“I think I have an idea,” Kane said as he stuck an Imperian cloud candy on the end of his stick and set it over the fire. “I’m gonna make a dessert sandwich!”

“A dessert sandwich? I don’t know man…” Sofiane said.

Kane stacked a block of chocolate onto some honey crackers. “Trust me, it’ll be good.”

Daisy cast a leery eye at the concoction. “Maybe it would be better not to waste the food. We still have a few more days to go.”

Newly confident in himself after being of so much use the past couple of days, Kane resolved to plow forward with his promethean vision of cloud candy and chocolate between two honey crackers. His eyes remained locked on the pillow of white, gelatinous sugar, watching for the precise moment when they would be golden but not burnt.

“Maybe the Yishang should’ve called it a sugar pillow,” he said without averting his gaze.

“That seems a little silly,” Shuixing said, straightening her glasses. “It’s really more like a candy than a pillow, and its color resembles a cloud. I don’t see the pillow connection.”

Kane still felt as though ‘sugar pillow’ made more sense, but he couldn’t really defend his position. It just felt right. As he was thinking this, the sugar pillow turned the exact shade of gold he was looking for and he withdrew it from the fire and placed it on top of the chocolate bar and used the top cracker to squish it. The heat of the roasted pillow melted the chocolate slightly, creating a rich, gooey middle which he bit into.

“Oh man that’s good!” Kane said, his words garbled by the chewy confectionery.

“Chew with your mouth closed, dear,” Daisy said.

“Sorry! Want a bite?”

She raised an eyebrow at the half-eaten monstrosity in front of her. “That’s quite alright, I’ll…”

Daisy’s words failed her as she was struck by the beautiful sight of snow falling gently in the dark like rain at quarter speed. Her next thought was that, with the halloween party barely a month behind them, it was a little early for snow. Usually the Yishang waited until right around Christmas to have some kind of special event coinciding with the snow.

“I don’t like that,” Sofiane said, taking the platter of food across his and Gomiko’s lap and setting it on the ground as he stood.

“They wouldn’t! There’s no way!” Daisy said. “Wouldn’t the Yishang have more to gain by dragging it on?”

Shuixing frowned. “Not necessarily. That’s what we assumed, but suppose they want time afterwards for another event to announce the eight xians moving over to their new game? If that were the case, we—”

“Could be under attack,” Gomiko said.

“Hold on a sec, we haven’t heard anything from our scouts!” Harald replied.

Sofiane curled his fists. Calling everyone to their posts was the smart decision, but ruining a night like this, one that everyone needed…

“The feast is over,” Sofiane said. “Daisy, go find Natsu and Pech. Kane, find Joad. Gomiko and the others escort Shuixing and the research team down to the sewers. We have to assume this is the real deal.”

“H-Hold on a sec! What if it’s a false alarm!? It’s just some snow…” Daisy said, her words failing to convince even herself.

“Doesn’t matter. If it’s false, it’s false, but this is what we were drilling for,” Sofiane said.

He turned away from their campfire and yelled for someone to find him the other committee members. Word spread quickly and soon everyone but Joad was gathered around Sofiane. He selected an empty wagon nearby to hold the impromptu meeting. Despite his efforts to keep it private, however, rumors and gossip rippled outwards from campfire to campfire, and it was clear to all the Non-Heroes what might prompt an emergency meeting in the middle of a feast.

“What’s going on!? I thought you said we had three more days!” Spriggansnout said.

“The snow. You’ve been around long enough, you know what snow means,” Medea replied, then turned to Sofiane. “Am I correct?”

Sofiane nodded. “Yes. Vronsky, any reports from your scouts?”

Vronsky exhaled. “Nothing since a few hours ago. If there is anything, we’ll—”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Smoke!”

The voice came from outside. The first exclamation was drowned out amidst more shouts and screams. Sofiane poked his head out of the canvas flaps to see for himself. Despite the haze from the bonfires around the tent village, darker columns of smoke and pinpricks of light through the trees told him the smoke signals had been lit. It was impossible to tell from where he was, but it was possible they were lit all the way to the borders with Tianzhou or Cascadia. He stepped out of the wagon, arrested by the shock of what he was seeing, and the other committee members came to look for themselves.

Vronsky whistled. “That’s it alright. Here we go.”

Spriggansnout grinned wickedly. “About gods-damned time!”

