The house was silent, as if even the building was holding its breath. Lucas inhaled as slowly as he could, sure that even the slightest sound he made would be cacophonous in the still night. There was no wind. No rain. None of the sounds one could expect from being surrounded by people; everyone had gone as motionless as him. There was no peace to this soundlessness.

Not with the things moving around outside. It sounded like there were dozens of them, but it was hard to tell with their erratic footsteps. There was no rhythm to their pacing, nothing to gauge where their attention was. One would come closer, then move further away. Another would loop around the building a few times, then spring off into the distance for no apparent reason. A third would hop around frantically then stop, then go again faster, then stop, then amble along. All these sounds mixed together, blending into a rumbling mush of movement.

At least they weren’t screaming. The initial beastly noise had come from out in the field to the east where the corpses of the first three attackers had doubtless lay before their rapid decomposition. It had gone on for minutes, oscillating and shifting back and forth like the beasts were searching for who had done this to their comrades. Eventually, they’d settled, and the night had fallen silent.

After a few minutes though, they came to investigate the farm houses. For whatever reason, they hadn’t actually tried to enter any of the actual buildings. They were just prowling. There was no indication that they knew there were people and animals inside some of the buildings, and yet they weren’t leaving.

It left Lucas in a tense in-between state, expecting battle at any moment but being denied it. The waiting was wearing him thin. He couldn’t calm down with them out there talking through Elwyn’s small farmland, but his heart thundering along for so long surely wasn’t good for him. He didn’t dare do anything to mess with his mana in case they’d somehow sense it.

More heavy steps approached, skittering like giant bugs. A few beasts let out screeches, and Lucas winced. Holding the shape of his soul at the forefront of his mind was mentally taxing, especially when he didn’t know when one of the bastards was going to scream and he’d have to put his full focus into resisting the chaos. One could only maintain anger for so long. Eventually, fear would creep back in.

Silence fell once more, but it didn’t last. However, the sound that broke it this time wasn’t a beastly scream. It was quieter, muffled.

A sheep’s bleat.

Like a chain reaction, the beastly screams rose to a feverish pitch, dozens of monstrous voices ringing out at once. The force of it slammed through the party, earning a visible flinch out of Wick. Eleanor, the farmer’s daughter, gasped and slapped her hands over her ears, releasing Jamie from where she’d been cuddling him in her lap. Elbert’s eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped against his father’s chest. Elwyn made a small noise of distress and gathered both of his children to him, lookin suddenly wan and pale, eyes turning feverish. Only Valerie showed no reaction, her face hard as stone.

Lucas, meanwhile, was focused on wrestling his mana system into submission. Those disgusting abominations out there were not going to have their way with his soul if he had anything to say about it. Fear bled away, previously-waning fury stoked once more. It blazed hot within him, burning away the chaotic corruption. His jaw clenched, teeth grinding together. He wouldn’t let them win. He refused.

Outside, a thunderous stampede of footsteps were storming towards the barn. Multiple sheep raised their voices in response. There was something strange about the sound, a depth that couldn’t usually be found in a prey animal’s call. It resonated in a similar way to the beastly screams. It was familiar, too. Lucas’ eyes widened and his brows climbed, disbelieving.

Delving into his pyromantic sense, he could only watch with shock as a wave of heat wafted out from the direction of the barn. The barn itself was outside his range, but the clouds of red pulsing in the air were unmistakable: there was a fire in there. How?

The heat signatures of the beasts were nonsensical. It was hard to get a handle on their numbers, but twenty or so was his best guess. His pyromantic sense told him little about how they actually looked or how big they were. The heat on their bodies fluctuated rapidly, going from hot to cold and back again at random, sometimes even vanishing completely. He’d think he had an idea of the shape of one of the monsters, only for some of the heat to disperse and reveal one part of its body was actually somewhere else, or it was a different size than it had appeared, or something. It was infuriating.

There was the sound of something slamming into the wooden walls of the barn, then the crack of splintering wood, followed by the screams of the beasts rising to a triumphant crescendo. The sheep bleated to match it, undaunted. A pile of monsters scrambled over each other to get to their prey.

