Kyros has never seen red snow. But when he gazes out from the top of the wall, everything below is in shades of black and red blood. He turns away, feeling thankful he hasn’t eaten this morning, or else he’ll be on his knees looking at it right now.

“Gotcha!”

Butcher’s nasally voice carries on the icy winds. Kyros hears a meaty slap, and turns to see the man catching a bundle wrapped in oil paper and weighted with stones. The fat man looks almost jolly as he tosses the bundle into a nearby crate like he's loading up on presents, which he may as well be.

For three days now, the eastern mountain has been receiving packages like this. It isn’t efficient in the slightest, but given the short respites between each wave of attacks, the Battlefront men don’t have the luxury of time to patch the twenty-foot gap missing along the wall.

“Incoming!” shouts the man on the other side of the gap as he throws another package. Kyros watches it sail over the massive hole, right into Butcher's waiting hands.

“Gotcha!” he says, grinning. “This one smells good!”

“Dun eat it yet, aye?”

Kyros doesn't even hear Mung approach until the man is already stepping past him. The skinny man looks even thinner. Even smiling, the circles under his eyes are heavy. He stops to pat Butcher on the back. “But if you do, at least throw away the wrapping paper, aye?” Laughing, he takes out a steel telescope and peers through it at the vast snowy desert on the other side of the wall, where the yaojins have been attacking from.

“Shit!”

As he goes to toss the packet into a crate, Butcher fumbles and it slips from his hands, pinging off his big belly into the hole. And then it's gone. Butcher stares after it for a second, like he can’t believe what just happened.

“SHIT!”

Mung turns from his telescope to follow the fat man’s sorrowful gaze. “Welp,” he says. “Can’t nuthin be done about that, aye?”

“That one smelled good though,” says Butcher miserably.

Mung goes back to surveying the ice. “There’ll be more," he assures Butcher. "The boys dun have much else to do over there. Not much wall to guard, aye?”

Kyros doesn’t hear more of the conversation because he’s walking away. He has a job to do inside the mountain and noon has just passed, though it's always difficult to tell with the stormy clouds overhanging the skies lately.

As the steel room descends into the mess hall, Kyros walks out lugging his bag of bandages and wine. He’s tasked with checking on the wounded this afternoon, which isn’t a difficult job because the yaojin don’t tend to leave injuries that aren't fatal. The few times men have gone down the wall to fight head-on, not more than a handful survived. Luckily, there have not been more than two of these skirmishes during the past three days, and Kyros is grateful he hasn’t been ordered down there yet.

He’s even more thankful no one has questioned why he was even on the wall during the first attack. Technically, he was on the ground on the yaojin’s side, but by the time the other explosions had started and men started pouring out from the mountains, he’d killed the yaojin bomber and was already on his way back up.

The first explosion, the one caused by the lizard-yaojin Kyros killed, didn’t end up doing much. It was the other ones that followed which caused the hole in the wall. Even three days after the first attack, no one has figured out what the yaojins used to cause such destruction. Even Windry, after sniffing along the entire top of the wall, announced that in all her dwarven years she’s never seen something, “Able-bodied enough to command obsidian to give.”

One thing is certain though. The hole has completely cut off the two mountains on each end of the wall from each other. And as it turns out, only two squads were in the west mountain at the time the hole was made, which means that even though each mountain has its own cache of resources, one is running out at a much faster rate than the other.

The silver lining, if there can be one, is that after three days of relentless assaults, the Battlefront’s numbers have dwindled to a mere hundred. Kyros has noticed that the rations today were the largest yet. But it isn't a good feeling, because he knows he's eating the portion that would've been given to a fallen comrade.

“Why now?”

Kyros snaps out of his thoughts. He glances at the man lying on the bed whose bandages he’s changing. “What?”

“They’ve left the wall alone for decades,” says the man. He’s deathly pale and more a kid than a man, now that Kyros is looking closely. He wishes he hasn't. The boy reminds him too much of Timothy.

"Maybe they've gotten desperate," he says, turning his focus on the boy's injured leg. He unwraps the blood-soaked bandages and fights back a gasp. The wound is bone-deep. Black blood oozes from the gash and pieces of skin still cling to the old bandage as he tries to pull it off.

"You mean Maria destroyed their lifeline?" the boy asks, eyes fixed on the ceiling. "Goddesses, I hope so. Else I'd have died for nothing."