Medea hopped down from the wagon and began yelling, “Everyone who’s on the wall, get to your rally grounds and find your commander, they’ll know what to do! Go there in an orderly fashion!”

The volume of the crowds murmur rose exponentially and despite Medea’s orders, the area within earshot of her turned into a mad scramble to find FDJ weapons forgotten during the feast. The entire camp, as though synthesizing the festive mood of the feast and the sudden shock of battle preparations, took on a bizarre unreality. Anxiety held hands with giddiness and wherever Sofiane looked he saw people stumbling over things, knocking weapons over, and running amok as their shadows danced in the light of the forgotten campfires.

“I don’t like this. This is not what we drilled,” Sofiane said, his eyes flashing with a rare anger.

Spriggansnout bumped Sofiane with an elbow. “Let ‘em get it outta their system now. The chaos’ll organize itself. Then we’ll whip ‘em into shape.”

He glanced at the goblin then back at the unorganized chaos. “I really hope you’re right. And why haven’t you started organizing your soldiers?”

Spriggansnout snorted. “Aye, aye, captain.”

As the goblin chief started yelling at the crowd of Non-Heroes to go to their rally points, Sofiane felt a tug on his sleeve. He turned to find the Tianzhounese bandit, Zicheng, the Non-Hero he put in charge of information-gathering and recruitment.

“It looks like I’m no longer needed,” Zicheng said. “With your leave, minister, I have some business to attend to.”

Sofiane blinked. He forgot entirely that he had proclaimed himself minister of defense after everyone kept ragging on him for it. Only Zicheng kept up the title.

“Depends on the business,” Sofiane said.

Zicheng held up a Cascadian musket, no doubt packing an FDJ bullet in its breech. “Recreational hunting.”

Sofiane chuckled. “Leave granted.”

After Zicheng departed, Sofiane was left to face a strange idleness once he had delegated all of his duties. He still needed to find Joad and have him distribute the rest of the FDJ weapons, but at this point it was a game of waiting for their enemies to arrive. He had carried out all his preparations at the peak of urgency and, on the eve of the final battle, had nothing to do but wait. His nerves felt like they wanted to crawl out of his skin.

“Hey, Sofa!”

His heart melted, only to be flash frozen by the realization that it was Natsuko yelling at him and not Gomiko. She and Pechorin were almost frightening as they emerged from the darkness and into the campfire light.

He folded his arms. “You’re not allowed to call me Sofa. You can call me Puffball if you want.”

“Sure thing, Puffball. I’m guessing y’all already figured out what’s happening?” Natsuko replied, gesturing with her head at the pandemonium unfolding behind Sofiane.

“Shuixing has a fancy word for it that I can’t remember right now,” Sofiane said. “But basically, if you have a decentralized group of people who share the same knowledge base, it’s possible to have everyone realize the same thing simultaneously.”

“That’s a fancy way of saying we all know what snow means,” Natsuko replied.

“Did Daisy find you?” he asked.

“No, we came back when we saw the snow,” Pechorin said.

“Shoot. Let’s go back to the campfire and hope she comes back to it. Everyone else is getting into position,” Sofiane said, secretly glad he had a concrete task to tie himself to.

They arrived to find the campfire deserted. Not that this was surprising, though the abandoned feast felt to all three like a symbol of the impending battle. Only minutes ago it had felt like the feast was all that existed in the world, and for a precious few hours they could forget the end of the world for just a moment. Now a tray of roasted cheesecake lay trampled in the mud.

“So…” Natsuko stuffed her hand not holding a wine bottle in her pocket. “This is it, huh? Last stop.”

Sofiane looked at her across the fire. “You worried, firecrotch?”

She smirked. “Nope. You, Puffball?”

“Yeah,” Sofiane said, “but there’s nothing I can do now. This is it. Are you ready, Pech?”

Pechorin cleared his throat.

“Smoke rises slow,

An unseen enemy,

Sieging heart’s gate.”

Swept up by her feverish mood, Natsuko added,

“We see the unseen foe,

And kick his fucking teeth.”

The clumsiness of the couplet broke some of the anxiety and Sofiane laughed some of his nerves away. The silly poetry grounded the three of them for a moment before reports of gunshots echoed out of the darkness. Sofiane tried to estimate how far away the guns were shooting from, but this task was sped up considerably as a bullet clipped one of the logs in the fire and sent it sliding through the ground.