—Rolling back the clock.

Among Ravena’s agents who were present in the battle, there was one who knew what was going on. This one had been mum about her secrets for a while — but maybe not for much longer.

Alyssa watched with horror as the victims of her bombardment got on their feet. She and Amani were perched on a grassy spot overlooking the encampment, so there wasn’t any immediate threat. Still, nothing less than a direct hit from a grenade would take down the new undead, and she didn’t know why.

She’d heard about the undead, of course, but such things weren’t found around Stave. She’d lived all her life in the confines of the walls, and the only information she’d ever gotten about the outside world came from adventurers’ exaggerated tales and whatever her teachers had told her. There were the usual slimes and large boars, but undead?

They were wicked things. Both the Order and the Theater despised them, even if for different reasons: one believed that the undead were a stain to Lumina’s Creation, while the other just found them exceedingly hard to kill.

Alyssa backtracked on what her teachers had taught her about the undead. Westeren necromancy needed nearby necromancers, so she just had to kill the necromancer! … except, she was sure that if there were a necromancer anywhere, they’d be among the dead by now; she’d been very thorough in shelling the whole camp.

At the same time, magic at a scale that covered an area the size of this whole camp should have only been possible in the hands of a powerful necromancer, and if someone so powerful had been here all along, they should’ve come out by now and directly attacked Alyssa — so what was going on?

“This… This is…” Amani muttered. There was a sort of budding horror in her heart, but mixed with contempt. It was a feeling she didn’t know what to do with.

Alyssa saw the emotions on her face. “Do you know what this is?” she asked

“I… I’m not sure if” —

“Just spit it out.”

“I — okay. My tribe, we were known for our bitasha almawit — death cards.”

Alyssa narrowed her eyes. “Is it some kind of necromantic magic conveyor?”

“What we know is that it captures the soul once the person dies.” She looked towards the encampment, where hundreds of undead Kittari shambled around, seemingly aimless — but they weren’t. “I think someone changed the spell inked on them. They’re supposed the assuage the dead before they pass, but not … this.”

Death cards. Alyssa thought, if the cards captured one’s soul, then were the mercenaries down there … piloting their dead bodies? If it’s like that, then she could understand why Amani felt distressed over this.

“How do we kill them?” Alyssa asked.

For a fleeting moment, Amani felt conflicted over Alyssa’s assertion. Destroying death cards while they still had souls in them would destroy the souls as well, and they wouldn’t ever rejoin the world’s cycle of life and death.

On the other hand, these souls had nowhere else to go. The cards had been rewritten to imprison them and force them to continue soldiering on, even beyond death. It was, all things considered, better to just end their suffering, even if it ended them forever.

“Destroy the cards,” she replied.

“How big are they?”

Amani showed the palm of her hand — frustrating Alyssa.

“Well, that’s incredibly easy to hit, isn’t it?”

The situation wasn’t looking too good. They didn’t have enough grenades to blow every single one to bits. The zombie mercenaries were too numerous; hundreds of them roamed the encampment, and already, some of them were spreading out and combing the grasslands, looking for the damned cause of their deaths. Their souls demanded vengeance, and even though their bodies couldn’t move the way they wanted them to, it was enough that they could walk and slash with swords. That was all they needed to do.

As if declaring all this struggle to be for naught, a bugle horn sounded out, followed by the heavy beating of the ground by the hooves of heavy cavalry and dragoons. Small balls of light climbed up into the sky before bursting into a bright, persistent flare that illuminated the battlefield.

Alyssa gave a wry smile. “Come, girl, let’s disappear for a while. I think we’ll be meeting Jon soon, as well.”

Alyssa was already walking away, but Amani hesitated, looking between her and the encampment. “W-what about the undead?”

“Bah! The Order’s a cheat when it comes to fighting undead. They’ll just go, ‘O may the holy light grace thy face,’ and then wham, they fall like puppets with their strings cut!”

Alyssa had already turned around and resumed walking away in the middle of her rant, but her tirade had made Amani think deeply about the Order’s power.

She had quite the intimate knowledge about death cards. She was the one responsible for making them for her tribe, after all.

Against death cards, she was sure the Order’s techniques would work. Part of the wisdom passed down to her by her mother included techniques of the west.

In a manner of speaking, both eastern and western necromancy were the same: they both needed a controller, anchor, and a vessel. In the east, the controllers were newly deceased souls, the anchors were inanimate objects, and the vessels, of course, were corpses. In the west, a necromancer performed the role of both controller and anchor, and the vessels were corpses — or inanimate objects.