"You won't die," Kyros answers immediately, perhaps too quickly. Even though he knows that people at the Battlefront aren't here due to good behavior, he can’t help but feel sad that the kid is right. The skin around the wound is dark and is giving off a sour smell. The leg will need to be amputated and soon. As he's thinking about how best to break this information to the boy, he feels a hand on his shoulder.

It's the boy. He's smiling at Kyros.

"It's been like that for two days," he says. "I had a look at it meself. It ain't gonna heal."

"It can," Kyros assures him. "But we'll have to cut it. Off."

The boy shakes his head. "I ain't learned, but I can recognize wounds that kill. Seen it enough up here." He sighs, looking many times his age. "Can't say I ain't scared shitless regardless." His eyes flicker over to find Kyros's. "Can I be honest?"

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"Of course," Kyros says, doing his best to clean the hopeless wound.

"I wanna get outta here," the boy whispers. "I know they won’t let me, but I wanna die someplace warm.”

Kyros digs in his medicine bag for fresh bandages. “No one is going to die,” he says, almost cringing at the corniness of those words. “Stay tight. I'll let someone know we need to do an amputation.”

“Ah,” the boy says with a chuckle and a wave. “You ain’t no bad guy.” His hand drops to his side and his face relaxes. "Thanks," he says quietly, closes his eyes, and goes still.

Kyros packs up his things and moves on to the next patient.

He’s only just got back out to the top of the wall when Kyros hears Mung calling him. The skinny man approaches easily, his boots gliding over the snow-covered ground as if he’s just been taking a stroll through a strawberry field, not the aftermath of an enemy’s assault.

“Everyone peachy, Sir Kyros?”

Kyros catches himself admonishing the title. What the hell, he thinks. If the man wants to have some fun before we all die, let him.

“Sure,” he says. “They’re all worried, asking where Maria is.”

“Maria shmaria.” Mung gives a dismissive wave of his hand. “We don’t need her. We’ve held off for near a week now, aye? I’d say we’re just peachy.”

“If you call three days a week then you need a new calendar.” Kyros fights to keep his tone under control, but he’s getting very annoyed with the Acting Commander. Sure, as one of the longest-serving members of the Battlefront, people have been listening to Mung long before the first arrows started sailing over their heads. But the man is no master strategist.

“We need to get our priorities straight,” Kyros says. “People are getting slaughtered every time we send them down there.” He points to the vast empty space over the wall’s ledges. A snowstorm is gathering. Thick flakes dance on the grey wind, collecting on the black obsidian like a layer of white fluffy skin.

Mung follows Kyros’s finger. “Hm,” he says.

“The west mountain is running out of people,” Kyros continues. “We're forcing them to spend all their time tossing bread and cheese over when they can be repairing the gap. A prolonged assault will crush them. And when they do, so will we.”

Mung nods once, then turns and starts to walk down the wall. “Come,” he says. "There's something I want to show you, aye?"

Kyros follows Mung down the wall, past barrels of oil and boxes filled with arrows. The wall’s defenses are lackluster, but it’s always been enough if tales about this place are true.

It just shows that there hasn’t been a proper siege until now, Kyros thinks grimly. He thinks back to what the boy said. They've left the wall alone for decades. What changed?

They’ve reached the hole. Butcher is still there, catching parcels bu this time his face is twisted in concentration. Mung stops to watch and Kyros does the same. Together, they follow the man as he catches another weighted parcel, bringing it safely into his fat belly like a slime sucking in a rock.

“Gotcha!”

The hole in the wall echoes his triumph. Mung speaks over it. "Have a see for yourself, Sir Knight."

Kyros looks to see Mung holding out the telescope. He takes it, turns to the emptiness beyond the wall, and lifts it to his eye.

At first, he sees nothing but swirling snow. But soon, shapes stand out among the white. Tall shapes, with angular sticks coming from the bottom. They look like tiny crabs, bobbing slowly up and down across the horizon.

"What are those?" he asks, hanging the telescope back to Mung.

Mung speaks softly. It’s getting dark now, so there’s no one here at this part of the wall except for him and Kyros, and Butcher, but he’s keeping his voice low as if there are ears all around to eavesdrop.

“The crow we sent to Castle Ragnarock returned this morn.”

Kyros glances over at him. The thin man is staring at Butcher’s back as if the key to winning against the yaojin is written across that expanse of hairy skin.