And a torrent of fire erupted from the barn, spilling over the beasts and sending them sprawling back. The fire flooded out of the barn, quickly spreading through the grass. Lucas acted as fast as he could. Jamie glanced at him as he took control of the heat surrounding the house. He couldn’t do anything elaborate, but the mental lag of his pyromancy wouldn’t affect him setting down a boundary and holding it. He pushed his fire mana out to the limits of the farmhouse, coating it in a shell of his fire magic.

A second later, the fire from the barn rolled over the outer walls of the house. White-hot flames broke against his hastily erected pyromantic barrier like waves on rocks, then spread out, quickly surrounding the building. It took a moment to realise there were figures in the flames apart from the chaotic heat signature of the beasts.

It was the sheep, Lucas realised with sheer bemusement. All fourteen of them, galloping through the fire like it was nothing. No, he realised, they weren’t just moving through the fire: they were the fire.

Their woolly fleeces were shining balls of flame, their legs blazing rods, and their heads were roaring infernos in the shape of a sheep’s skull. They moved as if they were flesh and blood, and in their wake they left after echoes of fire trailing behind them. The barn and second building were ablaze, and the inferno was just getting hotter as the sheep pumped heat into the air. At the same time, the sheep seemed to be drawing from the natural fire that was being caused by their magical flames, compounding their heat and strengthening themselves. They were getting hotter by the second.

Lucas marvelled at them. The five he’d accidentally made magical had evidently somehow passed on the gift to the others. To his pyromantic sense, it was a beautiful thing to behold. They’d dived right into the fire body technique Jyn was so proud of—there was no knowing if they’d be able to turn back or if they’d even want to.

“What’s happening out there, Lucas?” Valerie whispered, snapping Lucas’ attention back inside the house. Looking around, he saw why.

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The Skycloak crouched by the table, her white pendant necklace keeping Elwyn and his children entranced. They were watching it sway with lifeless white eyes, unable to tear their gazes away. Aly hovered nearby, watching them with a helpless kind of horror in her eyes, bow clenched in a white-knuckle grip. Wick was standing over Lucas, both of his shields pointed in the direction the screams were coming from.

Lucas swallowed. “What’s wrong with them?”

“They’re not strong enough to fight off the chaos, so I’ve been forced to take drastic measures,” Valerie said. “What is happening out there?”

“It’s the sheep,” Lucas said. “The ones I gave magic to passed it on. They’ve turned themselves into fire, and…”

He was about to say they were fighting off the beasts, but they weren’t. Not really. Oh, they were putting up a good showing. The fires they’d created were as powerful as a furnace, stretching far beyond Lucas’ range and reaching a dozen or more metres into the sky. They’d created hell out there.

But beasts were the spawn of demons, and hell was old hat to them.

The fire was somewhat keeping them at bay, but it wasn’t lasting. The same effect that made it hard to get a handle on them with his pyromantic sense made them all but immune to fire. A master pyromancer like Jyn hadn’t been able to do more than harass the beasts, and the sheep—which were quite considerably less powerful and experienced—didn’t have a Skycloak with a certain-kill-sword to filter the beasts towards. Even if they had, the sheep didn’t possess that kind of tactical intelligence. The fire wasn’t hurting the beasts, so the sheep were just trying to make it hotter, pouring out more and more power.

It wasn’t working. The real, tangible effect the fires were having was in the powerful drafts they were creating, making it difficult for the beasts to move around. The monsters still swiped with whatever unnatural weapons they possessed when a fiery sheep got too close, and it was mostly luck so far that none of the sheep had been hit. But it felt like it was only a matter of time.

Most problematic for the humans hiding inside the only building that hadn’t been incinerated was that the fire now surrounded them on all sides, including above. Lucas could keep the heat of the flames away easily enough, but what did they do about air? Suffocating in the middle of a giant oven sounded like a horrible death. Lucas was no expert on breathable air in enclosed spaces, but he suspected seven people surely couldn’t last more than a day in a room this size.

Lucas explained all this to Valerie, and her lips pressed into a thin line. She looked at Wick. “Do you think you can get Ser James out of here?”

“It would be difficult,” Wick said. “But doable.”

“Hey, no,” Lucas said. “I’m not leaving anyone here behind.”

“I believe I can survive this with only some severe burns,” Valerie said.