Both were necromancy, not because of the corpses involved, but because the “passing of souls” was used as a power source. The passing of a soul leaked out great amounts of mana, and necromancers simply tapped into this otherwise wasted energy.

Severing these connections would destroy the necromantic spell — but not the souls used to power them. The Order’s “holy light,” in modern terms, would be akin to an EMP that destroyed the electronics of an engine, but not the engine itself.

Amani felt a little more at ease leaving the business of taking down the mercenaries to the Order. Even if she would shit on the graves of the dastardly men down there, who sold their own people as slaves to foreign nations, she wouldn’t extend her resentment to their next lives.

The Order’s priestess rode among the dragoons of two cavalry formations, numbering a total of 150 men. She donned religious war vestments: pants to ride horseback, a dust skirt that split in the middle, a steel cuirass, and more robes draped over that to mark her as a priestess — all gray for a priestess of Lumina to show a solemn respect for what goes on in war.

She had been woken up in the middle of the night and informed of the ruckus at the harbor. It was as if she wasn’t allowed to sleep for more than three hours lately. Was this another one of Lumina’s tests? Probably not, but the temptation to leave this kind of life was the strongest it had ever been.

She was among the rear formation, mounting her own horse. There were shouts coming from the formation at the front as they approached the smoking encampment at breakneck speed. The scouts must have returned to inform the captain.

One of the scouts slowed down to match the priestess. It appeared he had a message directly for her.

“Priestess! There are undead! The captain requests you at the front!”

She nodded. “Guards, to the front!” she shouted. She and her personal guards left the rear formation, spurring their horses to catch up to the front.

They were too close to the encampment, however, and the tip of their charge already arrived at the camp. She watched as the frontmost dragoons skirmished the zombie mercenaries, discharging carbines and pistols before retreating.

Their bullets hit their mark, blowing out chunks from the undead, but that failed to put them down. That much was to be expected.

“Make way for Her priestess!” her guards announced. “Make way! Make way!” they said over and over. Not all their allies could hear them, but those that did hastily cleared the path.

Meanwhile, the knight captain organized the front, buying precious space and time to let the priestess position herself in the best spot. The undead were fighting with alacrity unusual for the undead; from the looks of it, they’d died only recently, so he supposed that was only to be expected.

The priestess and her guards stopped their horses in the midst of the fighting. As knights desperately shot and delimbed the undead — more were coming every second, crawling out between the burnt husks of the camp’s tents — the priestess produced a small cylinder from her inner pockets.

She lifted it into the air, and it extended in two directions into a long staff. There was a blue crystal on one end, contained in a golden wire cage embellished with golden leaves and flowers. The other end was an iron spike.

This is a good place, she thought. She planted the staff in the ground, and as her guards dispatched the undead who unanimously decided she was the first who needed to die, she grabbed the golden cage, holding onto it with a silent resolve.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

She closed her eyes and said a long prayer. The world outside went quiet. There was nothing but her, her goddess, and her wish.

… May they find peace, and Lumina remake them.

[Ok.]

Huh? She was ... confounded. She’d fought undead many times, using this exact same staff, and this was the first time she’d gotten any kind of response from Goddess Lumina Herself. Rather, wasn’t this actually a major world event? No one had ever gotten a response from Her in 500 years! Wait, who’d even believe her? Wait, if she went around saying Lumina actually replied, wouldn’t that bring a lot of undue attention from Central? That would be a royal hassle, perhaps even in a literal sense.

No, no, she was fighting undead right now, and she hadn’t had enough sleep to confidently declare any decisions made at the moment to be sane and responsible.

For now, she focused on putting mana into the staff’s crystal — huh? It was pulling in mana on its own!

She opened her eyes, the crystal in the cage was glowing so much brighter than she’d ever remembered — and it hurt to look at! She quickly looked away, and in a moment of panic, she tried to pull her hand away — but she couldn’t!

It just kept sucking in mana like crazy. Was she going to die here? Probably. Maybe Lumina had actually meant to take her, after all? Well, that was fine. Her life and death were for Lumina to decide, after all. This, she sincerely believed as Her priestess.

Just as she resigned herself to death, not only had the crystal gotten so bright, but it started to emit a high-pitched sound that got louder and ever-higher-pitched as seconds passed.

Convinced that Lumina had decided to blow her to bits, her faith began to waver. Wasn’t such a fate too cruel for someone as devout as her?

