anger at the war being forced to a respite. You want nothing more than to kill all of those curs to the south. I want that too, if only to be done with this and move on to more glorious things.”

Hippon’s eyes glared at him with malice.

“Upon a time, I wanted to kill you for what you did to Druya and my people. But,” he shared a glance with Blackstone. “To do that now would be to waste your talents, and I do not need to lose men and women who can help me achieve those more glorious things. So answer me, Vasileú Hippon, do you want to achieve the glory your Father stole from you with this moment of peace? Do you want to become immortal and see the world bend the knee to a true Vasileús of Aslofidor? Or do you want to die here and now, forgotten for all time?”

Hippon’s eyes softened into fear, contemplation, and then acceptance. All three were forged into dread as Blackstone appeared beside the Runemaster and took his place. Hippon tried to scream in the forced stillness as the Av’an took his face into its hands and surged into his brain. Erik Apa curled his arm, and the Vasileú fell to the ground, unconscious as his mind dwelt with Time.

“Hippon!” the Vasileús cried, finally rising from his throne. “What did you do to my son!?”

Erik Apa turned to face the Vasileús. “Showed him a better way.”

“Enough!” the Vasileús roared. “Enough of this!”

“Yes! It is enough!” the Runemaster snapped, throwing his spear at the throne and skewering the back beside the Vasileús’s head, dust and disintegrating stone splitting into the air. The Vasileús gasped and nearly fell forward. Ezel Apa screeched in rage, but the Runemaster’s own quelled her words. He looked between his men and those of the Vasileús’s and the Vasileú’s. “Enough of this fucking alliance between strong warriors and weak hearts! Nothing has been gained from this bloodshed but attrition and the softening of our nations! No land gained, no land lost. Just bodies piling and blood drowning us all for no purpose other than mindless violence and pettiness. And we all suffer for it! Even now, the freaks of Aqella attack our coasts across all sides in search of plunder and slaves, using our distractions of war to take from us again and again! Inhuman monsters control the most powerful landmark in Khirn! Your leaders lie to you every second of the day about their plans for the future. They do not wish for you to fight for God and Country. They want you to fight for THEM and THEIR gain and only a loss to you! Fight for me and achieve blessings forevermore.”

Strands of shimmers leaked from the visor of his helmet, surreptitiously filling the room. The warriors began to look amongst themselves. Ezel Apa among them.

“Enough. Enough! Kill him! Kill him now!” the Vasileús ordered.

No one moved.

“You’re time is done, Vasileús Aslofidor,” the Runemaster declared, pointing an armored finger at the withered man. “You stand alone. You stand on the brink. Even now, even if you defeat me here, the land of Veoris fills with the dead to erase the mistakes of Khirn and join me in conquest. You are a failed Vasileús of a bloodline that has existed only under false prowess. I hold the promise of Acominatus and the Golden Lords. I hold the wits and the might of those who came before them. I hold the blood of those who were first. And I will seek the truth of those beyond our two worlds of Khirn and Aqella. I am the Runemaster Erik Apa of Druyan, Child of Blackstone, and I am ETERNITY.”

Erik Apa clenched his hand into a fist, and the Vasileús was no more. His skin sloughed like wet paper, his organs inverted, his body twisted and distorted, his bones snapped, and his marrow boiled. His blood curdled like milk, and his muscles turned to ash. But his face was left untouched. Left in a state of frozen pain that was so pure and indescribably terrible that anyone of an ordinary mind who looked upon it would fall to their knees and beg the Runemaster to cleanse them of the image he had made. He did so with kindness, and by nightfall, the entirety of the castle of Heracla had become enthralled to him.

All...save his mother, who had never moved from her spot next to the throne, eyes glued to the mangled mess that was Vasileús Aslofidor. The Vasiles Aslofidor was absent entirely from the castle.

Erik finally stepped before her. “Mother,” he said quietly. “Look at me.”

She did. “What are you?”

“You made me. With lies and deceit.”

“What lies? What deceit?”

“Your conspiracies with the thing in the Tower. You standing before me masquerading as the woman who gave me life.”

“You have lost your mind.”

“No. I have found it. And now, I have found my rightful place in the world—the one you so long denied me. You are no longer Runearch of Druyan. You are no longer my mother. You are no longer Ezel Apa.” He closed his fist and reduced the woman who was his mother to a speck of amorphous flesh on the ground. “You are no longer alive.”

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Akma Yal. Goka Tur. Adil Ere. Ulek Aks. Yola Tal. Isme Erd. Erki Ney. Demi Ney. These were the names of those in his retinue that he could trust the most—hold closest to his heart. Now, they were his wartime advisors, his councilors, surrounding him at the war table stolen from the Vasileús.

“What is the plan? What do we do?” Akma Yal asked.

Erik Apa circled Heracla on the map. “Tomorrow, we take the city. Take them all. Convert them entirely to our side or kill them.”

“And after that?” Imse Erd asked.

He drew a line down through Acocaea and to the largest city in Khirn. “We take Amphe, kill the Dioúksis for failing his part, and then take his men into our ranks. And then we move here-” The line continued to the Spine of God. “The Star Bastion.”