“With reinforcements?”

“The King told us to wait until he's done burying Lord Ned Thornrose,” says Mung. “Wasn’t worded quite like that but close enough.”

“The Right Hand is dead?” Kyros asks. “How?” He doesn’t have much of an impression of the mysterious man who occasionally visits Kesrock to see his wife, but how could someone with so many titles die just like that?

Mung spits onto the snow. The phlegm freezes almost instantly in contact with the cold. “Can’t imagine what done the bastard in. Ain’t a tad sorry to hear it either, aye? He’s the one that sent me here, you know that?”

Shadows stretch along the wall as lanterns become lit. Unlike Mung, Kyros has no ill will towards his country and monarch. He knows very well it was the work of Sir Jernal and the corrupt Captains of Kesrock that caused him to be here. He’s never been one to question the almighty leadership of King Icheonsoll Kami, but this is a decision even he cannot wrap his head around. “Can’t His Majesty send troops while the funerals go on?” he asks Mung. “It doesn’t seem to me like the two actions conflict.”

Mung shrugs in a way that tells Kyros he’s had that exact thought already. “Guess they were chummier than we thought, aye?”

They stand in silence a while longer, the quiet of the cold air broken by Butcher’s periodic hoots of, “Gotcha!”

“I get the feeling you didn’t bring me out here to bad mouth the King,” Kyros says finally, to which Mung gives him a sideways smirk and answers,

“Plenty of places to do that here, aye?”

Kyros nods. “Is it Maria?”

The amused look on Mung’s face disappears. “No birds for two days.”

“From any of the three parties?”

“Nary a feather.”

Kyros points to the tall shapes in the snow. Without the telescope, they're invisible. "Because of them?"

"Dunno."

Now Kyros knows why Mung wanted to talk here, far away from the main forces so no one can hear them. “Do we at least know what happened to the three teams?” he asks, not sure he even wants to know. “Did they go missing? Or…” He can’t even finish the sentence. Everyone has been holding out on the sole expectation that Maria will swoop in any second now with her three elite parties, perhaps clutching the Heart of the Mountain in her hands. That was the reason she even went on the covert mission in the first place, to capture or destroy this fabled secret weapon of the yaojins.

But with the way the siege has been going on, it seems unlikely the woman succeeded.

“We got back one owl the dusk of their departure,” Mung says, squinting out at the snow plains beyond the wall as if any second, Maria’s dark figure will come charging through the falling snow. “It told how they moved into the northwest, encountering no resistance.” Mung laughs darkly at that. “We now know why, aye? The bloody beast-folk were all on their way here.”

Kyros has never seen the man so serious. It’s almost disconcerting. Around them, the snow-filled dark seems to be closing in. “We should look for them,” he says. “Send in a small group of our best. Bring news of the attack straight to them.”

Mung shakes his head. “Not too bright for a knight, aye? Why do you think the west mountain is so empty, Sir Kyros? They dun start quite that few. And where would they go? Maria keeps her cards closer to her chest than a poker player who just bet their firstborn daughter.”

The entire truth of their situation finally dawns on Kyros. If no one knows where Maria and her team even are, sending people after them is the same as sending them out to die. “We’re all alone up here,” he says. “No one is coming to save us.”

Mung is silent. They listen to Butcher playing catch for a while longer.

“What do you want me to do then?” Kyros asks finally. “I’m assuming you’ve told me all that not because of your generosity.”

Mung smiles drily at him. “Aye, Sir Kyros. Turns out, I do have a plan just for you.” He leans in and starts to whisper, forcing Kyros to lean in closer as well to hear him. Behind them, Butcher’s loud voice carries far along the wind.

“Gotch-”

He doesn’t get to finish. A rock comes hurtling from the darkness, too fast for anyone to see it clearly. With a wet crunch, it catches Butcher square in the side of his head. The man stumbles a step. The package he's meant to catch crashes to the ground.

Kyros and Mung spin around, shouting in alarm. But Butcher is just standing there, watching them with an almost confused look on his face. The big man reaches up to the side of his head where he’s been hit, his fingers brushing the empty space where his skull is supposed to be. His eyes go wide like he’s just understood something. He turns to them and chuckles, the sound a gaspy, confused thing.

Kyros pushes past Mung and races for Butcher but by then the man is already on the ground, his brains leaking out from the hole in his head.