All sound stopped, and there was a flash. Even when she closed her eyes, the light was so all-encompassing that it still blinded her.

A wave of magic struck down from the sky, homing in on the staff, and exploded, rippling over the terrain and the sea. It was like an utterly violent tidal wave — a tidal shockwave — of mana.

The zombies dropped to their knees and slumped over — but not just them. The dragoons and the knights, too, dropped to their knees, praying the hardest they ever had in their lives, all because of this miracle they had witnessed.

The priestess opened her eyes to find her allies kneeling before her — a great mob of devout soldiers surrounding her in a circle. Such was the sight that she’d thought she had died, and she was already being welcomed by Her angels.

Of course, she started to recognize the angels’ faces, soon realizing she was very much not dead.

Damn it, what should she do? Now Central’s going to be all over her for this incident. Her devout belief in Lumina was real, but dealing with people was still more hassle than it was worth, even if those people were men of the cloth. It was precisely because she hated dealing with people that she sought sanctuary in Lumina’s teachings — but look where that landed her.

There was no escaping it. She came up with something on the spot.

“T-this is a miracle of Lumina! Behold, for we have not been forsaken!”

There were sniffles among the knights and dragoons, who looked up to her with eyes pleading for guidance.

Those eyes exerted too much pressure. Damn it, why can’t they just move on? … Oh.

“But this is not the moment to pause! We must make full use of Her grace and proceed in all haste! She watches over us!”

The knights and dragoons got on their feet in embarrassment. The least soldierly among them had reminded them not to let their guard down, and that there was still a mission to carry out. “You heard Her voice!” the knight captain shouted. Among everyone, he was the most embarrassed; rallying the troops was his job, after all, and having someone do it for him was a stain on his professionalism and pride as a commander.

A part of the Order’s forces, including the priestess and the knight captain, dismounted and proceeded further into the encampment, where they only found more corpses and craters.

“Who could’ve done this?” the knight captain asked.

“I don’t know,” the priestess replied, entirely aware of who could’ve possibly had convenient access to this amount of firepower. “But these men aren’t innocent, either.”

“They may be mercenaries, but that doesn’t prove their guilt,” the knight captain reasoned. It was legal to employ freelancers, after all. These mercenaries may just have been destined for distant lords and were merely resting here.

… Though, at the back of his mind, it was strikingly obvious what the mercenaries were here for. Playing the advocate of naivety was never a comfortable role, but every single question had to be asked, or else they would be accused of being unthorough.

The city lord’s office should have also been notified of anyone making port at a military site. That should have been the case, because if not — if such an important parcel of information were dismissed at any link in the communications chain, then … it potentially implied a deep corruption rooted in the city’s highest seats.

He didn’t want to entertain such a thought. Against everything he’d seen over the years, he wanted to believe that people still acted in grace — but how long would that last, he wondered?

To his earlier question, the priestess quipped, “Kittari mercenaries, of all people?”

For a Westeren noble to hire Kittari mercenaries was like saying, “I don’t care about the rules of war.” Whereas knights would be ransomed, they would instead be made into battle slaves; whereas battles should be agreed upon beforehand, they would sneak into the enemy camp, demoralize their army, and take the head of their leader.

To settle things fast, and to co-opt every human resource for the purpose of war — these were the harsh ways of a people born into a harsh place. If they did not think in these terms, they would not survive the Aranai.

The Order reached the pier. The knights checked the makeshift bridge if it could take their weight; out of mistrust, they took ten minutes to overbuild it with nearby planks, before they finally formed up and continued advancing down the pier.

An advance squad of dismounted dragoons moved ahead to keep the priestess out of harm’s way. They made sure to tap the burnt bodies littering the pier before stepping over them, but soon, they were forced to step on them. The Pinebristle was to their left, with nothing but a single, burnt rope keeping it tethered to the pier — nothing but a few core strands still straining against the steady, calm rocking of the sea. Ahead, they could see the Hermitage anchored some ways off from the pier. They would need rowboats to reach it.

For now, they boarded the Pinebristle with the last remaining gang bridge. From the mouth of the pier, the priestess watched them disappear behind the top deck of the ship. It was a tense few minutes before one of the advance squad reappeared and waved, signaling for the rest of the Order’s forces to advance.

When she reached the top deck, a gore-infested scene greeted her. She’d seen plenty of death, even at her tender age, but this wasn’t just on the level of seeing a dead body. Rather, the inner doctor in her screamed to stitch these guys back together at the very least. The Order wasn’t in the business of just tossing body parts into a ditch and letting Lumina’s creations claim it; even their enemies deserved the respect of a proper internment.