“And the others?” Lucas said, gesturing at the farmer and his family, still entranced by Valerie’s pendant. “You clearly don’t want them to die either.”

“I would also rather not take that path,” Wick rumbled. “I will only do it if my choice is between saving no one and saving one person.”

“We’re not going to need that path,” Lucas said. He looked at Jamie and held out his firehand. The monstercat rose and stalked forward to nuzzle at his fiery fingers, somehow cool to the touch. Lucas obliged him, giving some scratches behind the ears. “Me and Jamie are going to help out the flock.”

Instead of diving deeper into his pyromantic sense, he cupped Jamie’s chin and lifted his head, then held it there. He stared deeply into his bonded companion’s molten eyes and searched. There was heat in the monstercat’s core, a higher temperature than anything else in his range. Lucas’ heart’s flame, merged with an eldritch abomination. Jamie’s body was packed with countless bones, muscles, veins, and organs, all crushed together into an impossible configuration that somehow, on the outside, looked and moved and sounded and felt like a normal tabby cat.

What Lucas was most interested in, though, were the mana pathways. Jamie had been working on opening pathways just as Lucas had, but the creature was both advantaged and disadvantaged. On one hand, it seemed to come easily to him, opening and expanding pathways to completion with barely a lick of effort, uncaring of the pain or just not feeling any in the first place. On the other hand, there was so much in its anarchic tangle of a system that Lucas suspected it would take the creature years to fill it all out.

“You and I,” Lucas said, “are bonded by our very souls. We’re a part of each other. I can sense everything inside of you as easily as I can my own mana. You are my mana, my heart’s flame. You’ve been very accommodating of my unreasonable request, and you’ve cooperated with my desires even when all you really want to do is sleep. I don’t know why you agreed to all this, why you initiated it, or what you got and continue to get out of it.

“But just this once, I’m gonna need you to focus with all you have. Listen to me, and act as soon as I give the orders, okay?”

Jamie’s eyes flashed, and Lucas took that as agreement. He wasted no time diving into his pyromancy, seizing control of a pocket of nearby fire.

The sheep were still going, still pushing the blaze greater and greater. They were sucking up an unbelievable amount of superheated air and venting it skywards, but they were doing so as one uniform mass of flame. The only deviation was the sheep themselves dancing through the conflagration.

Meanwhile, the beasts were thrashing around, barely paying attention to the fire itself anymore now that it had reached a consistently climbing equilibrium. The heat didn’t stick to them, and the uniformity meant they could wade through it to chase down the firesheep without having to worry about getting unbalanced by pockets of venting heat.

Here, Lucas could make a difference.

To give himself more room to work with, he pulled in the boundaries of his control, blanketing only the central room in his protection. A mistake.

There was an ear-splitting boom. The heat and fire rushed to fill the new space, and the cooler air he’d previously been maintaining in the outer rooms ignited in an explosive reaction he hadn’t predicted. The walls of the inner room trembled from the force, and Lucas winced. It was only his current pyromancy and previous preparation with floramancy that kept their shelter standing.

“What was that?” Valerie said.

“Sorry,” was all Lucas could manage in reply. He had more room to work with now, but the power of the fire had increased. Sweat dripped down his brow. The room was getting hotter just from their body heat filling the stale air with nowhere to go. Was he feeling light-headed because of the exertion or lack of air? Either way, he had to act.

“I’m gonna need you to hold this boundary around the room, okay, buddy?” Lucas murmured.

The ward of heat around them seemed to strengthen without his input. He took that as confirmation.

Pushing fire mana through his pathways as fast as it would go, Lucas blasted his pyromantic sense out to the furthest reach it could go and lost himself in the fire. The sheep were doing most of the work for him; he just needed to give them a guiding hand.

As a beast lunged to strike at a passing firesheep, Lucas sent a command. Jamie responded faster than ever, focused on the task, and Lucas took control of the heat in the beast’s path and amplified it, creating a pillar of superheated air that rose at incredible speed, roaring like a jet engine. It was little wider than a fist, but it caught the beast mid-lunge and launched it out of the top of his sense’s range in an instant. Its scream rose high into the sky until it faded with distance. Music to Lucas’ ears.

The thrill of success surged through him, but Lucas wasn’t done. There were at least ten more beasts within his range alone, and that could not be tolerated.