Still, this just inflamed her suspicions. Obviously, Alyssa — who else? — bombed the encampment, but she found it hard to believe that she could deal so much damage that one of the ships had been set adrift into the middle of the harbor.

A knight came running from the gang bridge. “Report! We’ve captured sailors from the second ship!”

The knight captain went running. The priestess joined him.

— How did Alyssa do it? Or perhaps, it was Jon’s work, after all?

When they came down to the pier, they found a group of knights confused between wanting to arrest or help the two sailors who had arrived by rowboat. They were both suspects and witnesses at the same time, and above all, they were shaking so badly, you’d have thought they’d seen ghosts.

The priestess looked them up and down. They seemed to be young men. To be in a place like this, they must have been drawn in by the promises of high pay and adventure. If not innocent, they were merely naive. Had someone shown them the truth and given them the chance to run away, perhaps they would be in a better place than here right now.

Ravena wouldn’t bat an eye for such a thing, however — and that was why she followed Lumina.

The knight captain looked to the priestess for guidance. This dependence on her for moral judgments irked her, but … well, alright. “Put them at ease. Treat them as victims and let them recover before putting them through due process.” Let the caretaker be the guard.

The knight captain nodded. He assigned a few men to bring the sailors away. A pier filled with bodies burned and ripped to shreds wasn’t a good place to recover one’s sanity.

“Did they mutter anything when you received them?” the knight captain asked one of his men.

“Well” — the dragoon hesitated — “ ‘They’re all dead.’ ”

The captain huffed a sigh. He and the priestess climbed back aboard the Pinebristle.

That was when a dragoon hurried up the ramp with loud steps. “Slaves in the cargo hold!” he announced, catching everyone’s attention. Emotions flared in even the lowly infantryman’s heart.

Slavery in Westerens, you see, wasn’t such a straightforward affair. There were classes of slaves, and each were treated differently.

There were property-owning slaves, slaves permitted to establish families, and ordinary house slaves. Long gone were the days that a slave was regarded as an object to be whipped and treated as a machine that only needed food and water to live. These days, they were simply “those who fell into hard times” or “those who reaped what they sowed,” and the law simply took away their right to conduct their life as they pleased.

Their employers were decided for them. Their times of waking and sleep were decided for them. Who they were allowed to fall in love with, and when and where they could establish a house — and to what amounts they were allowed to own anything — were also decided for them. The restrictions were often harsh, but in the face of what such people had done to get to that point — law-breaking, whimsical spending habits, or somehow personally incurring the wrath of a lord who rarely even left his castle — the Order viewed these as “fair.”

It was a thousand-year path the Order took to get to this point, curving the beliefs of not just Westerens, but also of many other nations across the known world. Their persistence bore fruit, as more and more nobles recognized something important: that they no longer had to fear their lessers stabbing them in the back, if only they offered dignity in return for respect.

Compared to that … what they found was a salvo of spit on their ideals. Knights and dragoons pried open the bars holding back a horde of starved people, put there because of some ill-nuanced sense of “I won, so you need to follow what I say.” Some of them even cried as they looked and looked away from this cruel betrayal of everything they grown up believing. What did these people do, personally, to aggrieve the Kittari slavers so much that depriving them of all their needs and dignity — and selling them off to distant lands — was considered fair?

The Order brought in more personnel, working overnight to clear the bodies and ashes of the encampment, and finally bring out all the slaves. They were each so fragile that the priestess had to warn the clerics and orderlies that making them move too much would kill them.

They were afraid when they saw the sun, as if they were seeing some kind of mythical being. There was no place for Kittari like them in Stave, but the Order would find a way to take care of them.

It was all very strange, really. This place was used as a staging ground for illegal slave trafficking. They were considered high-ticket goods, and no one would have ever thought to ship in so many of them at once. Consequently, this was the first time such a huge slave shipment had been busted in Stave — and it was also the first time the Order had encountered so many slaves of this kind in 50 years.

The news reached Central by the next day, but before a gag order could be issued, it had also reached many other regions across the continent — by way of personal correspondence by the multinational knights who had joined the Priestess of Stave that fateful day. They told their families of the horrors they witnessed, and their families told their churches and officials, and it all became a public discussion.

Beneath the fiesta of indignation that followed, whispers of a new eastern crusade made their way to the ears of Central.